What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

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throAU
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by throAU »

The VCS runs linux with 100% open drivers.

The problem with a bare metal emulator is effort. You’re going to need to learn the intricacies of modern PC hardware and its simply far too complex for most individuals to understand. Even AMD/NVIDIA have problems getting decent GPU drivers out for their own hardware for a long time - and they have dedicated, paid teams working on it :D

And you’re going to need to do much of the stuff the OS does anyway to host your emulator. Sure, you can write your own scheduler to very specifically cover your use case, but you may well still be better off with an extremely stripped down linux distribution and just writing your own scheduler / virtual devices for that.

Even the late 90s and on consoles didn’t require programmers for the native platform to program the hardware directly. The dreamcast for example offered DirectX via Windows CE built into it, if the programmer wanted to use that. Sega Rally 2 for example was written using the included Windows CE support.

So for more modern consoles you just neeed to emulate the console’s APIs that the software was written for, not the hardware. If you emulate the APIs fast enough, the hardware implementing them is irrelevant. Just like no PC game cares for example whether you’re on an NV20 GPU, it just cares that the driver does OpenGL or Direct3d fast enough.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by MiSTer_Kirk »

Taking a 240p image and scaling it to 4k is not a hack. Changing how the graphics chip is emulated internally, so that this upscaling doesn't even need to happen, is a hack. Doesn't matter if it's FPGA or software emulation.
Original hardware don't have 4k scalers, if you connect original hardware to a fancy 4k OLED TV then the resolution will be native, and the TV will do the scaling. On a Mister, the display isn't doing the scaling, the Mister is. So, if emulation running at 4k is a hack then so is the Mister.

If THIS, isn't a hack...

dvi_mode=8

For 1080p scaling on the Mister, then neither is this...

resolution = 1920x1080

in any emulator's ini file. If the Mister is scaling up the image, then so are the emulators. You can't say one is scaling, while the other is a hack.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by softtest9 »

So, if emulation running at 4k is a hack then so is the Mister.
No core is "running at 4k" or "running at 1080p". The core runs at 240p or whatever the console is designed for. Then the MiSTer's scaler upscales the image as a post-processing step. Emulators of 2D consoles generally work the same way. The emulated console is rendered at the original resolution, and then the final output gets upscaled by the emulator's user interface.

This has _nothing_ to do with increasing the rendering resolution, which is what a lot of hardware renderers do for emulators of 3D consoles.
You can't say one is scaling, while the other is a hack.
Correct. Nobody is saying that.

You are either a troll or you have serious problems with reading comprehension.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Reed_Solomon »

If raspberry pi's and other SBC's keep getting more powerful, we'll probably see the day where a future rPi compute module can be paired with an compatible FPGA development board to work in a similar way to how the DE10-Nano interfaces with its ARM side, but with the increased power on the ARM side probably be capable of hybrid emulation maybe even up to the N64, maybe even the Gamecube and Wii. Perhaps in several years from now.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by MiSTer_Kirk »

You are either a troll or you have serious problems with reading comprehension.
You're an idiot.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Bas »

A universal software emulator would look like a lopsided PC: CPU with extremely fast single-threaded performance and at least a second core for housekeeping chores, and a GPU that can do both 2D in wonky resolutions as well as good 3D and output it all through every type of port from ancient analogue monochrome to the latest DisplayPort. RAM would be far less important. Low latency IO pins for controller interfacing and a generous amount of GPIO for misc add-ons and some fast interconnect like PCI(e) for integration of the device into even bigger constructs would round it off for me. Adding an FPGA into that mix could prove to be very interesting.. But as it stands now, such a system is mostly just a pipe dream.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Sigismond0 »

MiSTer_Kirk wrote: Tue May 04, 2021 1:00 amIf the Mister is scaling up the image, then so are the emulators. You can't say one is scaling, while the other is a hack.
You're missing something here--emulators for N64, Playstation, Wii, etc. can alter the internal rendering resolution and actually run the game at native 1080p or 4k or whatever, plus they can load in HD texture packs. Completely separate from scaling native render resolution.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by justaguy »

throAU wrote: Mon May 03, 2021 10:26 pm
justaguy wrote: Wed Apr 28, 2021 3:38 pm If Dreamcast and up wouldn't really benefit from FPGA emulation, would a hypothetical "MiSTer but for more advanced consoles" really need to be FPGA-based?
it’s called a PC. you can build them in small form factor these days and they have the advantage of the emulators running on them having often had decades of performance tuning and debugging.

