What is the purpose of MiSTer?

[Bas]

As a relative newcomer to the MiSTer community, I'm still a bit fuzzy on the actual purposes or goals of the project. It was probably clear as day back when it started but I see a lot of conflict appearing here that boils down to a difference of opinion on what MiSTer is and where it should be heading. So what are the actual answers to this question?

Personally I came to MiSTer to replace my Amiga 500, C64, Laser 310 and a whole slew of other vintage hardware with modern hardware that doesn't require advanced electronics skills to build and maintain. I have my own private stash of floppies and tapes converted from the eighties and nineties and I primarily look at MiSTer as an awesome conservation platform for dead and dying "real" systems that only museums will eventually be able to either acquire or maintain. As such I'm also interested in the niches of professional computing like DEC VAX, NextComputer, big box Amiga, Apple Lisa etc. and I'm not all that much of a hardcore gamer.

Would love to read your thoughts.

[dshadoff]

I'm sure you will get a lot of variation in the responses, but I think that many people have either used or written emulators, and found that *some* critical component was just too difficult to recreate effectively in that medium. It could be controller latency, or precise timing interlinkages between two critical chips, or sound profiles, or video synchronization or something of that nature. These things can be recreated effectively on FPGA, and - while I wasn't around at the start of the project - I am pretty sure that's where it sprang from.

From there, the "goal" is pretty organic. The people who choose to develop for the system, do it of their own free will, from their own free time, and based on where they want to spend their energy (or where they can learn). The only people who receive any money are the people who have set up Patreon accounts for that purpose - MiSTer is not a company or an organization which employs people. It is not realistic to think for a moment that developers are sitting around without ideas of their own but for some reason seeking requests of what to implement next. Each of the developers I have spoken with, has a list of things they want to do next in order to satisfy their own desires.

Based on that, the direction could be difficult to explain. Some developers work with other authors to port existing designs into the MiSTer ecosystem, some work on implementing new designs from the ground up, and some work on the framework - mostly updating existing cores to take advantage of new framework features. There are still a huge number of systems and arcade to port, and maintenance to perform on existing cores.

[grizzly]

It´s a weapon!
Sorgelig and most mister core developers are aliens and are here too enslave earths people.
Their weapon off choice is the DE-10 nano.

For what purpose they want too enslave us is unknown!

[max1602]

The weapon aspect of mister can't be overstated enough. Devs want to suck free time from earth

[Bas]

The box certainly eats a lot of time!

[thera34]

For me it's the best gadget I can use to re-create my first 486 setup (back then I had a dx4 486, 12 MB ram, a VLBUS 1mb graphics card, 272 mb hdd and ESS clone of SB) and also to learn about those beautiful computers/arcades I never had as a kid:
Amiga - I became so found of it and even if the learning process is not always straightforward, I immensely enjoy it (quite proud that I manage to install by my own AmigaOS 3.9, internet support, games, apps and so on). I found great help on this forum, so cannot thank enough to this nice community
ZX-Spectrum - A colleague of mine had one back in the days and we spent long hours to play those games, load them from tapes and so on. Now I can re-learn how it worked, its games and features.
NES/SNES/Sega/NeoGeo consoles: always fun to have some old games I played in the past at friends/arcade shops
C64/MSX/other computer cores - Also never had one and this is a fine opportunity for me to learn their way of working, etc

So bottom line, for me is a fun way to learn/remember/experiment this kind of stuff, to preserve my own old data, connect to BBSes/Internet when is possible and get back that childhood feeling that I had when I started dabbling into computing
What I would also like, would be a Next/DEC cores too, as Bas mentioned too, if it will be feasible.

[caffeinekid]

The purpose of the mister is the same purpose as anything else - it helps pass the time between your birth and your inevitable death in an entertaining way. It does a good job of that.

[MostroW]

To me the MiSTer is something i would have wanted as a kid in the 90's albeit impossible it does bring me the same joy playing the games i did then, at home or at the arcade(s).

I always keep an eye out here to see if there's any new cores released or updated, i can't thank all the devs enough that spend their time developing this wonderful system!

[vanfanel]

The MiSTer is a harware platform that serves as support for classic computer and consoles reimplementation using reprogramable logic.
This itself is a collective effort of preservation: once the present platform has passed away, the implementations will live on since they are opensource and free, so they can work on new reprogramable hardware.

That's it. Everything else is mundane / not interesting at all. Of course the project can bring some feelings to computer people, but that's not it's purpose I believe, that's just a side-effect.

[DiamondDave]

To play games

[Alkadian]

The purpose of the mister is the same purpose as anything else - it helps pass the time between your birth and your inevitable death in an entertaining way. It does a good job of that.

That so true! I did love your statement!

[MiSTer_Kirk]

It's as close to the real thing as can be, and you can connect it to the original machine's display tech - a CRT.
And apart from a few missing features, such as disk controller support still missing in cores like the BBC, for a tiny box it's much easier to maintain and keep in a permanent space - unlike my real hardware which I have to keep boxing and unboxing due to lack of space.
I still prefer the real thing, as there is nothing like touching, feeling, using the original keyboard, controller, original media, etc...

[mhartman]

I've come to conclude that it is a secret government project designed to have the MiSTer community think that they are building cores to entertain themselves. The actual purpose is to have vintage computers recreated in FPGA to ensure that the government(s) can access the multitude of files that they have stored in the national archives. It turns out that most of the e-documents in the archives are now non-accessible due to the fact that the technology needed to access the files has disappeared.

[thera34]

Yes, @mhartman, the ultimate goal is to port IBM 5100, thus rendering John Titor obsolete

[mhartman]

Yes, @mhartman, the ultimate goal is to port IBM 5100, thus rendering John Titor obsolete

... or is it time travel?

[bootsector]

To make fun of Analogue

[thorr]

Simply put in my mind: To have the best of the best emulation. It's not software. It's hardware.
It's still not perfect emulation though because of uncontrollable factors such as having the right keyboard, analog components, etc., but it is probably the closest we can get in most cases. With that being said, it is usually better than the original because the picture quality looks better in many cases such as NES, etc. since it is not required to use composite video.

[dmckean]

temporal escape

[Newsdee]

The original goal of MiSTer was to upgrade the MiST into a device that had native HDMI. It then started unifying cores under a common framework to facilitate maintenance, and slowly started introducing quality-of-life enhancement targeted mostly to gaming.

MiSTer does not need to head anywhere - it is a platform for writing and running cores that people contribute to it, and it is already good at that.
It is best to think of each core as a separate project (or a sub-project if you prefer) which could theoretically be ported elsewhere one day.