For Christmas I got my father this thing I found called an FPGA board that can flip switches on a chip to become a type of vintage computer or something. I got this for him bc he has a large collection of strat o magic and replay baseball and football DOS games he’s played since the 80s but they’re difficult to get running on modern hardware since they’re designed for 286 or 386 or whatever so I bought this thing for him since it pretty much turns into the computer you tell it to like it’s the real hardware.
It can become other old computers like amiga And c64 which is why I’m doing now while I set this thing up for him. I told it to become a 64 then connected to the bbs at theoldnet.com which has a text based browser and now I’m on this site.
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FPGAs are for giga neurodivergents and i mean that as a complement
Im a brainlet and could never get my projects to work, cheatmaxxed at college to pass lmao
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FPGAs rule, I only used them to model circuits (made a CPU with a friend
) so it is crazy to me that they are powerful enough to run whole computers.
Also if you have never created ur own CPU in some form or another you are not a real programmer
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YWNBAP
If i had infinite time to piss around with projects I'd definitely give it a go, model something ancient like the Altair or smth cos im![:marseybrainlet: :marseybrainlet:](/e/marseybrainlet.webp)
Like a decade ago on hackaday or makezine i saw these uni kids make 3d models with FPGAs. Like, direct hardware output to VGA off the board and all the rendering done at the component level. Terry Davis shit fr fr
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Mostly joking to dunk on zoomoids that dont understand how CPUs work lol. I def couldn't do that graphics shit because I slept through most of linear algebra
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Sorry to break it to you but Zoomers used redstone in Minecraft to make computers.
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Do
even know about hardware anymore
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CPUs actually open a portal to the computer universe tbh
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Is this a chris chan joke or are u just on his wavelength
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Hardware autism is alive and well with Zoomers.
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This kid at my wife’s bar was telling me a kid it last week and it sounddd incredibly complicated but I literally just had to flash an sd card, let it run to set things up and then update once I put a Wi-Fi usb thing in it
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Oh yeah if ur just running pre programmed shit it's different
An FPGA as far as i understand it lets u model processors down to the transistor level, they're used to simulate new hardware before they make a chip. U could manually build a 386 processor if u wanted but why
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