see: the new atari VCS. it’s a small form factor pc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the kind of guy who turns up his nose at PC emulators just because they're "software emulation". It's just that I find the experience of setting them up, keeping them updated, and just about everything besides actually playing a game (which to be fair is the most important part) to be so much worse than MiSTer. If there were a Linux-based emulation frontend with a MiSTer-like UX, but which supported emulators for systems that MiSTer could never run, I'd be all over that.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by keilmillerjr »

justaguy wrote: Tue May 04, 2021 6:16 pm
throAU wrote: Mon May 03, 2021 10:26 pm
justaguy wrote: Wed Apr 28, 2021 3:38 pm If Dreamcast and up wouldn't really benefit from FPGA emulation, would a hypothetical "MiSTer but for more advanced consoles" really need to be FPGA-based?
it’s called a PC. you can build them in small form factor these days and they have the advantage of the emulators running on them having often had decades of performance tuning and debugging.

see: the new atari VCS. it’s a small form factor pc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the kind of guy who turns up his nose at PC emulators just because they're "software emulation". It's just that I find the experience of setting them up, keeping them updated, and just about everything besides actually playing a game (which to be fair is the most important part) to be so much worse than MiSTer. If there were a Linux-based emulation frontend with a MiSTer-like UX, but which supported emulators for systems that MiSTer could never run, I'd be all over that.
There is. It's called attract-mode. I created a layout that has inspiration from the neogeo unibios picknmix. Works perfect at 240p on crt as well as a high resolution lcd. It wouldn't be hard to create one that looks like the mister.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by SegaSnatcher »

Devs will just continue to make the cores available better. There are still plenty of things that can be implemented on MiSTer. I never expected MiSTer to go beyond say PS1 anyways. I'm actually really excited and happy with all the recent improvements on the C64 core.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by vgesoterica »

I mean it seems like PS1 / Saturn are doable so honestly if MiSTer can pull that off...I am cool with it!

I mean in ten years do I hope for "MiSTer V2: Hyper Edition" that can handle Dreamcast/PS2 era stuff? Def. But I can wait
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by radicalbyte »

I've been really enjoying playing with the MiSTer and the 8/16 bit cores; these are machines where timing is vital to the systems and at the same time impossible to implement in an emulator on modern PC hardware.

Later systems aren't a great match - the code written for an Xbox / PS2 / Gamecube doesn't rely on exact timings so you can achieve a fantastic result via software emulation (with powerful PC hardware). Then you have some insane benefits by applying new rendering techniques and these AI-upscaled textures and art..
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by darksakul »

Sigismond0 wrote: Tue May 04, 2021 4:02 pm You're missing something here--emulators for N64, Playstation, Wii, etc. can alter the internal rendering resolution and actually run the game at native 1080p or 4k or whatever, plus they can load in HD texture packs. Completely separate from scaling native render resolution.
That is because those emulators are replacing the hardware render of those original systems with the emulation's own tools.
Example: an N64 emulation on a Original Xbox isn't using the 3D hardware and Software API render the N64 had, it's using the existing Xbox Rendering to render N64 Game Graphics. It can give you stunning visuals, but it's also completely inaccurate as you are just forking N64 assets to work on Xbox hardware.

You are pretty much using the Emulation Environment to fudge rom into barely working order, You aren't simulating that MIPS R4300i @ 93.75 MHz and that Reality Coprocessor GPU, you are making that N Six Four rom run on a 733 MHz Intel Pentium III and Nvidia GeForce 3-based NV2A GPU and betting on the 733 Mhz Pentium 3 to be fast enough to do what a 93.75 MHz MIPS R4300i is supposed to do along with all the API redirects. Hoping the GeForce 3 with redirects can do a Simulacrum of a different GPU with completely different architecture.
radicalbyte wrote: Sat May 15, 2021 6:59 pm I've been really enjoying playing with the MiSTer and the 8/16 bit cores; these are machines where timing is vital to the systems and at the same time impossible to implement in an emulator on modern PC hardware.

