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Early Access

Crosstalk: Second Reality · published 1 Aug 2026, 21:33 UTC

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We originally planned to release Crosstalk into 1.0 as a city-builder. It was to include real-world electronic components and let players build cities that they wanted, electrically valid or not.

After some deliberation, especially after the postponement a few days ago due to a pending PCB delivery from a fabricator, we've decided to push the game into Early Access and make it something more than a city-builder. We have a fully featured EDA engine with physics solvers that use the methods that scientists and engineers use professionally, so we want to fulfill the potential that we think Crosstalk has outside of city-building.

The city-builder feature, along with the adversarial mode (which we classify under the city-builder feature), will release first, and it's what Early Access will open with. After release, the community will be able to submit ideas, which we'll consider when building new features, whether for the city-builder mode itself, or new game modes.

Concretely, we want to integrate into Crosstalk the following:

FPGA support (+ SystemVerilog), along with the standard flow:
1. Preprocess
2. Parse
3. Elaborate
4. Synthesize
5. Map
6. Optimize
7. Place
8. Route
9. STA
10. (native bitstream generation will only be available for our FPGA and not 3rd-party FPGAs, so we will instead "assume" that the bitstream has been created by emitting C and running it during the board simulation)
Custom IC creation, where players can define their own components and place them on their boards
- Logic components (described by SystemVerilog)
- Electronic components, which will bring a schematic editor to the game

Existing PCB scanning and import, a.k.a. "scan your motherboard and use it in Crosstalk"
Board stacking
Two storylines, one of which will maintain the isometric perspective of the city-builder and the other will use the first-person perspective
Environmental upgrades so that the board surroundings look like a workshop or a garage, possibly several so that players could choose
Educational campaign with challenges formatted as "missions"

We've been working on FPGA support and custom ICs for some time now, and the feature is in an advanced stage. It will also be a part of the professional EDA suite that we plan to release next year.

If you like what you see and would like to see updates, then please join our Discord and optionally wishlist: Discord invite

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Community7 Sep 2026The first Crosstalk trailer demo board has arrivedThe board mentioned in this post as having been done by the fab has arrived! The conclusion that there are some improvements to be made remains, so this post is just to show a bit more photos.Community4 Sep 2026Hardware Sniffers: The DLUWelcome to the next Hardware Sniffers post entry. Today, the topic is the DLU, which stands for the DANGLING Logic Unit , and it is the first CPU of the MISC architecture . The DLU consists of the following parts: · dangalu.sv: the DANGLING Arithmetic Logic Unit · dangdsu.sv: the DANGLING Sound Unit · dangddu.sv: the DANGLING Display Unit (80x25 text mode + a framebuffer mode, which some parts…Community3 Sep 2026Dropping old achievements that are no longer achievable at releasePrevious achievements are being removed so that the initial Early Access release state of the game contains only those that can be awarded at that time. They will return once EDA features return.