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Comment by denkmoon | Hacker News Reader

It's tens-to-hundreds of 30 year old consoles though, https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/cores/console/

but yes, it is fairly excessive if you just want to play games, emulation is absolutely "good enough" and even indistinguishable for most. We do it for the love of the hobby ;)

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Replicating the physical interfaces does a lot for the quality of the emulation experience. Take, for instance, the C64 maxi: it’s physically a C64 (dimensions closer to a VIC-20, but that’s negligible) and, while the emulation is good, it feels much closer to using a cycle-accurate C64 over a PS/2 keyboard.

I don’t think the potential market for Amiga and ST keyboards for use with MiSTer justifies the investment, but I’d LOVE to see LK-411, Atari ST, Amiga, Sun, Symbolics, and other pre-PC-101 layouts as reasonably priced USB keyboards.

Also, those original components have more than 25 years-old... They can fail anytime. DE10-nano is new hardware with new components which last other 25 years at least.

Realistically the only components that are likely to fail though are the capacitors, which are trivially replaced.

While other parts CAN fail it’s physical damage that’s much more likely a problem

I didn’t think MiSTer was particularly concerned with accuracy like this project is? Just implementation on FPGA.

Am I wrong there?

My feeling is that it’s more reverse engineering than this, which aims to be an exact replica of the original.

It depends on the core. For example Furrtek decapped the Neo Geo chips to write that core, and thus is extremely accurate.

Gotcha. So core dependent basically, rather than a specific project goal?

That tracks with what I thought. Great to know about the NeoGeo!

Yeah, the MiSTer project is really just a loose collection of people with a loose common goal. So the true accuracy of cores does vary a lot. Most users don't really care, as long as they provide a pretty accurate experience. I think most MiSTer owners (myself included) prefer it over emulation due to having no lag. I also really like that the MiSTer does not buffer any writes, so there is no shut down. Just turn it off when you are done, allowing my setup to be very console-like.

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