Groovy_MiSTer Core

[Newsdee]

Any plans to try this with PS2 or GC emulation? I'd love to see it used for systems out of reach of the DE-10 Nano.

[Neocaron]

I didn't get the chance to try it just yet, but I would actually love to see it compatible directly with a media player app on windows or windows directly, so I can watch downscaled video/movie/tv shows on my CRTs.

[mrchrister]

If PS2 and GC become a thing, we won't be bottlenecked by old GPUs anymore. Not sure if advanced 3D Graphics could be processed through a LAN connection but the core is already pure wizardry to me as it is.

Edit: psakhis talks about it here:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... msg1769790

So from my limited understanding all the 3D processing happens on GPU and then only the pixels will be displayed by the MiSTer. Let's hope that DC/GC and PS2 will be a thing down the road, that would basically cover all 240p/480i systems (with the exception of PS3/Xbox 360 but those were not really designed with CRTs in mind anymore)

[psakhis]

It's in the roadmap, at least for retroarch which also has built-in media player

[KennyL]

Is it possible to downscale 480i and above to 240p? I guess that needs to be done on PC side.

[Calamity]

Is it possible to downscale 480i and above to 240p? I guess that needs to be done on PC side.

It is. You have to define a custom crt_range in mame.ini for that. Either that, or force a resolution manually. e.g.

Code: Select all

mame gamename -r 640x240

[kconger]

Very cool project! It's pretty useful for folks using modern displays as well, any plans to add Shadowmask and Adaptive Scanline support?

[PikWik]

Very cool project! It's pretty useful for folks using modern displays as well, any plans to add Shadowmask and Adaptive Scanline support?

was also curious what the current limits of video output resolution is?
can this output 1080p, 1440p, or 4k to a computer monitor hooked up to a MiSTer over HDMI?
or does it max out at 480p??

[mikehaggar]

Very cool project! It's pretty useful for folks using modern displays as well, any plans to add Shadowmask and Adaptive Scanline support?

It's really for CRTs. It's probably not going to help in terms of video latency compared to a normal VRR setup, and even though it has less audio latency than most contemporary setups, the fact that the Mister is limited to 1080p @ 60hz more or less kills the image upscaling quality. You'd be far better off with a normal HDMI 2.1 cable to a 4k OLED TV or something. 1080p really isn't enough for the fancier CRT shaders either. It's really hard to compete with the insane number of Retroarch shaders that already exist for that stuff.

[Bristles]

Very cool project! It's pretty useful for folks using modern displays as well, any plans to add Shadowmask and Adaptive Scanline support?

Eh ? What would be the point of this ?
You can already do this, natively, with the PC running the original emulation, and shaders running on the PC.
Bizarre.

[virtuali]

Eh ? What would be the point of this ?
You can already do this, natively, with the PC running the original emulation, and shaders running on the PC.
Bizarre.

What if the PC is not powerful enough to run emulation + shaders? Like a RPI that might be fine to run the emulation, but might not be able to afford extra shaders, not with fps drops at least.

[Bristles]

Eh ? What would be the point of this ?
You can already do this, natively, with the PC running the original emulation, and shaders running on the PC.
Bizarre.

What if the PC is not powerful enough to run emulation + shaders? Like a RPI that might be fine to run the emulation, but might not be able to afford extra shaders, not with fps drops at least.

If it's not powerful enough, then how would it cope using the Mister Groovy core ?
The PC still has to do the heavy work, the Mister core only displays the output to a CRT, the Mister isn't doing any heavy work here.

[Neocaron]

I actually have a case for a feature working on any screen. For exemple my PC (4090) is in my work room at the 3rd floor of my house and my TV is in the living room at the 1st floor. So if I want to play on my TV or even just watch content, I can use my router to send the video signal to my TV in less than 4ms using the Mister, it's awesome! I actually also have a CRT in my living room and it works great! But send the signal to any TV via the Mister would be awesome as well, it could be use with the retrotink, It's supper easy to use ethernet or Wifi in comparison to a HMDI in these cases. It gets super meta and I love it

[virtuali]

If it's not powerful enough, then how would it cope using the Mister Groovy core ?

