I have spent the last month adding features and improving performance to the inz486_Mi STer, mostly working through games from the first half of the 1990s. Looking a few years ahead brought me to another change I wanted to explore: the arrival of 3D graphics cards. The first one that left a strong impression on me was the Voodoo.

The game was Need for Speed II SE. Smooth textures, fog, and the speed of the whole thing made it feel like a new generation of PC gaming. Could I recreate that on an FPGA now that the z486 CPU exists? The result of this detour is z SST, a System Verilog implementation of the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics, or SST-1.

Combined with my z486 CPU and the surrounding PC hardware, it forms z486 XL: a DOS PC with Voodoo graphics running in the programmable logic of a Xilinx KV260 board. Tomb Raider now runs with its original 3dfx renderer. z SST implements most of the central Voodoo features: prepared triangles, texture filtering and mipmapping, depth and alpha tests, fog, blending, dithering, framebuffer access, and buffer swaps. It supports both the fixed-point and floating-point setup interfaces.

Hardware game testing is still concentrated on Tomb Raider; broader compatibility and later Voodoo generations are work for another day. The CPU and renderer run at 100 MHz on the KV260. That board has enough logic, DSP blocks, on-chip memory, and DDR bandwidth for the combined design.

The DE10-Nano does not have room for this graphics addition. The KV260 uses its onboard DDR; there is no external SDRAM module to add.