MEGA65

[danboid]

Hi vossstef

I've ordered my Nano 20K and look forward to trying your C64 core when I get it.

Seeing as the Nano 20K can also handle the Amiga and Atari STe, I would imagine its powerful enough to cope with the MEGA65.

Would you consider porting the MEGA65 to the Tang Nano FPGAs?

[vossstef]

@danboid, i am already rather busy to keep my three cores stable and enhance them from time to time apart from the SDK and Companion activities...
You may want to have a try on your own ?
Guess the 60k boards onwards might be able to handle that M65 but not sure that a 20k will be sufficient.

[danboid]

I've never done any FPGA dev so it would be an interesting challenge.

What makes you think a 20K would be insufficient for the MEGA65? I emailed the main MEGA65 dev to ask if he thought it could be ported to the Spectrum Next and he said:

I haven't checked what FPGA the Next uses now, but I believe its a 7-series Xilinx, and so should be capable to run the MEGA65 core, if
someone ports it.

[harbaum]

The Mega64 is a great project. I'd be afraid to harm their hardware sales by porting their core to other platforms. They should IMHO not be punished for being rather open with their code.

I'd suggest buying a Mega64 if you are really interested in it.

[danboid]

I do not think it would be "punishing" them at all. If they didn't want it to be ported to other FPGAs, they wouldn't have made it open source and Paul Gardner-Stephen (the main M65 dev) would've asked me not to port it when I wrote to him about a Spectrum Next port.

On the contrary, the MEGA65 working on more FPGAs would make it more accessible to developers and would encourage more people to write software for it so it would be good for the platform. Not very many people can afford €666.66 for a M65, I know I can't.

[harbaum]

Of course you are free to give it a go. But I personally don't support that idea.

[danboid]

It seems the port of the M65 core to the MiSTer stalled pretty early in its development but there is a more complete (I think?) port to the Poseidon and NeptUno FPGA boards here:

https://github.com/benitoss/Mega65_Altera

The documentation is a bit scant and it doesn't cover how compatible it is, known bugs or which of the two supported boards is the most suitable, if one is better than the other somehow so I've opened a ticket to try and get the author to add this info to the projects README. Both boards come to about 200 ish Euros which is still quite pricey but its cheap compared to the almost 700 Euros to buy an official M65.