MiSTer FPGA Forum

What is the best way to monitor changes that would be pulled in by an update_all? Especially arcade cores/ROMs.

In real time you can ssh into MISTer, cd /media/fat/Scripts and ./update_all.sh.
Or afterwards ftp into MISTer, goto /media/fat/Scripts/.config/downloader and look at the downloader.log.

How best to do this without connecting the MiSTer to the internet? Is there a good Twitter account to follow for this?

May be I misunderstood you. You want to know beforehand what updates are available?

Exactly, yes. I don't want to update constantly and would like to know when something I'll use becomes available.

It would be nice if we had the choice to choose which updates we want. This could be done by a flag in the settings before the updater runs. And if it is set, the downloaded would display all the new files about to be updated/installed and we could choose the files we don't want to be updated.

Anything less formal/accurate like a MiSTer arcade enthusiast who likes to post on Twitter?

For official arcade it is a little bit difficult as updates to arcades are almost never announced in "MiSTer Updates & Changelog".
For Jotego arcades which are usually pushed on Friday I try to announce it.
If you only want arcades you can place a filter in downloader.ini to get only arcades plus whatever you are interested in but you won't know beforehand what will be downloaded.

What would be nice, if possible, for cores recently updated had some kind of marker to indicate it was new, until the next time you run update all.
The script runs so fast now you really don't get time to see what its updated. It's a pain to have to go into a log to see it.

The console and computer cores have a date behind their name.

Unfortunately that is not the case for the arcade cores. I keep forgetting which arcade cores were updated and then have to look that up.