The CPU might be powerful enough to emulate, but with not enough GPU power to run shaders or post process. This core allows to skip the gpu, it's like an e-gpu, basically.

[RiotRay]

Hi!

This core seems to be a revelation in my setup here.

When can we expect this core to be integrated to "update all"?

Thanks

[Bristles]

But it's not for ANY screen, it's for CRT owners.
Plus, the Mister is limited by its own HDMI output, as it can barely do 1440p without Pixel Repetition, so it's never going to do 4k.

[PikWik]

But it's not for ANY screen, it's for CRT owners.
Plus, the Mister is limited by its own HDMI output, as it can barely do 1440p without Pixel Repetition, so it's never going to do 4k.

i agree CRT users are the main target group for Groovy_MiSTer, and will benefit the most from something like this in an arcade cabinet.

and i apologize for asking the same thing, but i cant find a definitive yes or no for my question. i understand 1440p is around the max the MiSTer can output, and 4K is out of the question. but can i setup Groovy_MiSTer to output at 1080p over HDMI?

i havent configured a computer to test this out, so im just brainstorming things and deciding on a way to incorporate this into my 1080p/HDMI setup
(which is in an enclosed arcade style cabinet, so would prefer to have less video input switching as possible)

[Neocaron]

But it's not for ANY screen, it's for CRT owners.
Plus, the Mister is limited by its own HDMI output, as it can barely do 1440p without Pixel Repetition, so it's never going to do 4k.

Signal could be sent to the retrotink at lower resolution. It would be a convenience I think. Maybe it already works even, I haven't tried yet.

[mikehaggar]

But it's not for ANY screen, it's for CRT owners.
Plus, the Mister is limited by its own HDMI output, as it can barely do 1440p without Pixel Repetition, so it's never going to do 4k.

Signal could be sent to the retrotink at lower resolution. It would be a convenience I think. Maybe it already works even, I haven't tried yet.

Using GroovyMister with a retrotink is basically a rube goldberg machine. You could buy a solid video card for what a retrotink costs. It makes no sense.

If you want to game on a contemporary flat screen monitor, just get a VRR capable monitor and graphics card and game at 4k. It's better and requires no exotic hardware or software.

[Neocaron]

See I don't agree, it's not about usability, it's about options, I have a CRT, I have an Oled screen for my PC, but I could find a use for this for retro evening on a bigger screen in the living room. None of these are essentiel in the first place you know, it's about fun and possibilities.

[deepthaw]

I finally got to update to the latest core, MiSTer binaries, etc and spent an evening toying with this.

I’ve gone with a basically headless setup - it’s an Intel NUC running Debian, and in addition to being hardwired to the MiSTer, it shares its WiFi with it to get around the terrible WiFi performance I always see on the MiSTer.

Right now I kickstart the whole thing by launching groovymame via ssh, and can usually use the MAME in game menu to switch systems. I do occasionally get a black screen when trying to switch systems, and killing and restarting groovymame usually, but not always clears it up. I’m going to write some basic bash scripts and throw them in the scripts folder of my MiSTer to help manage that kind of stuff.

How well does groovymame behave if the Groovy.rbf is temporarily not running? Will it wait until it makes a connection? That’s my only concern with having to jump to a scripts menu to manage stuff right now.

Audio works great coming out of the MiSTer, non detectable lag. I have an older Trinitron using svideo so I did encounter some image quality issues with poor color sync, dot crawl, etc. The kind of stuff I saw with MiSTer native arcade cores over YC until MikeS was able to tune them for better ntsc compatibility. Given the huge spread of games, I wonder how feasible logic to try and further automatically tune their output would be.

[zoopster]

In principle could light gun arcade games be played on the CRT via the PC? That would be huge!

