Exploring TapTo on the MiSTer

[@TomBortels]

I thought this was a very silly idea at first... but when you got to the paradox of choice, it clicked. Insightful - and now I need one!

[@whatskenmaking]

It’s been interesting - ever since I started using TapTo, I’ve only been playing games that I have on card. The barrier to putting in a card is so low

[@pyramidal_ancestors]

I thought it was silly too but EXACT same thing. I'd rather make some cards with a) The games I play the most often (SSFIIX when my friends are over), and b) Games I INTEND to play because I saw some YT video of them but I can't remember the names, and c) My significant other can easily get to her favorites

[@Fezzler61]

Very cool. Interesting how gaming drives so many vintage computing innovations.

[@TheMasterSpecter]

I wasnt terribly interested in this project beforehand, but now it seems really cool! Dont know if Ill actually get one, but it is certainly an interesting tool. Gives back some of the physicality of putting in a cartridge or disc, and being limited to only a few instead of a never-ending scroll through a menu. Speaking of that floppy disc drive case, it would be awesome to see one with the big switches like on the 5 1/4 drives; you could slide in the card, then flip the switch with a satisfying "clonk". Maybe the switch could move the NFC reader onto the card, so it has more of a practical purpose (or it could just be for fun)

[@pyramidal_ancestors]

That's a super cool idea.

[@emersonmarques1174]

Great Video, thank you so much, i knew nothing of what "Tap To" and "NFC Cards" was. I just ordered a PN532 , some NFC Cards, downloaded the Commodore 1541 NFC Enclosure 3d Print Files, and can´t wait to try this.

[@shpongled]

Absolutely fantastic summary of the project and possibilities .... I wasn't really all that interested before but now I can see how this could really enhance the MiSTer experience.. Great video!

[@bryantaylor2523]

VERY cool idea putting the NFC stickers inside the physical cartridges! It might also be cool to combine that idea with the insert function to have actual cartridge slots without the need for different physical connectors and/or custom electronics for each type. They'd all just be the same nfc reader with different enclosures.

[@whatskenmaking]

I saw on the discord that someone put an NFC reader into a Super Gameboy enclosure. I thought that was a pretty cool idea!

[@steambub]

I wasn't much interested in the TapTo, but your idea of putting tags in cartridges is something I must do for myself.

[@BedroomNinja]

Great video as always Ken and thank you for featuring my cases :)

[@valentine_puppy]

I’m a Sega fan and a Sega styled case would be awesome. Master System preferably.

[@whatskenmaking]

Thanks - your cases are awesome!

[@whatskenmaking]

I was thinking about that, too - but I would want to do it as an entire SMS MiSTer case with the NFC slot in place of the sega card slot.

[@valentine_puppy]

@@whatskenmaking I’d love to see it. With the slot loading option to load the games from Sega Mycard style nfc cards. I just mean a sticker that looks like the Mycard cover front and back. Thank you for the content and keep up the great work. Peace and love brother.

[@Phoenix_1991]

This was a very nice video and overview of the TapTo project. I'm currently making my own TapTo reader by putting it inside a cartridge :D. Very fun stuff!

[@whatskenmaking]

Nice! I'd love to see some more innovative reader designs out there

[@wobblyrampack9655]

Terrific video, thank you Ken! So well explained and thanks for going the extra mile into the TapTo API! I'm currently building a MiSTer barcade, with an ESP32 to control an RGB matrix Marquee. So it was cool seeing you using the ESP32 that way. Just so many options like you say!!

[@zetathix]

Why just don't make the coin card a circular card so you won't grab the wrong card while also improving the immersion?

[@thereaintnojusti]

That’s a great idea! I can just imagine making custom arcade tokens.

[@itapun]

I'm using the same wedge case for my MiSTer! I printed mine in black with red side panels :)

[@KonaKonaKaabisteru]

Would be cool if we get an NFC reader capable of letting you put in cards down in it like a game cartridge and then launch them via a power switch with a satisfying click. The Disk Drive System is cool admittedly but I can't help feeling this'd let me come even closer to the homely feeling associated with our physical cartridges~

[@NicolasPerrier]

You can totally do that already

[@KonaKonaKaabisteru]

​@@NicolasPerrier Huh, I'd like to hear how~

[@PixelCherryNinja]

Great video, great project 👏

[@GeminiNight]

This is a really good video! I love the idea of TapTo and really really loved the sticker in a game idea. I wonder if you could do something similar with a floppy disc and have the reader make actual floppy noises when you insert it hehe!

