Exploring the MiSTer & DE-10 Nano FPGA - Is this the future of Retro?

[@DrLilo]

As a MiSTer user, I just want to say, this is by far the single best video on the project I've seen anywhere on KZbin. Extremely well informed and with the production values to match.

[@soloM81]

I have to agree with you its how it should be done not like the others who didn't take the time to do the research

[@RMCRetro]

Hey thank you! There's so much you *could* talk about with this or so many cores you could demonstrate it's hard to know when to stop! But I really enjoyed getting to know it better and it's permanently setup now in The Cave for whenever I need my fix

[@SteveJones172pilot]

I agree.. a great overview.. I have the same setup he has, and haven't had a chance to really get deeply into it.. this has given me some inspiration to do so!!

[@arcadesunday4592]

Check out "Smoke monster" on KZbin. This is probably the best MiSTer KZbin resource.

[@DrNoBrazil]

Watch any recent video from SmokeMonster. You are welcome.

[@rekvin]

Nice to see my old amiga demo "SOTA" runing so smothly. Copper plasma it is hard to emulate. We used a lot of self modifing code too.

[@Retrojuju]

Major A-hole himself?

[@doctorcrankyflaps1724]

@@Retrojuju ??

[@mnemo70]

@@doctorcrankyflaps1724 Look at the credits of "State of the Art".

[@Steeps1969]

One of my favourite demo's, that one!

[@3k3k3]

I still got the original disks with this demo..

[@danielberrett2179]

"Intel is wrong, this is for gaming" favorite line.

[@glenndoiron9317]

The irony meter exploded. Altera (manufacturer of the FPGA on the DE10) is a division of intel.

[@MrDuncl]

FPGAs are for anything where development costs need to be low and unit cost can be high. Jeri Elsworth, the designer of the C64 DTV, realised that in about 2002 but had to transfer the design to an ASIC in order to be able to sell it at toy store prices. It wouldn't be surprising if the component cost of Neil's setup is higher than an Xbox 1 or PS4. Much more versatile though.

[@mUbase]

NO! I bought my board and learned VHDL because I wanted to build a controller for my fridge. Not games!! (Brilliant video, thanks Neil. :) ) . I have a Papilio one board.Xilinx I know but FPGA is fascinating to say the least....

[@soylentgreenb]

@@glenndoiron9317 Of course. The joke wouldn't work if Altera wasn't a division of Intel.

[@thebutcherjb]

My favorite is "Tell me I'm a wizard Hagrid!"

[@RMCRetro]

That's my take on the MiSTer and FPGA....what are your thoughts? Have you tried it, are you sitting on the fence or are you going to rush out and buy one? Here are some useful links! MiSTer XL Razer bundle facebook.com/retroshoppontopt/ The DE10-Nano www.digikey.co.uk/en/product-highlight/t/terasic-tech/de10-nano MiSTer MIDI with SoftMPU - kzbin.info/www/bejne/ip21fIlsmLqpnJY The MiSTer wiki: github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki Neil - RMC

[@bazza5699]

misteraddons.com/ defo worth checking out porkchop express's page, he has some incredible cases. twitter.com/MisterAddons ebay usually has sellers advertising the I/O boards, memory and USB boards.. worth doing a search on there if you're interested also

[@UltraHealthyVideoGameNerd]

I can't imagine how many hours it would take testing all these cores and games out to make an informed video on a product like this. Thanks for doing the work for all of us

[@RMCRetro]

Hey you're welcome! Thanks for taking the time to watch

[@samuelschwager]

Do I NEED this? No. Do I WANT it? Definitely!

[@khhnator]

no you need this

[@PooperScooperTrooper]

@@khhnator I need this...but I don't _actually need_ it.

[@SmokeMonster]

Great video. Always happy to see MiSTer in a master's hands :D

[@aminekostone1411]

The community owes a lot to you sir, for stirring up the interest!

[@RMCRetro]

Thank you! And I urge anyone who enjoyed this video to check smokemonsters channel for some excellent coverage and work!

[@SuperDerek]

Awesome IT Crowd reference there, quite subtle but much appreciated. And otherwise a great video altogether. The MiSTer has been on my radar for a while. :)

[@wich1]

Indeed, loved that reference. Just watched that episode again the other day

[@HadleyCanine]

For a moment it wasn't flashing, and I wasn't sure if I should tell someone, but instead I just looked away.

[@bombjack1984]

+1 for Bomb Jack footage! Fascinating stuff, this FPGA thing is such an interesting way of processing things differently.

[@Beaps73]

What a great great video. I've had my MiSTer setup over a year now and trying to convince people its BETTER than a Pi has been a tough one. I was hoping to catch up with you as the last meet to talk to you about MiSTer but it seems you got it covered. Great vid man.

