MiSTer FPGA Forum

Cool collection. The only thing it misses - and imho very important - is pseudo stereo. I know songs have specific SID in mind on which they were composed and especially for MOS6581 it might not be clear right away which "version" of it as they all sound (not quite) slightly different so value of selecting right SID and recording songs in...

How do I force NTSC color encoding in both 60Hz cores/modes and 50Hz? ntsc_mode at 0 automatically switches between PAL and NTSC. ntsc_mode at 1 forces PAL in both 50/60Hz. ntsc_mode at 2 is strange because I can only get colors in PAL and my JVC monitor shows PAL is detected. Looks like this option only concerns 60Hz video modes forcing some kind ...

I noticed it too. Startup sound is not quite right.
It is kinda expected at this stage really. We just got sound at all and it is really surprising how well it works. Emulators struggled with PSX sound for years.

I found another strange thing in the code which didn't make any sense 20220123_200305-silent-hill-original.png can easily become this 20220123_200316-silent-hill-fix.png with simple trick with inverting (pluses become minuses and -1 from this because it goes from -4 to 3) dither pattern for alpha blended textures with additive draw modes. Pretty mu...

Syphon Filter didn't work for me crashing after menu screen but with at least with today's release it works beautifully. All sounds seem to be working including music.

Any latency these filters add is probably already baked in to the cores and enabling/disabling filters cannot change it. It is also probably part of those 4 lines of input lag that scaler itself adds. I mean the point scaler that is the default filter when no filter is enabled is itself just defined inside code. At least that would make most sense ...

What video_mode would you recommend for 15KHz CRT for Amiga?

Another cool feature would be double-scanning. Most (S)VGA monitors can do 240p at 120Hz fine. I haven't tested 288p @100, but I assume it would work too. That would be fantastic for Amiga/C64 gaming in particular. I can do that out of a Pi easily, but I haven't tried fiddling with MiSTer modelines to see if it's possible. It can be done currently...

Try video_mode_ntsc=8 and video_mode_pal=9 for increased compatibility. Mode 9 uses more blanking that is more standard for PAL and some displays interpret it better. I second that My plasma doesn't even want to run at video_mode=8 with vsync_adjust=2 and displays garbage if I do not add exception for pal to use video mode 9 but if I do that then ...

I would not expect MISTer to run much hotter on PSX core than on typical core.
Chip is not clocked all that high in this core. It currently uses two memory sticks so power draw might be higher due to that and overall temperature but otherwise FPGA chip should not be super hot. I would expect something like Ao486 which runs 90MHz to get MISTer hotter

Pattern does seem to be pixel perfect match On RGB and especially when viewing it on LCD there isn't much of a difference 20220121_204028-screen_psx.png 20220121_204037-screen_fixed.png When some blending is applied the rotated version looks more correct hence the topic 20220121_204130-screen_blend_psx.png 20220121_204139-screen_blend_fixed.png Oth...

I cannot believe we have 100% SPU when week ago I could not believe we have any sound at all
With this pace and bigger FPGA like Stratix X we would have PS2 core up and running in just few months tops

Truly amazing work.
And now on to "testing"

While playing with PSX core, as one does, I notices something strange in module called gpu_pixelpipeline. In table used for dithering pattern when I summed all values in any given column gave -2, -2, -2 and -2 respectively and when summed values in rows I got -6, -2, -6, -2. If SONY engineers wanted to utilize blur caused by composite video output ...

I didn't have second SDRAM chip to test sound so I bought second MISTer and scavenged SDRAM module from it :D It came with newer module version and in my old MISTer I had old type. So I have 32MB old type + 32MB new type and sound works just fine. Not sure what I will do with poor ramless MISTer I guess that while I order and wait for 128MB module(...

I created pull request for this feature https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PSX_MiSTer/pull/1

Please feel free to refactor it as you see fit. I am still learning so the design might not be optimal.

Ao486 does in 3dbench score of 43.8 It is the same benchmark as one with giant Superscape and score in small box in bottom right. In this benchmark the faster the PC the higher the score. Dosbox is known not to be very fast and provided benchmarks only confirm that. I wouldn't dismiss idea of using hybrid emulation based on that but to me this idea...

Better buy a very expensive FPGA board then because the Cyclone V in the DE-10 Nano might only emulate a first generation Pentium. By doing hybrid emulation we might get a solution to do some early Glide games with playable framerates. This would be big in the retro PC market. Imagine all those retro PC gamers not having to buy and maintain old an...

With Minimig, it really depends on what you want to do. The vampire cards show what CPU speed would be possible in the FGPA. With the AO486 core, the CPU speed is actually sufficient, what would be missing would be a Voodo 1 card. Then most games would be much easier to play directly. Voodoo with 486 class CPU makes absolutely zero sense. MAybe if...

We need better x86 CPU in FPGA and not some flaky hybrid CPU solutions
Connecting Pi to Mi? Why not connect monitor and input devices to Pi directly and enjoy superior performance right away?

According to this result page https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9nOAMKLeCpHR_SaA48M7sUXItwIi72gHRcw0wpNU/edit#gid=0 Ao486's results of 43.8 in 3dbench2 and 3565 real-ticks in Doom put its performance on par with 486DX2 66MHz On top of that Doom runs pretty much the same as in this video https://youtu.be/cKwnuwDcfcI?t=486 and not like on 48...

Caldor wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 5:54 pm instead of a 33mhz.

Where did you get this "33MHz" figure from?

If it could emulate an x86 CPU without also doing GPU, sound and such, then that should give a pretty good indication of what it could do. Sound is irrelevant because it is not needed to emulate sound. Well, except PC beeper. Only with PC Bleeping Bleeper we are talking IBM PC :lol: VGA is pretty much simple framebuffer with few counters, also not...

@Caldor
To know if the idea of running X86 emulation on Mister's ARM is even viable or not it would be helpful if we had benchmarks numbers from available emulation solutions like QEMU running on Mister's ARM CPU vs Ao486 with fastest settings.

Can you execute such tests?

Change core name and it will have its own configuration.

Also worrying about Mister Main with this project is a bit premature, don't you think?

Composite Blend and Gaussian blur isn't the same as dot crawl. One simulates the color blending on a CRT, the other (what you asking) is noise on the line. NTSC dot crawl has nothing to do with "noise on the line" (whatever that even means) but color encoding and its limitations. One RCA cable would be perfectly able to support even 1080...

Nope, no OS. It runs on the Pi directly. So in order use that, someone has to develop some kind of an interface to the Pi to DE10 ;-) Pi has 3.3V on its I/O pins just like DE10 so connecting them should not be too difficult, even without any specific interface. The issue might be loosing either I/O board or SDRAM due to only having two I/O connect...

marcelosofth wrote: ↑Sat Jan 15, 2022 5:20 pm In the answers I believe that the fight is level between CRT and LCD, and now who can save me?

Mr. Flatron perhaps?

The drawback of a VGA monitor is it does not look the same as a CRT TV, so if you want that authentic look, you need a CRT TV. I completely disagree with that statement :!: VGA CRT can use scanline filters such as Scan_Br_125_NN.txt with NN being the level of scanlines gaps vs brightness that you want to achieve. It is easy to achieve the same loo...

Plasma panels offer similar sharpness in motion to CRT. It is not quite there but far superior to any LCD. Except maybe those which can flicker at low refresh rates but these are as rare as two horned unicorns and they flicker too much and tire eyes quickly unlike plasma or even CRT. One issue with plasma panels is that at least Panasonics stopped ...

Wow, absolutely awesome improvement!