[@seethruhead7119]

since it has an api you could configure EmulationStation running on a rapsberry pi to launch games on the mister (instead of launching an emulator) all you would need is an ip controllable hdmi switch to switch from the rpi to the mister when launching a game, and back to the rpi when you exit one. then you'll have a world class ui with box art on an fpga system

[@geofreypejsa54]

Another great video Ken. Thanks for the excellent content

[@exodous02]

Ah man, this is awesome. I'd get card holders and print up my entire library. I used to hang card holder pages from a binder on my wall to display cards I owned. It would be nostalgic to do this with games I print up! Ohh, or just pint statues and put one of those stickers on it.

[@whatskenmaking]

That’s a great idea - display the cards on the wall. If you’re going to make a lot of them, I’d suggest using a cutter like a cricut. After cutting out the first few sheets of labels, you start feeling it!

[@exodous02]

@@whatskenmaking As kids we made business cards for my Dad and had to cut them out with a paper cutter so I'm going to give it a try. I checked Etsy just to see if anyone was making them but nope.

[@phillai]

Great video as always Ken! Been on the fence a while with this and your video might have just persuaded me to go and get one! 👍

[@whatskenmaking]

Thanks! The cost is so inexpensive (compared to the many other ways you can spend money on the MiSTer) that it’s worth playing with. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did. It’s at the point now where I use TapTo almost exclusively

[@ThePiones]

At last my idea on which I've never worked on materialized on the real world.

[@TheMikeyb86]

Ah yeah. I was wondering when you were going to do a video on MiSTer NFC.

[@whatskenmaking]

It was on the list - just took a while to get around to it!

[@DrLilo]

Every time I look into TapTo I'm super tempted until I start running the numbers and become aware of just how quickly making cards for every game would balloon in price and become a storage/accessibility issue.

[@Phoenix_1991]

Well, the way you can do it is just by putting your favorite games on them. Those NFC cards, especially the tags or stickers literally costs only cents from AliExpress. Yes if you're going to put entire libraries on them, you will be bankrupt in no time. But I would say just do it for your top 50 games or something. I personally made a list of my top 120 games and ordered some tags. The tags were like $13 for 150 of them. You could of course do less, use cheap/expensive paper. Your call, have fun!

[@whatskenmaking]

I think the key is to narrow it down and make cards for the games that you play often. If you have 1,000 cards, it's going to take you longer to find the game you want to play, than if you just launched it through the menu. But if you just have a couple dozen, grabbing a card from the stack and tapping it fast and easy. Although, I'll admit that creating cards is addictive, and I'm now at the point of having a card storage problem 😆

[@DrLilo]

@@alexvolney i dont have much of a physical game cart collection, I use flash carts.

[@RetroRockGamer]

I know, everyone sold their collections and bought a MiSTer, now we're building physical media collections again. :)

[@DrLilo]

@@RetroRockGamer it's not that, it's just I live in Europe. All my childhood carts and all he carts that can be found in the wild around me are 50hz. Not worth owning...

[@gluttonousmaximus9048]

I'm actually curious if the TapTo can be repurposed into other appliances and gadgets, not just the MiSTer things. What if it can be used as an easily accessible physical token on home media boxes to play movies, or as a car infotainment add-on to automatically play music albums denoted by the token? If configured right this kinda eliminates having to go through a bunch of menus to play whatever you want.

[@gluttonousmaximus9048]

Inspired by Cathode Ray Dude's mentions of his struggle with Spotify

[@wizzo-b8i]

That’s the plan! I am porting TapTo to other platforms as we speak. Windows will be up next, then looking at the various Pi distros like Batocera and Recalbox. Music and video playback will definitely be supported soon, including services like Spotify

[@whatskenmaking]

I just saw that wizzo released a windows demo on the discord and twitter. I don’t think we’re too far away from seeing broader integration

[@ChristianWS.]