[@NaeMuckle]

I had no idea you could get this for the price. I own 5 pis and was costing the price of the pi 4. When you include the case and cables id need its still cheaper than this but not by much. This seems way more interesting to play with though.

[@cleverkitsune4302]

Who cares the pi is still easier to setup and has a much larger following that can show you how to do damn near anything with it

[@sawf6962]

Fantastic to see MISTer getting some love this side of the pond. Development really kicked off when Smokemonster did his video last year and since then there has been many more features added. The neogeo core doesn't seem too far away, and PlayStation 1 will be a great addition when it happens. Price wise I think when you consider the price of arcade pcbs such as 1943 the MISTer is worth it for that alone, truly a great game. I think you should link the Atari forum page as well as that is where people can find info on everything MISTer, and sellers of the add on boards themselves. There are a lot of sellers around the world so I'm sure your viewers would like to avoid high postage costs and import taxes. I've been selling boards myself for nearly a year and am based in the UK.

[@willyarma_uk]

I've just ordered one :) I'd heard of it before but had no idea how large the scene was and what it was all about until I saw this, so many thanks for an awesome video!

[@bazza5699]

yay nice one neil.. finally getting round to doing the MISTer review... :) they are brilliant :) i totally agree with you neil.. there is an unidentifiable 'feel' you get on MISTer.. i've played rasp pi amiga emulators.. but when i booted up the MISTer minimig.. it just felt like the real thing.. same with the spectrum core and also the bombjack core which i played to death in arcades as a kid. great video.. nicely explained.. i hope more people get into the system and develop more cores.

[@VaterOrlaag]

Even after you mentioned soviet homemade computers, I was still surprised to see Sharp MZ on the list. :-) I'm glad that this beautiful yet obscure machine is getting some love.

[@bitroast]

enjoyed the discussion on "feel". got my FPGA MiSTer setup up and running good number of months ago, and this is point is spot on. it feels accurate in a way that previous emulation never really has. it makes emulation feel all the more like an approximation, like looking at the software through a window. playing software on the FPGA MiSTer, the brain quickly forgets that it's not original hardware. it's lovely stuff :-)

[@matthewjohnson1891]

Totally. I was playing genesis and actually wenrmt to pause and my right thumb reached up passed the b button. I wasnt using a sega 3 button so there was nothing there. Way different experiance then software

[@berighteous]

Great video, thanks! I've been a MiSTer user for over a year now. You almost are able to describe just how awesome the MiSTer is.

[@ruggie.74]

Your knowledge aside (which is obviously extensive), I love your professional presentation and production. I'm almost 30 and I find watching 99% of KZbin content unbearable when creators act like hyperactive children for no reason. Thank you for taking your job seriously.

[@RMCRetro]

Thank you Brandon!

[@shadowtheimpure]

"Because I lost several hours of my life to Civilization" Don't feel bad mate, happens to all of us.

[@sega_kid4288]

Civ5 on a MS Surface 1 in touch mode. Procrastination bliss during my time at university!!! Let's see, write 2000 words on Heidenger or play CIv, lol.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

Can I just put a quick recommendation for freeciv in here? It was originally a civ2 clone and is now very polished. It's like if they kept the isometric graphics, polished it forever and added geeky things like custom rule engines.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

Also, if you like Settlers 2, Widelands is the freeciv equivalent of Settlers 2. Including a campaign mode! Build those farms, breed those donkeys, oh yeah!

[@BlueBird-wb6kb]

Paradox games are better

[@LemonRush7777]

I wasted my childhood away on Civ3, MoO 2, Homm3 and X-com Ufo Defense. I have no regrets.

[@electronash]

