great to see MiSTer back in the news again.. i got mine around the same time as you, dave in dec 2018 and paid £108.. it's been my go to device, and even after 6 years still receives regular core updates, new cores, new hardware developments and now a clone board.. incredible open source developers and community. many many thanks..
Another tip to resin coat large objects. Get yourself 2K PU car clear coat. You can apply it in think coats. Especially when you spray it to horizontal surfaces. We used this to seal wood for guitars so you don’t have the wood texture. Then we sprayed the colour and then 3 more coats of 2K PU clear and wet sand it smooth.
This isn't going to help me with getting my essay done by Monday... its not just the one hour something to watch it, its all the pausing I have to do to Wikipedia all the interesting bits of information that pop up in the stories, suddenly the day is spent TWIRLing.
An upgrade to Paula WAS part of the AA chipset project - according to Brian Bagnall's book, Glen Keller worked on it. However, for some reason the effort failed which saddled the A1200 and A4000 with the original Paula's dated four-channel audio, amongst other problems.
On the topic of preservation of consumer durables that we've all purchased over the years, it's so sad to think that the museums of the future will almost certainly have to be virtual, with nothing physical to show to the curious visitor. Everything has an end-of-life expectation - I'm not expecting Morphy Richards to fix my 1982 toaster nor do I expect a refund for a so-called lifetime guarantee to be honoured by a company that went out business decades ago. But if the car I drive or the air fryer I use is deliberately designed to stop working by the manufacturer... that's the argument. Petition signed. 👍
modern manufactured consumer machines/devices - like the Apple iPhones or the Tesla EVs - are designed in such a way to be throw away. This amounts to (practically speaking) as a crime against humanity.
Been enjoying the show recently. Thanks for these great series of videos! When it comes to an FPGA re-implementation of a chip or entire system it's not emulation. It's a re-implementation or another way of being the same or similar hardware. For example, if you know exactly all the logic gates, all the timing information, and all the details of a particular piece of hardware, then you can make an FPGA that performs exactly the same and does so in a similar way using, if the original is documented or reverse engineered. For example you can create a binary adder out of logic gates inside the FPGA that does the same work in the same way as a dedicated chip (in theory). The difference between this and emulation is that an emulator is another system with another processor and is running software that is pretending to be the same environment so that the software running on it doesn't know the difference. But it's from working backwards from the desired final result back down to the software. FPGA is bottom up from new hardware up to it running the original software. I'm over simplifying, sure, but emulation is a very very different way of trying to get to an approximation of the original final result. An FPGA could, again if there is enough documentation and there's no other analog aspects to a design that aren't supported by a given FPGA, then an FPGA can perform in exactly the same way as the original hardware and should also exhibit the same emergent quirks found in the original design without having to have those quirks specifically added in. An emulator has to emulate the intended behaviour, but often then has to have special programming to detect and perform emulations of the quirky unintended original behaviour. It's hard to describe but one is pretending to do something and the other is actually doing the something just as the original did it.
My first experiences with the BBC Micro was Granny's Garden in school, but they did have a Teletext receiver. Emulating it I liked Exile and of course Elite. It had its place.
British children learning requisite national identity gardening skills - whereas US school children were all busy dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail
I think possibly a good way to describe the fpga and in terms of MIst or Mister is that it's like a big brain that can operate in the same way chips do regards to how they perform the logical tasks. I guess certain parts of the brain are allocated differently depending. Through the software core the various chip's workings are loaded in and allocated and can perform in the same way and at the same time as the real hardware would or certainly quite closely depending on the core's accuracy. Emulation is different despite it giving very similar results. Emulation runs through it's software program witch itself is very accurate enough of course in mimicking each machine but the chip's function are run entirely through the software from there being enough power to do so but not 1 to 1 and at only one thing at a time until the cycle of that repeats. The results are very similar but for FPGA it's more like you are running almost the actual hardware in the sense of the brain performing the tasks of the chips in the very same way and at the same time. Emulation is delivering what the chips do through it's software only and while the results are incredibly similar to witness, it's arrived at very differently. For some that is why FPGA has become so key to why they own one because you know the chip's logic can be the same performed at a real hardware level I think that's how it works
Only the CD32 had it, using the Akiko chip. I agree they should've incorporated it into the AGA chipset or added Akiko to all aga systems. Better still, would've been to have released AA/AGA much sooner and get on with AAA and Hombre systems. Oh well, so many missed opportunities. It makes me sad.
To be fair, it's ALSO complete BS that I need to sign up for a Ubisoft account to play a bloody Ubisoft game. Like just having the damn ubisoft client on my system when I bought it through Steam is just infuriating
A de10 board and all the bits are very expensive. A cheap mister might be interesting, depending on how much all the other bits are. I'm still waiting to see what happens with mistex project.
