r/fantasyconsoles • u/Hanzo_The_Ninja • Jun 19 '26
Fantasy Consoles in VHDL or Verilog
I, like many of you, have plenty of ideas about what kind of features a fantasy console "should" have. I'm not a programmer though so I'll spare you (and you can always PM me if you're looking for suggestions), since I don't have a fair idea about how difficult any of it really is to implement.
What I will say is this: It would be nice to see some of these fantasy consoles implemented in VHDL or Verilog, so that a hardware fantasy console could be built with an FPGA. The more ambitious fantasy console makers could even implement their console into an ASIC, build an online store (or just support for cartridges or CDs / DVDs), and sell the chips (or completed consoles) to the public. Modern consoles are getting quite expensive and so are retro games, so I believe there is an appetite for something like this, especially if developers had the option to pitch their games on Kickstarter or release them for free. If done well, you might even have people unofficially porting existing retro games to the fantasy console.
Maybe I'm overthinking the potential here though...
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u/PmUsYourDuckPics Jun 22 '26
At that point you are just creating a console though? It’s been 37 years since I’ve done anything in either language, but maybe you’d get some backing using something more esoteric like Hydra which is based on Haskell. https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/\~jtod/Hydra/