> The whole system runs on a low-cost development board (Xilinx Spartan-3 by Digilent, with 1 MB of static RAM)

If somebody wants their FPGA work to be available, they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning. Costlier, but way more likely to be found around.

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Rochus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The availability of the board to run Wirt's system was an issue pretty soon. There were even people who offered their own boards to fill the gap (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20160831063355/http://oberonstat...).

My system version instead runs on RISC-V, so no custom FPGA implementation, currently on an emulator, but eventually on the ESP32 (which has a much better availability).

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Joker_vD 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning.

Well, the MiSTer project was yet 4 years from being launched back in 2013 when the RISC-5 was implemented in FPGA, so I hope you'd excuse Wirth from not choosing it.

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Rochus 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And shortly after Wirth launched his RISC-5 system, the original FPGA board went out of production.

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Which most likely wasn't predictable for him.

FPGAs were never that maker friendly, due to the whole ecosystem.

	▲	butvacuum 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It probably was NRND on mouser/digikey by then... not that there was much choice in 2013- you went with what you had instead of $1000+ dev boards.