First 48 hours with MiSTer Reflections

[morecoffee]

This is just a simple write up on my experiences on recently getting a MiSTer FPGA. None of it should be taken as any criticism, but just pointing out where I had very minor struggles, probably due to just not reading the wiki closely enough. This is not support request either. If something I mention I am still stuck on I will probably post or discord on it later. This is just my experience as a brant new MiSTer user while it is still all fresh and new.

Background:

I’ve followed the MiSTer project for over a year and a half on youtube. I found SmokeMonster & Pez82 do a good job of being entertaining and selling the benefits of mister. (Pez you should post some more videos). Those videos really got me imagining taking a virtual tour of 8 bit computers and perfect 2-D console gaming. I think Flynn’s work on the AO486 put me well over the edge and couldn’t stop thinking about getting a MiSTer. For reference I was 12 when Windows 95 was out so, I remember 386/486’s at home and 8 bits at school (my school had maps & textbooks with the USSR well after 1991).

Why I chose to buy one in January:

I originally was going to buy a DE-10 nano and a cheap hub and cooling to get it up and running. With a stimulus check I decided to splurge. I also feared a PSX or Sega Saturn core would drop then I assumed all the add-ons I might want would be extremely hard to get for a year or two. The concern of having to wait a long time to get what I wanted at a higher price was a concern. I think anyone on the edge should consider if these new cores drop how much harder it will be to find what you want/need in stock.

My experience:

Saturday afternoon USPS dropped off my Ultimate Mister Pro from Portugal. The unit was put back in a padded DE-10 Nano retail box with foam padding inside and the end of the box cut off. It was put in a shipping box with additional bubble wrap.

The included SD card was inside the unit and ready to go. I took it out and put in 400 gb card with Mr. Fusion directly into the cavity of the case. Oh, the humanity. Imagine dropping a guitar pick in acoustic guitar with only tiny small slits to retrieve it. After shaking for a while I just took off the bottom of the case and flexed a side of the case a little to let the card fall past the usb board.

Mr. Fusions did its thing. COMFAST AC1300 wifi adapter worked with no setup required. I added the wifi password and then updated. I added the script Update All and did that. Took about 30 minutes. Thank you, designers, for putting the IP address clear and upfront and not buried in menus. Well done. I tried turning on Samba and couldn’t connect to it. I didn’t spend much time trouble shooting, but that was a blessing. I added FileZilla to my computer and used FTP instead. Transfers seemed much smother and less awkward than dragging between folders and network shares.

I found getting things like Sega CD & TurboGrafx CD easy to set up with just a making sure the bin/cue’s were unzipped. But Neo Geo… I don’t know how to fix this one for a while. It took a lot more searching and googling than I would have expected but watched an old youtube video showing the screen shot of the correct forum post on another site. I was surprised how precise it is expecting for game files. I am also not use to dealing with unibios. I couldn’t figure out how to access them until I mapped the ABC to a single button.

Setting up the controllers was easy. I used PSX usb controllers from my PS Classic mini and an 8BitDo arcade stick over 2.4 wireless. One thing I failed at the first few times was mapping the menu button because it was after all the mouse commands. I wasn’t even sure you could map the OSD/menu button to a controller until I googled it to confirm I could.

The Results:

I was able to complete Super Mario Bros. with little fuss and can tell that raspberry pi 4 just isn’t that precise on timing. MiSTer felt like the real hardware. TurboGrafx shooter Soldier Blade (Caravan mode) ran much more responsive, but also seemed to run faster than Pi 4 emulation. As I never played it on original hardware, I will have to do some unlearning.

Things I am imagining doing in the future:

-I want to get AO486 with the top 300 classics transferred and going on MiSTer and follow along with youtuber LGR on his favorites.
-Figure out the best settings for 1440 p on my 4k tv. Seems a there is little horizontal stretching and the letter boxing seems smaller than I would have throught.
-Work my way through time from a Commodore PET through C64/16. As an accountant, I’d be interested in seeing some of the early spreadsheet and business software packages.
-Consider if I could safely (for the TV and spouse approved) get a rotating wall mount for my 55” tv.
-Research if there are any low latency 1440p portable monitors.
-Find and sneak a small thrift store Sony Trinitron tv into the house.
-Experiment with fast USB polling.
-Get USB C to USB A converter for my Neo Geo Mini controllers.
-Connect to a local BBS hosted on a commodore 128 in my area via telnet from AO0486 and C64.
-Look at the simplest core possible in VHD or Verilog to see what magic makes this thing work.

Thoughts for project maintainers

Well done. I should probably end with that. Here are the things that would have made thing slightly easier as a newby (who read about mister for a year and a half) and nothing is a concern after having it for ~48 hours:

-Adopt an official MiSTer removable sticker spec showing an outline of seating the microSD card against the top plane of the slot and a caution showing a card slipping below the socket for hardware sellers to use.
-Leave more breadcrumbs to help people figure out how to get Neo Geo files working. I know this one is probably a little sensitive, and maybe I just missed the clues.
-Move the menu button mapping ahead of the mouse mapping as I would finish my mapping early when the mouse stuff appeared.

Thank you to the maintainers, posters, hardware vendors, and developers for such an amazing project.

[barfood]

I'm surprised you had issues with NeoGeo. In my experience, running the Update_all script was all I needed to get all the bios and my games running. In any case, welcome to the family!

[darksakul]

You are coming in at a fantastic time for the MiSTer.
There like 30 console cores, 50 microcomputer cores and I forgot how many Arcade cores.

CPS2 and Cave cores are in beta and PS1 and Saturn cores are being planned for an unannounced future release.

I been using my MiSTer for about a year now and we got so many more things added, I watched as Sega CD, Turbo Grafix CD, DEC PDP-1, CPS O, CPS1, CPS 1.5, Atari ST, Dodopatchi, amd Qbert been added to the MiSTer as well as a top to bottom rework of the entire Arcade core framework, no more writing bat files to convert mame roms to a.rom format, you can leave the mame roms zipped in a mame or HB Mame folder and let MRA files point to the
cores.

[morecoffee]

I'm surprised you had issues with NeoGeo. In my experience, running the Update_all script was all I needed to get all the bios and my games running. In any case, welcome to the family!

Thanks. Glad to be here. I think the bios stuff was fine. Just my games set wasn't working, but got it sorted out.

[morecoffee]

You are coming in at a fantastic time for the MiSTer.
There like 30 console cores, 50 microcomputer cores and I forgot how many Arcade cores.

Mister has matured and grown a ton in the last year and a half I've been following it. As far as retro computing and gaming it is a great time to be alive!