As a MiSTer user, I just want to say, this is by far the single best video on the project I've seen anywhere on KZfaq. Extremely well informed and with the production values to match.

Nice to see my old amiga demo "SOTA" runing so smothly. Copper plasma it is hard to emulate. We used a lot of self modifing code too.

"Intel is wrong, this is for gaming" favorite line.

I can't imagine how many hours it would take testing all these cores and games out to make an informed video on a product like this. Thanks for doing the work for all of us

That's my take on the MiSTer and FPGA....what are your thoughts? Have you tried it, are you sitting on the fence or are you going to rush out and buy one? Here are some useful links! MiSTer XL Razer bundle facebook.com/retroshoppontopt/ The DE10-Nano www.digikey.co.uk/en/product-highlight/t/terasic-tech/de10-nano MiSTer MIDI with SoftMPU - kzfaq.info/get/bejne/itKCfrlnyLvalmg.html The MiSTer wiki: github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki Neil - RMC

Do I NEED this? No. Do I WANT it? Definitely!

"Because I lost several hours of my life to Civilization" Don't feel bad mate, happens to all of us.

Great video. Always happy to see MiSTer in a master's hands :D

I've just ordered one :) I'd heard of it before but had no idea how large the scene was and what it was all about until I saw this, so many thanks for an awesome video!

+1 for Bomb Jack footage! Fascinating stuff, this FPGA thing is such an interesting way of processing things differently.

Thanks for the video! I've ordered both. The people from retroshop were very nice in helping me find what i needed exactly

Awesome IT Crowd reference there, quite subtle but much appreciated. And otherwise a great video altogether. The MiSTer has been on my radar for a while. :)

I've been looking forward to this video Neil and it didn't disappoint. Well done Sir!

I have one of these, and seeing RMC build one himself and lay out the charms of it makes me feel good feels.

The best MISTer video I have seen so far. Thanks!!

"Tell me I'm a wizard, Hagrid" - I lost it

Great video, thanks! I've been a MiSTer user for over a year now. You almost are able to describe just how awesome the MiSTer is.

Very good coverage of the MiSTer project DE10 Nano! Very informative and entertaining. Cheers for now!

Once again, a fantastic and informative video. Top marks to you, and yes I understand what you mean by “feeling” one day when I can afford one, I WILL get one. Thank you so much 😊

I just heard about FPGA yesterday - and here you are with a wonderful video detailing exactly what I was seeking. Thanks so much!

This is so, so tempting, thanks for introducing this to me!

Great video. Thanks! I bought the parts a few weeks ago now I need to sit down and put it all together.

Great video! Thank you for the great information. Can’t wait to get one myself!

What a great great video. I've had my MiSTer setup over a year now and trying to convince people its BETTER than a Pi has been a tough one. I was hoping to catch up with you as the last meet to talk to you about MiSTer but it seems you got it covered. Great vid man.

Great video. I'm excited for FPGA and the accuracy it can bring

This looks amazing, I like how it's modular, this is something I would definitely like to play with in the future.

Just the video I was looking for. I think I am ready to dive into all this!

Thanks for the info, I'll have to check this out!

Brilliant review neil. This is a capable machine with some great features and like you said it handles everything you throw at it. FPGAs will only get better, let's see what the next generation of coders can do with them😀😀😀 Kim 😁😁😁

I'm happy about the Acorn Archimedes love in this video :D The BBC Micro put me off computing when I was a tiny child because we had to play Granny's Garden and it scared me to death. But when I was a little older they got an Archimedes and ARCventure: The Romans and I was interested again! Then during lunchtimes and after school an enterprising kid put games on there like Mad Professor Moriarty and a Space Invaders clone with ketchup bottles and fried eggs. Then Lemmings got put on there and I begged my parents for months for something that could play Lemmings. Then at Christmas they got me an A500+ with the cartoon pack...

Thanks for this great review, as one of the developers of the Altair 8800 core is was happy to see you gave it a try.

As always Neil, you've outdone yourself! Very entertaining video 😍👍

Fantastic video!