John mentioned by Teli the Compis project which won the competition in Sweden (as BBC Micro did in GB), and then a competitor Esselte 100 (maybe compared to Sinclair ZX81 or the like). The Compis failed spectacularly. Too late, too awkward, no compatibility with anything else. But let’s stop there. However, I want to highlight a successful project that was used in schools but not supported by the state as a school project: namely ABC80. It came before any ideas were created for an educational computer program by the state. It started just a year after the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80 was launched. They were launched in 1977 and ABC80 was launched in 1978. It had decent sound, but only fair graphics, if games are your only measuring stick. But as we students had no other things to compare with, it was fantastic. And it was used in schools …
It makes no sense to try to force commercial entities to support software that is not ‘profitable’. However, they should be stopped from going after people that want to resurrect old games/software. Furthermore, companies that choose to abandon their products should be obliged to relinquish all exclusive rights over them and release them as open source, since they have evidently already decided that no profit can be lost from doing so.
Re: Emulation terminology -- of course emulating hardware _in hardware_ is still "emulation", but I think there's value in having a field-specific vernacular around these things. We've all grown up with "emulators" being software programs that emulate hardware. Technically, some "emulators" aren't really even emulating the hardware -- they're just re-interpreting the system calls to something compatible with the local environment. Maybe that's environment emulation? It can get tedious and unproductive to try and split those hairs, so we just refer to software that runs other software in a non-native fashion as an emulator. But that's not exactly what is happening on things like Mister. That's what makes it so significantly different than a RetroPi, for example, despite how they could look very similar to the uninitiated. I think it's worth having a different term for these things, a kind of shorthand to distinguish them, particular since this is likely to be a common technique for preservation and future products. I personally like "simulation", as it is distinct enough from "emulation" while still acknowledging that it's not the genuine article and may still be someone's interpretation of how said genuine article actually works under the hood. I don't see purpose in dogmatically insisting that "it's still emulation." Of course it is. But it's a different _kind_ of emulation, and lumping them together is imprecise and unhelpful. Ergo, I don't mind marketing copy that says "no emulation" when extolling the virtues of an FPGA-based device. I get the nuance, and I appreciate it.
Re: Software lifetimes and the law -- as much as I want to support this, I don't see it going anywhere via legislation. What is being asked for is essentially a warranty of serviceability, without any specificity into length or means. That's never going to fly. It's too nebulous, and would be difficult to enforce. One of the greatest threats is a software vendor going out of business, effectively abandoning the service. Who do you hold accountable then? Plain and simple, if this is important to you, it needs to be a "vote with your wallet" issue. Support vendors that provide means for play offline, DRM-free, in single-player, co-op, local multiplayer, and on self-hosted servers. Do not support vendors who don't. Make it clear why. If you really want things to change, this is how you do it. Be louder than the shareholders, and create an impact on their return, so that your goal becomes their goal. Everything else is, frankly, a waste of time. It might feel good now, but when you get those "sorry, we can't help you" replies, it feels less good. Do something real and enduring instead.
I'd like to say get a clone MiSTer right now before they get much nearer the price of a real board (pretty inevitable esp. when the real board is cancelled) but then you're risking bugs that get fixd later
I got my Mister long before the price went sky high. With a new one on the way it will be very good, for me it is "hardware recreation" it saves me getting a old machine out and powering it up. I own some ZX Spectrums a Amigas that I do use. I never has a Atari ST and many more. I can use them in the Mister.
I will point out. Keeping a game in working order is to vague of wording. To take that literally would mean they have to keep updating for new OS's and hardware. But I do agree that they should have to update the game if they shutdown servers so it can run without the servers.
one thing about the steam 'countries' is that it's regions, steam calls them on their DB countries but it segmentation is more like a tax region segmentation, so they have 250 '''countries''' on their database, but places like aland aren't really their own country. so it was 177 out of roughly 250 regions where it got pulled on steam rather than 177 countries of roughly 200. anyway there's further issues with requiring the PSN login, some regions you need to use your ID to make the account and some persons are banned forever because their account got hacked and they used chargebacks on their credit card to get their money back. some of those hacks are due to sony themselves as well. have you thought about having ross of game dungeon as a guest to signal boost the dead games thing? you could talk about some weird old games too
Dave is right. It's EMULATION plain and simple. Also time to convince Neil and Heber to make a new Multi-System with an FPGA already included. Let's go.
Nope, it's digital circuitry that implements a given electronic device - but said digital circuitry is not permanently etched. (However, the electrons coursing said circuitry, giving rise to actual digital signals, don't know the difference.)
