Subj : Re: TheA1200
To   : tenser
From : Nightfox
Date : Mon Dec 08 2025 14:50:35

  Re: Re: TheA1200
  By: tenser to Mortar M. on Tue Dec 09 2025 10:22 am

 MM>> FPGA is not emulation.

 te> Of course it is.  None of these machines, when they were still being
 te> manufactured, shipped with a soft core on an FPGA.  They shipped with
 te> regular, run-of-the-mill 68k series CPUs in silicon.

 te> FPGAs are programmed with a bitstream that makes them do, well, whatever
 te> the bitstream is programmed to do; in this case, perhaps, implement the
 te> core of an MC68k CPU.

 te> Because the FPGA itself is a hardware device that provides programmable
 te> logic, and not a general-purpose CPU that's running a program compiled to
 te> that CPU's ISA that is emulating another machine, I can see how one might
 te> not consider them "emulation" in the same category as a software emulator.
 te> But this is, at best, arguing semantics.

While it might not be the same exact physical CPU, even though an FPGA is programmable, I feel like FPGA could be thought of as a hardware re-creation of the original.

But even so, I've heard software emulation often isn't totally 100% accurate (maybe 99% though); compared to the original hardware, software emulation can have some issues that make it behave differently in some small cases (and corner cases).  I've heard FPGAs are (or can be) generally 100% compatible and don't have these issues though.

Nightfox
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