As recently covered in a video from Pixel Cherry Ninja, work has started on creating an FPGA core for the Sega Dreamcast.
The retro tinkerer ElectronAsh is the person building the Dreamcast FPGA core, with the developer currently being in consultation with others inside the community to try and realize this ambitious goal.
According to Pixel Cherry Ninja, who has been conferring with ElectronAsh recently, the core, unfortunately, won't be compatible with the DE10-Nano, which is the FPGA that the MiSTer uses but will require the release of a more powerful FPGA module in order to be functional.
Here's what Pixel Cherry Ninja had to say about the progress of the Dreamcast core in his recent video:
“Right now, it’s just a very basic state machine in verilog, which reads polygon commands from a VRAM dump. The actual triangle rendering is still in C code at this very moment. And that’s pretty much it right now. Just some testing."
While talking to ElectronAsh, Pixel Cherry Ninja was able to get an estimate, however, on when he believes work will be finished, and as expected it's a bit of a wait:
“The timeline on this — ElectonAsh thinks that if he works on it alone now with some consultation help, by the time this becomes an actual core for an FPGA, he estimates around three years time. However, if he does get help from other developers [...], that time may significantly decrease."
We'll obviously try and keep you posted if any significant updates occur, but for now, you can go and watch the original video from Pixel Cherry Ninja to see some screenshots of its current progress.