The MIST FPGA

[EvilDragon]

I'll have a few MIST FPGAs in stock within the next few days.

In case you don't know what it is:

http://lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96

It's an awesome FPGA with tons of neat cores in development.

I'm especially interested in the Amiga core, of course

 

[___]

Yay, I just bought one of these last week from lothareks website! I am really excited for it to arrive. then I'll have some people to share experiences with!


EDIT: corrected terrible spelling.

 

[rSl]

verry cool!


i'm definately interested too!


thanks for the info!

 

[EvilDragon]

And the MIST is now in the shop

https://www.dragonbox.de/en/consoles-and-tools/285-mist-fpga.html

 

[WizardStan]

Yet another "toy that I want but haven't got the time to play with nor any real idea what I'd eventually do with it but it'd be so cool to try"

 

[___]

I picked up my mist fpga from the package station yesterday. It's awesome! I started with the minimig core and tried a couple of adf images, turrican, r-type, spin dizzy with a c64 joystick. the sound is amazing. I never had the chance to hear an actual amiga before. I also updated the firmware, real easy via sdcard.


I can also report that the AGA core seems to run fine as well. Haven't tried a lot, but lion king works and alfred chicken, too.


Today I added a harddrive image and made a partition which I installed workbench 3.1 to. I copied dune II from floppy to hdd, added the appropriate line to Start-Sequence and it works like a charm.


I did have to look up a lot of commands in the amigados manual though. the shell is quite different from msdos, which I used when I was a kid. Anyway, had a lot of fun with it already!


Does anyone have a good website with utilities for amigaOS? Or maybe an introduction for newbies? I can find lots of emulation sites, but those really don't help a lot.


PS.: At first I was a little confused as to wether my usb wireless dongle for keyboard and mouse would be supported. For anyone who is wondering: It works flawlessly.

 

[Ian J]

Very interested to hear that the AGA core works.

What is the video output like?

Blurred or sharp edges to pixels?

Can you try some of the following AGA games:

Pinball Illusions

Pinball Fantasies

Banshee

Super Skidmarks

Thank you

 

[___]

Hey there! pixels have sharp edges over vga, I am using an EIZO display. There are also options for filtering the video output in the osd menu, didn't try them yet though.


I will test the games as soons as I am home! cheers!

 

[Trip]

Just found out about this yesterday.

Amiga and C64 on one board; I'm very tempted B)

 

[___]

work has come in the way of me testing anything today. have to be on the job in an hour, I will test some more AGA games later this evening though!


c64 I will test tomorrow. cheers!

 

[Ian J]

work has come in the way of me testing anything today. have to be on the job in an hour, I will test some more AGA games later this evening though!


c64 I will test tomorrow. cheers!

No rush, sounds very promising though.

Many thanks for your time.

 

[___]

Pinball Illusions - still have to test this.

Pinball Fantasies - Works but seems very buggy. Balls keep getting stuck and sometimes there were gfx glitches

Banshee - works flawlessly, we played it two player just fine

Super Skidmarks - seems to work pretty well, don't know about the car sprites though. They keep flickering and have strange colors. Don't know how it's supposed to look like on the real game.

Cheers!

 

[EvilDragon]

Pinball Fantasies - Works but seems very buggy. Balls keep getting stuck and sometimes there were gfx glitches

I always liked the non-AGA version better, to be honest.

PartyLand was WAY too colorful on the AGA version

 

[ekianjo]

Pinball Fantasies - Works but seems very buggy. Balls keep getting stuck and sometimes there were gfx glitches

How is that possible ? I thought the MIST was not running an emulator but reproducing the actual hardware?  

 

[skeezix]

I've been goofing around with it for awhile (and the FireBee before it) - FPGA machines are fun to fiddle with and code on

Wicked toy

The video emulation on the MiST can be annoying; the ST core is my main interest, and I find most of my TVs just don't like its resolution and framerate combination .. I'm in NTSC world, and I imagine PAL world would be a bit easier off; the video emulation varies by core though, so some cores are more solid for me than others. (Some folks route it through a upscaler which essentially just adds a video adapter layer, but I am trying to cut down on how many widgets are needed..)