I've thought about how this can be used in Linux to basically send whatever script you want. Could potentially make a card that entirely deletes your home heh

[@wizzo-b8i]

@@ChristianWS. not by default! I do try to be cautious about arbitrary code execution. But you can enable manually if you want and go nuts making drive wipe cards

[@HisVirusness]

That is such a clever medium. You used it for the Konami code; I wonder what it would go into using cards to automatically perform Fatalities in Mortal Kombat. Specifically the first game, since I imagine you'd need a LOT of cards to cover every Fatality in just MK2 alone.

[@deadox]

Didn't know this existed at all. This part 11:50 makes me wish all sorts of fake micro cartridge replica (meaning, piece of plastic in the shape of famicom cart or mega drive cart and stuff, probably around the dimension of GBA cart) to show up on Alibaba in bulk but I know that's not gonna happen anytime soon😭

[@GconduitYTubeAccount]

With NFC tags going up to 4k that's perfect to store whole 2600 ROMs. Is there any way to present the NFC reader as a USB storage device?

[@Kairu43]

I love the idea of placing the nfc stickers inside my cartridges. In practice however, when adhered to the inside of the back half of the shell the success of the read seems to vary significantly between testing the plastic shell half and reassembling the cartridge. It seems like any time there's something behind the tag, be it shielding or pcb it rarely reads the tag. I've had a lot of issues with GBA where the pcb is behind it; on N64 Battle for Naboo, a half height cartridge it works fine but Shiren 2 a full height shielded cartridge does not. Have you run into this and is there some sort of thin barrier material that might prevent the interference/read failures that you're aware of? Thanks for the great video either way :)

[@rustkitty]

Now we just need a variant port cover lid that integrates the NFC module, so the whole thing can look even more like an oversized PC engine.

[@Tom_Neverwinter]

This might be neat to revive the mariokart gxp or the horse racing one where you could up stats over multiple play sessions. megaman? pokemon?

[@mwk1]

Fajny patent 😎

[@dandoyle]

Why printer do you have? Thanks!

[@MozTS]

Is there a way to force a save state whenever a game exits?

[@80skidsgaming]

is this still available for windows? for some reason i cant find the download. if possible can you do a tutorial on the windows setup?

[@thepenultimateninja5797]

Couldn't you also do this with regular RFID tags? You would just need to associate each game with the serial number of a tag.

[@randymcmillan3382]

Haha I like what you did with E.T. Nobody would program that terrible game with an nfc card

[@730indoorsman]

I'd love to do something like this for my digital film library on pc. is this possible?

[@wizzo-b8i]

Please keep an eye on the project, this will be possible soon with TapTo!

[@whatskenmaking]

Yeah, I saw in the discord that wizzo has it launching steam games on windows now.

[@thatssomegoodpie]

So are the roms stored on the actual cards or is it just another way to tell the system which game to load from internal memory?

[@SavedByZero]

The cards are just used to trigger the process.

[@koldtoftkim]

How do you get the stickers to sit so straight on the cards? Do you have a secret method for applying them?

[@whatskenmaking]

I peel back just the corner of the backing and cut it off, so just the of the sticker adhesive is exposed - then it’s easy to adjust the position on the card. Once you have it where you want it, peel off the rest of the backing to fully apply the sticker

[@80skidsgaming]

Will this work with raspberry pi running retropie or is it just for the mister?

[@shawnwheatley2957]

14:27 is that a custom MiSTer or kit?

[@whatskenmaking]

That’s Todd’s keyboard case - you download it from Printables here! www.printables.com/model/777370-mister-fpga-keyboard-computer-case

[@jackipiegg]

17:53 Has anyone "evolved" it to use a raspberry pi as a dumb frontend for boxart/video previews and launch mister using a hdmi switch/kvm?

[@whatskenmaking]

I don’t think I’ve seen that specific scenario, but wizzo is working on a serial interface, so that’s possible even without making API calls. I think we’ll see some interesting front end devices that people build as a result

[@jackipiegg]

@@whatskenmaking Wow really? That's excellent news, for us using tapto is no problem since we are familiar with the gameplay but for kids video previews is a MUST! Actually for us too since we like to discover new games!