Welp you got me looking to get one again.
The shadow masks are really nice. Better than I expected. The main advantage CRTs still have is in color and brightness. MiSTer has a number of gamma options but I haven’t found anything that looks quite as nice as a good CRT in that department. Maybe if I had an OLED it would be different.
Color, brightness, contrast are where an OLED screen blows away my little late-model CRT. I’ve never spent so much time just appreciating the beauty of colors as when I loaded up Defender on it.
Motion is still a bit off for scrolling on an OLED (held images make scrolling appear stuttery-er) and while black-frame-insertion solves most of that it cuts brightness in half to the point where it’s really similar to the CRT.
Something else I’d forgotten is how much older games look sharper on small displays. On a large screen I go to a lot of work to fuzz them up, but <20" they look very sharp indeed.
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I have a tiny little 8" pvm and contra hard corps looks so sharp and vibrant on it. My lcd monitor might actually be capable of producing equivalent color and vibrancy, but I haven’t found a way to do it in MiSTer with the video options it provides. It might be possible though.
And any of the shadowmask options are going to drop lit pixels and cut your brightness, so you need a lot more than a comparable CRT to start with. Still, CRTs are designed around ~175 candelas and with HDR monitors we’re starting to crack brightness and saturation past the point where even kneecapping a flatpanel gets you there.
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I gotta find out why my little iPad screen setup drops the signal intermittently (could be a bad HDMI controller, shouldn’t be the cable but it’s possible), but the shadowmasks sure do look a lot better on it than my LCD monitor.
My only regret with this thing now is having gone all-in (case and board-wise) with the analog IO, when it sounds like the Saturn core is gonna definitely need two SDRAM sticks to get going.
It’s very nice to be able to hook this thing up to an old TV, but as these shadowmask and scanline filters get better and better…dang. Made the wrong bet, maybe!
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the last i heard srg320 is still going to attempt to get saturn working with solo SDRAM, so here’s hoping
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I got the mister multisystem, so I am in the same boat. I don’t regret my multisystem purchase though. I think devs will do everything in their power to get these systems working on the most setups possible. I haven’t followed the saturn development but psx at least looks promising.
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guys what do you do when your FPGA runs out of reprograms? can you replace it or is it like, idk, eMMC or whatever and you just expect it to last the lifetime of the device
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I’d expect it to last the lifetime of the device. Shouldn’t you get hundreds of thousands of reprograms?
i don’t know! probably lol
Hmmm the scaling in basically all the arcade cores I’ve tried ends up with the top and bottom cut off just a little more than is acceptable. I’m guessing it’s doing an integer scale of a slightly different resolution or something? Do I just need to try a different one of these? https://github.com/atrac17/MiSTer_Integer_Modelines/tree/main/ini/pre-cfg%20ini
I haven’t gotten very far in, but so far it seems like a realistic look at the MiSTer in its current state.
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I really oughta give that Playstation core a go. Been waiting for it to hit update_all but it seems pretty solid already.
I think I post that every time this thread pops back up, so to add something new: I finally found all the different Game Boy palletes, which are kinda fun? I feel like the default DMG one is a bit too dark, but that might be my misremembering (I was given a Game Boy Pocket by a friend when they lost my copy of Castlevania Legends back when, so it’s kinda recolored (oh ho ho) my memories of how most games looked back when).
That video is pretty good, though! Skipped around it last night and had no idea the lengths the PC Engine core writers went to for accurate composite coloring. Always thought a lot of PC Engine games looked way more saturated than I remembered them being.
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Okay I am maybe stupidly breaking down. I see I can get a de-10 from taiwan. I can get kits for relatively cheap from Amazon but they are marked Manual Weld.
Like how much work is involved in this?
Alternately I should just get a rasberrypi but that won’t run 32bit CDs with filthy CRT filters either.
I don’t know running a mister as a 486 traps some part of my brain and I hate it.
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That kit would be really straightforward - plug the top and bottom board in, screw in the fan, use the included brass screws to clamp them together, screw the top, bottom, side plates on. Should be less than 20 minutes.
Then load an SD card with the install software, stick it in and you’re basically done.
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Consider mine, my suggestion is to buy a kits.
I don’t like those retro-sellers, so after a long time github trip, I decided to DIY and bought a de-10 at 2021, at beginning, it only costs me $180, sounds not bad.
then things go wrong when I tried to resolved all the problems what come cross,
including
understanding the switch on board, learn how to debug a board (the de-10 I bought at first was not working and seller needs the proof), learn where and how to make a board from pcb files and ask for a friend to help me welding those daughter boards and made lots of junks, bought those cards from a local DIYer, bought a SD/TF card reader, made an independent 12v power for USB hub instead of got the power from OTG supplied, and discovered the best configure for my dell 2007FP.
I think it costed me more than 150 hours I guessed to finally run games on Mister and perfectly switch core without glitch screen. And now I have many useless things, rosin, a voltmeter, lots of resistors, serval usb ports.
Things went wrong when I decided to DIY.
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Okay, I finally decided to try a nightly build of the PSX core and - it’s great?
Beat the first levels of Incredible Crisis and Rising Zan without issue, the latter running in widescreen because, hey, why not. Also got my butt kicked in Evil Zone because it’s been a million years since I’ve actually sat down and played it. But these three are always my go-to games to try on this sort of thing, and they all worked without issue.
Feels like the core is straddling the line between “pure console experience” and “wild emulator shit,” but it’s super impressive no matter what.
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I told some folks here I was gonna throw the 32X library onto my Mister and everyone yelled at me not to, haha.
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