MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hello Sorg would it be possible to add support for this opensource DIY Cartridge reader: https://github.com/sanni/cartreader in any off the cores? Would be so cool if we could use original cartridges / floppy's etc. with Mister.

As far as i understand the De-10 nano does not have enough external pins to be able to support cartridge slots.
There probably (but probably not easy) is a way to do it trough usb and the ARM cpu but then it would likely be like for example the retroN 5 in that the rom is ripped from the cartridge and then used like any other roms from/on disk.

All in all do not count on this feature appearing at all.

grizzly wrote: ↑Mon Aug 17, 2020 1:45 pm As far as i understand the De-10 nano does not have enough external pins to be able to support cartridge slots.
There probably (but probably not easy) is a way to do it trough usb and the ARM cpu but then it would likely be like for example the retroN 5 in that the rom is ripped from the cartridge and then used like any other roms from/on disk.

All in all do not count on this feature appearing at all.

I don't believe they mean connecting the cartridge reader directly to the mister's I/O, I think they mean connecting the cartridge reader to the mister by USB.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/9e17 ... 3f646c3d31

It's a fully enclosed unit that you can then plug in via USB to a computer.

So someone would have to develop a USB "storage" driver for the MiSTer for this specific device, I believe.

If cores have to use SDRAM because the onboard FPGA RAM isn't fast enough to respond to random cartridge read requests, I think that pretty much makes any USB interface to a cartridge a non-starter for anything other than one-time dumping.

Agreed, this seems just like for dumping, which if you are using a MiSTer and you have no personal PC (which can dump the roms), how did you flash the MicroSD in the first place?

I sold the PC and 3 containers full off original games off-course

Dumping on the fly is how the Retro Freak and Retron5 operate. Also, the Retrode2 does the same job as this device and exposes the ROM in a small file system, but it can be slow.

It could probably be used with MiSTer (at least as an external hard drive) but it would be clunky. It would be easier to just dump everything once on a PC. Good to have open source alternatives for it, at least.

So, does this mean we'll never see direct cartridge access for any of the MiSTer cores (as in, it is not feasible)?

Correct. Sorg has confirmed this many times, and the same goes for disc-based games. Any CD drive or cartridge reader would only be usable for ripping the game to internal storage, and then what's the point? Just do it on a PC and put the games onto SD/USB. Having the MiSTer rip games won't be functionally better in any way.

The only real argument to be made is "but it's more satisfying to plug in the original cartridge and then play", and there's some nostalgic merit there. But functionally, plugging in a game to MiSTer and then ripping, and then playing the ROM would be no different than just plugging the game into a cartridge slot on an original console or a reader that isn't connected to the MiSTer, and then playing a ROM on MiSTer.

NightShadowPT wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 3:12 am So, does this mean we'll never see direct cartridge access for any of the MiSTer cores (as in, it is not feasible)?

Not desirable given it's a waste of FPGA GPIO pins...

I am also interested in this. I also wanna post with question if Retro Freak console adapter could be used. Adapter from inside have two USB plugs that connects to console that is small box, and two USB ports for controllers. This adapter have famicom, NES, snes, and md cartridge ports.

Sigismond0 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 1:24 pm Correct. Sorg has confirmed this many times, and the same goes for disc-based games. Any CD drive or cartridge reader would only be usable for ripping the game to internal storage, and then what's the point? Just do it on a PC and put the games onto SD/USB. Having the MiSTer rip games won't be functionally better in any way.

The only real argument to be made is "but it's more satisfying to plug in the original cartridge and then play", and there's some nostalgic merit there. But functionally, plugging in a game to MiSTer and then ripping, and then playing the ROM would be no different than just plugging the game into a cartridge slot on an original console or a reader that isn't connected to the MiSTer, and then playing a ROM on MiSTer.

The CD drive interaction isn't set in stone I believe. I know Laxer3A has been thinking about having a CD-ROM support for the PSX, the downside is a USB CD-ROM driver would have to be developed, and that could be costly in terms of logic cells.

I've been curious about this as well. Wouldn't there be enough IO if we had a special ram board that could be bypassed or simply powered off and run all that freed up IO to a cartridge reader PCB? I would think there would be enough IO for every cart except for the Neo Geo.

The Retrofreak adapter is just a cart dumper, in other words it extracts a ROM from a real cart once, but can also rewrite the save RAM when needed.
There is a USB device that does a similar thing, the Retrode 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrode. I'm not sure if they use the same mechanism, but both can be a bit slow to run (it takes 3-5 seconds for the cart to be read).

How about we have this all wrong with a USB cartridge reader what if It just reads the cartridges enough to identify which one then the MiSTer can load the game from your SD card. Same can go with a USB CD drive. So basically this becomes the most complicated hardware based game launcher. If you have all your game roms yet you love your disks this can be that happy medium. The hardware doesn't need to be perfect as if you were doing a real dump. KISS, that way you could even have a setting to load the core and rom of the cartridge when powered on so it can feel like a console but not really be using the Cartridge.

At that point, might as well just glue NFC stickers to carts and assign them to specific games. Then place your game on top of your MiSTer and it launches. That would avoid wear on actual connectors and you can still make a case that holds the carts in place as if they were inserted.

