I remember buying the Neo Geo Pocket and loving the striped-down Metal Slug games. Now the irony is I have access to arcade-perfect Metal Slug games (via the Neo Geo core) and I'm waiting on the striped-down version. Many good times with the Neo Geo Pocket Color. It stood no chance against the Game Boy Color, but the ratio of junk to great games was great!
Awesome, yeah, the handheld is just too appealing. For those like yourself with arcade machine set ups, the clone boards should provide a cost effective solution. I hope we don't see additional delays, and the initial release is September.
Great week for it! I must get around to powering up my Mister at some point, been a while since I played 😢 Anyway thanks as always PCN, appreciate the news!
Alright! My Saturday edition of PCN News arrived at my doorstep and getting ready to acknowledge the latest in the industry. Thank you as always PCN. 8^) Anthony..
I really hope we end being able to play all MiSTer console & arcade cores with real-time MIDI and OPL3/4 synthesis eventually, this would be a huge audio upgrade over just emulating the audio, currently only computer cores allow this on MiSTer, but even being able to separately emulate audio via a Raspberry Pi like the MT32-Pi allows would open up some cool audio options, the best outcome would be a dedicated MiSTer audio processor that uses a proper audio DSP, a modest separate FPGA for handling some of the audio processors some consoles have like the Z80 or Motorola 68000 audio CPU's, the FPGA could also be used to properly replicate Soundblaster audio CPU's in their various forms, a real Yamaha OPL3 chip, a real Philips PGM chip, and lastly the MIDI audio, could be handled by a decently clocked RISC CPU, complete with a couple decent chunks of audio SRAM for audio banks and loading sound-fonts, tied together with a few oscillators clocked at various frequencies, a VCO for sound-shaping, and finally a Pre-AMP that handles bass/treble/depth/tone/reverb/etcetera, with a vintage AMP output mode that matches the sound profile of 80s & 90s amplifiers, and finally it should of course have both a bit-crusher mode and PCM & DSD upsampling.
@@PixelCherryNinja I don't really understand why the MT32-Pi isn't already used for sound improvements on MiSTer for console and arcade cores, as a DSP you could do tons of fancy audio improvements.
Also, there is still so much that can be done with MiSTer, besides more cores, and refining current cores, changing them from emulated cores to 1:1 hardware cores like the Mega Drive, OG Game Boy, and Neo Geo (think it's just those 3 so far that are 1:1 parity hardware FPGA replica cores), hopefully the SNES, NES, GBA and so forth will eventually be 1:1 hardware replica cores (even the N64 eventually), there is also the potential to upgrade MiSTer with new iterations that have improved RAM, including native SRAM, this would enable better compatibility, audio & video timings and even new arcade cores that are not possible without low latency SRAM, there is also potential audio upgrades such as a proper dedicated audio DSP with sound-fonts et cetera, and the biggest upgrade potential is combining MiSTer with other projects like RGB-Pi or Replay OS all in one console for the ultimate FPGA and RISC based retro console that includes 7th generation systems, and also porting over all the awsome decompiled games like Ship of Harkinian (would be awsome to play them with low latency like the originals), so it's safe to say that there are some serious legs in the MiSTer as a whole that could last another decade before MiSTer 2.0, which will mean that by the time that comes around, the biggest leap in FPGA logic will be possible, enough for Pentium 3 and Gamecube FPGA cores even. I'd also love to see an official TapToo store, where we can buy professional quality gamecards, complete with repro game manuals and box art, the ultimate prospect for me would be a MiSTer with full CD-ROM support and being able to buy factory quality CD-ROM reproduction games for all the MiSTer cores and games, being able to buy CD-ROM versions of games that were originally cart based for instance, complete with high-res PCM audio.
I'm curious if anyone wants to tackle a Sony PSP core, I feel like MiSTer should be able to handle it, even if it can't run the XMB interface and only boots games. (That's all we really need)
Cronela's Mansion looks cool, but I would say just pick a platform, developing for all the consoles from scratch just means a diluted game overall, better to concentrate on one console and make use of all it has to offer imo, if it's just a NES game for instance running in an emulation container on all the other platforms, then I wouldn't be interested, if it's a Switch game downgraded for each platform, I wouldn't be interested in that either, when devs do this it's a bad sign, as it usually means appeal to as many platforms as possible to get as much $£ as possible. If I was them, I'd make it a full-fat Switch version of the game, with a GBA version that plays more like a traditional handheld game to differentiate the two versions, make the GBA game a handheld companion of the main Switch game, this is what Nintendo did back in the day with their console and Game Boy releases to great effect, you ended up with a really dope traditional handheld game that complimented the main original release, and many other devs did this, something I miss to be honest, that is traditional handheld style games, we used to get releases like the brilliant Sonic Colours for Wii and a totally separate Sonic Colours for the DS, the DS game is actually the better game, it's basically the 2.5D Sonic game we never got for the Saturn (and it's the best Sonic game since Sonic CD), even though the Wii game is a banger too, but the DS release was a traditional-handheld game and played to the DS's strengths.