Great job on this, mate. I think you explained it all perfectly. It is difficult to get across the "feel" of playing the games with near-zero lag until you've spent a bit of time using the platform. The low-latency is a far more important factor than I realised, too. When I first started using MiSTer with a CRT TV, it was quite a revelation. And I don't think it's just placebo, as it's been shown now that lower lag can improve gameplay and the overall experience, at least for a lot of retro games. It even managed to improve my terrible gaming skills slightly. lol (modern games are generally somewhat less dependant on having super-low latency, as many of them are written with modern displays in mind. That is starting to change as well though, as more TVs and monitors have low-lag modes.) It may not be for everyone, as you say, as many people will be more than content with software emulation etc., and that's fine. And now we're even starting to see things like the Run-ahead mode on some emulators, which can help mitigate some of the overall latency. Emulation has come a very long way, since the early days of ZSNES and UltraHLE. ;) But, the FPGA cores really are en entirely different approach, even if the cores do suffer the same challenges as software emulation. Namely, the lack of in-depth chip-level info for some systems. (It has taken many talented devs many years to get more systems running well under MAME, for example.) And a lot of that has to do with the fact that chip-level netlists simply aren't handed out by the manufacturers, so a lot of "black box" analysis has to be done on the custom chips and CPUs, to figure out exactly what happens on each clock cycle, given different input stimuli. One of the only times I've known of chip-level netlists being released to the public was for the Atari Jaguar. That core should be super accurate already, and has been working for several years now. It just needs a bit more work done to get it running on MiSTer. The author of the core has been taking a look at that in his spare time, so we may see it running on the new platform soon. The same talented dev also wrote the Genesis / MD, and PC Engine / tg16 cores. He's a true wizard. hehe... github.com/Torlus Otherwise, writing super-accurate re-implementations of the more complex systems often requires techniques like decapping the chips themselves, and analysing the silicon, just like Furrtek has been doing for the past few years for NeoGeo. The same techniques are now being used for some software emulators, including drivers in MAME, and that all helps to filter down to the FPGA cores eventually. There aren't many people actively working on new cores, though, only a tiny fraction compared to people writing software emulators. Hopefully that's now starting to change with exposure from vids like yours, and people starting to understand the benefits. ;) And yep, for me it's also very much about the preservation of the original machines. The original hardware sadly won't last forever, although restorers like yourself are doing great work to prolong the life of these old systems. Using FPGAs is pretty much the ONLY way we have atm (as consumers / hobbyists), to truly preserve the logic of these systems. Not all cores can claim to be 100% bug-free, nor cycle-accurate as yet, but they are gradually getting there. Many of the 8-bit cores likely are very accurate already, though. Now that most of the popular cores are up to a good standard, we can start working on the tools and techniques for confirming accuracy against the OG hardware. For the slightly more subjective measurements, like audio, people have now written tools to do Fourier analysis on various consoles like the Mega Drive, so the audio can be compared directly between console revisions, and to the FPGA version. Anyway, yeah, it is an exciting time atm for this stuff, and whether people are into software emulation or FPGA re-implementations, it's always good to have more choices. ;)

[@SianaGearz]

As to the low-latency argument, well you can pretty damn close in software emulation. You can chase the beam and overwrite a single buffer just ahead of the scanout, it is a massive current emulator research direction. And various hurry-up and latency negation schemes, like, what if your gamepad had 8 or so possible button transition states, with any given button being pressed or release, you can simply fork the emulation and emulate all these states, and then you basically already have the emulation result of what would have happened a frame or two later when the game finally reacts to your inputs. I mean a game might be reading the input at the beginning of the frame, updating the simulation during the frame (moving sprites and projectiles and whatnot in a back buffer), updating the video registers in the blanking period to copy the simulation state to the visible state, and then the scanout happens - but you already have the input and the result that would have happened in the future, so you can negate game's inherent input latency. But that's all still relying on common emulation shortcuts for the sake of performance. For systems that are well researched, FPGA truly allows to avoid those and the inherent compromise. It is exciting indeed! Emulation latency might also be inherently easy to eliminate (and in good implementations nonexistent) for purely framebuffer-based targets such as Playstation original and such, as the fundamental mechanism and sequence of operation matches between the console and the PC. The more complex, abstract and high-level from software standpoint the machines got, more modern-PC-like in a way, like Gamecube is a great example, the less cycle-based emulation accuracy has been achievable or sensible, and software may very well genuinely be the better approach. On the other hand, with Dreamcast i can still see value in this because the GPU has no modern equivalent in its operations and is remarkably difficult to emulate - so if you could make a hybrid, if you can just fit the GPU into the FPGA and emulate the CPU in software, you could achieve something decent. Of course the other argument is that something maybe should be done even if for little practical purpose, just because it appears borderline possible, and if it becomes reality, it's just such a fulfilling achievement. If it crosses a particular quality threshold at least - nobody likes those emulators that only crawl along at a few frames per second with no sound.

[@connoredling8864]

I have this board! We used it in school as a dev tool. I'm absolutely going to order stuff to try this out. I think it would be a great engineering project

[@zxkim8136]

Brilliant review neil. This is a capable machine with some great features and like you said it handles everything you throw at it. FPGAs will only get better, let's see what the next generation of coders can do with them😀😀😀 Kim 😁😁😁

[@wraithcadmus]

"Tell me I'm a wizard, Hagrid" - I lost it

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

Loved and used the MiSTer since its early days and it has come such a long way. The experimental PSX core blew me away and there's even a SPARCstation core which is able to boot SunOS, Solaris and NEXTSTEP, so not only can I relive the games of my youth, I can also relive the work apps and workstations of my youth. Brilliant.

[@MEGAMIGA]

Great video! Long time Amiga here. Because of a faulty PSU, I blew up my Apollo 060. When I have money, I will buy a Vampire 1200. FPGA is indeed a small revolution for us old school computer users ;) Love your channel

[@adamsfusion]

I have one of these, and seeing RMC build one himself and lay out the charms of it makes me feel good feels.

