Most liked posts in thread: What's new Pussycat too?

I looked at one of these just before I got my Mini PC, the thing I liked most was the almost lag free play, the selection of cores was impressive, but I had to balance it against what I could do on the Mini PC. For me, the ability to play more machines with very good emulation and the general computer usage won out. What the video skirts around, is that although it's not classed as emulation to some, it does require the core to be recreated as closely as possible, or you get the same issues that a not fully emulated solution offers. As he showed, the Amiga core does not play some demos correctly, it was a brief mention. Naturally, the cores will get better with time (if people keep working on them), but recreating custom chips is a tough job.

Up to a certain level, these MISTer things are amazing, and I hope Alex has tons of great fun on them, me I'm happy with the miniPC, I'm not as agile as I once was, so a little lag hardly affects me. And as I have most of the real machines still, I have a good choice.

Shame about the expense of them, by the time you add on all the add ons, it's a pretty old penny.

Still, I hope Alex had an epic experience with it..

Happy Xmas all..

 

Thank you all for your words, guys. So far I could start playing with this MiSTer machine and I must say that it's really fun. Some years ago I bought a similar product called MiSTica which is essentially a version of the MiST with a couple of ports (namely joystick ports or audio ports). There are many differences between these two devices: first of all the quantity of usable memory to reproduce or simulate (NOT emulate!) PCB, chips, and electronic components of several machines. They can be computers, consoles, arcade machines, etc. And that's essentially what an FPGA board/device does. You can "program" the assets of a ZX Spectrum or a Nintendo 64 by listing the CPU type, the audio chips, the data bus, the input/output ports, etc. And you can do this by using a special programming language and an IDE built on purpose. So basically the FPGA board can become a different machine every time you load a "core" (.rbf files) that describes a particular computer's electronics and circuitry.

The MiSTer combines a powerful FPGA board with a second board (and they're all on board!) which works as a mini Linux implementation. This works as the controller or the OS of the entire machine, it allows you to control the mass storage devices, load and save cores, manage the network ports, etc. The basic setup is pretty simple but you can exploit all the powerful features of the resources (network ports, extra RAM, USB connections, and more) to enhance or simplify the usage. So for example you can connect the MiSTer permanently to a NAS in order to have much more space than a simple 512GB SD card to store your favourite cores, rooms, and games. The community around the MiSTer is quite alive and the initial configuration has been made even simpler than before. There are ready-made scripts (basically they are sh scripts for Linux) to download and organize all the cores into your SD Card, which is the primary but not exclusive booting "disk". Probably the most boring activity is to find and transfer games for computers, and consoles from your other disks or the Internet. Games and programs can be left within zip files (for most of the cores) and they can be read and run by the different cores anyway. Luckily enough you can find packages of games already available on the Net or even images of SD Cards to start quickly and without any hassle. You just fire up the MiSTer with an already configured SD Card, plug in a USB gamepad and configure it easily and you're ready to load a PSX, Saturn, C64, QL, MSX, coin-op game.

It's hard to make a comprehensive list of the machines you can reproduce with a MiSTer, they are hundreds and the arcade machines are thousands. For each computer or console you start, you can use it as though it were exactly (say 99%) the same original hardware. Same behavior, same feeling. There is almost no difference from the original machine. And that's because the device is not emulated, but simulated with the reproduction of the same PCB, CPU, chips, RAM, and I/O ports.

Distros like RetroBat or Batocera and many others make full use of emulators and exploit the power of i7 multi-core modern CPUs and that's fine. They are amazing as well. MiSTer is just a different approach to retrocomputing, probably the most faithful to the original hardware and of every single IC that populated our beloved home computers or consoles. Just think of the fact that the famous SID IC installed in every C64 is completely reproduced by programming logic and gate arrays on the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) boards.

From what I noticed so far, and this is a point in favor of PCs with RetroBat/Batocera/ELEC/SuperConsole X Pro/other Chinese multi-consoles, the "modern" consoles such as PS2/PS3/GameCube/Switch/WII/PSVita/DreamCast are not reproduced by MiSTer. At least not yet. The last one to join the club of the reproduced consoles is the Sega Saturn. This is probably due to the limited number of cells of the available RAM that the FPGA CPU uses to build the scheme of the machines. But as said, the MiSTer world is continuously evolving so we can expect new and recent consoles to be added to the list of the devices it can start and manage.

