Since almost exactly 2 weeks ago, I’ve built and enjoyed a functional MiSTer setup. It was quite pricey, as to be expected, but I view it as an investment, and much like a satisfied stockbroker, I would even call it a great investment. Enjoying near hardware-perfect retro gaming has been a treat, and more importantly for me, a great opportunity to dive into the weird and obscure corners of it. While I still have yet to properly do so (mostly played arcade games and the popular consoles for now), the fact that I have a painless way already set up is fantastic, and I will eventually get around to doing it. Maybe I’ll even write a post or two about my experiences. We’ll see.
(My setup as of today. Sorry to the 2 people in the audience who give a shit about it not being a direct screenshot. I tried.)
For now, I’ll talk about what I’ve already accomplished.
Setting it up was a lot easier than expected (for many, at least). While I had some slight trouble with building the setup itself due to the lack of a standoff screwdriver in the house, a wrench ended up working well with unscrewing the standoffs included with the DE10-Nano (the main brains in the operation of this thingamajig). Installing a heatsink, USB hub and SDRAM module was no problem after that, and I got it to power up and function.
Flashing the SD card with the OS was a minor hurdle, however. Due to me being an idiot and not knowing how to actually use dd, and not being able to get Etcher to work, I wasn’t able to get it properly flashed on my Linux laptop. I had to resort to the only functional Windows laptop in the house with an SD card slot to flash it with Etcher, but after that, it was all smooth sailing! Eventually the setup of Mr. Fusion finished, and it booted right up into the menu!
After that, it was trivial automated setup, courtesy of the great update_all script. This was definitely the most frustrating step however. Not because of the script or the setup being broken in one way or another. The main cause of frustration was the agonizingly slow Wi-Fi dongle I had installed.
See, some months ago, I’ve been using one of my spare PCs as a Windows XP box for retro gaming and whatnot. Since I had no way to connect it to the internet outside of wireless, I had to rely on my phone with a hotspot and USB tethering to get online, which was… less than ideal. So, I quickly scrambled and ordered the cheapest dongle I could find that worked with XP. I saw mentions of it having terrible range, but I thought “surely, it can’t be THAT bad!” Well, needless to say, it WAS that bad.
(Seriously, this thing is fucking unusable. 150 Mbps my ass.)
Even on the XP machine it was originally for, I got very slow speeds due to the modem being on the opposite end of the house, and since this thing has less functional range than my own fucking arms, it was slower than molasses. However, I had no choice but to use it on the MiSTer setup, which means the update_all setup took… 4 AND A HALF HOURS. I wish I was exaggerating. The setup does take at least an hour usually, but not quadruple that, and I instantly figured it was the shit range of this dongle. Still, it worked, and I got arcade games working out of the box, which I enjoyed a bunch! (Fun fact: the first game I tried on it was Robotron 2084.)
Eventually I got FTP to also work, which meant I didn’t need to take out the microSD card to get my games on the device. This caused even more frustration, and it was so slow it could take a quarter of a day just to get a few smaller ROMsets to upload. I was quickly fed up with the agonizing upload times, and got myself a better Wi-Fi dongle. While the speed was only around 5-6 MiB/s with a single transfer going, again, due to the modem’s distance, it was MILES better than my old one and uploading all the ROMs was a breeze. (For reference, the best performance I could get out of the old one on a good day was around 500-600 KiB/s and that’s just with a single transfer going.) I uploaded the larger ROMsets I put off for later and I felt the difference. The AmigaVision/MegaAGS ROMset, which is around 10 GB, was fully uploaded in about half an hour. I don’t even want to IMAGINE how long it would take with the Snail Mail dongle.
Ranting about garbage cheap dongles aside, I’ve enjoyed myself with the arcade and console cores I picked. I played stuff like R-Type Leo, DoDonPachi, Robotron, NewZealand Story, NeoGeo, NES, SNES, and even a bit of PS1. While the latency on my end wasn’t as mindblowing as the MiSTer’s reputation would lead you to believe (completely my own fault, I’m using a wireless Xbox controller over Bluetooth), I could still feel enough of a difference to enjoy the games a lot more than usual. Once I get myself some SNAC adapters and the appropriate controllers (and an IO board and case, since I don’t have those yet), I’m sure the experience will be even better. For now, it will suffice.
And so that’s what I’ve been doing since 2 weeks ago when it comes to MiSTer. However, the future looks to be incredibly bright. Not only do I have a huge amount of cores I didn’t even try yet, but also the N64 core development is progressing at a rapid speed, to the point where I can confidently say that N64 games will be properly playable by the end of the year. Plus, The Simpsons Arcade core was recently finished and is currently in beta, which is incredibly exciting to me, as it’s one of my favorite arcade games of all time.
Some of you will be asking: “Why not use MAME and emulators?” Well, I HAVE been using emulators, and in fact, I still use them for games outside of MiSTer, but I’m too dumb to figure out how to set up MAME properly with the games I want to play, so having the arcade games MiSTer offers, and with basically no additional setup needed, is a treat.
Of course, I’m not going to be an elitist about it and shame others for playing on emulators. They’re still fantastic options. However, I chose to go with the MiSTer for the cores it provides, and I’m not disappointed at all. If you’re looking for very high accuracy and authenticity, and you have the dough to build one yourself, I highly recommend it.
