
MiSTer: Run Amiga, SNES, NES and Genesis on an FPGA - alexyoung
https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
======
cmrdporcupine
I have the MiST, the predecessor to this and really like it. It was originally
made for Atari ST emulation but quickly acquired other cores. Mine even has
MIDI ports like the original ST.

It's odd the MiSTer page doesn't even list an Atari ST core as available. Odd
given the heritage (and name).

On the other hand, there's an X68000 core. That's pretty amazing.

But apart from bigger FPGA one of the big advantages of MiSTer over MiST is
HDMI output. Dealing with VGA is a real pain in the but, esp if you want to
hook up to a living room TV.

I'll probably invest in MiSTer at some point, but it would be nice if they had
an expansion which added MIDI and 9-pin joystick ports like you could get on
the MiST.

~~~
siffland
Like the LL Cool Joy add on board:

[https://twitter.com/smokemonstertwi/status/10523148009807298...](https://twitter.com/smokemonstertwi/status/1052314800980729856?lang=en)

~~~
cmrdporcupine
nice, it exists

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siffland
I have a SuperNT, a MiSTer, and a raspberry pi 3 running retroarch. They all
work very well and all should be considered great for retro gaming. Here are a
few of my thoughts.

SuperNT - I love it, i don't have the jailbroken firmware and play strictly
from games. I have made several Super Mario based carts from Rom Hacks and i
find not having save states has probably made me a better player. The system
is dirt simple, i plug a game in and it plays. There is a menu and you can
play with settings but you dont have to. Using only purchased carts makes this
legal .

Retropi - Very nice allows you to play up to the PSX. All is pretty much
smooth and there are so many howto's anyone can set it up. If you have never
played on the original hardware you will never probably never know if there
are any issues with the emulation. Still a very nice choice and cheap. Unless
you dump your own ROMs you have to use illegal content on this (and dont lie,
almost no one dumps their own ROMs).

MiSTer - This is very nice. It boots quick, the emulation is great. The menu
is easy to navigate, but very ugly (no scraping or any game information very
folder driven). controller set up is not difficult, but is not as straight
forward as retropi. Installation is simple compared to retropi. Very expensive
($130 for the board and at least $25 for the SDRAM board unless you build your
own, USB Hub as well). Arcade support is limited. Still have to provide your
own ROMS.

All three choices are still great depends what you want to do. There is always
room for all three options (I realize the SuperNT is not a multisystem
machine, but it i mean a dedicated FPGA system, they are coming out with their
sega genesis FPGA as well).

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baroffoos
Very cool. I have wanted to try some FPGA stuff out but it seems like its very
encumbered by proprietary toolchains and industry secrets.

Wondering what the pros/cons are of using this vs a raspberry pi.

~~~
Grazester
Raspberry is emulation which will not be console accurate. The FPGA would more
accurate since it is recreating the console on a hardware level(chip)

~~~
pmlamotte
To expand on that, Higan[1] is a super accurate SNES emulator that requires a
decent CPU to run at full speed due to all of the weird quirks and on-
cartridge chips[2]. For the popular games, typical emulators are probably good
enough, but for true accuracy of all the quirks and special chips you need
quite a bit of compute power. In the case of Speedy Gonzales, at least for a
time (not sure if it's still the case) the only emulator you could actually
beat the game on was Higan.

By comparison, Analogue sells the Super NT which is their own FPGA SNES that
uses micro USB for power and probably requires about as much power as a Pi,
but is comparable to Higan in terms of accuracy. Their implementation still
uses physical carts though, so they skipped on implementing the special chips
that were contained in the cartridge of various games. For _that_, there is
the SD2SNES flash cart which runs its own FPGA for most of the chips (SA-1
support in beta).

[1] [https://byuu.org/emulation/higan/](https://byuu.org/emulation/higan/) [2]
[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-
power-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-
mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Byuu, the author of Higan, has been quite critical[1] of the claim that the
Super NT is as accurate as stated. It may be tempting to assume "FPGA =
hardware recreation = perfect", but we don't have access to the original SNES
schematics, so anything we recreate involves some level of guesswork.

Higan has been in development for more than a decade, and literally every
first party SNES game has been tested to ensure 100% compatibility. By
contrast, since the Super NT was released, its creators have issued multiple
patches to fix game-specific issues that were discovered. As is expected in
the development of any emulator, it is likely that these patches have created
new problems in other games, which haven't been discovered yet.

\---

[1]
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uHa892...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uHa892sRNOQJ:https://byuu.org/articles/fpgas-
arent-magic/)

Sidenote, the above link is using Google's cache. Byuu appears to have not
only deleted all the articles from his site, but _also_ prevented the Wayback
Machine from preserving copies of them.

Byuu, _please_ don't do this! You've spent your life making sure old video
games are preserved for future generations! The Internet Archive should be
allowed to preserve your work as well.

~~~
jron
Byuu's work in emulation and ROM preservation should be commended but his FPGA
dismissal seems rooted in envy. After spending 14 years developing Higan, I
can sympathize. The fact is, the SNES chips are well understood (partly
through the work of Byuu). The SuperNT FPGA code from Kevtris mimics almost
every perceptible quirk of these chips in gameplay and I'm sure MiSTer will
get to the same point if enough talent is drawn to the project. The list of
known timing/graphical issues for the SuperNT is less than 20 from some of the
most fanatical users: [https://github.com/SmokeMonsterPacks/Super-NT-
Jailbreak/issu...](https://github.com/SmokeMonsterPacks/Super-NT-
Jailbreak/issues)

Edit: only 10 of the known issues are confirmed and graphical/timing related.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
To me, Byuu didn't come across as dismissive of the SuperNT so much as the
idea that FPGA's are _inherently_ more accurate than software emulators. Both
approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

20 known issues is significantly more than Higan's _zero_ known issues (for
the SNES emulator specifically; other Higan emulators are of varying degrees
of quality and maturity). Unless you count issues like, there's a certain game
that appears to randomly crash slightly _less_ often in Higan than on real
hardware, which was still being investigated as of when I last checked.

~~~
jron
I'm not dismissing the incredible work of Byuu. I'm simply suggesting it is
far easier to get cycle accuracy and correctness in an FPGA than through
software emulation. Kevtris probably spent less than a year in his spare time
to pull off nearly identical results with his FPGA. He also hasn't gone back
to work through the known issues because of his work on the MegaSG.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> I'm simply suggesting it is far easier to get cycle accuracy and correctness
> in an FPGA than through software emulation.

This is the line I would disagree with. What about an FPGA makes cycle
accuracy and correctness easier than with an emulator written in software?

Make no mistake, Kevtris is immensely talented. But he also had the advantage
of additional research going in (such as byuu's), and, well, I truly don't
think the accuracy is comparable as of right now. The difference in effort
required to get between 99% and 100% compatibility is immense, and the Super
NT is clearly at 99% right now.

~~~
jron
Verilog/HDL has obvious advantages to C/C++ in the emulation world that seems
to escape too many people in this never ending debate. Are both using some
blackbox magic? Yes, but if we could compare the HDL size to byuu's code base
the mystical advantages would start to become more transparent. Byuu, by his
own estimation, spent "40% of his life" developing Higan...

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BasicObject
Slightly off topic but feel this might be a good place to ask... Does a FPGA
exist that would allow me to resurrect a 68k Mac SE? I'd love to find
something like that.

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ForHackernews
Reminds me of [https://www.analogue.co/mega-sg/](https://www.analogue.co/mega-
sg/) which is also FPGA-based, IIRC.