[@1luarluar1]

very well explained. It would be interesting to do a comparison between software emulation and fpga of a bunch of games and show the difference in detail. cheers!

[@TheTurnipKing]

25:29 I think the SAM did actually run at 6mhz in Sam mode. it only knocked the CPU speed down for speccy compatability.

[@RMCRetro]

Thanks for clarifying, and that does seem to be the case, a Z80b running at 6mhz. You can also knock it up higher on the MiSTer to 12mhz for example. It's odd that there is an "original" and a "6mhz" option though I wonder why that is

[@TheTurnipKing]

@@RMCRetro one for the core author, I suspect.

[@RoyHess666]

23:49 "What a gem this is"

[@RMCRetro]

10 points to you 😁

[@batlin]

That brought a smile to my face too.

[@lmlmd2714]

Definitely an emerald gem.... green as green can be!

[@deeiks12]

It seems to be worth for just the Amiga emulation only. I've been looking for a 1200 for a while now, but they are getting pretty rare and expensive. this might do the trick. It would be great to have a possibility to use a real amiga keyboard from an amiga with a faulty system board for example. awesome.

[@armisg5664]

Ooh, that 486 core is very intriguing!

[@SirDimpls]

Thank you for this video, this just blew my mind as I didn't know a community replicating gaming hardware in FPGAs existed. Me and a few friends were about to begin a preservation project for arabic-localized computers and this seems to be the perfect way to do it!

[@tanithrosenbaum]

When you say "intel is wrong, this is for gaming" (laughed like crazy about that btw), you should probably explain why you're mentioning Intel there and that Altera is a division of Intel now, since that's probably not obvious to people outside the FPGA world. Great vid all arond!

[@anjishnu8643]

You, my friend are the hero our world needs.

[@rachelwindsor850]

I love that little Noctua fan on there. I'd love to get my hands on one of these at some point. I'm going to keep an eye on it and see if the price drops a bit.

[@grimvisionz91]

I've been watching through your video collection recently and I have to say that you're becoming one of my favorite retro gaming channels.

[@RMCRetro]

Thank you that’s very kind

[@AdamChristensen]

Hardware emulation in hardware. It's a fine idea! At the very least, it makes hard to find systems much more accessible.

[@TheTurnipKing]

more importantly, it KEEPS them accessible as the original hardware starts to fail.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

I wouldn't call it hardware emulation, it's more hardware equivalence, or bootleg. If they're copying closed designs it's unlikely they're a gate-for-gate copy, but it is _real_ gate-level hardware.

[@6581punk]

Emulation suggests software simulation. But it really does create a hardware equivalent. As much as people can do without having access to the original chip designs.

[@spikester]

@@6581punk People are writing FPGA cores out of die level shots and photos of mask roms... original chip design not always required.

[@DecibelAlex]

@@spikester there's not a whole lot of information you can use from just looking at photos.. you can't see inside a rom, unless you have x-ray vision. did you mean schematics? even if you have all the schematics you still need to read I/O signals. that goes for anything you want to backwards engineer, no matter if you do it in physical form or virtual

[@Colin_Ames]

The best MISTer video I have seen so far. Thanks!!

[@DubiousEngineering]

Admittedly I’m listening to this in the car while driving rather than watching the video... I bet the performance of the FPGA cores hardware emulate far better than the PI software emulating... I’m keen to watch the video when home... (I typed this on my drive)

[@RMCRetro]

Stop typing while driving Howie!!!

[@DubiousEngineering]

RetroManCave you have cameras everywhere!! :-)

[@PluckyD]

Excellent video! Here's to more FPGA solutions for consoles being released. Software emulation was a nice holdover, but I believe this evolution of game preservation is the right direction to go. Hopefully we'll see more powerful SoC's and lower cost in the future.

[@PluckyD]

@TehPsychedelic Not exactly sure what point you are trying to make to whom here lol. "Was" as in we don't HAVE to use them for many 8-bit consoles and (thanks to Kevtris) the two biggest 16-bit consoles as well. Nobody was asserting to throw out your 8th gen consoles because FPGA's are taking over next year...I'm fairly certain everyone else knew I was talking about classic consoles.

[@PluckyD]

@TehPsychedelic No worries, but I'm still hoping an advanced race of aliens visits Earth and gives us the schematics for an accurate N64 FPGA core...guy can dream, right? ;-)

[@BAZFANSHOTHITSClassicTunes]

The ST and Amiga days were glorious.

[@Raveler1]

I just heard about FPGA yesterday - and here you are with a wonderful video detailing exactly what I was seeking. Thanks so much!

[@MostlyPennyCat]

The long and short of it is thus: They gave a computer an FPGA, a genetic algorithm and an impossible problem to solve. Which it then promptly solved. And nobody knew how.

