MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hey all. I'm resurrecting my Mister after a 5ish year hiatus and I'm trying to figure out what I'd gain by upgrading certain components to the latest revisions. I've figured out that if I upgraded my USB board it would eliminate the micro usb cable and move the power to the back for a more cleaner look; also going from 32mb to 128mb ram would give a better audio experience with the psone core. But what would I gain from upgrading my analogue IO board to the latest rev?

Thanks for your assistance.

Upgrading the RAM would not improve PSX. It will however enable some of the larger Neo Geo games to work correctly.

Latest IO board would support Genesis/ Megadrive over Snac. Dual Ram would improve the PSX sound marginally but you would not be able to use dual ram on an Analogue IO board

Upgrading the USB board just to use a USB bridge seems to be an expensive proposition if it only for the look.
The SDRAM upgrade will allow you to run more cores and mras like Coco3, Saturn, some NeoGeo games, some CPS2 games. It won't make PS1 sound better as this would require the 2nd SDRAM which is not possible with the Analog board and from the picture it looks like you are using the VGA output. It also seems that the sound improvement is marginal.
For the Analog board upgrade I am unable to answer this question but I doubt it is worth it.

SDRam is probably the most “worth it” upgrade as it would actually allow you to play some games that need it. If you care about cleaning up the look of the hardware, it would also be worth it to upgrade to a newer usb board so your power plug moves to the back and you just need the micro usb bridge.

Don’t do anything. There is nothing to be gained except possibly 128 MB, if you like neo geo (which I assume you don’t, since you didn’t even know this). The mister scene is full of fomo for some reason, don’t contribute. You have a fully working mister. Be at peace and enjoy it.

jca wrote: ↑Sun Feb 12, 2023 9:19 pm

It won't make PS1 sound better as this would require the 2nd SDRAM

And it will only sound better for very few games, don´t remember exactly but there where about 5 or so games that are affected.

Depending on the CRT you're driving, you might get slightly higher quality output from the new Direct Video analog system. You buy an HDMI->VGA converter with a specific chipset, and configure the ini to use Direct Video. That changes the digital HDMI output to analog. It's best suited for VGA-type monitors, and will show more colors and will generally have a slightly superior signal on that type of device.

However, it's not as compatible with TVs as the analog board is, and you can't do both digital and analog at once, as you presently can with your setup. You have to pick one or the other.

As a very minor benefit, you could then replace the analog board with a digital one, which would in turn allow you to use dual SDRAM sticks. That's not very useful right now, but it may be for the Saturn core, if that ever gets into a releasable state.

If you want the Direct Video thing, AFAIK you can do that without removing the existing analog board. It might even work with both analog ports at once, although I don't actually know that for sure. If you move your CRT to the HDMI->VGA conversion port, you can leave the I/O attached for the buttons and TOSLink. Then, if the Saturn core ends up needing it, you'll have the option of swapping in a digital I/O and a second SDRAM stick.

edit: from the other comments, I guess the user port/SNAC is also new to more recent I/O boards. If you're interested in lightguns or an MT32-Pi, a new I/O board would support those. If you just want retro controllers, the USB Daemonbite adapters are easier and just about as good; they have about 1ms of lag compared to SNAC. You wouldn't likely notice the difference.

See? There’s the fomo I was talking about. “There’s a change you might get slightly better image quality, but it doesn’t work on all TVs…”, “there might be some rare edge case where a dual ram setup could make some kind of sense sometime in the future…”.

Just stop it, please. Are you people like this with everything? What a terrible way to live.

Thanks everyone for your advice. I did end up making one hardware upgrade not mentioned here, and man was it worth it! In the future I may upgrade the RAM for Neo Geo.