The 2023 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on November 14 and 15, in the traditional location of the Holiday Inn Munich City Center. This was the 10th time the conference took place, serving as an excuse for a great anniversary dinner. Also new was the addition of a research track to provide academics publishing at the conference with the academic credit their work deserves. This year had a large number of papers related to virtual platforms, so writing this report has taken me longer than usual. There was just so much to cover.
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Using FPGAs to Simulate old Game Consoles
A while ago, Ars Technica reviewed the Mega Sg, a modern clone of the old Sega Genesis gaming system. I stumbled on this review recently and realized that this is a fascinating piece of hardware. The Mega Sg is produced by a company called Analogue (https://www.analogue.co/), presumably named thus because they create analogues to old gaming consoles. The way this is done is different from most current “revive the old consoles” products that simply use software emulation to run old games. Instead, Analogue seems to have settled on using FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) technology to basically build new hardware that is functionally equivalent to the old console hardware.
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I have read a few news items and blog posts recently about how various types of software running on top of virtual machines and emulators have managed to either break the emulators or at least detect their presence and self-destruct. This is a fascinating topic, as it touches on the deep principles of computing: just because a piece of software can be Turing-equivalent to a piece of hardware does not mean that software that goes looking for the differences won’t find any or won’t be able to behave differently on a simulator and on the real thing.
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