[@unclerubo]

I got the Richmond reference. It put a smile on my face.

[@srotkiske]

Great video. Thanks! I bought the parts a few weeks ago now I need to sit down and put it all together.

[@airgreek]

Do you have links of where you bought them and which ones?

[@zxrenew5642]

I've been looking forward to this video Neil and it didn't disappoint. Well done Sir!

[@RetroRecollections]

Brilliant overview and review. Devices like this are most certainly the future of emulation. Great value in comparison to devices made by Analogue as you mentioned. Hopefully in the future someone will create add-on boards (for example a cartridge slot) that allow people to use their original games with the MiSTer or it's successor.

[@KyussTheWalkingWorm]

The obvious difference is that the boards from Analogue come in a nice case that takes real cartridges and controllers, with no setup required. A MiSTer is more powerful and flexible for the price, but it's not quite the same for putting in your living room, for example. Both devices serve slightly different needs.

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

Thanks for the video! I've ordered both. The people from retroshop were very nice in helping me find what i needed exactly

[@DbugII]

You are mentioning the apparent accuracy of the behavior of machines compared to software emulation. Have you tried software that actually push the hardware in undocumented ways like demos, mostly on Atari ST and C64, with all the funky hybrid graphic modes, overscan, color palette changes that are clock cycle synced with bitmap changes, sample sound created from bashing sound registers, blitter/cpu syncing exploits, etc... ? I know that pretty much every time one of us (demo makers) release a new demo, we end up breaking the emulators and the emulators guys spend a could of days to a couple of months to fix their emulators (like for example both Closure from Sync and Time Slices (from myself) released at the STNews Christmas Coding Convention 2015 were not working on the Steam emulator until the emulator was modified to handle what we did).

[@RMCRetro]

That's a really great idea. It handled all the Amiga demos I threw at it but there are perhaps instances where things aren't running exactly as the coder intended if not at all. I wonder if a good list of tests could be compiled to try out

[@DbugII]

@@RMCRetro I may be wrong, but I believe the Amiga programs are generally less prone to have issues caused by timings, the main reason being that most video/splits/color effects are performed by the copper (which has a very well documented way of behaving) and the Amiga itself is a machine that varies a lot in performance depending which video mode is used, the presence of fast or chip ram. On the ST on the other hand there's a ton of things that are used and abused, such as for example any of the 160256 clock cycles perfectly synced with the video display, YM soundchip, blitter, etc... with specific frequency and resolution changes done to trick the video chip in opening borders. If anything is not correctly done then you get anything from dropped frames to garbled display, corrupted colors and glitchy sound :) I can give you a bunch of demos to test: - demozoo.org/productions/151601/ (very fancy video mode with smooth scrolling and a lot of colors) - demozoo.org/productions/140822/ (many high color pictures requiring accurate syncing of color palette changes) - www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66702 (the winning demo of STNICCC 2015, everything is fullscreen) - demozoo.org/productions/72655/ (that one exploit the fact the 68000 can still perform long divide operations while the blitter is using 100% of the bus) And if you feel like it, two I made :) - demozoo.org/productions/151603/ (that one requires a monitor that support the monochrome mode of the Atari STe) - demozoo.org/productions/2492/ (mostly fullscreen pictures with color splits and smooth scrolling) Each of these links has normally screenshots, youtube video, as well as download links, so you should be able to see if what you get matches what you are supposed to get :)

[@gnattress]

Ok, it's taken a few months since watching this video before I went down the Mister DE-10 nano route - but I'm happy I did. The experience is fantastic! Thanks

[@kbhasi]

3 minutes in and I realised why they're using the SoC version of the Cyclone V instead of the regular version, and that could be in order to be able to pull up a configuration OSD from the ARM side!

[@Brewskii2117]

I've been having allot of fun exploring the different computers offered, had no idea about the Acorn Archimedes and Risc OS, what a great system.

[@queenbeeautumn]

I remember being entranced by that Frontier demo when I was a kid, unfortunately I never did actually play the game, may have to pick up one of these to scratch that old forgotten itch :)

[@cheaterman49]

23:13 YES! A Frontier demo! You thought of me! Thanks :-)

[@DaveVelociraptor]

With 1942, and 1942 (and hopefully more Capcom) and Neogeo you could revisit this topic Neil. Looks like CP system is coming to MiSTer and that's going to be incredible. For me Arcade games didn't go far into the 90s so it looks like MiSTer will cover all I remember.

[@DonovanColbert]

The 486 core is difficult to set up, but I have it running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups with Ethernet connectivity - and that makes everything about it a far more pleasant experience. A lot of the challenge is remembering everything I forgot about setting up Dos and Win 3.x machines and config.sys, autoexec.bat, and highmem and mouse.sys

[@binarybond007]

How are you getting "Ethernet" with ao486? Are you taking about PPP or is there something I don't know?

