The Tang Nano 9K is a cheap FPGA development board that can usually be acquired for around $15 or so. [ThePartsBin] has been experimenting with this hardware and figured out …. Cheap FPGA Board Becomes Retro-Style Computer.
The board is based around the Gowin GW1NR-9C FPGA which only has 8,640 LUTs. That’s enough to spin up a 36 MHz RISC-V CPU, and there’s 8 MB of RAM on tap, along with HDMI, 48 kHz stereo audio output, two USB ports, and an SD card reader. Combine all that together, and you’ve got a machine capable of playing a whole raft of classic 1990s games.
[ThePartsBin] ported Doom, Tyrian, System Shock and Ultima VII, all of which run at a playable speed at a tasty 720 x 480 resolution. The writeup does a great job of explaining what it took to actually implement these classic games on the platform. Tons of compromises were made along the way, but that’s the engineering challenge, isn’t it.
Discover more from ChuckysCarnage
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
