Embed Notice

Right, so, time to start thinking about implementations and design decisions. First off, there is in fact a gaming platform that used the i960 as the main CPU, and it was the Sega Model 2 arcade system! I don't think it would be wise to completely copy this, as it uses a very complicated and proprietary set of graphics chips, but MAME will have the CPU emulated, so we can borrow that for a FOSS-based fantasy console emulator. In terms of making something physical, I would love to find the Model 2's schematics, as that would help with the multiplexing shenanigans. For video, that's going to be tricky. Having a very strong sprite-based system would be, IMHO, a good idea. Though being able to freely draw pixels in a bitmapped form would also allow for things like Doom to be possible. And people seem to expect polygon drawing support for something that's 32-bit... though I would like to avoid making it cursed like the Sega Saturn's polygons. Doing this all in a software environment is easy, but making a hardware counterpart will be rather sketchy. Anyone have thoughts about this?

Also, if you want to learn more about the i960, this is better than anything else I could write: http://www.righto.com/2023/07/the-complex-history-of-intel-i960-risc.html