If we call FPGA an emulation (without actually evaluating what the actual core is doing) then we could also call the MOS 8500 an emulation of the MOS 6510 or the C64C an emulation of the old-chipset "breadbin" C64, which is obviously incorrect. I believe that in cases when the FPGA is recreating the same system of logical gates then the term "reproduction" is more accurate. However there are cases when the FPGA acts as a mixed system of reproduction and emulation: The SID chip of the Commodore 64 for example consists of digital and analogue circuitry so while the digital part can be reproduced with the programmable gate array the analogue part needs to be emulated.
Great podcast as always. Looking forward to the Mister project. Simulation reproduces every aspect of the real thing and an emulator pretends to be the real thing. Apollo Astronauts trained on Simulators for the moonlanding not on emulators.
Commodore should had focused on R&D, and realised they could have owned the whole of the graphic design and video production market if they really wanted to. And from that perhaps the (hardware) gaming market. But noooo, instead they wanted to do the "office computer" thing, with IBM clones, and all that. At worst, they would exist as a video graphics company, if they were able to understand their consumer base. I really believe that if Jack Tramiel had stayed with Commodore, they still would exist. He was tough and rough, but respected engineers and other peoples ideas, if those worked.
Open source abandon ware servers? I suppose it's technical proof that the withdrawal of service for older games has the purpose of selling newer games. They'd argue giving the server code makes it easy to steal a server for a competing game. But would open server just really be a null login and a protocol API specification? They wouldn't even kickstart a keep the server running thing?
FPGA? If you're making about 50,000 of them, perhaps top metal with on board RAM, built in 68K, Z80, 6502, 8086 ... and various custom chips .... To upgrade a core to a "bigger" FPGA is just a recompile?
Uncool: Probably the Commodore 16. You'd be reminded constantly that you don't have a C64 and be able to play a pretty crap pool of games. Any PC with a Cyrix processor. You promised so much and gave us so little.
The future is where we don't own anything but pay for everything. It's all pretty lousy. With the amount of layoffs in the gaming industry you'd think E.T was being buried in a landfill. Ah well, there is always the Aurora Borealis.
So Neil, is it time for a volume 2 of your retro computers colouring book(s)? - the ugliest and most uncool toy-like edition? - just pulling your leg, mate... 🥸😆
This same nonsense happened when Epic bought Fall Guys and you suddenly needed an Epic account to carry on playing. It killed Fall Guys which was the biggest online game for a while. The servers are barely running now, will be closed imminently no doubt. How can these big, apparently very experienced companies, repeatedly make such seemingly ignorant decisions and be so out of touch with their customers?
If you need a simple way to wrap your head around what FPGA is just think of the famiclones or sega 'console on a chip' systems, you wouldn't call playing games on those emulation/emulating because they do have all of the hardware, it's just recreated and shrunk down into a single chip, that's what you do with an FPGA. Gate array is just a fancy way of saying "blank slate" of transistors that are not configured in any way, and what a core does is to program that "blank slate" to configure all those transistors into an as precise as possible recreation of all the hardware a system would come with. You are creating an honest to goodness hardware clone of the original system. Also the mister clone uses the same CPU as the original, so when he says that "if de-nano lowers prices" he means that the price of the CPU will drop so he will also be able to make his clones cheaper, then! Not now!
Sorry I don't agree with your explanation of FPGA/MiSter. Also you're quite wrong in your correction of what he said. He means if the DE-10 nano lowers in price. He doesn't not mean the FPGA on the DE-10 nano. (Dave)
Moral of the story, do not buy modern Western AAA games, stick with indies and Japanese games. If you buy these and loose access to your games, then it's your own fault.
We’re all good! None of us felt that way at this end. We usually like to throw a few counterpoints and fun digs in to see where it takes the conversation.
mini mister, or mini me for short, generalists fare better than any specialist, what do you lead if you dont know where you are going, ie market valuation cannot be any guidance, if any is required. ai or automation does the spell check even for this comment. lol. instead release them in a state that they work even after online portions shut down. ie stand-alone disc. no download. no servers. yes the pressed discs approach is much much much better over anything online. or let people burn their own local working copies of the game on disc. including steam games. no login required. its not a backup if you need to login. and game publishers never put dodgy patches on games themselves. hmh. well if they revoke the product, under law, then they must refund it, fully. cheap de10nano is like raspberry pi. but it could be even cheaper. cpu and chip stuff is mostly ok with de10nano, but adding a gpu would run most stuff. maybe just a better more final fpga soc board. mistex can be used to run de10nano cores on anything. so the upgrade path. replicator. you will be mist. oceans wave.
