MiSTer Project - Open Source Multi-Emulator on FPGA


Chip

[Insert Custom Title Here]
Joined
Jun 25, 2003
Messages
3,503
Age
46
Location
NJ, USA
Website
chipandre.com
Just found this project today. I know there's nothing here a RPi can't do (and a lot more that a RPi can that this can't), but there's something very satisfying about the speed, accuracy, and lack of lag that FPGA emulators provide.

This project is still in early stages, but the dev(s?) have already put quite a bit of effort into it and don't seem to be slowing down. The DE10 nano dev board is a pretty darn capable and relatively affordable piece of kit, and is probably worth owning just for fiddling around with.

I will be watching this project with interest. Once this is doing SNES emulation, I might just have to jump on it.

 
  • Like
Reactions: rSl
FYI - SNES emulation is now readily available and is cycle-accurate. The latest version supports several of the more popular custom chips, so most games work.

 
Its an FPGA. it emulates the hardware so yes it is an emulator. if it is not original hardware then in some fashion it is emulating the original hardware.
 
Actually it's hardware re-implementation.

Do you have one? It's one of the best things ever.
 
a Field Programable Gate Array..

is not re implementing it IS emulating hardware through equations progrwmmed into the FPGA.. thats the whole point of them. It also why you can program different cores into it.
 
it's not emulation. it's real.
It's hardware, configured like the real hardware and acting like the real hardware, so it's emulating behavior of the real chip. You might even call it a simulator, as the goal is to replicate the internals of the real chip. And it's not software, so it's not an emulator. An emulator replaces the need of the real hardware, by mimicking it's behavior. While the simulator tries to model the real hardware accurately; in this case real-time. Making in a good replacement of real hardware.

An FPGA could still have timing differences compared to an actual chip. So some fancy demos using clever timing tricks could still fail on the FPGA. An emulator would also fail as it has to hardcode this behavior to, as it has to do with all the functions it emulates.
 
MiSTer has made me fall in love with all the reflex-based games of my youth. I had forgotten how excellent SMB3 is. WOW. So zippy.

The Mac Plus core is also really really cool to experience again. MacPaint was a killer app.
 
MiSTer has made me fall in love with all the reflex-based games of my youth. I had forgotten how excellent SMB3 is. WOW. So zippy.

The Mac Plus core is also really really cool to experience again. MacPaint was a killer app.
I liked the game because you could turn into a cute animal Mario. I liked the limited world in the older games compared to the larger and more option-rich world in SMB3.
Guess that's due to the amount of time I was allowed to play as a kid in combination with the lack of save options in the original Mario games.
1742642092443.jpeg
 
And the speed .... Super Mario had the innovative speed button. Because so many games were just too slow .... You need a fast setup or it's not very much fun. I'm getting a bit obsessive about latency. It wasn't on my radar for a long time. I think this is why I didn't play retropi much.

 
To weight in on the issue, systems reimplemented on FPGAs are very much emulators.

The difference to software emulators is that FPGA-based emulators are hardware based.
Which makes them harder to implement, but makes cycle accurate emulation economical.

For example, you need a pretty beefy PC at 3 or 4 ghz to have cycle accurate SNES emulation while the Mister can just run at the Snes' clock speed.

Note that cycle accurate emulation doesn't mean perfect emulation. It just means that one instruction executed in the emulator takes as many cpu cycles to execute as one instruction executed on hardware.

There is still plenty of room for bugs.

Another cool thing about the mister: it recently got a pretty awesome N64 core which offers much higher quality emulation than any software N64 emulator in 2025.

If you want to buy one, I would recommend a clone board of the de-10-nano as they are much cheaper and as capable.

Another cool FPGA device is the Analogue Pocket.
Cycle accurate gba and snes emulation on the go!
 
I've been using my MiSTer pi with genMIDI recently, a midi interface to the genesis synthesizer. I always loved the sound of megadrives. Funky.
 
Back
Top