Fascinating stuff! I'm impressed and enraptured.
When I first heard about FPGAs, I assumed that we'd start seeing them on motherboards, in tandem with CPUs, so that advanced software (e.g. rendering, video/audio editing) could optionally snag (parts of) them and perform lightning-fast calculations. I wonder why this hasn't happened.
I was really into digital electronics a decade ago. In highschool, my Electronics project was going to be a dirt-simple computer with nine buttons (hex input + execute program,) a common cathode display for hex output, and just enough op codes to allow the creation of a machine-language prime number calculating program. It was going to be glorious. Unfortunately - due to circumstances out of my control - I had to leave highschool and find a job.
A couple years later, my roommate and I decided to build a simple robot - just three CMOS chips, a 556 timer, and a couple sensors. Basically the logic was: go forward, steer away from walls, if you bump into one reverse and turn for a while. That guy was crazy, but I'll be damned if there's something he can't make out of cardboard, metal tape, and coathangers: we had a pretty sweet chassis for the thing. Unfortunately, (and this is what killed my interest in electronics,) I could never figure out how to drive the motors. I had enough juice from the CMOS output to light LEDs in my H-Bridge to show what directions I wanted the motors to go, but not enough transistor theory to know how to ramp up the power enough to run the motors at more than a crawl.
Sorry if I'm blabbering on, this topic is exciting! :D
Designing a video core would be a blast. Designing and coding engines for games is my favourite part of the process - I like the challenge of designing an API which will be flexible enough to allow the creation of a variety of games, yet simple enough to keep the games' code eloquent. Designing a video core would be an extra step in that direction. Designing a programming language would be fun too, however daunting it might be. What I learned about the GBA's video core when I wrote a (simple) engine with GCC for it was fascinating.
I doubt I have the knowhow to help at all, but if you need a beta tester, let me know! ;)
When I first heard about FPGAs, I assumed that we'd start seeing them on motherboards, in tandem with CPUs, so that advanced software (e.g. rendering, video/audio editing) could optionally snag (parts of) them and perform lightning-fast calculations. I wonder why this hasn't happened.
I was really into digital electronics a decade ago. In highschool, my Electronics project was going to be a dirt-simple computer with nine buttons (hex input + execute program,) a common cathode display for hex output, and just enough op codes to allow the creation of a machine-language prime number calculating program. It was going to be glorious. Unfortunately - due to circumstances out of my control - I had to leave highschool and find a job.
A couple years later, my roommate and I decided to build a simple robot - just three CMOS chips, a 556 timer, and a couple sensors. Basically the logic was: go forward, steer away from walls, if you bump into one reverse and turn for a while. That guy was crazy, but I'll be damned if there's something he can't make out of cardboard, metal tape, and coathangers: we had a pretty sweet chassis for the thing. Unfortunately, (and this is what killed my interest in electronics,) I could never figure out how to drive the motors. I had enough juice from the CMOS output to light LEDs in my H-Bridge to show what directions I wanted the motors to go, but not enough transistor theory to know how to ramp up the power enough to run the motors at more than a crawl.
Sorry if I'm blabbering on, this topic is exciting! :D
Designing a video core would be a blast. Designing and coding engines for games is my favourite part of the process - I like the challenge of designing an API which will be flexible enough to allow the creation of a variety of games, yet simple enough to keep the games' code eloquent. Designing a video core would be an extra step in that direction. Designing a programming language would be fun too, however daunting it might be. What I learned about the GBA's video core when I wrote a (simple) engine with GCC for it was fascinating.
I doubt I have the knowhow to help at all, but if you need a beta tester, let me know! ;)