Recreating the classic 3dfx Voodoo 1 on an FPGA proved feasible thanks to modern RTL frameworks. Using SpinalHDL, the author described the entire graphics pipeline, simulated it, and pushed a working bitstream to hardware—all from a single repository on GitHub. The result is a faithful hardware replica that renders scenes indistinguishable from the original card.

Unlike contemporary GPUs, the Voodoo packs every rendering step—gradient interpolation, texture sampling, mip‑selection, bilinear/trilinear filtering, depth testing, fog—into fixed silicon. Its register interface must juggle four distinct write behaviors, ensuring state changes travel with in‑flight pixels or wait for pipeline drain. By extending SpinalHDL’s RegIf abstraction, the designer encoded these categories directly in