CAVE 68000 Any News for MiSTer

[lamarax]

Hey folks. Absolutely loving DoDonPachi, have there been any developments with ESP Ra De and Guwange?

My list for more Cave shooters on Mister is strong

Well, ESP Ra.De. and Dangun Feveron were running fine to begin with since their introduction to the beta, only missing sprite zoom where (seldomly) present on their respective PCBs.

Guwange on the other hand, still needs a bit of work on the core to be called playable, but I'm confident Josh will come through in the end! He may seem slow, but he's stubborn, persistent, and doesn't try to hide around problems.

[wark91]

@FatSlob71 you can use MRA's here https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Arcade- ... master/mra with the last release.
The SOS Fever is present.

[Ganondork]

Does anybody know if Josh is still working on this. Two months without any sign of life, just after he said he planned more frequent checkins. Not judging at all, just curious if the core is still in development.

[Captain FPGA]

Cave, isn't that the machine which produces Xbox 360 Deathsmiles?

[Skeeter]

Does anybody know if Josh is still working on this. Two months without any sign of life, just after he said he planned more frequent checkins. Not judging at all, just curious if the core is still in development.

He has a habit of disappearing from time to time. I'm sure he's a busy man and all but it would be nice if he gave more frequent status updates to his Patrons. Like you, I'm not here to judge, I just adjust my Patron to him accordingly.

[Ganondork]

That‘s exactly what I do. I propably would constantly pay the beta tier if there were check ins every few week.

Just something like „Very busy at workt atm, slowly debugging Guwange right now, when I find the time“.

I don‘t expect or demand anything and I am very happy, that there is someone tackling the hardware and developing at all. It just doesn‘t feel great to send your support if you don‘t know if the project is active and if there is anything to support.

[hideous]

Yep I think its fair enough to quit the patreon till you see signs of life at this point.

[lamarax]

I think Josh, given his work patterns which I very much respect and understand, should adopt an 'open' funding model akin to what @Blackwine does: have everything accessible to all, then leave it up to those who truly believe in you to chip-in. This may not exactly be 'safe' financially, but it's upfront and leads people to appreciate you and go along.

His latest bug fixes (from ~2 months ago) to the Cave 68k core for 'patrons', have been simultaneously released to the "public" (bar the .mras on beta test), which I think proves his general stance and ethic.

That said, I too have paused my contribution, until some sign of progress gets communicated some way

[Phaedrus]

I just hope he's ok in these crazy times.

[Ganondork]

I also do. Another two months without any sign of life.

[neogeo81]

Does anyone know why all has stopped working? Only Dondonpachi works.

[KremlingKuthroat19]

No one knows tbh. nullobject just ghosted everyone. I'm completely fine with him taking a break, having personal issues he needs to sort out, or even simply losing interest in the project. All it takes is 5 minutes to update people.

I'm extremely grateful for everything he's done and hope he's okay, but some of his Patreon subscribers should DM him to see what's up.

[pacoarcade]

Hopefully he's fine since he seems to be active in Github: https://github.com/nullobject

[neogeo81]

Yeah, a small feedback would calm our concerns.

[Ganondork]

but some of his Patreon subscribers should DM him to see what's up.

My personal experience is that paying Patreons wrting over Patreon don‘t get ghosted less.

I was worried about him for a few months, but he is ocssionally visible i Github or at least was on twitter. I hope someone else forks his work. No matter what kept him away, being absent without any brief explanation for months is disrespectful towards anyone supporting.

If you take a hiatus for whatever good reason you could also freeze your patreon instead cashing in 4-digit values from people who are not your employer but support and trust you.

It sucks. Big time.

[neogeo81]

BTW he released new versions of the CAVE core and the MRAs of Dodonpachi and ESP Ra.De.

AND just checked: Although stated different Dangun Feveron (Fever SOS) and Guwange still work with the updated core.

[MrsBison]

Damn i cant wait for more Cave Shmups.

Total need = IBARA, Mushihimesama, Deathsmiles, Akai Katana

Cheers

[MrsBison]

Air Gallet is an absolut stunning vertical shmup.
The Shuttle launch at the end of the first stage is so unique.
Never seen such a great scrolling effect in a other game.

