Show HN: Gameslab, a FPGA powered handheld game console

That’s a seriously cool project.<p>I love that retro game emulation has spawned this massive culture of super complicated and roundabout ways to replicate $50 consoles. It’s everything I love about DIY projects in general.

For those interested in that, Analogue will release the Analogue Pocket, a FGPA handheld console too. It will play Gameboy and Gameboy Advance games and you will be able to develop for it. There will be 1 FGPA to emulate the console and one another for development.<p>Analogue does great products usually so I can&#x27;t wait for it.<p>(I&#x27;m not affiliated at all with them, I just love their products).

Craig&#x27;s project is awesome! Had a chance to interview him about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theamphour.com&#x2F;469-an-interview-with-craig-j-bishop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theamphour.com&#x2F;469-an-interview-with-craig-j-bishop&#x2F;</a>

Congrats on getting it done.<p>Just mastering Ki-CAD is an accomplishment. I learned circuit design with P-CAD. And it was anything else but intuitive. Playing around with Ki-CAD reminded my of thise days.<p>Can you recommend a good Ki-CAD tutorial?<p>Can you elaborate a little bit on the mistakes you made and what led to the choices you made? E.g. first time read about Das U-Boot.

&gt; The FPGA fabric means that games and apps can bring their own unique hardware to load into the fabric.<p>Curious, can you both execute code on the FPGA and simultaneously write other parts of it? Or do you have to write it in one go, than &quot;start it&quot;? And in the latter case, can you write it incrementally or do you have to erase it first?

It&#x27;s weird to see someone refer to a zynq as a FPGA.<p>Every time I&#x27;ve been involved with one, it&#x27;s been basically a CPU with various accelerators for specific functions done in the fabric, with the design being CPU-forward. I&#x27;ve never seen anyone approach them from a FPGA-forward angle. Interesting!

Wow, this was quite a treat to read! Do you have any recommendations to learn more about FPGA (and maybe not Verilog&#x2F;VHDL, I&#x27;m thinking more about a SCALA based language). I always start with beginners tutorial but I always get super bored. Something about making LED drivers makes me really unmotivated.

This is awesome. The case fabrication looks great. What materials and fabrication process did you use? I&#x27;m particularly interested to hear more details of how you made such a pro looking design.

A little late on the draw here, but this is a serious contender for submission of the decade IMO. FPGAs are one of the last frontiers of computing that I&#x27;m curious about, as the realtime requirements of audio processing make GPUs somewhat of a non-starter for this particular application of grid computing. Really impressed at seeing this level of thoroughness and polish. Congratulations!

I just ported my 3D engine to Raspberry, the latest (4) has a new, really good GPU! I&#x27;m looking forward to something like the compute module for the Raspberry 4 because then the mods community will port it to their handhelds, only problem is power, it uses ~5W so you need a huge battery!

This is an amazing Show HN. The best bit was “I did this because I&#x27;m lazy” I suspect not somehow. I did wonder why those chips were so expensive? I have a super limited knowledge of hardware so I was unable to figure it out exactly. Thanks again and I can’t wait for more write ups.

This is one of the coolest hardware projects I&#x27;ve seen! Can&#x27;t wait to see the next post.

&quot;Or, a Gameboy emulator could load a Gameboy’s CPU and peripherals into the FPGA fabric to “become” a Gameboy rather than emulating it in software.&quot;<p>Basically the holy grail of emulation... Not-emulation.

&gt; STM32L0 onboard runs embedded Rust firmware<p>First time I’ve seen a real project using this.<p>How far is embedded rust away from “prime time” you think?<p>Also, the STM32 is a system supervisor, did it really need an RTOS?

This is amazing, I look forward to more posts! I&#x27;m trying to get into more hardware projects, stuff like this is very inspiring. Thanks!

Very cool. It would be incredible to see what some professional game devs could do with FPGA acceleration.

You are a genius, and I am glad that there are many geniuses like u, to make our world more fun!<p>Good work!

This is insanely cool, and must have been a massive undertaking! Awesome

This is absolutely nuts! Congrats!