July 16th, 2020 at 12:47 AM
Glad I'm not completely crazy lol. One of the nice things about modern gpus is that they can scale things really well so I'd passthrough the video to them, but for backwards compatibility purposes it'd be awesome to have like a pc98 or Amiga core loaded onto an fpga expansion card and allowing Amiga or pc98 software to run in modern os's, hell even old dos programs would work great if the fpga could handle 16bit compatibility on a 64bit system.
One cool example is the latest vampire card for the Amiga 500, it's an fpga based replacement for the onboard cpu and adds HDMI output to a system from the early 90s.
And here's a prototype accelerator card
![[Image: accel.jpg]](https://www.mike-stirling.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/accel.jpg)
Effectively they've bypassed the cpu which is based on a Motorola 6800 and rigged the fpga to communicate with the main board in it's place, adding extra memory and other features as well.
This existing is the other reason why I'd like to see an fpga expansion card for modern PC's.
The accelerator card is like the scaled up crazy version of getting a 286 to 486 adapter and installing a 32 bit 486 dx2 on top of your old 16 bit cpu.
As far as a second fpga for video...
Well since multiple gpu setups are a thing I don't see why not, hell there was a time when sound cards had expansion daughter boards to add extra functionality. It'd still have to output through the main gpu through passthrough to scale stuff though if only so you aren't stuck with 240p or 640x480 resolution, and then output to the display.
Finally I think the fpga expansion card should have an updated parallel port, 32 bit one even, because it could be used for external connectors for the simulated hardware.
Better yet, gpio, the fpga could then also double as a chip programmer and who knows what else, it opens up some crazy possibilities.
I mean can you imagine if it could simulate an arm cpu like in the raspberry pi or an Arduino and run code on a desktop while using those expansion boards?
One cool example is the latest vampire card for the Amiga 500, it's an fpga based replacement for the onboard cpu and adds HDMI output to a system from the early 90s.
And here's a prototype accelerator card
Effectively they've bypassed the cpu which is based on a Motorola 6800 and rigged the fpga to communicate with the main board in it's place, adding extra memory and other features as well.
This existing is the other reason why I'd like to see an fpga expansion card for modern PC's.
The accelerator card is like the scaled up crazy version of getting a 286 to 486 adapter and installing a 32 bit 486 dx2 on top of your old 16 bit cpu.
As far as a second fpga for video...
Well since multiple gpu setups are a thing I don't see why not, hell there was a time when sound cards had expansion daughter boards to add extra functionality. It'd still have to output through the main gpu through passthrough to scale stuff though if only so you aren't stuck with 240p or 640x480 resolution, and then output to the display.
Finally I think the fpga expansion card should have an updated parallel port, 32 bit one even, because it could be used for external connectors for the simulated hardware.
Better yet, gpio, the fpga could then also double as a chip programmer and who knows what else, it opens up some crazy possibilities.
I mean can you imagine if it could simulate an arm cpu like in the raspberry pi or an Arduino and run code on a desktop while using those expansion boards?
"I reject your reality and subsitute my own." - Adam Savage, Mythbusters
![[Image: 5.jpg]](http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg)