Big need für Arcade Nerds

[Hodor]

Damn i cant wait for more Cave Shmups.

Total need = IBARA, Mushihimesama, Deathsmiles, Akai Katana

Cheers

Forget about these games. They have nothing to do with the Cave 68000 and the hardware behind them is much more powerfull, beyond the limits of the De10 Nano I'm afraid.

[MrsBison]

Oh ok.... thanx for the technical explanation

Kind regards

[Goran]

Damn i cant wait for more Cave Shmups.

Total need = IBARA, Mushihimesama, Deathsmiles, Akai Katana

Cheers

Forget about these games. They have nothing to do with the Cave 68000 and the hardware behind them is much more powerfull, beyond the limits of the De10 Nano I'm afraid.

Will more cave shooters be on the Mister someday? Like Ibara Black Label, Ketsui and so on

[Goran]

Will there be once a core for the SH3 System Cave shooters

[Goran]

I wrote that they are not possible. Right? PGM System too?

[AmanoJacu]

Cave CV1000B/D should not be possible:
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=868
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=961

However, the PGM "might" be possible and it has some CAVE games:
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=809

[Goran]

Cave CV1000B/D should not be possible:
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=868
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=961

However, the PGM "might" be possible and it has some CAVE games:
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=809

Will be onetime a new mister pcb with better cpu for more cores likes this one or ps2?

[FPGA64]

AS the complexity of the HW increases such as the processor or the GPU the effort needed expands raapidly to more than 1 perosn can reasonably handle. If you want modern systems go to SW emulation. Even the PS2 is vastly more complicated than the PS1 and would probably take a team of developers

[andre74]

From RAKI´s patreon:

"Possibilities for CV1k

A lot of people are wondering if the CV1k will move on the MiSTer, and I'll do a little research on the specs of that board and tell you what I've concluded for now.

1. There is currently no FPGA platform that can run it.

2. It might be possible on a MiSTer with dual SDRAM at >133MHz.

3. The Pocket doesn't have enough VRAM capacity.

4. The biggest problem is the SH3. The j-core SH2 is nice, but it's written in VHDL(we can accelerate Verilog simulation by using Verilator), and I'm not sure it can reliably run at 103MHz on the worst Cyclone V silicon. I'll have to make a SH3 core with care. The manual is about 800 pages long. I don't have to read it all, but it's going to take me a long time if I make it myself.

5. The game program on the CV1k is stored on NAND flash with 70ns access time, and the main RAM is an SDRAM(32-bit) at 50MHz. MiSTer DDR3's Latency is unpredictable, but fortunately, we can send a wait signal to the CPU. Even if I were to store this on DDR3, the cache miss penalty shouldn't be too bad if I implement a 2-way L2 I-Cache.

6. Currently I don't know the bandwidth of the MP2 sound player, but it should be able to fit on DDR3.

7. The biggest bandwidth Moloch on the CV1k is the DDR VRAM. The original board used 32-bit DDR RAM clocked at 74 MHz. To get a similar bandwidth with the dual SDRAM, we would need to run it at >148 MHz. However, these numbers are not "absolute". Unlike old PCBs like the Darius II, the blitter can send wait instructions to the main CPU. By lowering the VRAM clock, the CPU will wait longer for the blitter command to be done. A veteran shmup player will notice this in certain scenes, but I don't think it'll be terrible.

This is a pretty challenging system for a consumer-level FPGA platform, even if it wasn't state-of-the-art at the time. It's a good thing the CPU isn't an OoE superscalar RISC. But still, MMU will be tricky to implement. I've made CPUs a couple of times and the task itself isn't that hard. An SH “core” that just executes instructions without interrupts, exceptions, or bi-endian consideration would be easy to make, but it would take more time to decorate around it with peripherals. "

So atleast RAKI will look into the possibility for a MISTer core.

[evil_ash_xero]

The PGM is possible, right? There's some good games on that.

Ketsui, DDP DOJ, ESPGaluda, Demon Front...