Hacker News: fayalalebrun

The Agent-Native Editor Was Invented in 1976

fayalalebrun — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:12:10 +0000

Article URL: https://noquiche.fyi/emacs-for-agents

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597067

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools"

fayalalebrun — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:23:15 +0000

Apparently Voodoo cards defaulted to 1.3 gamma instead of the standard 2.2. I wonder why that is, since it theory using a non-standard gamma would just reduce your color range with no real benefit.

This is definitely fixable in the design though by looking at the DAC gamma register. I'll do so once I get to the scan-out implementation on the DE-10 Nano.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools"

fayalalebrun — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:12:27 +0000

This fits and runs in a DE-10 Nano without too much difficulty, uses around 70% of the fabric. I've been working on timing closure and just got it to 50 MHz.

Note that I also implemented cache components not present in the original Voodoo in order to be more flexible in terms of the memory that can be used. So it could be quite a bit smaller, maybe 50% of the fabric if you got rid of that.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools"

fayalalebrun — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:35:06 +0000

You do have a nice point here. Then the compute unit can simply stall the commands coming out of the register bank. Without this I need to stall the write FIFO, which feels less elegant and has given me some pain in terms of combinational loops. The drawback though is that you have to duplicate a significant amount of registers in the compute unit.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools"

fayalalebrun — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:05:36 +0000

Thank you! These things do pack in a ridiculous amount of functionality for what they do. Probably why they look so good but also why it took 30 years for a hardware re-implementation.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools"

fayalalebrun — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:02:29 +0000

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that functionality is implemented in another component. The register bank only records the category of each register and implements the memory-mapped register functionality.

This list of registers and their categories are then imported in separate components which sit between incoming writes and the register bank. The advantage is that everything which describes the properties of the registers is in a single file. You don't have to look in three different places to find out how a register behaves.

Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

fayalalebrun — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:24:38 +0000

Article URL: https://noquiche.fyi/voodoo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477284

Points: 225

# Comments: 54

Show HN: Latchup – Competitive programming for hardware description languages

fayalalebrun — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:06:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.latchup.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319562

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by fayalalebrun in "A FPGA friendly 32 bit RISC-V CPU implementation"

fayalalebrun — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 02:37:53 +0000

SpinalHDL did not fork from Chisel. You might be able to say that it was inspired by Chisel, but it does not share a commit history. See this comment by the author: https://www.reddit.com/r/chisel/comments/4ivevd/comment/d3lj...

New comment by fayalalebrun in "“Bad Apple” in Minecraft"

fayalalebrun — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 18:47:31 +0000

My favorite dithering algorithm for motion video is Yliluoma dithering: https://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/dither/jy/

It is especially useful for grayscale content, as finding the optimal dithering matrix from the available palette is a straightforward exact operation, and the result can be placed in a LUT for real-time rendering.

In my opinion it looks much better than bayer or random dithering, especially on gradients.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Ask HN: What business would you start in 2025?"

fayalalebrun — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 12:08:22 +0000

Do you have any other examples where systolic arrays are suitable other than matrix multiplication? As far as I am aware, other problems require different systolic architectures. So I am curious whether you are talking about a general purpose architecture.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Google Chrome has an API accesible only from *.google.com"

fayalalebrun — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 19:21:46 +0000

As a result of a flaw in the protocol itself or in its implementation?

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head"

fayalalebrun — Sun, 12 May 2024 05:27:59 +0000

This is a common misconception, but is not the case. For example, look at the Voodoo 1, 2, and 3, which also used fixed point numbers internally but did not suffer from this problem.

The real issue is that the PS1 has no subpixel precision. In other words, it will round a triangle coordinates to the nearest integers.

Likely the reason why they did this is because then you can completely avoid any division and multiplication hardware, with integer start and end coordinates line rasterization can be done completely with addition and comparisons.

Chasing resets

fayalalebrun — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 05:47:03 +0000

Article URL: https://zipcpu.com/blog/2024/04/01/chasing-resets.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39976472

Points: 35

# Comments: 2

New comment by fayalalebrun in "A rudimentary simulation of the three-body problem"

fayalalebrun — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 07:28:24 +0000

A few years ago a friend and I made something similar to universe sandbox, though only with the gravitational simulation part: https://github.com/fayalalebrun/Astraria

Surprisingly enough the jar still runs without issue. Something which probably would not be the case for linux binaries, but maybe for windows.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Red Hat to author new Linux driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust"

fayalalebrun — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 06:35:04 +0000

Even though the newest nvidia drivers have started to support GBM, the Wayland compatibility story is still not great. In my experience on Wayland, several OpenGL programs refuse to work, and Vulkan does not work at all. This is with driver 545.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Veryl: A Modern Hardware Description Language"

fayalalebrun — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 06:45:36 +0000

I probably don't have nearly as much experience as you do, but I have used VHDL, Verilog, and modern HDLs like Chisel and SpinalHDL. I think the main advantage of a modern HDL is to have the full power of a traditional programming language when it comes to generating hardware. This especially helps when making deeply parameterizable and reusable hardware in a fraction of the lines compared to SystemVerilog, and which sometimes is impossible to do in Verilog.

From a first impression, your language doesn't look all that different from SystemVerilog. Does it have any features that make parameterization easier than SystemVerilog? Can I, for example, easily generate hardware using higher order functions and other functional programming features like those available in Rust and Scala?

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Veryl: A Modern Hardware Description Language"

fayalalebrun — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 06:09:44 +0000

Chisel does emit FIRRTL. Which can be made into a bitstream directly by Yosys.

New comment by fayalalebrun in "Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1"

fayalalebrun — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:01:31 +0000

Perhaps already possible via MoltenVK -> Vulkan -> Zink?

New comment by fayalalebrun in "OpenFPGA"

fayalalebrun — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 13:18:43 +0000

I am surprised no one has yet tried to make a portable shell for the DE-10 Nano (Mister-FPGA's target platform). With a power usage of 10 watts, I think it should be quite feasible even with the addition of a small LCD panel. However, it would probably require re-engineering some of the standard addon boards for the form factor.