A short list of the machines reproducible with MiSTer:
Oric-1/Atmos - All ZX Spectrums - QL - PC8801 - PSX - SAMCoupe - SNES - SMS - BBCMicro - Electron - Amstrad - Amstrad PCW - Acorn Atom - Genesis - MegaDrive - All MSXs - NeoGeo - Neogeo Pocket/Color - MegaCD - NES - SVI328 (Spectravideo) - VTECH LAser - TGFX16-CD - TI-99/4A - TRS-80 - X68000 - Atari Lynx - Atari ST - All Amigas - All Atari 8-bit - Acorn Archimedes - PC XT - PC 486 - Saturn - MacPlus - All Commodore 8-bit - Apple I and II - ZXNext - MAME and HBMAME arcades - Atari 2600/5200/7800 - Game Gear - Gameboy - GBC - GBA - N64 - WonderSwan - NEC PC Engine - Sega S32X and SCUMMVM (on the Linux implementation).

 

Thanks, Baz - and talking about price... There's something worth a few words...

I have been chasing a fully assembled MiSTer since 2020 or so. A couple of sources were available during the last few years, but the price went to the moon rapidly after 2022, reaching more than 500 EUR, which, to me, seemed quite outrageous! Year after year, I kept following forums, FB groups, and YT videos, all narrating the prodigy and the power of this piece of hardware. My MISTica was cool enough, I could do myriad things with it, reproducing most of my beloved machines and even those I was just curious about (Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Oric, etc.) but it was/is kind of limited in the number of cells available to build arcade, console and computer cores. Of course, the MiSTer always represented the top hardware you can get in the FPGA world.

So last November I was perusing a couple of YT videos about the MiSTerPI variant, which has nothing to do with the RaspberryPI. It's just that the "PI" suffix is now being used for every SoC board produced, just because it's cool and it attracts the looks of every retrocomputing fan... So I found out about a new lot of the MISTerPI that will be produced and sold by February 2025 at a reasonable USD 180 price. I posted a request on a FB group asking if someone had already bought one item of the first lot, but none replied. But an occasional contributor to RMW magazine and somewhat of an expert on FPGA systems (I think he has 4 or 5 of them, haven't you Roberto?) responded by pointing me in a different direction: buy an ‘original’ MiSTer from QMTech, a company specializing in PCBs and hardware circuits that sells through AliExpress at a good price. Even on that platform, they sell in batches of 150-200 pieces at a time. My contact was kind enough to send me directly the link to the most advantageous offer possible at that time. Thus, after just two days of monitoring, I saw that a new batch had been put up for sale at a very advantageous price: about EUR 160. The online shop warned that the product was being sold without VAT and customs costs that would probably be applied on delivery. And here is a small stroke of luck for me: on the small box that arrived at my address, the packers at QMTech had written a comforting description ‘Demo Board’ for a total value of 19.90 USD. The lazy Swiss customs agents, God rest their souls, let my ‘demo’ board through without delay and I saved a few notes that I soon turned into alcohol and Christmas sweets...

What is the moral of my rant? Obviously none!
But if any of you have the urge to take a MiSTer puppy to look after for the next few months, you can count on my experience, which I am always willing to document, and the magic link on AliExpress which, with a bit of luck, will make you happy users of the most advanced FPGA board for retrocomputing. It's not easy to find the best offer by QMTech on AliExpress, of course! Just pay attention at all those different listings at much higher prices, like € 250 or more, up to € 400. They basically sell the same thing but they are speculating over the QMTech original and complete assembly of the MiSTer, which comes with all the expansions needed and ready to be plugged in. They even include a SD/TF card with the basic system to boot up.

 

Quite a busy start to the year with a few systems making their way out of the cave. I'm also on a self imposed ban from Amazon purchases for at least January. But no one mentioned a quick look on eBay

I picked up nine issues of a magazine called Atari World that was produced around 1995. Nice magazine that is very well produced. Including postage it was only £10 total and the mags themselves are in excellenct condition. Sadly it only lasted eleven issues so if anyone has issues 1 and 6 and wants to sell them, please let me know!

I was killing time in HMV waiting on my daughter finishing work and found them selling the Blu-ray of Rubber Keyed Wonder, the recent documentary movie about the Speccy. It was pretty cool to see this for sale in a high street shop so £12.99 later I had purchased my first ever Blu-ray title.