[@EHProjects]

I enjoyed the "IT Crowd" reference with the Altair. =)

[@michaelmonstar4276]

13:11 - It sounds like when you have a buffer set too low in the audio-processing and you start hearing stutters or crackles. But it's indeed more the effects than the music.

[@arcadesunday4592]

Very good coverage of the MiSTer project DE10 Nano! Very informative and entertaining. Cheers for now!

[@k001daddy]

I saw a PET core in there. Would it be possible to have one where you can issue the "killer poke" and it would require the core to be reloaded? That would satisfy a particular itch that we would never do on actual hardware.

[@electronash]

Of course. :p You could probably even make it explode if you're a VERY determined coder. lol

[@6581punk]

Wasn't the killer poke a poke that destroyed the monitor? I don't think it harmed the digital board.

[@6581punk]

I remember correctly: "When the PET range was revamped with updated hardware, it was quickly discovered that performing the old trick on the new hardware led to disastrous behavior by the new video chip, causing it to destroy the PET's integrated CRT monitor."

[@Robert-dB]

The actual issue was that a 74 chip and a 74LS chip were trying to push an output in opposite directions... the 74LS chip lost.

[@aminekostone1411]

Great video. I've had the set-up since Christmas, and it has, a little sadly, replaced my MiST setup. It is absolutely amazing. I'm more of a fanatic of the old computers personally, so seeing the likes of the Coco3 and ZX Spectrum (by the way, how you couldn't show the Amstrad and Speccy in the video was criminal!!) makes it very good. Very recently we've had additions such as the Acorn Electron and the Oric Atmos - although no disk/tape support just yet. All in all most amazing.

[@amigoamiga9254]

This looks amazing, I like how it's modular, this is something I would definitely like to play with in the future.

[@NipkowDisk]

Noctua fan on the MISTer... that speaks quality right there.

[@Asterra2]

You did a fantastic job of enunciating the tangible appeal of this development. I think the message will really hit home once those 100% certifications start landing and people commence assembling charts to compare latency between the various options: Traditional emulators in their ideal state, official recreations (Nintendo minis), the original hardware, and FPGA. I think people who have relied on standard emulators will be shocked indeed to learn that they've been settling for multi-frame latency for decades. That's going to be the factor that drives the popularity of this approach.

[@vix_in_japan]

Loved that sneaky IT Crowd reference :)

[@josephwright433]

Came here to say that haha

[@michaelsworkshop9031]

And just to be clear, it isn't JUST that it "plays Robotron", it plays hardware accurate (presumably near cycle accurate) Robotron exactly as an arcade motherboard would - so much better than the MAME experience or any port to another platform. You really did a good job of conveying that exactness of the true feeling in the platforms MiSTer supports, Neil - thank you for another great video.

[@haziqsembilanlima]

I had the chance to use Cyclone II based FPGA board in a limited time. To see a quite affordable (FPGA usually cost more) DE10 board is interesting.

[@ZILtoid1991]

I'm also looking into the FPGA technology, but as a means of developing enhancement chips or mappers for old consoles. One plan is to make a mapper for the NES, that also has a few extra wavetable channels.

[@RMCRetro]

The MegaSD cart is a great example of this. An FPGA megaCD add on for original hardware

[@JorfDB]

Great video. I'm excited for FPGA and the accuracy it can bring

[@Noedell]

Got mine up and running! What a great little device! AND I found a bug in the Gameboy Core! Hope it gets fixed soon!

[@MordecaiWalfish]

keep reporting those bugs! its the only way we're gonna get 100% accurate cores, along with various comparison/testing programs that are in development and recently released, like MDFourier.

[@fredvaneijk1092]

Thanks for this great review, as one of the developers of the Altair 8800 core is was happy to see you gave it a try.

[@natsume-hime2473]

Indeed this is great for enthusiasts, it won't usurp emulation for casual users. It's a great idea and already represents a fantastic alternative to retro-hardware collection. Which is becoming more and more expensive, especially since fewer and fewer units of old hardware survive each year.

[@ZaPpaul]

This video swayed me into purchasing the DE-10 Nano and I have now had it for just over 3 months and can only sing its praises. The only thing that bothers is that at the end of the video there was what looked to be the R-Type arcade core, but I have never been able to find it. Other than that, wow! It's an awesome piece of kit and well worth the investment and that's coming from someone that was a Retropie die-hard. Thanks for this video it has changed me and for the better.

[@Zachiroth04]

Its the TurboGrafx-16 port.

[@IrenMasot]

What is that wild vibration at 3:47? You can see visual distortions on the brass spacers as the camera shakes like mad.

[@Crustenscharbap]

I think this is a great chip because the new A500 Mini has much struggle to play the demo at 20:20 Minute.

