The Tang Nano 9K is a cheap FPGA development board that can usually be acquired for around $15 or so. [ThePartsBin] has been experimenting with this hardware and figured out how to set it up as a retro-style computer.
The board is based around the Gowin GW1NR-9C FPGA which only has 8,640 LUTs. However, that’s enough to spin up a 36 MHz RISC-V CPU, and there’s 8 MB of RAM on tap, along with HDMI, 48 kHz stereo audio output, two USB ports, and an SD card reader. Combine all that together, and you’ve got a machine capable of playing a whole raft of classic 1990s games.
[ThePartsBin] ported Doom, Tyrian, System Shock and Ultima VII, all of which run at a playable speed at a tasty 720 x 480 resolution. The writeup does a great job of explaining what it took to actually implement these classic games on the platform. Tons of compromises were made along the way, but that’s the engineering challenge, isn’t it?
If you’re looking to play retro games, this is not really the fastest or cheapest way to do it. You could probably just emulate them on the machine you’re using to read this very website. If you’re trying to get to grips with a new FPGA board for the first time, though, projects like this can be a very useful learning experience indeed.