[deepthaw]

See I don't agree, it's not about usability, it's about options, I have a CRT, I have an Oled screen for my PC, but I could find a use for this for retro evening on a bigger screen in the living room. None of these are essentiel in the first place you know, it's about fun and possibilities.

You could certainly use a Retrotink, but I can’t think of a reason to send it anything higher than the game’s native resolution. The Tink is a beast of a scaler so I’d want it to handle as much of the scaling as possible.

[_javi_]

In my opinion, projects like this and almost anything else someone comes up with are absolutely welcome. In this particular case, it is a major accomplishment for passionate CRT owners. If you are not a CRT owner or only want MiSTer things to be completely self contained, this project isn't hurting you, just don't use it. Another example I would someday like to see is the MiSTer be used for music synth cores. Why does it need to be only for games and computers? It doesn't. It's an amazing FPGA product that can be used for anything anyone makes for it.

Offtopic:
Glad you mentioned the music synth cores.. I thought i was the only one dreaming about a DX5 one.

Ontopic:
Thanks for this Groovy_Mister core. It seems a fantastic idea!

[Neocaron]

See I don't agree, it's not about usability, it's about options, I have a CRT, I have an Oled screen for my PC, but I could find a use for this for retro evening on a bigger screen in the living room. None of these are essentiel in the first place you know, it's about fun and possibilities.

You could certainly use a Retrotink, but I can’t think of a reason to send it anything higher than the game’s native resolution. The Tink is a beast of a scaler so I’d want it to handle as much of the scaling as possible.

The reason would be to send a video signal from a PC that is not in the same room as the Mister using Ethernet/wifi with the router for retrocontent on my main oled (watching movies with scanlines and shadow mask using either the Mister for the shadow mask and scaling or a retrotink). It's very specific obvisouly but since it's already sending an analog signal it probably works already.

And I agree, this is an amazing core! I used it with my CRTs in my room and living room and it works amazingly well! That's what I love with the Mister project, talented people coming up with amazing ideas and workaroud like this! Thank you!

[mikehaggar]

After Calamity explained the program logic to me, I think I can start to do some real damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-WwNgBgAy0

[mrchrister]

Supermodel is notoriously difficult to set up through CRT Emudriver with custom Modelines required. Amazing work @mikehaggar
I'm seriously impressed that supermodel with GroovyMiSTer is a thing!

[KennyL]

I got groovy_mame working but having trouble with Retroarch on Windows 11.

I copied over the retroarch.exe and put these in retroarch.cfg per instruction on github with my mister's ip address:

Code: Select all

mister_ip = "192.x.x.x"
mister_lz4 = "true"
video_mister_enable = "true"

And tried to run it with this command line but only seeing it running on windows.

Code: Select all

retroarch -L "E:\programs\RetroArch-Win64\cores\bsnes_mercury_accuracy_libretro.dll" -c "E:\programs\RetroArch-Win64\retroarch.cfg" "D:\Games\SNES\1 US - S\Super Mario World (USA).sfc"

I'm running it through my router so maybe that's the problem? I can't test direct connection to my pc at the moment...

Also, I never used Mednafen before so a command line example for running things would be appreciated.

Edit: I got it working after fresh install of Retroarch. It's pretty great!

[psakhis]

About RA, with test build, you need overwrite retroarch.exe from same test build folder. It's experimental build.
If you delete retroarch.cfg, at first launch will be created with these 3 options by default, so change ip and enable video_mister.

Mednafen it's easy, just type "emu4crt.exe game.zip". This fork accepts CHD as well.

To setup for MiSTer, in mednafen.cfg set options described on git.

[Neocaron]

Would it be possible to use this with a retroPC setup to send the actuall windows XP signal to a CRT? I'm currently building a Windows XP PC and I would love to be able to send a 800/600 or 640/480 signal to my CRT. I'm building it off this video using a GTX 560 which seems to work very well for XP era gaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGsffEoWOM