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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

I would say miSTer's weakest point is that it isn't designed for the open FPGA synth, place and route stack.

It depends on proprietary tools tied to Intel's FPGAs.

This is somewhat understandable, as the open stack wasn't ready when miST was conceived.

Part of the appeal of mister is it runs on cheap "dev" FPGA boards that have their price reduced to appeal to students and educators. Those are typically boards from Intel and Xilinx. It's been awhile since I looked at open FPGA synth tools, but I remember that Intel support was non-existent and Xilinx support was rudimentary. You couldn't get the same performance and packing as you can with the proprietary tools.

The Xilinx -7 series of FPGA is fairly well supported by SymbiFlow these days. https://symbiflow-examples.readthedocs.io/en/latest/building...

Unless it changed recently, I think it doesn't have full support for BRAM, and no support for BSP and hard blocks, right ? I wouldn't be surprised if some were used in the Mister project. (Doesn't change the fact that Stmbiflow is an impressive feat)

I don't know the state of Xilinx family 7 open source support, other than there has been work on it for years.

A competitive chip that is well supported (including BRAM etc) is the Lattice ECP5, as found in e.g. the ULX3S dev board.

>price reduced, cheap, etc

Note that the chip used in that board is listed in retailers such as digikey. It's not so expensive as to prevent third party boards.

It would even be well feasible to use a larger FPGA or a higher speed grade. FPGA chips used in devboards are typically the lowest grade.

I'd say its weak point is the appalling user interface. Really hard to understand all the menus and modes and how to navigate. (Yes as a programmer I ought to pitch in to fix it)

Are you talking about the dev tools or the mister itself? I have a 7,4 and 3 year old. All three prefer the mister menus over retroarch and they can put their favorite games on and do save states etc themselves no problem.

The MiSTer itself. It's still a great system.

Surprising. What about the menuing itself do you dislike. My kids can’t get around retroarch no matter the theme. Mister they just go to the core. Select it. It drops in in the cord directory of games. They select it. And they play. Retroarch is Roms folder then they select the core and if they don’t select the right one their save states aren’t there and their configs aren’t there. Good luck doing 5x scaling with retroarch too.

That's kind of my experience with the MiSTer UI - confusing, deep menus, unclear what button gets to what menu or how to get back, etc. I now wonder if there may be several MiSTer UIs and I'm just using the wrong one?

My only experience with Mister is playing SNES games with the device my brother set up on a CRT tv. Playing an SNES game is just a matter of choosing the SNES core, picking the game rom from the default directory, and learning the hot key combination on the controller to go to the save menu to save your in game save file to the sd card.

For this use case it's easier than Retroarch- you don't need to fiddle with resolutions since everything outputs natively to the CRT and you don't need to fiddle with cores since only 1 core exists per system.

Maybe there's more complex features that are harder to use, but as a replacement for a super nintendo I find it to be dead simple to use once setup.

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