MiSTer FPGA Forum

I made a change to enable the SRAM banking and ROM banking at the same time and it seems to work, but I still don't understand what's happening with sound. Oddly, it seems to work fine on the Data Select screen but is broken (sometimes static or distorted sound but usually just silence) elsewhere. I think this isn't due to my SRAM banking change be...

Strange thing is... certain cores [e.g. TG16CD] allow me to compile an RBF using Quartus Lite, not so with this 'ao486' core... why/how, I wonder, does that occur? As discussed in another thread , it's because the ao486 core uses a 16550 UART "IP core" from Intel/Altera that requires a paid license. Quartus will allow you to use the core...

About the CPU, it says: "Samsung S3C2400X01 (ARM920T core), 20 (and under) to 133 MHz (overclockable to 166 MHz+ in some cases. Some have even reached 256 MHz (not always stable, low battery life). Overclocking ability is random, however all GP32s are supposed to reach 133 MHz. A few early "bad" units maxed out at 132 MHz.)" I ...

Apparently instantiating a 64k ram (reg [15:0] ram[32768) really upsets the synthesis software and sends it to the brink of insanity. I only have a little familiarity with this problem, but I think what happens is that synthesis doesn't recognize your RAM as being compatible with any of its standard RAM entities (due to e.g. mixed synchronous and ...

The / file system on MiSTer is not read-only, and yours is not actually full. Unix file systems allow reserving part of the capacity for exclusive use by the root user, conventionally 5%. The "available" space according to df doesn't include this space. That being said, having an ext4 file system actually be ~99% full is considered bad be...

In addition to dshadoff's suggestions: Post the MD5 or SHA-1 hash of the ROM/disk image after verifying it on the MiSTer platform to confirm that you're actually running a known image. Multiple people have reported strange behavior only to find that they'd somehow corrupted their files (e.g. by FTPing binary files in ASCII mode). Make sure it's not...

I don't think anyone's saying it's impossible, just that it's too big of a project to take for granted that it will happen anytime soon.

There are a few things happening that I can think of (not actually a game developer, but I follow some discussions around gamedev) that basically revolve around reducing the consequences of lag: Animations tend to be much less "twitchy". Characters are rarely completely still, and animations are often designed to blend into one another ov...

Yeah, the core's "SSF2" mapper doesn't support SRAM switching. That's easy to add (as long as we don't care too much about precisely matching the behavior of the original chip, as I'm not sure anyone ever confirmed whether that chip even has the SRAM control register, let alone exactly how much of the ROM space gets switched to SRAM). I'm...

I'm no DOS memory management guru, and I don't think I have anything handy that uses EMS to actually test it, but DR-DOS's EMM386 says this when asked to auto-detect the EMS frame:

dano wrote: ↑Sun Jun 14, 2020 1:46 pm uhhh I still haven't bought a mister yet...should I wait??

No. There's no guarantee that this will lead to anything, and even if it does, it will be more expensive than a regular MiSTer setup while only adding small improvements.

As macro mentioned upthread, it's the 16550 UART core. The relevant warnings look like this: Warning (12188): OpenCore Plus Hardware Evaluation feature is turned on for the following cores Warning (12190): "16550 UART" will use the OpenCore Plus Hardware Evaluation feature Warning (265072): Messages from megafunction that supports OpenCor...

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. MAME can be a very useful reference for implementing a core, but a direct translation isn't possible because MAME simply isn't structured the same way that a core is, and it tends to not be very strict about some hardware details that are much more important for a core, especially: RAM organization (e.g...

Can anyone tell if it's potentially MiSTer-compatible? It seems like the actual FPGA/SoC chip is the same, but I'm not sure what issues to look for in I/O or HPS differences. By "MiSTer-compatible" I mean that support for it could be added to mainline MiSTer releases while retaining compatibility with the existing hardware, at worst just ...

The "CPU" on these is a beast, too. It was designed to be a graphics coprocessor and was used on some high-end graphics cards, but it has enough general-purpose instructions that a separate host CPU isn't strictly necessary.