A very good summary. Thanks for making this!

This is fantastic. Love it.

Even after you mentioned soviet homemade computers, I was still surprised to see Sharp MZ on the list. :-) I'm glad that this beautiful yet obscure machine is getting some love.

very well explained. It would be interesting to do a comparison between software emulation and fpga of a bunch of games and show the difference in detail. cheers!

I have this board! We used it in school as a dev tool. I'm absolutely going to order stuff to try this out. I think it would be a great engineering project

Ok, it's taken a few months since watching this video before I went down the Mister DE-10 nano route - but I'm happy I did. The experience is fantastic! Thanks

This video at the time alerted me to this little marvel and I am still loving it.

yay nice one neil.. finally getting round to doing the MISTer review... :) they are brilliant :) i totally agree with you neil.. there is an unidentifiable 'feel' you get on MISTer.. i've played rasp pi amiga emulators.. but when i booted up the MISTer minimig.. it just felt like the real thing.. same with the spectrum core and also the bombjack core which i played to death in arcades as a kid. great video.. nicely explained.. i hope more people get into the system and develop more cores.

23:13 YES! A Frontier demo! You thought of me! Thanks :-)

Fantastic to see MISTer getting some love this side of the pond. Development really kicked off when Smokemonster did his video last year and since then there has been many more features added. The neogeo core doesn't seem too far away, and PlayStation 1 will be a great addition when it happens. Price wise I think when you consider the price of arcade pcbs such as 1943 the MISTer is worth it for that alone, truly a great game. I think you should link the Atari forum page as well as that is where people can find info on everything MISTer, and sellers of the add on boards themselves. There are a lot of sellers around the world so I'm sure your viewers would like to avoid high postage costs and import taxes. I've been selling boards myself for nearly a year and am based in the UK.

I've been watching through your video collection recently and I have to say that you're becoming one of my favorite retro gaming channels.

enjoyed the discussion on "feel". got my FPGA MiSTer setup up and running good number of months ago, and this is point is spot on. it feels accurate in a way that previous emulation never really has. it makes emulation feel all the more like an approximation, like looking at the software through a window. playing software on the FPGA MiSTer, the brain quickly forgets that it's not original hardware. it's lovely stuff :-)

Very cool video, the hardware is simply fantastic. Now I gotta go out and buy one.

23:49 "What a gem this is"

I've been having allot of fun exploring the different computers offered, had no idea about the Acorn Archimedes and Risc OS, what a great system.

I love that little Noctua fan on there. I'd love to get my hands on one of these at some point. I'm going to keep an eye on it and see if the price drops a bit.

Great video! Long time Amiga here. Because of a faulty PSU, I blew up my Apollo 060. When I have money, I will buy a Vampire 1200. FPGA is indeed a small revolution for us old school computer users ;) Love your channel

I got the Richmond reference. It put a smile on my face.

Ooh, that 486 core is very intriguing!

First time seeing your channel. What a really great video.

Great video. I've had the set-up since Christmas, and it has, a little sadly, replaced my MiST setup. It is absolutely amazing. I'm more of a fanatic of the old computers personally, so seeing the likes of the Coco3 and ZX Spectrum (by the way, how you couldn't show the Amstrad and Speccy in the video was criminal!!) makes it very good. Very recently we've had additions such as the Acorn Electron and the Oric Atmos - although no disk/tape support just yet. All in all most amazing.

The ST and Amiga days were glorious.

Thank you for this video, this just blew my mind as I didn't know a community replicating gaming hardware in FPGAs existed. Me and a few friends were about to begin a preservation project for arabic-localized computers and this seems to be the perfect way to do it!

Excellent bit of kit. Would love to see this in the Checkmate 1500 👍

Loved and used the MiSTer since its early days and it has come such a long way. The experimental PSX core blew me away and there's even a SPARCstation core which is able to boot SunOS, Solaris and NEXTSTEP, so not only can I relive the games of my youth, I can also relive the work apps and workstations of my youth. Brilliant.

