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Comment by crtified | Hacker News Reader

For the thousands of people in the MiSTer FPGA ecosystem, some of whom bought the hardware [0] as long ago as 2020, for well under $200 (it's more, now [1]), a featureful FPGA N64 core - developed by Robert Peip, who is paid, most would say very deservedly, thousands per month via P_treon) - will be coming soon as a free update, once the already very advanced work is complete. The betas are playable now, and there are near daily updates.

[0] https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/setup/requireme...

[1] https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=...

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Why did you censor "P_treon"? Or are "a" and "_" close on your keyboard?

No great reason, other than a vague unease at the tacit promotion (to people, and/or to future spiders/bots) involved in citing the name of a specific corporate - it being a largely irrelevant side element of the greater point I was here to make.

I never got a MiSTer but I was always vaguely interested. Has the hardware been updated in all that time? Or is an updated one likely in the future?

They still use the de10 board as the base but there's been improvements to the io boards and memory support. Faster/higher density memory is what has allowed for the more modern systems to be supported.

There's a project called marsfpga that will support newer hardware.

The MiSTer, which imo is still by far the best bang-for-buck system of it's type either on the market now, or likely to hit the market anytime soon, is still based upon the original hardware. Several peripherals and form factors have been added or updated as options, but the central processors are the same.

Software updates are a different matter entirely. The system has evolved greatly, with each year so far having resulted in an impressive list of new additions and improvements.

The cogs and wheels of the niche entrepreneur industry have been slowly turning, and the next 1 - 5 years promises several likely newer generation products. People highly invested in some of the 32- and 64- bit systems not covered by MiSTer, and or people who want more modern display options, will be very interested in those. The price projections seem to be aiming at the $500-$1000 range.

But as of today it's still hard to look past the MiSTer, as a multi-year already proven system, which has for years offered elite level 8- and 16- bit recreations, recently added an amazing Playstation 1 core, is close to adding an N64 core, and can be had right now all-inclusive starting in the $300 segment.

There's a good Sega Saturn core in the official Downloader now too.

There have been a few minor revisions of some of the optional add on boards and things like SNAC adaptors for using original controllers from different systems.

There have also been a few different takes on making a mister in more of a console form factor, and boards that integrate into arcade cabinets or fit in ITX PC cases.

The software has come a hell of a long way. In the army days, the most advanced cores were 8 bit systems like the NES. Now we’ve got PlayStation 1, Sega Saturn and N64 in the works. Similar progress has been made supporting old computer and arcade systems too.

There is an upcoming sort of successor called Marsfpga that’s recently started being teased. From the little that’s been shared so far, the community seems hopeful that this will mean the Dreamcast and support for arcade games through the early 2000s are possibilities.

Once you get much beyond that era, an FPGA-based approach makes less sense - the systems become much, much more complex and also largely standardise around with x86 or ARM where there are always to run them without emulation at all. A notable exception to that is the PS3 with its cell architecture. Then again, people said for a long time that PS1 and Saturn were not possible.

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