MiSTer FPGA Forum

I never liked CRT filters and shadowmasks and always played my emulated retro games with razor sharp pixels, until MiSTer. I don't know if it's the minimal latency or what, but games on the MiSTer with scanlines and horizontal blur look and feel more like how I remember them being back when they were new. I think MiSTer's main goal should be to rep...

The big problem with the N64 is it has pretty large and very fast memory busses, much larger and faster than pretty much any other contemporary device. The SDRAM boards are not particularly large and fast by comparison, and it's taking a lot of clever designing like running the SDRAM faster than the original system's memory so that it can emulate m...

In my experience repeatedly jumping from core to core introduces instabilities, which is why I usually reset the MiSTer and go back to the menu core when I change games. I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of the problem, especially with arcade cores that haven't been updated to the latest framework over the years.

I highly doubt the VCD format will get support any time soon, if ever. Your best bet is to convert to bin/cue or CHD format.

Yeah honestly I'd be fine with a SAM that just randomly chooses from a folder of MGL files. The process of making MGL files can be pretty easily automated so I could see a world where I put shortcuts to my top 100 games in there, or let SAM or some other script generate MGL files for every stupid rom in my complete collection. Looking at the github...

Command line arguments to Main_MiSTer to choose the core and rom is exactly what MGL supplies, more or less. If you have the appropriate MGL file you could go to the shell and type echo "load_core /media/fat/mygame.mgl" > /dev/MiSTer_cmd and MiSTer will immediately load that MGL file, which will in turn load the core and rom. It's pretty ...

Long story short it allows for better looking effects when the image is scaled at other than integer scale. With these filters it will be much easier to make games look good full screen regardless of what resolution your display is.

Loading a rom from the command line should already work with my patch (practically it is the core of the patch). A script should just write the following lines to /dev/MiSTer_cmd: - scan_mask_add /path/to/rom - select_a_rom - scan_clear This still uses the "Input emulation" and "Fake filesystem" methods (and as I said, I would ...

Dropbear is a cool alternative but I don't believe including the full SSH package imposes any limitations on the project. AFAIK there's nothing stopping folks from removing SSH and replacing it with Dropbear themselves if they're that dedicated to making the Linux side of MiSTer as lightweight as possible.

I had this same problem, I had to solder pins to my I/O board because my generic board did not come with the pins populated. The good news is once I did that my MT-32 Pi worked great. I soldered pins into the ten holes closest to the user port (labeled P7) as well as one more pin in the empty hole (labled P9) near the GPIO header which apparently ...

The audio port is both an analog headphone jack and mini TOS-link for optical digital audio. The DAC on the board isn't great so it's typically better to take the TOSlink into an external DAC, but there's still an analog option there if you need it. This is another thing I wonder about. We have a lot of amazing hardware designers and builders in o...

Is this a problem specific to MiSTer or do these jailbars show up regardless of what is sending a signal to the monitor?

It looks like Aliens is based on the same hardware as TMNT which is being worked on by Furrtek. Consider donating to his Patreon to help with development!

Do you mean compressed CD images like CHD? That's a planned feature but isn't implemented yet and isn't high on the priority list.

Yeah it's looking about equal to how well the PSX core runs right now. From looking at the Patreon comments it seems like Sergey hasn't started on implementing save games yet, and I assume it's still running as dual SDRAM.

Yes, the "Scan Filter" setting is specifically what filter will be applied if you use the ScandoublerFX option, which is ironic to me since I always viewed the additional scanline filters as replacements for ScandoublerFX. Apparently Sorgelig likes ScandoublerFX though so we all get one extra entry for that.

If someone is going to seriously consider a hybrid 486/586 core I think it would make more sense to attempt to build a core specific to the DE-10 Nano first. The port of ao486 is impressive, and a lot of work has gone into optimizing it, but new builds for it routinely fail and it never meets its timings (which, thankfully, are largely unimportant)...

I would load up the SD card with the default OS provided by Terasic. If it doesn't boot, you can send it back for replacement, and if it does boot fine, you can still message them about getting a replacement board. From what I've heard their customer support is good, especially if you follow their instructions for performing the initial checks.

Video on MiSTer is still tricky. PS1 was able to play VCDs with a modchip, it's possible this functionality could be added to the core, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The Saturn had a similar Video CD Card, so the possibility exists there too. AO486 can theoretically play Cinepak or Indeo encoded video, but my last attempt gave me something that pl...

What SAM really needs is support to load both cores and game files from the command line. I wonder how much work it would be to add that support, and if it's something that could be done just in Main or if it would require changes to each core as well.

I'm sorry you had to deal with that. I got a generic MiSTer daughter board bundle from Amazon and had similar results. Mine didn't even have pins for the SNAC port, which I didn't realize until I tried to plug in my MT-32 Pi. I had to add my own pins and my amateur solder job still looks better than the one on your pins. My fan also gave out (infer...

In your defense, the SD card slot on the DE10-nano is much less visible than the one on the IO board, especially if you've already assembled everything together.

I think discounting the idea of a dedicated retro gaming FPGA board is a bit silly, MiST is a great example of what such a board can do, it has a FPGA with only a quarter of the logic elements as the Cyclone V, but it's capable of simulating a majority of MiSTer's platforms. A MiSTer successor board can be a custom design that trades the DE10-nano'...

My question is, how much of a performance improvement do you get going from 90Mhz to 100Mhz? I realize at these speeds every extra Mhz makes a difference, I'm just curious how much of a difference this can possibly be.

I built a "custom" arcade cabinet/kiosk out of an old industrial washer control panel from work. I took it apart and threw away all the old useless electronics from it, but then it sat in my garage for a couple years. IMG_20190202_192745.jpg I wasn't even sure how I'd turn the control panel into something new at first. I was thinking abou...

The main problem with the N64 is the 250Mhz memory bus. Only the DDR3 memory on the DE10-nano is fast enough to handle that, but because it's behind the HPS (Arm) side there's inbuilt latency that's a huge challenge to overcome. It's not impossible, but it's a more significant challenge than just about anything else that's ever been attempted, and ...

I asked srg on Patreon about the potential for a beta core release and he said it's not ready yet, and indicated his goal was to get it from dual SDRAM to single SDRAM before any public releases. Makes sense to me.

Hmmm well my common sense takeaway is the DE10-nano's Cortex-A9 could probably handle the workload of the Cortex-M7 in the CMM2, but I have two concerns: - The M7 is an embedded microcontroller and I'm not sure if the A9 uses the same instruction set, which means software meant for the CMM2 may not run directly on the A9 without an interpretation l...

One thing to remember is that later CRTs (those made in the early and mid 2000s right before 16:9 HD became the standard) may be designed for 480p progressive scan signals, which will not be as ideal for retro games that output a 240p signal. These are great for early 2000s consoles that output 480p, but not great for anything before or since. It's...

I've also noticed that changing the CPU speed and sprite limit in the OSD settings can have the opposite effect in some games. You should keep them set to normal unless you run into a specific game that benefits from it.