 

Sorry for late reply. The MiSTer is an amazing machine to play with. Fast, flexible, easy to interact with thanks to the side Linux OS - I've had such a great time during the Holidays, now much less time and other things to play with (Android TV box for wife and daughters, Super Console X2 to test, a USB Batocera 500GB drive to test booting my fastest PC, etc.) - Weekends are ok to test the several home computers, consoles and arcades you can start within the MiSTer... Once you've loaded a hundred games (or towsands) for a specific platform, you kind of must to test them all, musn't you? ;-)

Anyway, so far so good - I've also built a Windows 3.11 / DOS 6.22 486 PC using the core AO486, next step is a W95 PC with 16GB of RAM, then a PC-XT 8088 with Hercules graphics (that used to be my first PC ever), and playing around with QL, Archimedes, BBC Micro, etc. If only I was good at gaming... For example the console games (NES, SNES, N64, etc.) are so difficult to me I barely can camplete the 1st level of anything... Oh how old am I?

 

Yes, I definitely recommend the MiSTer in any form - we all know that the market will soon see new specific products that use FPGA boards to recreate the look and feel of the original machines (next up is probably TheAmiga 500 MAXI, hopefully, or the Atari ST. After the SuperStation (PS1) we'll probably have the chance to buy the great consoles of the 80s and 90s. But they all will only feature a cool case, cool colors and compatibility with joypad and other peripherals, nothing more. Probably the next leap of power for FPGA boards will be the possibility to run Pentium-based and VGA/XVGA graphics and 32/64-bit consoles like PS2, PS3, etc.

Meanwhile these achievements can be reached through emulation, with specific boards or general PC architecture (see what happens with Batocera, RetroBat or CoreElec boards) - single machines with 60 consoles in one and more than 120000 games for all platforms. They are a reality now, just search for them in Ali or Amazon.

Not being a gamer, I'm more a computer or software/hardware geek, I find my fun by playing around with technologies like specific 8/16/32 bit platforms. And they're a bunch of fun to explore. And learn to code games or demos for these old machines is something I've always aspired to when I started to program - but unfortunately all the requests I had from the start was the other side (the dark side) of programming, meaning programming management software, for business or for the web market afterwards - such a bore!! Actually some years ago I met an English professional programmer who always did the other way around, he only coded games for his entire career, and now he regrets "not having programmed something useful" ;-)

Sorry not being able to shoot some footage about my progresses with the MiSTer - other friends online asked me to - but I understand this takes a lot of time and the result I'm afraid it won't be as good. But I promise I'll give it a try.

 

We are quite similar, Dave, I game to see the mechanics of how it's used. Back in the day, I was more interested in diving into a games code and meddling with it. I so loved making the game do what *I* wanted it to do, that was the real buzz. Of course, if there's a great game that I'm into, then I'll play it to hell, but I'm more into making the PC faster, exploring other platforms and just messing around.

At the moment, my daughter and I are into Astrobot on the PS5, I'm just marvelling at the kinetics of the game. Watching your character having hundreds of shiny jewels dropped on them and then being able to spin and disturb vast amounts of them, all obeying gravity, the physics is amazingly well done. Actual energy being passed from one jewel to the next until there's no momentum left. Stunning. The Haptic controllers are used to the max, really immersive. I could go on and on about it, the creative ways things are done, the look, the poly shifting is just freaking good. And it's plays to perfections. That's a talented team of devs right there.

Again, I'm loving what they are doing and having an inkling of what is involved just blows my mind. The creation of the game is as much fun as the game itself.

 

Thanks for the feedback on your MiSTer. I think at some point later this year I'll either get a MiSTerPi or whatever new MiST Multisystem is released by Heber in the UK. I like the idea of having a little box in the living room with all the old 8bit micro's readily available on it.

 

Having come from the Amiga to PC, I was used to having to adjust stuff in the startup-sequence. So Dos was a no brainer, BUT, it to me a while to try and see why the PC was considered better. Initially it felt like this machine was a step backwards. Eventually, through money and upgrades I started to see the PC as 'better'. Now, I use the PC as my tinkering tool.

Consoles will remain my go-to games source, purely for not having to do any setup (although older computers didn't need too much tinker ala the C64 and Atari), in goes the disk or cart, and we are good to go, simples!

Hope your daughter likes Astrobot, it may look cute, but there's good old gameplay in shed loads..

