/vr/ - Retro Games

Quite a long time unless there is a miracle breakthrough in FPGAs. When the MiSTer project started the SNES was considered barely feasible, and while people have pulled off miracles even those are getting stretched thin. The N64 core is progressing but the creator, who had done other MiSTer miracles in the past, is not 100% confidant it will even work out at all and even if it does is pretty much guaranteeing that it can't hit 100% hardware accuracy with the MiSTer's FPGA.

Anything past the N64 is utterly out of the question, Dreamcast has no chance in hell, PS2 is less likely than Konami making games again, and GameCube has about as much chance as Atari re-entering the hardware market and blowing Sony and Nintendo out of the water.

We have pushed the Cyclone V FPGA in the DE-10 well beyond limits that we even dreamed were possible. We would need a better FPGA, and like many have explained, the DE-10 Nano board is heavily subsidized. Terasic's other board that uses the same FPGA but lacks the ARM CPU, RAM, or many other components costs MORE because that one is not subsidized. A FPGA that can handle the PS2 is going to easily be in the four figure mark.

The only one I saw that MIGHT be viable (Xilinx Artix-7) and mind you I am no developer to know if it would work, seems like it was a fluke. There was a suspiciously cheap $150 version floating around (but it still lacked the ARM CPU or some other components so it would need to be paired with something like a Pi) is now sold out... with others selling the board professionally for $500 now. There might be cheaper versions of a different board with the Atrix-7, problem is, those might require soldering or additional components to match the DE-10. A big advantage of the DE-10 is that it's not JUST a FPGA chip, but also an ARM CPU, RAM, storage, GPIO pins, and many other components in one that make it a plug-and-play assembly. Other options might require very intricate soldering and/or multiple components in addition.