FPGA Implementation of 3dfx Voodoo 1 Graphics Card Using Modern Hardware Design Tools

This frame of Screamer 2 was rendered not by an original 3dfx card and not by an emulator, but by an FPGA reimplementation of the Voodoo 1 that I wrote in SpinalHDL.

What surprised me was not just that it worked. It was that a design like this can now be described, simulated, and debugged by one person, provided the tools let you express the architecture directly and inspect execution at the right level of abstraction.

The Voodoo 1 is old, but it is not simple. It has no transform-and-lighting hardware and no programmable shaders, so all of its graphics behavior must be implemented in fixed-function hardware.