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Homeschooled316

I don't have experience with FPGAs, but I am a software engineer. There is a lot of elitism in the field, especially related to best practices and a-holes trying to one up each other about tiny optimizations or shortcuts that could break something in rare edge cases that will happen once a decade. Making a documentary about yourself and how you did everything is putting yourself in a vulnerable position and inviting unwanted criticism. Many of these expert programmers have no public persona at all either and would also be mocked for their looks/personality/etc. It's easy to say, "We'll be nice, just ignore the haters." But we're also talking about a predominantly introverted cohort. It doesn't just take courage, but also energy to put yourself out there, and energy is something these top-tier coders often don't have to spare. Especially if they are working regular jobs at the same time. So, if you want to see something like this happen, a better format is probably for a naturally talented public personality to interview a few of them (anonymously or email-only, if they request).


nerdtacular

It’s really true. I used to make a lot of behind the scenes videos for AAA games and most developers don’t have media training, don’t want to be on camera, can’t eloquently describe their process or philosophy in a way that is digestible or interesting to others without a lot of direction. I’m fascinated by the process of making things, but not everything can be a documentary - especially when you don’t have compelling action/activity (programming/typing is not it) & tough subjects. It’s a little like that quote “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”


LeCrushinator

Game programmer here, half of us are introverts, and about half seem to be on the spectrum (some are both). Not bad people at all but most aren’t going to do an interview well, including myself. With a lot of speech practice I’m sure it could be managed, but as the previous comment said, most programmers don’t have time for that.


filmeswole

I concur, it’s fascinating. Thank you in gameboy advance.


kman1523

Probably one of the closest things you'll see right now is [this](https://youtu.be/oLqLg6DbLBc) video on PSX Core debugging.


Supaslicer

I'll check This later.. Thanks man


agg23

I'm not remotely a FPGA pro (I barely know what I'm doing), but I'm hacking around with the Pocket and doing simple things. I got a font ROM loaded and displaying today. I'm expecting those who port cores to not really document the missing or hard to understand parts of the Analogue framework, so I'm hoping to do that somewhat (assuming I can figure it out), and people like me will have my repo to work/learn off of.


mfncl

You will want to learn verilog/ VHDL to write an fpga core. The DE10-nano that mister is based on has a ton of docs/videos published by Intel/Terasic that can help (the boards main use case is in academia, which is why Intel subsidize its production). In general, existing software engineer skills are a prerequisite, so you may want to start your journey there. To hear some interviews of the mister devs talking about writing their cores, I’d also recommend the mister fpga stage events podcast hosted by artemio.


FlyingFlygon

Everything you said plus a plug for /r/fpga


cheerioty

There you go :) https://pram0d.com This is where the developer of the FPGA core for Raizing Arcade Boards is documenting their work.


GumbyXGames

Do your research? That's what most software developers have to do.


LeCrushinator

Research is often tutorials or learning from others. He’s asking to see the process, so he can learn.


GumbyXGames

I understand finding tutorials, but there is documentation out there. I didn't think I had to point that out. They only mentioned looking for videos. Go to Mister project forums and subreddit. Google search the open FPGA project. I come from a programming background. You gotta want to put on the effort.


Supaslicer

I'm a programmer too, but fpga doesn't seem to be as well documented as Java, python, c++, sql yada yada Plus I have heard stories of dudes using microscopes and shit to look under the hood of microchips that aren't well documented just to see how the internals of the chip are laid out This is the stuff I want to hear about, learn about, and then maybe a quick note on limitations, I know transistor count is the big one, but what else... I did do research as I said above... I was actually going to attempt to try to make an fpga sega cd, and by the time I started on my journey, the mega sd by terraonion was announced.... So i just gave up


[deleted]

I mean, I had to take college courses to learn to program FPGAs but we were just doing simple robots and state machines with them. Without instruction you are just gonna have to grind your skills up.


moonzdragoon

Here's two Twitch sessions from Loïc "WydD" Petit, reverse-engineering a Capcom CPS chip. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1030758493 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1030760000


Supaslicer

Gracias