Classroom Glossary Public page

Week 1: DE10-Nano + Quartus + MiSTer Setup

The first move is the easiest to skip and the most expensive to skip. You boot the MiSTer framework on a DE10-Nano (or you boot the browser path on jsnes), load a stock NES core, and play Donkey Kong on silicon you flashed yourself.

Reading

  • Copetti, Architecture of Consoles: NES, sections one through three (overview, CPU, the cartridge slot). Free.
  • Altice, I Am Error, Chapter 1 (Famicom origin story). Roughly thirty pages. Anchors the rest of the NES modules.
  • MiSTer wiki, setup guide. Read the DE10-Nano boot section.

Lecture

Roughly three hours across two sessions. Key arc:

  • Why the DE10-Nano. The Cyclone V plus MiSTer ecosystem in one slide.
  • What MiSTer is and what it is not. Production-grade soft-core hub, not a finished product.
  • The browser-only path through jsnes plus the academy NES debugger R7.
  • First read of the MiSTer top-level Verilog. What you are looking at.
  • Forward pointer to Module 2: hand-writing 6502 next week.

Lab pack

Lab Pack 1 walks the full boot sequence. See Lab Pack 1: DE10-Nano Boot + Stock NES Core.

Classroom tools

  • Workbench: 6502 REPL (for the browser-path students).
  • SPK-101 classroom: jsnes and the NES debugger for the no-hardware path.
  • Quartus Prime Lite (DE10 path) or your browser (no-hardware path).

Architecture comparison sidebar

The DE10-Nano is roughly five hundred times the gate count of your CSA-101 Tang Primer 25K and yet runs a thirty-year-old console at full speed with cycles to spare. The pedagogical point is not that bigger is better; it is that hardware choice is a budget decision and the budget on a 1985 console was tight in a way modern silicon makes hard to feel.

Reflection prompts

  1. What did MiSTer choose to make easy and what did it choose to make hard?
  2. If you boot the same NES core on the browser jsnes and on the DE10-Nano hardware, what is genuinely different and what is the same?
  3. Why is the NES core in MiSTer about ten thousand lines of Verilog when CSA-101's RV32I-Lite was around two thousand?

What is next

Module 2 takes the 6502 you saw in CSA-101 Ch 4 and has you writing assembly that runs on the NES core you just booted.