[@TheRokkis]

I should play Under A Killing Moon through again. Amazing game, amazing acting.

[@DeputatKaktus]

„Intel is wrong - this is for gaming!“ Made my day. Thank you! ❤️

[@pomegran100]

You can now set CPU speed on both SNES and Genesis cores. You should try Gradius III on the SNES with CPU set to turbo! Now that is rock hard!

[@pomegran100]

@@city__lights well, it's s little unpredictable sometimes and as Kevtris is such a purist, not sure he will (and rightly so I think). However, it's a great feature in Mister. R-Type and Gradius are great to see running without a hint of slowdown. The SNES core also has the ability to increase Super FX speed too. It's a great project - love it (I also have a Super NT and Mega SG and don't use them anymore!)

[@pomegran100]

@@city__lights Yeah, come on @city lights, pay up damn it! Get that DE-10 Nano (and memory) ordered! ;-) If only I had a capture device I could show you POP in action ...

[@TheRetroByte]

Excellent bit of kit. Would love to see this in the Checkmate 1500 👍

[@RDJ134]

13:54 The slowdwon with the dragon in Gradius III was not the system, but the game self. It recently got patched and now it works full speeds like it suppose to do. Or mabey i understand it wrong with what your saying, in that case my excuse and forget the sentence above. I dont want to be a dick, just saying. Great and interesting video as always, thank you for that :D

[@aitchpea6011]

Bypassing Elite's copy protection system - just type INCOMING as the key word every time. It'll work within a half-dozen tries as it doesn't have a very big dictionary

[@retrorelicsandrepairs8572]

Once again, a fantastic and informative video. Top marks to you, and yes I understand what you mean by “feeling” one day when I can afford one, I WILL get one. Thank you so much 😊

[@doktor6495]

A new age of emulators! Great stuff! Greetings, Doktor64!

[@waltherstolzing9719]

I'd love to try installing mid-90s era Linux on the 486 core.

[@Ragnarok540]

The thing about Linux is that some recent distributions work on really old hardware.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

This is a coincidence. I've been learning mega drive coding and vhdl for FPGAs. I have a mind to design a brand new core, the 2D home console we never got because Saturn flopped and the 3D PlayStation took over. Sort of a Super Mega Drive, but not using any modern ISAs like ARM. Apollo core, XFM core (FM synth), custom sprite/blitter engine and other bits and bobs and a high Res output. Guess I know where to start now

[@RMCRetro]

A brand new retro console. I love this idea!

[@MostlyPennyCat]

@@RMCRetro Hurray! I'm not insane! ...or we both are... I mean, we never got that perfect home arcade console did we? Saturn was _very_ close, but, if you look at the high res 2D games, hardly anything fits on the screen? So you need high res output. I started by looking at the chips that power LCD dashboards in cars but they're still low Res, SVGA if you're lucky. So FPGA is your only hope for a new sprite engine. And this thing has an hdmi out, seems a good place to start. The idea came from playing Moonlighter on the Xbox 1. It's a 1.4gb download pixel art game. The console has 8gb ram. And it has loading screens. Which seems dumb. And it drops frames! And if you look at the design of the Megadrive, there's no firmware, no os. All memory mapped io, it reads it's first instruction from the cartridge. The bus sharing chip has a loop to share the cartridge and ram with the 68k, z80 and the custom sprite chip. Maybe I can build one, completely open, and maybe people will write games for it. So, where does the community live?

[@gusdelmoba3185]

I have a robotron cabinet. My dad build it in the 80s and i still have it. Need to fix it but that game is fun.

[@0xc0ffea]

Just took the plunge in large part down to how you expressed the feel of it. You're right, it feels night and day different from an emulator, emulation had me starting to wonder if I just wasn't any good at the games I played growing up. The feel of cycle exact hardware simulation with no controller lag is quite amazing.

[@SyphistPrime]

FPGAs are great. It's probably the only way we'll be able to preserve custom chips for retro computers in the long term. It would be really cool to see something like this for just the custom chips on an Amiga, that way you could continue to use all the physical upgrades around, or even the new ones like the Vampire (which happens to also be an FPGA).

[@michelvanbriemen3459]

The moment I was gonna type "I wish FPGAs will have full fat 486 PCs some day" I see Doom and Civilisation. FPGA's truly are going places quick.

[@DanielLopez-up6os]

Can't wait for FPGA to become so mainstream we can get them cheaper due to bulk demand.

[@NetrunnerZA]

This was epic, now send me that flashback game behind you :)

[@klaxoncow]

8:23 As always, in plugging in a USB, you attempt it the wrong way around the first time and then have to flip it. But let me blow your mind. When you pick up the connector, you see the USB logo? That always faces up. Job done. Indeed, you possibly don't even have to look for it. Usually, the USB logo sticks up or sinks in, so you can feel which side is "up" under your fingers, when you pick the connector up. You can thank me later.