It's possible to implement the system timings of a 8 or 16 bit machine in modern PC hardware, you just need crazy amounts of system resources to do everything in code.

Full speed accurate emulation of a Super Nintendo with low level emulation (using something like BSNES) requires a minimum Dual core 3 Ghz CPU with 4GB of Ram, a Graphics card with bare minimum VRAM of 512 MB and I would not bother with an OS older than Win 7. As you are trying to do is use the higher clock speeds of that modern CPU to do tasks that was done with multiple chips in the original system.

You right about one thing if you were referring to emulators such as ZSNES or SNES9X, you aren't getting the accuracy results.
The upside of FPGA, we don't need a CPU serval billion times faster than the original hardware had, and we can run all those special chips in parallel rather than series. A modern gaming PC can run 8 and 16 bit consoles just as well as FPGA, but you use alot of system resources to do it.
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.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by VegaVegas »

This topic went the way I expected just by looking at the title, discussing emulating super mega duper powerful systems like PS2. My question is rather something in between- will it be possible to emulate rare systems like 3DO and CDI?? I know they were all commercial failures but this is why these systems should rather be in top priority of preservation and some games/hardware may still be interesting and worth it
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by adamchevy »

VegaVegas wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 7:29 pm This topic went the way I expected just by looking at the title, discussing emulating super mega duper powerful systems like PS2. My question is rather something in between- will it be possible to emulate rare systems like 3DO and CDI?? I know they were all commercial failures but this is why these systems should rather be in top priority of preservation and some games/hardware may still be interesting and worth it
This is more interesting to me rather than going beyond the Saturn. There are plenty of systems that could benefit from having an FPGA implementation, like the Apple Lisa for example.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by dmckean »

The Apple Lisa could take a while. It doesn't seem to have a lot of software. And honestly, it's only been in the last six months that Macintosh core has gotten good.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Malor »

I've said this in other threads, but the limitation is becoming people more than the FPGA. The DE-10 is probably pretty well matched to what individual hobbyists can actually do. Even if you postulate an infinite-size FPGA, going much further than has already been done would require Herculean amounts of labor; the original Cell processor took like $700 million to design. An FPGA reimplementation would be easier, because the original chip has already been made, but it could be still be a $100 million project, and that's assuming that Sony didn't swoop in and shut the whole thing down.

Software emulation is likely to be the only workable method for anything much past the PS1, no matter how good FPGAs get.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by throAU »

Malor wrote: Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:52 am I've said this in other threads, but the limitation is becoming people more than the FPGA. The DE-10 is probably pretty well matched to what individual hobbyists can actually do. Even if you postulate an infinite-size FPGA, going much further than has already been done would require Herculean amounts of labor; the original Cell processor took like $700 million to design. An FPGA reimplementation would be easier, because the original chip has already been made, but it could be still be a $100 million project, and that's assuming that Sony didn't swoop in and shut the whole thing down.

Software emulation is likely to be the only workable method for anything much past the PS1, no matter how good FPGAs get.
The CELL also ran at 3.2 ghz in the PS3 so even if you have an unlimited size FPGA, unless it clocks at 3+ ghz is isn't going to be enough. The DE10 tops out around what... 90-100 mhz?
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Malor »

That's also an excellent point. FPGAs just don't seem to go that fast.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by radicalbyte »

Malor wrote: Wed Jul 13, 2022 2:52 am I've said this in other threads, but the limitation is becoming people more than the FPGA. The DE-10 is probably pretty well matched to what individual hobbyists can actually do. Even if you postulate an infinite-size FPGA, going much further than has already been done would require Herculean amounts of labor; the original Cell processor took like $700 million to design. An FPGA reimplementation would be easier, because the original chip has already been made, but it could be still be a $100 million project, and that's assuming that Sony didn't swoop in and shut the whole thing down.

Software emulation is likely to be the only workable method for anything much past the PS1, no matter how good FPGAs get.
MiSTER is very clearly and tangibly better at being an 8/16 bit machine than software emulation. The project has been an eye opener for me.

