there is a double-edged sword in that the project is run by a person known as sorgelig. he is by all accounts a maverick developer who has put in a truly absurd amount of time into making the platform as appealing as it is. with that said, i don’t agree with how he responds to requests and issues filed on the github. it can be very onerous to convince him of the worth of various things. for example, Ys (Japan) for SMS doesn’t work properly because of a hardware difference in the Mark III versus the later SMS console. When sorgelig read the bug report, he replied “Why simply don’t use US release? This is the only game affected and only Japanese release. And as far as i understand it’s not a bug, but just different revision, so basically nothing to fix.”
when I reported that the preferred, known good dump of Quackshot for the genesis gave a black screen, he replied that “If there is the same game with different working dump then i don’t see a reason to make the logic of core more complicated just for a single dump.”
to be clear, i can understand the challenges of FPGA implementation and the complexity that can be involved in these things, but the attitude chafes and is just unbecoming of a project that ever reaches for the word “preservation” in my regard. i have come to perceive it as a very pleasing emulator box for this reason. i think, in time, these wrinkles are being ironed out, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Ah, that’s a very recognizable programmer mindset that’s balancing purity and elegance against complicating factors. They’ve got a mathematical model they’re striving towards (and in this case there’s that pure goal of silicon emulation that tantalizingly might have A Correct Answer) and notifying them of edge cases feels like a request to shim it. And it’s really dangerous to add exception cases to code! because that’s how you get rat’s nests and inexplicable complexity that bites you years or months later. That’s how you get ZSNES.
Once you start delivering code that has real consumers you have to start compromising but the trick is to balance their needs with your needs to keep it organized enough that you can still progress.
i am completely sympathetic to the theoretical approach, especially taken over a longer term. i am far less sympathetic to the way he chooses to express this approach. these are not the only examples of responses he’s given with which i find issue. in those very threads you see other developers with responses that make far more sense to me. he tends to preclude the solution with “why bother”.
at any rate, we’re in a happy place that this is the only thing i really have to complain about, and again, i suspect time will mend these situations
“not a priority to fix” or “too complicated to implement in main”, or a variety of related phrases, they are 100% legitimate conclusions and ones i respect
the response of reading a bug report where a game doesn’t work properly and immediately writing “nothing to fix” and implying that since a localized version exists it’s moot anyway… that’s simply not true. that’s a false angle.
the developer with an investment in SMS of course recognized this and fixed the issue, but it isn’t merged because sorg needs to be personally convinced of its usefulness. i get it! but this is the reality of the situation. you don’t get that from watching smokemonster videos and listening to takes about its cycle accurate hardware perfection. there is a little grinding behind the scenes for now!
The most surprising thing about Mister is just how much easier it is to use than something like retroarch. I sometimes get a little confused about filesystem layout, especially with regard to the various arcade cores’ mra files, etc. but once setup actually using it is a pleasure. It is also very stable and bug-free (at least from a usability perspective, of course there are bugs in the simulation of individual cores).
It’s pretty obnoxious and I’ve got about a decade of wheedling programmers out of it. There’s a pretty clear hierarchy of who engineers like this will listen to; I know how to program so I can get in a lot easier than an artist or QA person who can be rebuffed – or god help you as a customer over the internet.
I do think that sometimes Mister’s accuracy is exaggerated by its various public boosters, but due to how lag-free it is, a Mister core is still likely a better experience than a more accurate emulator. I also think the high accuracy bar is easier to clear with an FPGA core than an emulator in the long run.
game boy/color/advance have save states and rewind, but nothing else does currently.
what are the benefits of emulation in total? being able to load roms? getting a perfect image? mister does those well. it has HDMI out as well as a VGA port (if you get the standard I/O board), so it’s for CRT folks as well as non-CRT folks.
you do lose shaders, but it has common scaler things (since it has a built-in scaler) like scanlines, interpolation, gamma adjustments, etc. it’s barebones compared to something like retroarch because it’s not using shaders.
if you are happy with emulators then you should be happy with emulators still! if you are unhappy with the following things
A) input latency
B) audio/video synchronization
C) playing games on your computer
then maybe consider a mister
if you use original hardware but you have issues with things like
A) expensive everdrives or endless outlay if you want to play all the games
B) needing to use console modifications and expensive upscalers and cables to get decent HDMI out
C) needing to use specific, old, discontinued controllers (or adapters)
then maybe consider a mister
it’s too much to summarize easily, unfortunately. i haven’t seen anyone do it yet
crt-pi and a zune a/v cable to a tv via composite is a good combo, and significantly less expensive than mister. just don’t ever change the wrong setting or update the kernel or you might break it, lol
i am actually interested in getting component video out of the pi but i am not entirely sure the best way to do that now
nice! yeah, the daughterboards go in and out of production pretty often but I still really like this solution. it’s very feature-rich and easy to use if you can handle Linux Shit in setting it up
