This paper tells the incremental journey of taking Tenstorrent’s Ascalon RISC‑V CPU IP from RTL and emulation to a playable DOOM demo on a Synopsys’s prototyping platform. Along the way we describe the problems we overcame, and how we optimized our flows and the design. We close with a set of lessons and recommendations for teams who want to use emulation and prototyping and realistic workloads like DOOM to de‑risk RISC‑V IP adoption and accelerate hardware/software co‑design.