New viewer to your channel, and I do like your content! Spaceballs demo, it blew my mind when it was released, and it still does now! :)

I remember being entranced by that Frontier demo when I was a kid, unfortunately I never did actually play the game, may have to pick up one of these to scratch that old forgotten itch :)

This is the video I needed to see ♥ 👌

Can't wait for FPGA to become so mainstream we can get them cheaper due to bulk demand.

FPGA is indeed the way forward (with some caveats), Great video!

When you say "intel is wrong, this is for gaming" (laughed like crazy about that btw), you should probably explain why you're mentioning Intel there and that Altera is a division of Intel now, since that's probably not obvious to people outside the FPGA world. Great vid all arond!

A new age of emulators! Great stuff! Greetings, Doktor64!

I enjoyed the "IT Crowd" reference with the Altair. =)

This guy is such a gentleman love the channel

Great job on this, mate. I think you explained it all perfectly. It is difficult to get across the "feel" of playing the games with near-zero lag until you've spent a bit of time using the platform. The low-latency is a far more important factor than I realised, too. When I first started using MiSTer with a CRT TV, it was quite a revelation. And I don't think it's just placebo, as it's been shown now that lower lag can improve gameplay and the overall experience, at least for a lot of retro games. It even managed to improve my terrible gaming skills slightly. lol (modern games are generally somewhat less dependant on having super-low latency, as many of them are written with modern displays in mind. That is starting to change as well though, as more TVs and monitors have low-lag modes.) It may not be for everyone, as you say, as many people will be more than content with software emulation etc., and that's fine. And now we're even starting to see things like the Run-ahead mode on some emulators, which can help mitigate some of the overall latency. Emulation has come a very long way, since the early days of ZSNES and UltraHLE. ;) But, the FPGA cores really are en entirely different approach, even if the cores do suffer the same challenges as software emulation. Namely, the lack of in-depth chip-level info for some systems. (It has taken many talented devs many years to get more systems running well under MAME, for example.) And a lot of that has to do with the fact that chip-level netlists simply aren't handed out by the manufacturers, so a lot of "black box" analysis has to be done on the custom chips and CPUs, to figure out exactly what happens on each clock cycle, given different input stimuli. One of the only times I've known of chip-level netlists being released to the public was for the Atari Jaguar. That core should be super accurate already, and has been working for several years now. It just needs a bit more work done to get it running on MiSTer. The author of the core has been taking a look at that in his spare time, so we may see it running on the new platform soon. The same talented dev also wrote the Genesis / MD, and PC Engine / tg16 cores. He's a true wizard. hehe... github.com/Torlus Otherwise, writing super-accurate re-implementations of the more complex systems often requires techniques like decapping the chips themselves, and analysing the silicon, just like Furrtek has been doing for the past few years for NeoGeo. The same techniques are now being used for some software emulators, including drivers in MAME, and that all helps to filter down to the FPGA cores eventually. There aren't many people actively working on new cores, though, only a tiny fraction compared to people writing software emulators. Hopefully that's now starting to change with exposure from vids like yours, and people starting to understand the benefits. ;) And yep, for me it's also very much about the preservation of the original machines. The original hardware sadly won't last forever, although restorers like yourself are doing great work to prolong the life of these old systems. Using FPGAs is pretty much the ONLY way we have atm (as consumers / hobbyists), to truly preserve the logic of these systems. Not all cores can claim to be 100% bug-free, nor cycle-accurate as yet, but they are gradually getting there. Many of the 8-bit cores likely are very accurate already, though. Now that most of the popular cores are up to a good standard, we can start working on the tools and techniques for confirming accuracy against the OG hardware. For the slightly more subjective measurements, like audio, people have now written tools to do Fourier analysis on various consoles like the Mega Drive, so the audio can be compared directly between console revisions, and to the FPGA version. Anyway, yeah, it is an exciting time atm for this stuff, and whether people are into software emulation or FPGA re-implementations, it's always good to have more choices. ;)

Loved the IT crowd reference!

