Lu

MiSTer FPGA News – Parodius Da! Saturn, Nintendo 64, TapTo & More

Posted on by Lu

Jotego New Public Core

Jotego’s JTALIENS core is now public, everyone can now play games like Aliens, Super Contra, Crime Fighters, Thunder Cross and more.

 

Groovy MiSTer Developments

Shane Lynch is working on a project that lets you cast any content from a PC to a CRT via Groovy MiSTer. Initially the experience was pretty laggy and would only be good for video plaback, but Shane was able to get the performance down to be around a frame or less than the source.

 

High quality DACs

Kuro, who’s done amazing work analyzing many DAC’s to see which ones offer the best image quality, posted that the Moread DAC’s are changing to a better IC. These DAC’s are only $7.99 so they can be a good choice for getting high quality direct video.

If you also want to see a video that goes over Kuro’s document, then check out Lex Locatelli’s video on YouTube.

 

Sega Saturn

The latest Sega Saturn core updates helped out the following games:

Grandia
NBA JAM Tournament Edition
Asuka 120% Limited
Zoop Shadow
Magical Night Dreams Cotton 2
Senken Kigyouden
Bug!
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
Primal Rage
Shining Force III
Croc – Legend of the Gobbos

 

Fujitsu FM-7

Pierco has reviewed the schematics for the japenese Fujitsu FM-7 computer and determined that not implementing the MCU will have no negative impact on the core’s accuracy. Last week he posted that he needed a dump of the MCU in order to create a proper keyboard implementation. So it turns out the dump wont be needed.

 

Core maintenance updates

Birdybro updated the below cores with the following changes.

Arcade: Joust 2, Inferno, Mystic Marathon, Turkey Shoot:
– Updated framework

Arcade: Tropical Angel:
– Updated jt5205 adpcm module to latest
– Simplify rgb logic (reverts my amateur LUT change from last time) to resolve a marginal timing issue observed, should see no visible differences.

Slug Cross:
– Updated framework
– Fixed what appeared to be potential bugs in the slug generator and border generator, no difference in behavior observed however.

 

Nintendo 64

There were several N64 rendering fixes that help with the following games:

V-Rally
Clayfighters 64
Vigilante 8 – 2nd Offense

 

CoCo 3

The CoCo 3 core has been updated with the following changes:

1. For cycle accurate 6809, changed PH2 to cpu_cycle_ena. (Improve timing of control register writes)

2. Changed PIA(s) addressing to allow complete mirror through FF00-FF3F

3. Corrected usage of SG6 enable (SW5 in orig code) which allows the usage of SG6. Formerly it was used to
enable artifacts. That is no longer true. For most compatibility it has be relabeled ‘CoCo3 LC’,
and it default setting is Yes which is fully compatible with the CoCo3. [setting no allows SG6 mode].
For some OS9 software this must be set to ‘Yes’ which is the default.

4. Added ‘Artifact Type’ menu in ‘Video Settings’ menu. Settings are ‘MESS’, ‘Simple’, and ‘NONE’. ‘MESS’
is the default and has improved fidelity over ‘Simple’ which was previously implemented in connection
with SW5 [see above]. Again, the default should be used. The artifact emulation can be turned off
by setting the option to ‘NONE’. The ‘Artifact Color Set’ choice is only valid for ‘MESS’ and ‘Simple’
artifact settings.

 

Parodius Da!

If you’re a Patreon subscriber of Jotego, you can now play a beta of Parodius Da!. Jotego mentions that the game seems fully playable but only the first two levels have been tested. You also will see some broken sprites due to the sprite scale range not being fully implemented yet.

 

TapTo

Spark2k06, who brought us the PCXT core has, made unofficial modifications to MiSTer that adds support for the TapTo project. Tapto is the project that allows you to run games by tapping NFC cards.

An official pull request has not been done because spark 2k06 is waiting for more testing to be done. If you would like to help test this, check out the misterfpga.org forum post.