Aug 24 2023
The MiSTery Machine
Since almost exactly 2 weeks ago, I’ve built and enjoyed a functional MiSTer setup. It was quite pricey, as to be expected, but I view it as an investment, and much like a satisfied stockbroker, I would even call it a great investment. Enjoying near hardware-perfect retro gaming has been a treat, and more importantly for me, a great opportunity to dive into the weird and obscure corners of it. While I still have yet to properly do so (mostly played arcade games and the popular consoles for now), the fact that I have a painless way already set up is fantastic, and I will eventually get around to doing it. Maybe I’ll even write a post or two about my experiences. We’ll see.
(My setup as of today. Sorry to the 2 people in the audience who give a shit about it not being a direct screenshot. I tried.)
For now, I’ll talk about what I’ve already accomplished.
Setting it up was a lot easier than expected (for many, at least). While I had some slight trouble with building the setup itself due to the lack of a standoff screwdriver in the house, a wrench ended up working well with unscrewing the standoffs included with the DE10-Nano (the main brains in the operation of this thingamajig). Installing a heatsink, USB hub and SDRAM module was no problem after that, and I got it to power up and function.
Flashing the SD card with the OS was a minor hurdle, however. Due to me being an idiot and not knowing how to actually use dd, and not being able to get Etcher to work, I wasn’t able to get it properly flashed on my Linux laptop. I had to resort to the only functional Windows laptop in the house with an SD card slot to flash it with Etcher, but after that, it was all smooth sailing! Eventually the setup of Mr. Fusion finished, and it booted right up into the menu!
After that, it was trivial automated setup, courtesy of the great update_all script. This was definitely the most frustrating step however. Not because of the script or the setup being broken in one way or another. The main cause of frustration was the agonizingly slow Wi-Fi dongle I had installed.
See, some months ago, I’ve been using one of my spare PCs as a Windows XP box for retro gaming and whatnot. Since I had no way to connect it to the internet outside of wireless, I had to rely on my phone with a hotspot and USB tethering to get online, which was… less than ideal. So, I quickly scrambled and ordered the cheapest dongle I could find that worked with XP. I saw mentions of it having terrible range, but I thought “surely, it can’t be THAT bad!” Well, needless to say, it WAS that bad.
(Seriously, this thing is fucking unusable. 150 Mbps my ass.)
Even on the XP machine it was originally for, I got very slow speeds due to the modem being on the opposite end of the house, and since this thing has less functional range than my own fucking arms, it was slower than molasses. However, I had no choice but to use it on the MiSTer setup, which means the update_all setup took… 4 AND A HALF HOURS. I wish I was exaggerating. The setup does take at least an hour usually, but not quadruple that, and I instantly figured it was the shit range of this dongle. Still, it worked, and I got arcade games working out of the box, which I enjoyed a bunch! (Fun fact: the first game I tried on it was Robotron 2084.)
Eventually I got FTP to also work, which meant I didn’t need to take out the microSD card to get my games on the device. This caused even more frustration, and it was so slow it could take a quarter of a day just to get a few smaller ROMsets to upload. I was quickly fed up with the agonizing upload times, and got myself a better Wi-Fi dongle. While the speed was only around 5-6 MiB/s with a single transfer going, again, due to the modem’s distance, it was MILES better than my old one and uploading all the ROMs was a breeze. (For reference, the best performance I could get out of the old one on a good day was around 500-600 KiB/s and that’s just with a single transfer going.) I uploaded the larger ROMsets I put off for later and I felt the difference. The AmigaVision/MegaAGS ROMset, which is around 10 GB, was fully uploaded in about half an hour. I don’t even want to IMAGINE how long it would take with the Snail Mail dongle.
Ranting about garbage cheap dongles aside, I’ve enjoyed myself with the arcade and console cores I picked. I played stuff like R-Type Leo, DoDonPachi, Robotron, NewZealand Story, NeoGeo, NES, SNES, and even a bit of PS1. While the latency on my end wasn’t as mindblowing as the MiSTer’s reputation would lead you to believe (completely my own fault, I’m using a wireless Xbox controller over Bluetooth), I could still feel enough of a difference to enjoy the games a lot more than usual. Once I get myself some SNAC adapters and the appropriate controllers (and an IO board and case, since I don’t have those yet), I’m sure the experience will be even better. For now, it will suffice.
And so that’s what I’ve been doing since 2 weeks ago when it comes to MiSTer. However, the future looks to be incredibly bright. Not only do I have a huge amount of cores I didn’t even try yet, but also the N64 core development is progressing at a rapid speed, to the point where I can confidently say that N64 games will be properly playable by the end of the year. Plus, The Simpsons Arcade core was recently finished and is currently in beta, which is incredibly exciting to me, as it’s one of my favorite arcade games of all time.
Some of you will be asking: “Why not use MAME and emulators?” Well, I HAVE been using emulators, and in fact, I still use them for games outside of MiSTer, but I’m too dumb to figure out how to set up MAME properly with the games I want to play, so having the arcade games MiSTer offers, and with basically no additional setup needed, is a treat.
Of course, I’m not going to be an elitist about it and shame others for playing on emulators. They’re still fantastic options. However, I chose to go with the MiSTer for the cores it provides, and I’m not disappointed at all. If you’re looking for very high accuracy and authenticity, and you have the dough to build one yourself, I highly recommend it.
By yoshi • Nonsense • 0