This was epic, now send me that flashback game behind you :)

Loved that sneaky IT Crowd reference :)

Brilliant overview and review. Devices like this are most certainly the future of emulation. Great value in comparison to devices made by Analogue as you mentioned. Hopefully in the future someone will create add-on boards (for example a cartridge slot) that allow people to use their original games with the MiSTer or it's successor.

Noctua fan on the MISTer... that speaks quality right there.

This video swayed me into purchasing the DE-10 Nano and I have now had it for just over 3 months and can only sing its praises. The only thing that bothers is that at the end of the video there was what looked to be the R-Type arcade core, but I have never been able to find it. Other than that, wow! It's an awesome piece of kit and well worth the investment and that's coming from someone that was a Retropie die-hard. Thanks for this video it has changed me and for the better.

Your knowledge aside (which is obviously extensive), I love your professional presentation and production. I'm almost 30 and I find watching 99% of KZfaq content unbearable when creators act like hyperactive children for no reason. Thank you for taking your job seriously.

You did a fantastic job of enunciating the tangible appeal of this development. I think the message will really hit home once those 100% certifications start landing and people commence assembling charts to compare latency between the various options: Traditional emulators in their ideal state, official recreations (Nintendo minis), the original hardware, and FPGA. I think people who have relied on standard emulators will be shocked indeed to learn that they've been settling for multi-frame latency for decades. That's going to be the factor that drives the popularity of this approach.

Just took the plunge in large part down to how you expressed the feel of it. You're right, it feels night and day different from an emulator, emulation had me starting to wonder if I just wasn't any good at the games I played growing up. The feel of cycle exact hardware simulation with no controller lag is quite amazing.

Hmm good suggestion for my watching. Thanks for the video have heard about the mister fpga before from ETA Prime , but not quiet as much info cool video .

I have a robotron cabinet. My dad build it in the 80s and i still have it. Need to fix it but that game is fun.

Its a fantastic device,yesterday tried neo geo core,working already but needs more work for getting it perfect.

Excellent video! Here's to more FPGA solutions for consoles being released. Software emulation was a nice holdover, but I believe this evolution of game preservation is the right direction to go. Hopefully we'll see more powerful SoC's and lower cost in the future.

I about died when you said "wait for it. Double Flash."

"Look, I'm proddin' it" instant Like & Subscribe

3 minutes in and I realised why they're using the SoC version of the Cyclone V instead of the regular version, and that could be in order to be able to pull up a configuration OSD from the ARM side!

Looks like I’ll be buying one of them 👍

Got mine up and running! What a great little device! AND I found a bug in the Gameboy Core! Hope it gets fixed soon!

5:49 Populous! yassss

I had the chance to use Cyclone II based FPGA board in a limited time. To see a quite affordable (FPGA usually cost more) DE10 board is interesting.

Hardware emulation in hardware. It's a fine idea! At the very least, it makes hard to find systems much more accessible.

Looking to play old Japanese game on various hardware up until windows 98, when I saw this video, now I'm subscribing, it's exciting to see the future of retro gaming

Sam Coupe!! I am so tempted.

Thanks for a great video! Giving me some head ache wheter to just get the analog system for all my megadrive games, or go the "project" route and go all in with a mister... 🤷‍♂️🙃

Good video

Cant wait for the Vampire Standalone system to come out, will be a great Amiga FPGA system

In one word: Yes.

I should play Under A Killing Moon through again. Amazing game, amazing acting.

With 1942, and 1942 (and hopefully more Capcom) and Neogeo you could revisit this topic Neil. Looks like CP system is coming to MiSTer and that's going to be incredible. For me Arcade games didn't go far into the 90s so it looks like MiSTer will cover all I remember.

Yay Robotron! Gotta be my fave too.

It seems to be worth for just the Amiga emulation only. I've been looking for a 1200 for a while now, but they are getting pretty rare and expensive. this might do the trick. It would be great to have a possibility to use a real amiga keyboard from an amiga with a faulty system board for example. awesome.

I too want an FPGA for the feels :)