Re: Crazy cross-MIPS-boards stunts possible?

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sun, 6 Dec 2020, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> Of course you'd usually not know what surprise you'd find in such an 
> FPGA board, if anything usable at all.

Thanks for the heads up on that issue. I've stopped looking for a Malta 
board for the moment and decided to play on the ERLv3 for now, instead.

However, since you seemed well versed on both MIPS and FPGAs, I am curious 
if you know of any thing about projects like this one:

https://www.eetimes.com/altera-mips-roll-fpga-optimized-soft-processor/

My basic curiosity asks:

  * Any MIPS soft cores work notably well on any modern FPGA hobbyist
    boards that might eventually (or already) run NetBSD?

  * Have you ever heard of any hardware upgrades for MIPS machines? I'd
    love to hear about someone making R-series chips again for SGIs as
    upgrades. Seems like FPGAs are fast enough maybe something like the
    68080 68k FPGA accelerator (ie... FPGA that emulates a very fast 68k
    processor gets pin-compatible adaptation for old 68k computers).

Besides SGI were other MIPS boards socketed? Would someone ever be able to 
try the same FPGA-replacement stunt on an non-SGI MIPS board/system/server 
?

I know a lot of this stuff is very pie-in-the-sky but things I never 
thought would happen *have* happened in this age of FPGAs....

-Swift