REMEMOTECH as a MiSTer core?

[muldjord]

I have recently started looking into the DE10 Nano board used in the MiSTer project. And I thought it would be amazing to have an MTX core to use with the project in order to broaden the knowledge of the Memotech to the large number of MiSTer owners.

I've never been able to dapple in Andy's REMEMOTECH myself as I've never owned an FPGA of any kind before. But I've always found the project fascinating and I will be looking into the possibility of somehow porting it to comply with whatever an official MiSTer core requires.

I have no idea if I will get anywhere with it, as I currently have zero knowledge of VHDL. But the worst that can happen is that I learn a bunch of stuff but still end up having to shelf the idea of "converting" it myself. That would be a success in my book as well. It's never a waste if you learn something.

I'm mostly posting to hear if Andy or anyone else has any input on the idea in general.

[Bill B]

For those of us who have never heard of MiSTer, I did some Googling:

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki

[Martin A]

For the well off, there's also http://www.heber.co.uk/product/multisystem/. To turn a naked DE10-nano into something a bit more interesting.

The FPGA on the DE10 is a lot "bigger" than the one on the DE1 so getting the VHDL to fit shouldn't be a an issue.

The biggest issue I can see is memory The DE1 has plain old static RAM onboard, the DE10 has DDR3 and from the page Bill linked there's an add-on SDRAM board a lot of the existing systems use instead. (128meg of SDRAM is built in to the Heber board)

I've used external static ram in VHDL designs (the CPLD doing the video on the Z180 board here viewtopic.php?p=4168#p4168 is programmed in VHDL) but not any of the varieties of dynamic ram. So any progress you make "tweaking" ReMemotech please do post!

The MSX core might have some useful clues.

[acsi]

This may be of interest to you

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=248

I have a DE1 with Rememotech on it and a DE1-SOC which has some cores ported to it.
Just waiting for the DE10 NANO to become available again.

[muldjord]

For the well off, there's also http://www.heber.co.uk/product/multisystem/. To turn a naked DE10-nano into something a bit more interesting.

That is exactly the board I've ordered a couple weeks ago - apart from a DE10-Nano of course. I believe it's exactly what I need for everything I could want in a MiSTer setup.

[muldjord]

This may be of interest to you

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=248

I have a DE1 with Rememotech on it and a DE1-SOC which has some cores ported to it.
Just waiting for the DE10 NANO to become available again.

That is indeed interesting, thank you. I am also awaiting my DE10-Nano. Supposedly it should ship late January from Mouser.

[stephen_usher]

Funnily enough the DE10 went out of stock soon after the MMS pre-orders went live. The first batch was 500 boards and that wiped out the global supply of the Terasic product.