Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog

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1. jecelOct 2024
   A very nice book is "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog" by Steven Hugg and is part of a series of books that is supported by

   http://8bitworkshop.com/

   I am writing a book somewhat similar to this (currently in Portuguese, but later in English and other languages) using the Digital simulator in Java for the examples as schematics, though they can be exported as Verilog for implementation in FPGA boards.

   https://github.com/jeceljr/LivroComputadoresEVideogames

   Each chapter represents a video-game console generation, with hardwired Pong and Soccer in the first chapter. I am now working on replacing the game logic in Soccer with a 16 bit version of RISC-V for the second chapter and then improving the video and sound to Colecovision levels. In chapter 3 we will have a 32 bit RISC-V with NES level graphics and sound, with a pipelined RISC-V with something like the Gameduino for chapter 4. The 8 Bit Workshop will let readers program the actual consoles from each era and not just our retro designs.

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2. agg23Nov 2023
   On the note of my sibling comment, a common book in this space for learning is "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog", which is specifically retrocomputing related.
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3. nicolas_tAug 2022
   There are some development boards like the Terasic DE10 Nano. It's sometimes a bit hard to come by because it's used by Misterfpga (a retrogaming fpga based simulator) but it's perfect to learn to develop on.

   Other than that I really recommend 8bitworkshop and the Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog. It's a great way to get started without an actual fpga board to test with.

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4. krasinSep 2021
   TinyFPGA BX ([1]) and nmigen/yosys as the fully open source toolchain for generating logic with Python and formally verifying it ([2], [3]). There is a good nMigen tutorial by Robert Baruch ([4]. [5]).

   Alternatively, if you really want to try Verilog first (not a bad idea), I enjoyed reading a book "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog" ([6]).

   1. https://tinyfpga.com/

   2. https://m-labs.hk/gateware/nmigen/

   3. http://www.clifford.at/yosys/

   4. https://github.com/RobertBaruch/nmigen-tutorial

   5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85ZCTuekjGA&list=PLEeZWGE3Pw...

   6. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1728619440/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

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5. pizza234Aug 2020
   It ultimately depends on the level of abstraction ("emulating a CPU" is ambiguous): emulating the logical gates of a CPU is an entirely different matter from emulating the instruction set; besides, generally one emulates an entire system, not just the CPU.

   If you're looking for the former, the canonical course is "NAND2Tetris". If you take the class on Coursera, the first (of two parts) covers the hardware.

   I've also seen two very interesting books, but I haven't read them - "The ZX Spectrum Ula: How to Design a Microcomputer", and "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog".

   Courses at this level are generally exactly defined.

   In the second case - emulating at the ISA level, the canonical entry is to emulate a CHIP-8, since it's simple and relatively well defined.

   At this level, targets are rarely exactly defined. CHIP-8 for example is well-defined in theory, however, for example, looking at the Wikipedia page won't suffice, because there are many extensions. Additionally, CHIP-8 has no standard clock speed. But it's easy to find the resources, and you can end with an exactly working system (the same can't be easily say, for example, of a NES or a C64 - you'll find conflicting information).

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