saturn is disturbingly good on MiSTer now. i played a bunch of Daytona USA CCE and watched a full demonstration game of Madden 97. pissed around in the first town in Shining Wisdom - god i’ll never get over the character renders in this, incredible
Panzer Dragon Saga apparently works perfectly now. guess it might be time to get stuck into that one
is Madden 97 the best one ever? it runs way more smoothly (30 FPS?) because it is still using the sprite tech from the 16-bit entries - though the sprites look magnificent here compared to megadrive’s madden 97. i think 98 is the first one to go fully polygonal, which i’m assuming tanked the hell out of the framerate… but i haven’t tried it yet. at any rate, 97 on Saturn is slick and smooth and is about the most impeccable-looking sprite-based sports game i’ve seen, i think.
to be fair, the 16-bit madden 97 also looks great. it just runs way worse
hmm, it’s hard to really tell what’s going on with the framerate. i think it’s trying to do 30 FPS but drops quite a bit. maybe it’s not even actually smoother than the megadrive version… not sure! that megadrive version of 97 is kind of a marvel in its own right
@meauxdal I feel like you have the deepest understanding of mister setup so I seek your advice
Is there any like Good Shit that isn’t on by default or part of update_all that I should set up? The furthest I’ve ever really dug in is setting up cifs and ssh and recently trying tapto for the first time. I don’t think I’ve even set a wallpaper! Are any of the sound or non-crt video filters worth setting? You mentioned that F3 opens up a Bluetooth pairing UI and my first thought was the f-keys do something??
Where do you learn about this stuff? I feel like the written docs are kind of all over the place
i learn about most of it by reading an awful lot of posts on the mister forum and discord for an awful long time now. the docs are indeed a bit swiss cheese
i’d actually been thinking about this recently - like some kind of “intermediate” pointers compilation. there are really a lot of little features and quirks that are incredibly sparsely documented
While the RT4KCE is a highly capable solution for 4K upscaling, some features from the Pro model were unable to fit within the smaller FPGA. Here’s a list of current differences:
No Rotation Support
Input Width Limitations: Maximum input source horizontal width is limited to 2048 pixels. (This does not affect MiSTer or other super-resolution sources decimated to a lower effective resolution).
De-Interlacing: Linear motion-adaptive de-interlacing only without advanced sensitivity controls; no bob field offset adjustments, no edge-adaptive interpolation. First order field differences only, enhanced motion detection using second order field differences not possible.
Inverse Telecine: No support for inverse 3:2 to de-interlace telecine content or to reconstruct 24 fps sources from 60i and 60p. No support for inverse 2:2 for PAL content and reconstructing 30 fps games output in 480i.
No IIR Blur Support: Horizontal softening can still be accomplished by using cubic, Lanczos or bilinear soft interpolation filters.
BFI: Basic BFI insertion of black whole frames only. No alpha bending or colored insertion.
S-Video: No enhanced S-video support. Regular SDP decoder only.
XBR Smoothing: Not included.
NTSC Composite Video: No 3D comb filtering. Notch and 2D modes only.
Auto-Phase Adjustment: Continuous background auto-phase is not available (auto console sample rate detection is still included, but users will need to calibrate and save the phase to their profile during first use). On demand auto phase (by pressing the button) is still supported.
OSD Color Depth: Reduced color depth for the banner image from 11 to 6 bits.
Other than the rotation to handle tate games (which doesn’t always work great anyway) none of these are even remotely a big deal. IIR blur is kind of nice but it can create some really annoying artifacts so I have it off most of the time
It has an uglier shell for sure but a qmtech mister is like $20 more so ???
Sounds like it’s a full mister under the covers so that’s not bad at all, and the controller ports are snac so if someone was going to buy those adapters anyway it’s pretty interesting
Chromatic Tetris (available at your neighbourhood archive dot org) is unsurprisingly a competent Tetris
the Thing About It, imo, is that it is in fact too dark & low contrast to reasonably play on Gameboy Color proper, demonstrating for all the slavish recreation of subpixel ordering on the Chromatic’s bespoke LCD and the bandying about it’s palette accuracy, at the end of the day it is hardly truer to the source device than something like the Pocket. probably that is OK, because (as a lover since childhood of the GBC) the GBC kind of sucks!
the firmware for their MiSTer-core-running soc shows a post-release patch preventing the diminished pivot in their dpad hardware from allowing input to cause and i quote “sprite errors”
i think the whole project makes a great microcosm of the “retro market” at large: chasing the dragon of authenticity rather than doing anything that might risk being actually interesting