I set up the MiST, and had my kids playing Dungeon Master (ST) pretty soon after, along with Oids and Xenon 2:Megablast. Joystick (with Wico old sticks) worked a treat Floppy emulation etc is solid.

MiST cores are all source available, and most can build with freely available tools, for if you want to screw with them or write your own.

The prie is outstanding for an FPGA dev board, that also does awesome retro; the FireBee is sweet as well, but is probably twice as much (oof), but is much more serious about its TOS computer (Atari ST 'on going') world.

jeff

 

[skeezix]

Pinball Fantasies - Works but seems very buggy. Balls keep getting stuck and sometimes there were gfx glitches

How is that possible ? I thought the MIST was not running an emulator but reproducing the actual hardware?  

People can argue about definition of simulated vs emulated etc, but suffice to say.. the FPGA is (at boot time) hardware configured to simulate another device; it is not a 1:1 mapping.. it is still building an emulation layer, in hardware. Its definately a lot closer to the hardware abstraction of course, but its still creating an emulation; someone has to define the high level FPGA code (that is compiled down to gate assignments) that has it operate more or less like the target device. So one FPGA chip is often configured to pretend to be several other chips as well.. like floppy controller + video + cpu, etc; its not like you're replacing the 68k in an Amiga with an FPGA, and the gpu chip with another FPGA, and one FPGA per target chip. ITs code, to be sure, but code written more at a hardware abstraction than a software abstraction layer.

There are also FPGA limits; how man gates it has (MiST has a _lot_), how fast it can simulate at, the assignment of the gates and how they map to peripherals on the chip, all sorts of stuff; so sometimes you just run into a convenience limit (boy, it almost works so well doing it like this, and its hell the better way)m or design limits due to the FPGA architecture you've chosen, etc. They're not a matgic bullet.

Course, you can always design in a bigger FPGA than you need, but the costs can ramp up _fast_. Still, the MiST FPGA and board is actually quite powerful, moreso than it needs for stuff like Amiga or ST.. so its quite flexible.

jeff

 

[pmprog]

It says on the website linked in the original post that the C64 core is "partially - still being developed", do we know what sort of state it's in?

Though I think WizardStan said it best...

Yet another "toy that I want but haven't got the time to play with nor any real idea what I'd eventually do with it but it'd be so cool to try"

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, I won't name it 'emulating' what an FPGA does - it's more like a reimplementation.


You try to copy the hardware of the system 1:1, but that's nigh impossible (missing documentation, etc.), therefore, glitches CAN happen, as the hardware is not exactly the same.


Heck, some games don't run on certain Amiga revisions that had small hardware changes, simply because the games were coded really close to the hardware back then.

 

[Newsdee]

The C64 core is not as mature as the others. It lacks disk support so it loads .prg files directly into memory (super fast, but won't run multi disk games), and the VGA output isn't very standard so causes more issues with many displays then other cores (unless you have a good upscaler). It is still very usable though, it has better video than the C64 DTV for example (and probably more compatibility but haven't tried).


Here's a video of mine running Eliminator:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9GDJRWBFZu0?feature=oembed

 

[___]

I am getting a little frustrated trying to install classic workbench. has anyone tried to do this before? My understanding is, that I have to mount the system.hdf in fs-uae, boot it, install the wb 3.1/3.0 floppies, then slam that system.hdf onto an sdcard and boot it in the mist, right?


Booting the mist with such a harddrive file gives me a black screen after a while of loading stuff from the hdd. I tried the full wb version, will try the lite version today. maybe that will boot. I have read from people with a minimig who were able to boot the full version though, what am I doing wrong?


edit: corrected spelling... was workbench classic, but I meant classic workbench.