(Since then more MiST boards have become available.) Then came along Alexey Melnikov, who uses the online handle Sorgelig. However, eventually the custom hardware that ran the MiST cores became sold out and the creator was slow to make new boards or did not want to make more boards. Then cores for other home computers and video game consoles became ported to it. MiST targeted a hardware platform designed by the author of the Atari ST core. Several years ago, the MiST project used an FPGA to develop a core for the Atari ST. MiSTer is not a project which evolved on its own.
In theory, this can allow the DE-10 Nano to simulate systems that Analogue's hardware lacks the resources to simulate. The FPGA on the DE-10 Nano has twice the FPGA resources of the FPGA that Analogue uses in its consoles, not to mention the ARM CPU. Intel has heavily subsidized the DE-10 Nano to encourage students and universities to use the Cyclone platform with inexpensive development boards like these. Ironically, the FPGA chip itself, 5CSEBA6U23I7, costs over $100.00 more than the development board.
The board on which this chip is installed has a host of other features : HDMI, three USB ports, a micro SD card reader, and Ethernet port, 40 GPIO pins, 1GiB of DDR3-SDRAM. This chip is a hybrid chip that contains both an FPGA and an dual-core ARM Cortex-9 CPU. At its core is a Cyclone V System on a Chip. The Altera (Intel) DE-10 Nano is an FPGA development board which is marketed by Terasic and costs $130.00 (or $110.00 for students and academic faculty). In this blog entry (or entries), I will dive into the world of MiSTer and discuss the aspects I like and dislike.Īltera DE-10 Nano FPGA Development Kit (courtesy of Terasic) This board is the key to the MiSTer project, a group of cores which simulate various video game consoles, computer systems and certain arcade machines under a common framework. The most popular FPGA solution not made by Analogue is based on the DE-10 Nano FPGA development board.
#MAME 32 POPEYE CONTROLS SOFTWARE#
A software emulator must recreate a system alien to the hardware on which it is running and is essentially limited to processing multiple hardware events serially. FPGAs simulate original hardware at the logic level and can simulate multiple processes in parallel. But doing all that without added latency is a huge challenge and one which oftentimes cannot be met without some very expensive hardware.Īn FPGA console is a modestly priced solution to lag. Everything else, accuracy, ease of use, authenticity, a software emulator can accomplish.
Lag is the most intractable problem with emulation and the most insidious. Why bother pricey FPGA simulation when there are so many excellent software emulators lying around? The answer can be boiled down into one word : lag. MiSTer Fully Assembled (courtesy of MiSTer Github Wiki)