However I don't believe that holds for the later era. The P1/PS2/PS3 generations are debatable - I personally prefer to emulate over even using original hardware. For anything after that.. we're talking about machines which are designed as and - importantly - treated as "fixed configuration" PCs. In those cases the delta between software and any theoretical hardware re-creation is smaller. Also emulation is likely to improve the games via higher resolution, better frame-rates and more advanced effects. You see that already with PS1/PS2 emulation; for machines designed in era where TV resolutions span 720P to 4320P...
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Bas »

What you're actually seeing in PS2 and arguably already in the PS1 and Saturn is how ugly 3D used to be. It was positively dreadful compared to the 2D pixel pushing that was perfected before it. Mind you, that process took a decade or two and similar timespans are at play for 3D. Only in the current generation or two do we see really convincing 3D graphics that stand on their own without being 3D for the sake of it. We're decades removed from the likes of Descent on PC's or the PS1's library.

We see emulation trying to spruce up the horrific quality of yesterday's visuals in 3D by increasing resolution, frame rate, texture detail etc. When was the last time we saw that happening with Commodore 64 games? What we're seeing there instead is an attempt to turn those 4K TV's into CRT's with tricks like scanlines and shadow mask emulation essentially recreating 80's display tech. For 3D we're pushing the old games into 4K territory that they were never intended for... Intriguing..
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by akeley »

Bas wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:08 pm What you're actually seeing in PS2 and arguably already in the PS1 and Saturn is how ugly 3D used to be. It was positively dreadful compared to the 2D pixel pushing that was perfected before it.
Opinions, heh. Guess we should all uninstall that PSX core pronto, lest the visual dreadfulness of games such as Grandia, Einhander, Xenogears, GranTurismo, R-Type, Vagrant Story, and numerous other damages our eyeballs ;)
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Atohmdiy »

There is discussion here about what a new board can do, but the way to conceive that board seemed to be as a simple upgrade of what it's done now but with more "headroom", so it include the FPGA + ARM CPU. It seems manufacturers start to build SOC with FPGA, CPU and GPU.
Of course these CPU and GPU parts are sure to be pretty slow... for now.
So the question i am asking, as a complete profane, is what the FPGA can offer here to build hybrid emulator for later hardware with these new all-in-one SOC ? I mean it was already discuss here that the asynchronous nature of PC is a problem for old hardware and less of a problem for newer one, where software emulation can "shine". But i remember reading here, i think from Aberu, that there is still part of newer hardware that would benefit from fpga because there are "things" really hard to emulate in software, for example building the PS2 CPU inside a fpga and doing software emulation for the gpu.
I am asking myself what could be done if the cpu and gpu "raw power" of these SOC is used together with the FPGA part that act to accurately emulate part of these machine that couldn't be well or easily emulated with software emulation.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by radicalbyte »

Bas wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:08 pm We see emulation trying to spruce up the horrific quality of yesterday's visuals in 3D by increasing resolution, frame rate, texture detail etc. When was the last time we saw that happening with Commodore 64 games? What we're seeing there instead is an attempt to turn those 4K TV's into CRT's with tricks like scanlines and shadow mask emulation essentially recreating 80's display tech. For 3D we're pushing the old games into 4K territory that they were never intended for... Intriguing..
We do this with mid-to-late-90s games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSzGUEEbk4U

:-)
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Bas »

Exactly my point @radicalbyte.. crummy 3D apparently needs an upgrade.

@akeley my point wasn't to bash the PS1 library but it is objectively true that early 3D had a lot of catching up to do to late 2D games. The clunky animations, lack of facial expressions, clipping errors, low polygon count etc. were prevalent across platforms. If you pit that against mature 2D titles like the Metal Slug series on Neo Geo there's not even a comparison. Except (!) where 3D really does add to the gameplay, but that simply wasn't the case in far too many titles. They were made a certain way because the snazzy GPU was there and it was expected. Not because the game needed it. Funny that you should mention R-Type. That got a whole slew of fluffy but superfluous 3D cut scenes and animations but the game itself looks like the TurboGrafx version: very decidedly flat 2D.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Hetzen »

There's a hardware context here. Those PS1 games look much better with interlace fields the system was designed around.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by thisisamigaspeaking »

My concern is more what will happen if/when Terasic discontinues the DE10-Nano or decides not to sell it to the general public anymore. I was wondering about that today. I am happy with the modest emulation abilities for 8, 16, and basic 32-bit systems of this FPGA chip, but it would be very disruptive to lose the supply of boards. I understand they were significantly less expensive when the project started so maybe it was an easy choice, but I somewhat wish MiSTer were based on a custom PCB design.

