Hardware vs Simh (and FPGA)

On Apr 27, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Dave wrote: It's quite similar, which makes sense, since they do almost the same thing. :-) I've never had cause to manually re-route anything, though, and I've been at this a while. Programmable logic has HUGE advantages in implementing any kind of synthesized hardware like CPUs, VGA controllers, PCI interfaces, etc. They're really terrible tasks for CPUs; I'm constantly baffled at projects like the SwinSID, which use the GPIO port on a microcontroller to implement the 6502 bus interface. Such a waste of cycles, even if it is interrupt-driven! Conversely, though, there are plenty of things that a CPU is much more suitable for, specifically most things that are highly sequential. You wouldn't want to make a web server on an FPGA, for example, because you would need to make lots of complex state machines that would be really hard to debug. Fortunately, it's usually pretty easy to just bolt on a microcontroller (or build one in FPGA logic, because a CPU is really just a specialized state machine with some logic and registers bolted on). Both Xilinx and Altera have soft-core CPUs that are free to use and toolchains for them that aren't COMPLETE nightmares. - Dave