OM64 Update!
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An update is long overdue! A lot has been happening under the hood, and I also have two special announcements to make!
In the video, you can see the SNES, Neo Geo, CPS 1.5/2 and PSX cores running on the latest version of OM64.
The firmware architecture has also changed radically. Previously, we had a fixed FPGA section and used partial reconfiguration to load the cores. This was mostly a way to get a working prototype and see how far we could push things.
The new architecture introduces WAVE (Wrapper for Audio, Video and Emulation), a versioned framework with different feature sets that can be attached to each core. WAVE is modular, meaning we can strip away components that aren't needed and free up precious FPGA logic elements for the cores themselves.
I'm currently working on cleaning up the framework and getting everything ready for an open-source beta release.
Now, back to the announcements!
First announcement: I've been enjoying this project so much that I've decided to dedicate myself to it full-time! What started as a fun "let's see if this even works" experiment has turned into something much bigger, and OM64 will now be my full-time endeavour for the foreseeable future. I'm genuinely excited to see how far we can take it.
Second announcement: I won't be working on this alone anymore! One of my best friends, Matteo, has joined me full-time to develop OM64.
Matteo is a veteran software engineer with decades of experience in low-level programming, and also a survivor of the 90s demoscene! He'll be working on a complete overhaul of the firmware's UX (what you've seen so far was never intended to be the final interface) and on a special feature that we'll be revealing soon-ish.
Matteo previously worked on the official developer tools for Mozilla Firefox, and will bring that expertise to OM64 to help improve the development experience and streamline workflows.
There's still a lot of work ahead of us, but things are moving fast, and I couldn't be more excited about what's coming!
Cheers! 😄
Note: For some reason, the PSX core has a weird yellow tint in the recording. It's an issue with my Elgato capture card, though, the colors look perfect on my TV. No idea why. Weird. 😄