First 48 hours with MiSTer Reflections

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morecoffee
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First 48 hours with MiSTer Reflections

Unread post by morecoffee »

This is just a simple write up on my experiences on recently getting a MiSTer FPGA. None of it should be taken as any criticism, but just pointing out where I had very minor struggles, probably due to just not reading the wiki closely enough. This is not support request either. If something I mention I am still stuck on I will probably post or discord on it later. This is just my experience as a brant new MiSTer user while it is still all fresh and new.

Background:

I’ve followed the MiSTer project for over a year and a half on youtube. I found SmokeMonster & Pez82 do a good job of being entertaining and selling the benefits of mister. (Pez you should post some more videos). Those videos really got me imagining taking a virtual tour of 8 bit computers and perfect 2-D console gaming. I think Flynn’s work on the AO486 put me well over the edge and couldn’t stop thinking about getting a MiSTer. For reference I was 12 when Windows 95 was out so, I remember 386/486’s at home and 8 bits at school (my school had maps & textbooks with the USSR well after 1991).

Why I chose to buy one in January:

I originally was going to buy a DE-10 nano and a cheap hub and cooling to get it up and running. With a stimulus check I decided to splurge. I also feared a PSX or Sega Saturn core would drop then I assumed all the add-ons I might want would be extremely hard to get for a year or two. The concern of having to wait a long time to get what I wanted at a higher price was a concern. I think anyone on the edge should consider if these new cores drop how much harder it will be to find what you want/need in stock.

My experience:

Saturday afternoon USPS dropped off my Ultimate Mister Pro from Portugal. The unit was put back in a padded DE-10 Nano retail box with foam padding inside and the end of the box cut off. It was put in a shipping box with additional bubble wrap.

The included SD card was inside the unit and ready to go. I took it out and put in 400 gb card with Mr. Fusion directly into the cavity of the case. Oh, the humanity. Imagine dropping a guitar pick in acoustic guitar with only tiny small slits to retrieve it. After shaking for a while I just took off the bottom of the case and flexed a side of the case a little to let the card fall past the usb board.

Mr. Fusions did its thing. COMFAST AC1300 wifi adapter worked with no setup required. I added the wifi password and then updated. I added the script Update All and did that. Took about 30 minutes. Thank you, designers, for putting the IP address clear and upfront and not buried in menus. Well done. I tried turning on Samba and couldn’t connect to it. I didn’t spend much time trouble shooting, but that was a blessing. I added FileZilla to my computer and used FTP instead. Transfers seemed much smother and less awkward than dragging between folders and network shares.

I found getting things like Sega CD & TurboGrafx CD easy to set up with just a making sure the bin/cue’s were unzipped. But Neo Geo… I don’t know how to fix this one for a while. It took a lot more searching and googling than I would have expected but watched an old youtube video showing the screen shot of the correct forum post on another site. I was surprised how precise it is expecting for game files. I am also not use to dealing with unibios. I couldn’t figure out how to access them until I mapped the ABC to a single button.

Setting up the controllers was easy. I used PSX usb controllers from my PS Classic mini and an 8BitDo arcade stick over 2.4 wireless. One thing I failed at the first few times was mapping the menu button because it was after all the mouse commands. I wasn’t even sure you could map the OSD/menu button to a controller until I googled it to confirm I could.

The Results:

I was able to complete Super Mario Bros. with little fuss and can tell that raspberry pi 4 just isn’t that precise on timing. MiSTer felt like the real hardware. TurboGrafx shooter Soldier Blade (Caravan mode) ran much more responsive, but also seemed to run faster than Pi 4 emulation. As I never played it on original hardware, I will have to do some unlearning.

Things I am imagining doing in the future:

-I want to get AO486 with the top 300 classics transferred and going on MiSTer and follow along with youtuber LGR on his favorites.
-Figure out the best settings for 1440 p on my 4k tv. Seems a there is little horizontal stretching and the letter boxing seems smaller than I would have throught.
-Work my way through time from a Commodore PET through C64/16. As an accountant, I’d be interested in seeing some of the early spreadsheet and business software packages.
-Consider if I could safely (for the TV and spouse approved) get a rotating wall mount for my 55” tv.
-Research if there are any low latency 1440p portable monitors.
-Find and sneak a small thrift store Sony Trinitron tv into the house.
-Experiment with fast USB polling.
-Get USB C to USB A converter for my Neo Geo Mini controllers.
-Connect to a local BBS hosted on a commodore 128 in my area via telnet from AO0486 and C64.
-Look at the simplest core possible in VHD or Verilog to see what magic makes this thing work.

Thoughts for project maintainers

Well done. I should probably end with that. Here are the things that would have made thing slightly easier as a newby (who read about mister for a year and a half) and nothing is a concern after having it for ~48 hours:

-Adopt an official MiSTer removable sticker spec showing an outline of seating the microSD card against the top plane of the slot and a caution showing a card slipping below the socket for hardware sellers to use.
-Leave more breadcrumbs to help people figure out how to get Neo Geo files working. I know this one is probably a little sensitive, and maybe I just missed the clues.
-Move the menu button mapping ahead of the mouse mapping as I would finish my mapping early when the mouse stuff appeared.

Thank you to the maintainers, posters, hardware vendors, and developers for such an amazing project.
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barfood
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Re: First 48 hours with MiSTer Reflections

Unread post by barfood »

I'm surprised you had issues with NeoGeo. In my experience, running the Update_all script was all I needed to get all the bios and my games running. In any case, welcome to the family! :)
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darksakul
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Re: First 48 hours with MiSTer Reflections

Unread post by darksakul »

You are coming in at a fantastic time for the MiSTer.
There like 30 console cores, 50 microcomputer cores and I forgot how many Arcade cores.

CPS2 and Cave cores are in beta and PS1 and Saturn cores are being planned for an unannounced future release.

I been using my MiSTer for about a year now and we got so many more things added, I watched as Sega CD, Turbo Grafix CD, DEC PDP-1, CPS O, CPS1, CPS 1.5, Atari ST, Dodopatchi, amd Qbert been added to the MiSTer as well as a top to bottom rework of the entire Arcade core framework, no more writing bat files to convert mame roms to a.rom format, you can leave the mame roms zipped in a mame or HB Mame folder and let MRA files point to the
cores.
It is my great regret that we live in an age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of people who try to.
morecoffee
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Re: First 48 hours with MiSTer Reflections

Unread post by morecoffee »

barfood wrote: Tue Feb 16, 2021 12:03 am I'm surprised you had issues with NeoGeo. In my experience, running the Update_all script was all I needed to get all the bios and my games running. In any case, welcome to the family! :)
Thanks. Glad to be here. I think the bios stuff was fine. Just my games set wasn't working, but got it sorted out.
morecoffee
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Re: First 48 hours with MiSTer Reflections

Unread post by morecoffee »

darksakul wrote: Tue Feb 16, 2021 12:12 am You are coming in at a fantastic time for the MiSTer.
There like 30 console cores, 50 microcomputer cores and I forgot how many Arcade cores.
Mister has matured and grown a ton in the last year and a half I've been following it. As far as retro computing and gaming it is a great time to be alive!
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