Terasic, the maker of the DE-10 Nano kit that’s the heart of the MiSTer FPGA project has just announced its successor: The DE-25. The new kit has 128mb of built-in sdram and dedicated / shared ddr4. Basically, it has 30% more block ram and is capable of higher clock speeds, but still in a similar form-factor. There’s no word on price or when it’ll go on sale. More thoughts after the link:
These specs are an interesting choice for Terasic to include. It’s certainly an upgrade over the DE-10 and once the MiSTer framework is ported over, dual-RAM will likely not be necessary and some existing cores like the Saturn, Jaguar and N64 cores will benefit from the faster chip and RAM. The 486 core has the potential to see the most difference, as higher CPU speeds should be supported, as well as MIDI emulators able to run properly on the more powerful HPS ARM cores. On the flip side, older cores like NES will work exactly the same, so this upgrade isn’t needed for everyone.
I’ll be honest though, I was really hoping for a much more powerful kit for people who wanted a big upgrade. My hope was Terasic would keep selling the DE-10, but also offer a “fully loaded” version at a higher cost. I’m sure there’s limitations to all that and of course Terasic needs to make the products that are best for them to sell, not for retro gamers to use.
Maybe this is something that’s really up to us in the community to tackle? I’d personally love to see a community-effort of a shared, open-source hardware implementation of an FPGA and co-processor that does everything we need. I still prefer projects that are focused on one set of hardware (like the MiSTer, Raspberry Pi, etc), as everyone is developing and troubleshooting the same group of hardware. I also think the goal of multiple sets of hardware that all use the same software would be incredible. Imagine 1080p, 4K60 and 4K120 versions of the same hardware, each at price points to match?
I realize there’s limitations to that and some of the chips required might not allow for open-source implementations. But I’m still crossing my fingers!
