Is a Dreamcast core possible

[ikilby]

Question as above really.

Does the DE-10 Nano have the meat to run a Dreamcast core?

Is anyone working on such a thing?

[PhantombrainM]

I don't think its possible.
I'm not a programmer but I looked at some specs myself.
As far as I know the MISTer Cyclone can have up 50Mhz and someone said it may be pushed up to 100Mhz by doubling it somehow.

The Dreamcast has far higher speeds.
Maybe a Hybrid Core can be made. In Theory.

[Sorgelig]

I don't think its possible.
I'm not a programmer but I looked at some specs myself.
As far as I know the MISTer Cyclone can have up 50Mhz and someone said it may be pushed up to 100Mhz by doubling it somehow.

The Dreamcast has far higher speeds.
Maybe a Hybrid Core can be made. In Theory.

up to 50MHz? where you get this nonsense?
50MHz input clock doesn't mean it's the only frequency possible. Even PC has something like 50MHz clock generator on board which is not preventing CPU to run at 4GHz

There is such thing like PLL which can multiply/divide input clock in wide range. There are several PLLs inside FPGA.

As for Dreamcast - it has 3D graphics which may require a lot of logic - probably more than MiSTer's FPGA has.

[Newsdee]

We're not even done with 8bit and 16bit systems... and as far as I know there aren't many 32bir+ systems on the works. Torlus was looking at Jaguar long ago but I think he didn'r publish his sources (just a video showing preliminary work).

[eris]

I don't think its possible.
I'm not a programmer but I looked at some specs myself.
As far as I know the MISTer Cyclone can have up 50Mhz and someone said it may be pushed up to 100Mhz by doubling it somehow.

The Dreamcast has far higher speeds.
Maybe a Hybrid Core can be made. In Theory.

up to 50MHz? where you get this nonsense?
50MHz input clock doesn't mean it's the only frequency possible. Even PC has something like 50MHz clock generator on board which is not preventing CPU to run at 4GHz

There is such thing like PLL which can multiply/divide input clock in wide range. There are several PLLs inside FPGA.

As for Dreamcast - it has 3D graphics which may require a lot of logic - probably more than MiSTer's FPGA has.

The Dreamcast had a PowerVR2 GPU roughly equivalent to a 3DFX Voodoo2 GPU. The PowerVR2 was clocked at 100 MHz and had quite a bit of dedicated and complex 3D operations in addition to 8 MB of dedicated internal memory. It can render 7 million polygons per second while the Dreamcast's SH-4 CPU is performing geometry transforms and lighting on 10 millions polygons a second to feed the GPU. Chip complexity is roughly 8-10 million transistors or close to the complexity of a Pentium II. That's not including any game logic, so yes I think it's probably a little beyond the brave little DE-10's capabilities even if someone didn't mind implementing the PowerVR and SH-4 cores.

[slowmo310]

you clearly do not understand how complex of a machine the Dreamcast is to reverse engineer...

[ikilby]

Thanks for the answers, & you are correct I really do not have any idea how complex the Dreamcast is to reverse engineer.

[ReedSolomon]

Torlus was looking at Jaguar long ago but I think he didn't publish his sources

ElectronAsh(http://www.atari-forum.com/memberlist.p ... le&u=28082) was playing with it a few days ago IIRC. https://github.com/Torlus/JagNetlists

you clearly do not understand how complex of a machine the Dreamcast is to reverse engineer...

Indeed. It was powerful enough to run Windows CE after all.