This is great news. One thing that's odd about this is that it's commonly just called Cave 68000 hardware, but the list of companies that share the MAME driver is sort of baffling. It runs the gamut from virtually unknown companies to much bigger names like Namco, Jaleco, and Atlus. Particularly odd is the fact that Cave-developed games were appare...

This looks like what I'd expect if you edited the file with a Windows text editor that saved DOS/Windows-style line endings (CRLF). Some Windows text editors can be convinced to save with Unix-style line endings (LF), but exactly how to do it varies by editor. Sometimes it's a file type selection in the "Save As..." dialog, for example. A...

I can't claim a particular passion for it, but CD-i is definitely more interesting than it's usually given credit for. It basically bombed in the consumer market, but it seems that there was a lot of corporate momentum behind it several years before it was (re)branded and released in a consumer-oriented form, and some of that carried over via oddly...

Fair enough. Thanks for trying. There's a possibiltiy that this only occurs on some manufacturing runs of the DE-10 Nano (the schematic has "DNI" on the components connected to pin 13), but any further investigation of that would be off-topic for this thread.

After fiddling with my EmuTOS images, it's consistently working here, too, including with what seems to be the same configuration that I was using in the first place. I'm not sure what actually changed, but I guess I'm generally joining the chorus of this being some kind of transient weirdness rather than serious breakage.

I'm also seeing failure to boot, with a previously booting config using a 512K EmuTOS ROM and no disks. I've played with the various RAM/chipset options to no avail.

This one? https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=section&a=details&id=21541 If so, it seems to work for me. I didn't play very far, but I didn't see anything alarming. I used a locally compiled binary of Floating IPS 1.31 on Ubuntu 20.04 x86_64 to apply the patch. I started with a clean, headerless Super Mario World US ROM: 524,288 bytes with MD5 cd...

a simpler system that uses the SH-2 (CPS-3?) The other "major" SH-2 platforms I know of are "Psikyo SH-2" (e.g. Strikers 1945 II/III, Gunbird 2, Tetris: The Absolute: The Grand Master 2, Sol Divide) and Kaneko Super Nova (e.g. Cyvern, Sengeki Striker, Gals Panic 4/S). Several of these games, predictably, have Saturn ports or sp...

This sort of thing can happen when ROMs are transferred over FTP in ASCII mode, or something else that does a similar conversion. For example, if converting newlines from DOS/Windows to Unix, ROMs that happen to contain the byte sequence "0D 0A" will be broken while those that don't contain that byte sequence will be fine.

All of what mic_ said, basically. People sometimes exaggerate Saturn's complexity to the point that it sounds like an utterly unfathomable beast of a system, but it is genuinely pretty complex. You have: Two SH-2 CPUs 68K (as a sound controller) SCSP synthesis/sample engine (Yamaha, but odd, i.e. not just an OPL3/4 core) SCSP DSP SCU DSP (custom DS...

Interesting. At least one room in my house has such a setup (ARC from the TV feeds into the soundbar, and turning the TV on/off also turns the soundbar on/off and vice-versa). Are you saying that if I plug my MiSTer directly into some other HDMI port on that television, that should be sufficient to reproduce the issue, i.e. the sound will come out...

Any idea whether that repeater somehow buffers/isolates pin 13 vs. passing it through, for those of us with setups that encounter CEC/ARC problems? No clue. How could I check? EDIT: Also, what are these CEC/ARC problems you are having? It's a series of issues that have been reported when connecting DE-10 Nano to a CEC-capable TV. In my case, audio...

Any idea whether that repeater somehow buffers/isolates pin 13 vs. passing it through, for those of us with setups that encounter CEC/ARC problems?

This is a great resource, but be careful with it, because arcade systems are pretty loosely defined. Some come in multiple revisions or configurations, some have hardware split between shared boards and game-specific boards (e.g. games might share a graphics board but have different sound hardware), and occasionally a "system" is just peo...

There's a note in the MAME driver that says "uses Kaneko's Pandora sprite chip (also used in DJ Boy, Air Buster ..)", so it looks like there's at least some significant overlap with the related Kaneko boards.

In the meantime, you might find Nightmare in the Dark on Neo Geo interesting.