 

Great find @Vyper68 - don't forget to send us some pictures of the games you are now testing on the CPC!

Last weekend I got back to one of my many favorite games of the 80s. I might be repetitive, but I do love football management games since the early days of Kevin Tom's first FM. I played FootBall Manager I again for a while using VICE emulator and found out again about all the virtues (simplicity, effectiveness, high playability, highlights, etc.) and the defects (only 16 teams each league, limited number of players, unrealistic results, etc.). So I switched to Football Manager II (see pic below) which features 24 teams in Div. 4, longer highlights (maybe a little too much), realistic results, and more. Of course, it lacks many features that I'd like to see in a FM game, but for 64K of RAM that resembles already to a little miracle.

Maybe @Andy Barr would wonder what team did I choose to manage? Well, recently The Black Cats entered my heart, mostly because of the supporters' energy and vibe... ;-)

 

Here are some photos of the CPC464

 

Here are some pictures of the "after dark" finish on the PCB's from OSH Park. I have ordered some Stereo POKEY PCB's in this finish to build a couple up and fit one in my 800XL.

 

The 464 is looking good Richie, nice to see you getting stuck in.
Remember and let me know when you are selling it and I'll pick it up next time I'm heading to Scarobourgh

 

It ended up Villa 5 Cardiff 0
My scorers were Line-ache-er and Barnes. Didn't have the Europe winning team. I do have a picture of them that I am getting framed. It was such a shame about Gary Shaw.

 

The TK Stereo II boards arrived if anyone wants one look quite nice in the bare copper and Black finish. I could build one or sell a bare PCB if anyone is interested.

 

Richie, you really are getting me tempted with this 464 when you decide to sell it lol

 

Latest pickups this month...

 

Latest additions...
Brand new Acorn Electron ULA socket
Falklands '82 for the ZX Spectrum
Alien Dropout for the Acorn Electron
2 new 6000mAh Batteries for my WiiU gamepad to replace the 1600mAh battery fitted by Nintendo. These are off Ali so don't know how good they are, we'll see.

 

After a couple weeks waiting for PC 3.5" drives to arrive (still finding one was the most difficult part of the project) I could play a little with this GreaseWeazle board v4.1, which allows to make digital copies of all your diskette software, no matter what's the system. It supports reading and writing Amiga, Atari ST. PC IBM, Acorn, Commodore 8-bit, Atari 8-bit, Sinclair ZX, and many more. 3.5" or 5.25" drives can be connected and used to create digital files of your physical diskettes or you can create physical copies of your digital versions (for example, ADF to disk or disk to ADF). Amazing product and not too expensive too. Oh and it supports the copy of protected disks, for instance using SCP (SuperCard Pro format) for Amiga-commercial/original games diskettes.

Do any of these pictures remind you smth?

 

GreaseWeazle is really good. I ended up buying the one that Amiga Addict had for review a couple of years ago from the guy who wrote the article. I used it to convert some ST files but it has sat in my drawer since then. Very handy device though and I'll need to dig it back out sometime and make some more ST images.

 

Yeah, @nysavant, ST and Amiga diskettes are my first targets, but also PC IBM, C64 and other systems' 5.25" floppy diskettes - it's only almost impossible to find a 5.25" 1.2MB internal/external drive - eBay offers are totally crazy (more than 100 € for single unity) and no luck contacting friends or local PC stores.

 

This particular 27c512 has all four Ultimate 16KB games on it ( Jetpac,Pssst,Cookie & Tranz Am )

 

Maybe I will build a couple of these....

GitHub - TomDDG/ZXPicoIF2Lite: Sinclair Interface 2 ROM Cartridge replacement using a Raspberry Pico. · GitHub

 

Hi @AlexDrito
So the cartridge can hold 4 16KB ROM images. Sinclair didn't produce many cartridges so that is a bit limiting and it can only be a 16KB image. There are other options for larger games like the Dandanator or more exotic variations of the Interface 2 cart using bank switching but that relies on extra logic. This one basically gives you a standard interface 2 cart but uses a dip switch to choose which image.
The images available for the cart I made can include games but there are also alternative BASIC's and diagnostic ROMs as well so you could use the Interface 2 or a clone of it as a diagnostic system for a Speccy.

 

I picked up a 28 Pin One ROM yesterday, very handy if you need to burn a 2764 of 27128 EPROM.

One ROM - The Most Flexible Retro ROM Replacement