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.
Unless it changed recently, I think it doesn't have full support for BRAM, and no support for BSP and hard blocks, right ?
I wouldn't be surprised if some were used in the Mister project.
(Doesn't change the fact that Stmbiflow is an impressive feat)
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)
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.
Surprising. What about the menuing itself do you dislike. My kids can’t get around retroarch no matter the theme. Mister they just go to the core. Select it. It drops in in the cord directory of games. They select it. And they play. Retroarch is Roms folder then they select the core and if they don’t select the right one their save states aren’t there and their configs aren’t there. Good luck doing 5x scaling with retroarch too.
That's kind of my experience with the MiSTer UI - confusing, deep menus, unclear what button gets to what menu or how to get back, etc. I now wonder if there may be several MiSTer UIs and I'm just using the wrong one?
My only experience with Mister is playing SNES games with the device my brother set up on a CRT tv. Playing an SNES game is just a matter of choosing the SNES core, picking the game rom from the default directory, and learning the hot key combination on the controller to go to the save menu to save your in game save file to the sd card.
For this use case it's easier than Retroarch- you don't need to fiddle with resolutions since everything outputs natively to the CRT and you don't need to fiddle with cores since only 1 core exists per system.
Maybe there's more complex features that are harder to use, but as a replacement for a super nintendo I find it to be dead simple to use once setup.
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"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Is that simpler? Dev boards are a dime a dozen, and far from everyone who wants to use FPGAs to mimic game consoles wants (or can) solder them themselves... I feel like if this platform runs out, people will mostly switch to another generic one with not too much effort.
I can't think of any, relative to a FPGA. MiSTer cores are regularly upgraded; an ASIC would defeat the point.
What's being proposed is a board that's designed for miSTer. Such a board would include an appropriate FPGA, alongside memory, a better cooling solution and ports useful for miSTer use.
These are currently accomplished via mods/addons to the generic devboard, which is far from ideal.
More downsides I'd say, the point of the FPGA is that you can always replace and update the cores according to what you need any given moment, just "download your game console" essentially. Physically swapping hard ASICs isn't as convenient. :)
Btw we made that guideline a bit more general recently:
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
I expect it can be generalized further still, but I wanted to make it unambiguously cover the generic flamewars about things like "why is this on Twitter instead of a blog", since those come up a lot and are super repetitive.
Hmm, if I may offer my two cents—while I like what you’re trying to do there I think you’ve made the guidelines less clear. Until you called out Twitter threads explicitly, I didn’t see the connection. And I’m actually still not sure what “name collision” means.
I have no helpful suggestions on how to make this clearer, unfortunately.
That's a perfect example. Another would be "why do people pick ungoogleable names" or generally any shallow-predictable comment about the name of a thing rather than the thing itself. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29449955 (not to pick on that commenter!)
If people post the endlessly repeated "I hate reading blog posts on Twitter when they should be a blog", that's a complaint about website formats, no? I don't want to make these things overly specific!
This seems like a bug, though. And this guideline is about general complaining about webdesign, where the design choices of the creators are not align with the users preferences.
The fact that these issues are so common that a YC News guideline had to be made to stop people commenting on it is interesting in itself.
If it wasn't a real issue, people would not bring it up over and over.
I wonder, is there anything constructive the YC crowd could actually do about this instead of just making a rule to not discuss it?
I mean... sigh... I get that we're all tired of it, but that's the point. We're all fed up with pop-up after pop-up, for one stupid or worthless reason or another. WE ARE THE PEOPLE writing the code to do this! Should we not stop? Form a union? So that we can summarily eject people from it if they insist on baking popups into low-level SDKs? E.g.: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/gdpr
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
So, I implore you, please don't tell people to just shut up and accept the garbage strewn all over the street.
They just want to clean their world up a little bit.
There's a place for it. Namely, the email of whoever wrote the piece. Not a discussion site. Spamming complaints on HN only serves to lower the quality of discussion.
The point is that ranting about it here can't directly fix the problem. Sure, it can keep the topic of accessible/usable web development in people's minds, but it likely already is for most web developers using this site. Where a specific page/site is concerned, the person to complain to is the operator of the site hosting the relevant content - i.e., the person/group who can actually do something about it.
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.