Mister FPGA: The Future of Game and Computer Emulation

https://www.racketboy.com/retro/mister-fpga-the-future-of-retro-game-emulation-and-preservation

by ecliptik • 5 years ago

109 53 5 years ago

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voltagex_• 5 years ago

What happens when the DE10 Nanos run out?

vardump• 5 years ago

Presumably it gets ported to another architecture.

snvzz6• 5 years ago

Or, simpler, somebody comes up with a OSHW board that's actually fit for purpose, rather than leverage a generic devboard.

melony• 5 years ago

Electrical engineers are cheap. Porting to a slightly different layout can be easily crowdfunded.

postalrat• 5 years ago

I've been hoping it somehow ends up available for pano logic client devices. No idea how big a project that be but it would be pretty cool since there are a reasonable number of them out there, they are kinda cheap, and are already in a nice case.

gchadwick2• 5 years ago

Hopefully terasic will keep making them for a good while and when they do retire them have a replacement.

It's not as simple as just develop a new board as the DE10 Nano offers a great price / performance ratio. There are more capable FPGA boards out there but they're also more expensive. Any purpose developed board would also likely cost more.

AlexanderDhoore• 5 years ago

Amazon.com: DE10-Nano Kit

  Currently unavailable.
  We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.

sibane• 5 years ago

Also, on Mouser:

  Stock: 0
  On Order: 2,877 Expected 1/28/2022
  Factory Lead-Time: 48 Weeks
  Long lead time reported on this product.

jiveturkey• 5 years ago

ooh glad I squirrelled 2 of them away pre-COVID

ungamed• 5 years ago

I believe they already have, at least interntionally.

snvzz6• 5 years ago

I would say miSTer's weakest point is that it isn't designed for the open FPGA synth, place and route stack.

It depends on proprietary tools tied to Intel's FPGAs.

This is somewhat understandable, as the open stack wasn't ready when miST was conceived.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Part of the appeal of mister is it runs on cheap "dev" FPGA boards that have their price reduced to appeal to students and educators. Those are typically boards from Intel and Xilinx. It's been awhile since I looked at open FPGA synth tools, but I remember that Intel support was non-existent and Xilinx support was rudimentary. You couldn't get the same performance and packing as you can with the proprietary tools.

delroth• 5 years ago

The Xilinx -7 series of FPGA is fairly well supported by SymbiFlow these days. https://symbiflow-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building...

snvzz6• 5 years ago

price reduced, cheap, etc

Note that the chip used in that board is listed in retailers such as digikey. It's not so expensive as to prevent third party boards.

It would even be well feasible to use a larger FPGA or a higher speed grade. FPGA chips used in devboards are typically the lowest grade.

rwmj4• 5 years ago

I'd say its weak point is the appalling user interface. Really hard to understand all the menus and modes and how to navigate. (Yes as a programmer I ought to pitch in to fix it)

flatiron2• 5 years ago

Are you talking about the dev tools or the mister itself? I have a 7,4 and 3 year old. All three prefer the mister menus over retroarch and they can put their favorite games on and do save states etc themselves no problem.

moring• 5 years ago

When it comes to the detailed timing and edge cases of hardware, especially peripheral hardware, software-based hardware emulators try to cover the most important cases. As far as I understand, an FPGA-based emulator would try to emulate the structure of the hardware, not its behaviour, thus resulting in more accurate emulation. Where do they plan to get information / documentation about the structure of the hardware? AFAIK most of the behavior is reverse-engineered by trial and error.

city41• 5 years ago

At least in the case of the Neo Geo core, the chips were decapped and fully reverse engineered. I'm unsure about other cores.

https://www.retrorgb.com/furrtek-demonstrates-decapping-proc...

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

If you're decapping old chips, do you even need to reverse engineer them, or can you just blindly convert a high-res photo to something an fpga can run?

bstar77• 5 years ago

If you look up Robert Peip, he's detailing a huge amount of what he's doing as he builds his PSX core. It's a combination of work done on emulators, getting expert feedback on the MiSTer, previous work on supported chips and docs from where ever he can find them. It's pretty incredible, I've supported him on patreon for about a year and have been exposed to so much interesting work.

ghastmaster2• 5 years ago

The Mister Multisystem appears to be a great improvement over the de10-nano. LGR did a video on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx45r-BRHxY

https://rmcretro.store/multisystem-board-only/

NovemberWhiskey• 5 years ago

This plugs into the FPGA dev board, doesn't it?

deelowe• 5 years ago

Yes. It still requires the nano.

willis9362• 5 years ago

Thanks for the reminder. This is very high on my want-list. Do you know what the "deluxe edition" mentioned at the store page is?

timbit42• 5 years ago

The Deluxe includes the DE-10-Nano FPGA board. The other editions require you to buy the DE-10-Nano board yourself.

creamytaco• 5 years ago

The Mister ecosystem is based on open hardware / software, besides the FPGA which is a necessary evil (and can be replaced in the future).

The "mister multisystem" (which is a proprietary design) comes across like a slap in the face. Don't support blatant opportunistic profiteering.

rwmj4• 5 years ago

No one is taking the ecosystem from you. This board is just one expansion option.

gchadwick2• 5 years ago

There's a fair few commercial sellers for MiSTer related stuff. Yes some just build existing open hardware designs, but not everything is open hardware.

E.g. the MiSTercade https://misteraddons.com/products/mistercade or the MiSTer mini ITX Ironclad Plus https://www.d3fmod.com/mini-itx-ironclad-plus/

None of these are trying to lock people into their solutions, they're just providing other options.

sersi• 5 years ago

The mister multisystem is not an improvement over the de10-nano. It's just an alternative in a different form factor to the open sdram module and the analog io board. You still need a de10-nano to plug into it.

It's not the first time I see this confusion but I'm a bit surprised by it because they also make it very clear that "A DE10-Nano is required to operate"

ghastmaster2• 5 years ago

Oh my, you are correct. Looking at the board and nomenclature, "multisystem", this should have been obvious to me. Thank you for the clarification.

Epiphany21• 5 years ago

The general purpose computer cores are what interest me the most about the MiSTer project. I'm keeping an eye on the 486 PC and Macintosh Plus cores. Emulators are mostly fine for what I do but I would just love to have dedicated hardware instead. It's a shame the DE-10 Nano is out of stock everywhere...

zdw2• 5 years ago

The ao486 core is much improved since this article was published in 2019 - it's had caches and a VGA chipset added, which make most early 90's games playable to some extent.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

Might want to check out the Vortex86. Other than sound, it might support what you want.

CyberDildonics• 5 years ago

Why do you want to emulate a 486 with an FPGA?

zdw2• 5 years ago

This is a 2019 article and quite a bit out of date. There's a dedicated forum for the project: https://misterfpga.org/

Many more cores have been supported or further polished, well into the 32 bit era - Playstation and Sega Saturn cores are in the works.

staticman22• 5 years ago

The best thing about this project is the seemless CRT TV support. There is no simple way to use a PC emulator and support CRT output.

willis9362• 5 years ago

Specifically 15 kHz. If you're okay with rough approximations then 480p VGA will be okay. If you really want the original art then you need to bend over backwards to get the original, strange aspect ratios and non-square pixels. It is indeed nice to have a project that outputs authentic analog video signals.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

Can it do 3dfx?

theodric• 5 years ago

No. And it can barely do anything without crashing. I hate mine.

Mister FPGA: The Future of Game and Computer Emulation

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