How hard would it be to move to a custom design and what would happen to legacy support? Would there be a fork of the project at that point?
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by Newsdee »

thisisamigaspeaking wrote: Thu Aug 04, 2022 3:17 am How hard would it be to move to a custom design and what would happen to legacy support? Would there be a fork of the project at that point?
Custom design was the norm before MiSTer, but it's easier said than done.

MiST was a great choice back in the day as it was the cheapest option and easily available, but it remained expensive (about same as a DE-10 Nano last I checked) and it's currently out of stock given there are no Cyclone III FPGA chips available to make it (https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=45)

Then you had something like the FPGA Arcade Replay, which is older than MiST but suffered from supply issues (MiST creator shared that the project started due to not being able to get one). A Replay 2 is now in the works, but Im not sure about ETA for it.

Those two are/were not truly open hardware though. The only project like that was the ZxUno (CC license for the hardware) but that had a very tiny FPGA (9K LEs). AntonioVillena, who was part of the design team, used to have them in his store; recently he had an updated version (ZxDos) with 16K LEs.

None of these cards has HDMI built-in, which also meant you need an external upscaler to use on modern TVs, or suffer bad upscaling/shimmering on VGA. Before starting on MiSTer, Sorg spent quite a bit of time to find a good upscaling solution for MIST, but most had issues. As for me, back in the day I would use an XRGB Mini upscaler; but that was a premium option. Today you could probably use an OSSC instead or try to mod a GBS 8200 if you're a tinkerer.

TL;DR it's hard to beat the value proposition of the DE10-Nano, even at a slightly higher price. If that goes away, unless a similar card is available, then it would take more hardware to do something similar (and I'd expect everything to be pricier, easily in the $500-$800 range for a full setup)

Edit: to end on a more positive note, at least there are plenty of options as long as cores themselves are open source :mrgreen:
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by retro »

Let's not forget one EXTREMELY critical factor - the DE10-Nano is very heavily subsidized by Intel University...
It's doubtful the MiSTer project would be where it is without that subsidy

Personally speaking, I am very surprised that we have gotten the PSX and 32X core on the MiSTer. I really thought they would never happen.

And the Saturn core is just icing on the cake.

The fact that we can have so many computers and consoles and arcade cores in a tiny box already seems like magic to me.

Even if we never see a successor to the MiSTer, the current version still has years of untapped potential if you ask me.
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Re: What Do You Think Will Happen Once MiSTer Reaches It's Limits?

Unread post by thisisamigaspeaking »

Newsdee wrote: Thu Aug 04, 2022 4:05 am TL;DR it's hard to beat the value proposition of the DE10-Nano, even at a slightly higher price. If that goes away, unless a similar card is available, then it would take more hardware to do something similar (and I'd expect everything to be pricier, easily in the $500-$800 range for a full setup)

Edit: to end on a more positive note, at least there are plenty of options as long as cores themselves are open source :mrgreen:
I think it already ran me $800+ with Checkmate case and MT32-Pi (not to mention that I had a Pi 3B on hand). AliExpress price for complete system is pushing $500 with no MT32-Pi. I'm wondering if some of these costs couldn't be consolidated with a single (mini-ITX?) board solution. Not counting the fancy case of course, but if it's mini-ITX there are a ton of cases on the market.

And of course the barebones DE10-Nano + memory module option can't be discounted, still quite cost effective.

I'm definitely glad I went this route rather than a Vampire V4 Standalone, no question there, I didn't want to be tied to some proprietary code, although I lust after the specs still.

Re: your edit, that's what I hope, is that with the open source cores in the future when it is time to move on, it can be done reasonably painlessly. Open source is the way. Would love to see the PCB open source as well, assuming an FPGA chip can be chosen that will have some legs as far as availability. Won't the cost on FPGA chips drop at some point?
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