I don't know how complex are NFC reader drivers for Linux, but it would only need to "listen" when the OSD is open and send a command to the firmware to load a game if the inserted cart changes. Downside is you need the NFC stickers, but those are probably easy to find blank. As a bonus you can also use existing NFC devices like Amiibos or Amiibos cards by linking up their IDs to specific games.

Edit: found this: https://megabitnes.com/store/combo-nfc-nes/

Newsdee wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2020 10:13 am At that point, might as well just glue NFC stickers to carts and assign them to specific games. Then place your game on top of your MiSTer and it launches. That would avoid wear on actual connectors and you can still make a case that holds the carts in place as if they were inserted.

Yeah the problem with that is you would have to buy the NFC stickers and stick them to your original carts, that adds an extra cost in both time, effort and cost all while making the carts less original with a big ugly sticker. If you are going to have a cartridge port you might as well make it able to at least minimally read the cartridge. And if you do that you can select the rom anyway no adding stickers for your entire library and all. I have over 100 Atari 2600 games fat chance I want to go through the effort of programming and setting up a NFC sticker for each one.

They're not mutually exclusive. If the firmware allows the reception of a string /data over USB to load a game, you can have more than one hardware implementation of the reader.

I might be alone on this but I think the best option would be to turn off or remove the RAM board and physically connect and use the hardware in the cartridge. Maybe there's already a core or branch of a core available now that is expecting a cartridge be connected to the mister IO rather than the RAM board?

It's open source so you can do whatever you want, but it won't be MiSTer per se anymore.

Also that will only work when there is no separate SDRAM needed from carts; that will be highly core dependent. But it's certainly possible to investigate since the cores will be much simple (they won't need the custom cart logic if you give up ROM loading completely).

Also if that's all you want, just buy an RetroUSB AVS: https://www.retrousb.com/product_info.p ... 6a43951aa8 for NES or one of the Analogue consoles for whatever is in stock.

Sorry for resurrecting a old thread, but I figured it'd be relevant and people ask this a lot anyways so here we go...
I'm working on a script to add support for the Retrode2 USB. Early tests are showing that it should work ok.
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1778

As long as whoever wants to make a addon board makes it so it behaves in a similar manner to the retrode than I can make sure it'll work on the MiSTer.

And for those that think that something like this would be pointless here's my opinion...
The only thing that I would want to use a Cart addon for would be for transfering save game data to and from the MiSTer. That makes it worth it for me, and I'd much rather have a DIY solution than some FOMO Analogue BS. Something like this would also allow for transferring saves between systems that there isn't currently any other FPGA alternative for, (GB/GBA/PC Engine/etc...)

I think some of us would be interested in the cartridge of various systems be available in some emulated format.

Like me. Would be nice to be able to use eg. the Atari ST core with an actual cartridge used for copy protection like Cubase 2.0 as the available cracks never really worked as Steinberg was using a lot of random reading code from the cartridge. When one of the later PC groups finally did a complete reverse enginering of Cubase it took them 2 man years of work to crack Cubase 5.0. Some of us do actually have the old 2.0 score dongles lying around somewhere even its nerly 30 years ago they were last used.

I can't see why an usb to physical slot that fits the cartridge of an 8mhz machine should not be able to be read fast enough, but I am no expert, so just asking.

master_d wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2020 2:31 pm I might be alone on this but I think the best option would be to turn off or remove the RAM board and physically connect and use the hardware in the cartridge. Maybe there's already a core or branch of a core available now that is expecting a cartridge be connected to the mister IO rather than the RAM board?

I'm designing a new hardware board dedicated to MiSTer, so I might consider adding an expansion port for things like this without sacrificing the RAM, but that depends on how many I/Os are required to plug in a cartdrige.

noel wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:24 am but that depends on how many I/Os are required to plug in a cartdrige.

NES carts are 72 pins, Genesis 64, SNES is 58 with expansion if I'm not mistaken.

Doesn't seem like you can free up enough I/O for them?

That's a lot of IOs ! I'll keep this topic in the corner of my head to see what can be done

noel wrote: ↑Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:03 am That's a lot of IOs ! I'll keep this topic in the corner of my head to see what can be done

I'm brand new to MiSTer but this thread has me intrigued. Do you have more information on the board you're working on?

Also, to anyone knowledgeable- would the new Retroarch Open Hardware https://www.libretro.com/index.php/intr ... e-project/ be an option?

That option is just dumping the ROM as well. They aren't actually interacting with the ROM in real-time like original hardware would.

They are using an STM32 chip on that cartridge reader, it's going to be marginally faster than the Arduino Cartridge Reader by Sanni. This means that the special chips on the cartridge and the mappers still have to be implemented on the emulator side regardless.

Any idea if USB CD-ROM support will be added to the PSX core?

That's purely up to the devs, but I suspect that would be a lot of work for modest benefit. You'd probably do better to use that USB CD to generate an image from your disk, and play from the image, rather than trying to play from the CD.

Even if could use the CD directly, it wouldn't be very authentic, because it would be substantially faster than the original hardware. The PS1 had a 2x drive, and most drives you'd buy now are in the 48x range.