[@NinjaRunningWild]

Unless the device orients the plugs upside down or the device you're using didn't either or, worse, didn't do it at all.

[@taw6528]

This video at the time alerted me to this little marvel and I am still loving it.

[@RetroBoxRoom]

I see a few things have been updated since the last time I played with my MiSTer. Time to do an update.

[@bazza5699]

it's been updated since this video fairfight.. haha. :)

[@RetroBoxRoom]

@@bazza5699 wow. I guess a lot has moved on since I bothered to check. Too busy with a real Archimedes right now. (stupid upgrades) lol

[@RMCRetro]

@@bazza5699 :D yes that made me laugh, just as I rendered the video an update came out! 😂

[@bazza5699]

@@RMCRetro yeah it's incredible how active the community is.. that's one of the reasons I like it.. cores are getting tweaked, new cores are being developed. on an almost weekly basis :)

[@bazza5699]

@@RetroBoxRoom when you've got your real archie sorted, fairfight, a comparison to the mister would be great..

[@mrreee4685]

Cant wait for the Vampire Standalone system to come out, will be a great Amiga FPGA system

[@NinjaRunningWild]

At 26:30 what're you playing R-Type on? Edit : Turbo Grafx 16. I see "Push Run Button". Excellent port I still own.

[@TechNoir808]

Just the video I was looking for. I think I am ready to dive into all this!

[@TheSulross]

Was thinking of going on eBay to buy an old retro Intel 80486 system as I wanted an authentic platform to do some custom enhancement development to the MINIX3 operating system (it already compiles to 32-bit 386 via clang/LLVM, has a microkernel architecture, but I will add protected mode and page mapping capabilities - and long term goal is ability to use Linux device drivers - not sure if that will be possible, but have some ideas). But I think instead I'll get a MiSTer and use the 486 core. Would be nice to be able experience all those other Golden Age 80s computers too - Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh, Acorn RISC OS, BBC Micro, Tandy Color Computer 3, etc., etc. The fact that can hook up to modern HDMI displays and USB keyboard and mice solves a lot of nitty issues that come up with actual vintage hardware - plus it's a lot more compact than an old vintage 486 PC. But for my MINIX3 retro project, I'll cross compile from my modern Linux PC and use the MiSTer 486 core as a testing platform. Wanted something that was sub 100 MHz as I'll eventually try to bring up a GUI desktop and want the challenge of seeing if can get performance to be more than acceptable - in respect to mouse behavior, window dragging (no annoying screen flashing), etc. PS: This is one of my favorite retro channels. This is my fav video that introduces the MiSTer - is what has convinced me to take the plunge. And I got to learn about the British Golden Age micros in-depth via this channel, from the BBC Micro, it excellent BBC BASIC, to the Acorn and its RISC OS. Should do a video series that regales the history of BBC BASIC (i.e., the woman computer scientist behind it), how it stacks up against Bill Gates' MS BASIC, and perhaps a bit of intro to programming in it - that at least highlights it's superior language structured programming features and ability to, say, do graphics programming with a library of API.

[@ricardobornman1698]

This is fantastic. Love it.

[@batlin]

The more I see of the Acorn Archimedes, the more I'm confused it was way ahead of its time -- even the operating system, RISC OS, seems incredibly powerful. That said, from what I understand it doesn't have pre-emptive multitasking, which the Amiga had (along with the Atari Falcon and TT if running MiNT or Magic).

[@stevechinz]

Thanks for the info, I'll have to check this out!

[@ArthurKannibal]

Currently a prospecting MiSTer adopter, I have been doing research on solutions for playing classic games on my old CRT TV at their native 240p resolution without breaking the bank. If all else failed, I was going to consider just buying a flash cart for each console which would have been an investment of hundreds of dollars. Ever since a friend told me about the MiSTer FPGA, I have been on a non-stop obsessive marathon of watching videos about it. To answer your question, I firmly believe that people who want the console accurate experience on a classic CRT TV should stop searching and hop on the MiSTER FPGA as soon as possible. Personally, I'm beyond convinced on what the MiSTer offers. If people feel like software emulation is still the way to go, that's fine because that is what options exist for.

[@raydeen2k]

Not gonna lie. I would love to have an FPGA Mac Plus/SE/Classic II in an original case with possibly a CRT or LCD replacement. Those old systems are getting harder and harder to keep running and there's just something really cool about sitting down at one of those machines. I've got one working SE FDHD and a couple of other units in various states of repair, along with a faux machine which has a PPC Mac Mini, an 800x600 KVM VGA display and a small surge strip all stuffed in a Classic case. It's a bit of a ghetto version that I'd love to replace with something that's pretty much completely solid state.