MyLifeInGaming

Massive 2022 Primer Video on MiSTer FPGA

Hey everyone, Try from My Life in Gaming here. We’ve been planning to do an episode that could serve as a primer on MiSTer for over a year now, but the reality of such a project was so daunting that it kept stalling after several starts (given how we just can’t help ourselves when it comes to covering too many angles of a subject). We finally committed to it being our first episode of 2022, no matter what it took to get it done. Well… turns out, that took three full months into the year. The result is our longest edited episode ever (I hate how I keep saying that), nearly 2 hours and 40 minutes long! Don’t let that sheer length scare you, though… it’s divided into chapters on YouTube, and it’s fun to watch because it alternates between more complex setup segments and more fun segments focusing in on what you can do with cores in every category – from consoles to handhelds arcade machines to computers (that last one was tough!!).

This project has been Coury’s baby for a long time and one of the key messages he wanted to convey with this is that “Actually, MiSTer isn’t that hard.” No, it’s not for literally everyone, and you do have to be a little proactive and hands-on with setting up certain aspects. But there are a lot of people who might really enjoy MiSTer who think it’s just a few steps too complicated for them. I know this because I’m one of those people, and in my parts of this video, I try to use my own experience of being afraid of MiSTer to show how you can learn to easily use it and have fun with it too. I’ve gone through several phases with how comfortable I am with MiSTer over the past couple of years, but through the trial by fire of working on this video, I feel I’ve learned it well enough to show you very simply how to get great results for audio and video, as well as how to use several other fun features. This is a video for dummies like us who appreciate cool tech and getting good picture quality, but only know how to do tech stuff just well enough to be dangerous.

Thanks to everyone who helped get us to the finish line! If you’re a longtime MiSTer fanatic, we hope you’ll enjoy watching (and maybe still learn something!), but really, the goal here is to give people on our level the easier starting point that we wish we had when we first got into MiSTer.