SmokeMonster

MiSTer Capcom CPS-1 Arcade & ArduBoy FPGA Cores

Jotego has been releasing beta versions of his MiSTer & MiST Capcom CPS-1 Arcade FPGA cores to his patrons, allowing fans to dive into the largely unported CPS-1 library. Each week he has brought a few new games to the core, and he intends to support the entire CPS-1 library. The core is currently private, […]

SmokeMonster

Upcoming MiSTer Cores: Sega CD, PlayStation, Jaguar, Cave Arcade, CPS1, and more

Bob asked me to write up the upcoming MiSTer FPGA cores, and I came up with quite a few. Below are the *known* in-progress or planned cores that are being worked on or researched. As is the case with MiSTer, you never know when something will simply manifest out of the ether, so there are […]

SmokeMonster

Atari 7800 Schematics Found in Dumpster Treasure Trove

Fifty pages of complete engineering schematics for the Atari 7800 and its associated ICs have been released by Curt Vendel, the historian behind the Atari Museum History Project. The documents have circulated among private individuals for years, but this is the first time they have been publicly accessible. The schematics essentially provide a blueprint that […]

SmokeMonster

Xilinx’s New FPGA has the Highest Logic Density of Any Single Device Ever Made

Xilinx revealed their new high-end FPGA, the Virtex VU19P, which will be the largest FPGA ever created. It comes from their line of 16nm UltraScale+ FPGAs and contains 35 billion transistors. It boasts the highest logic density and the input/output count (2,072) of any single device ever made, and is 1.6X larger than the Virtex […]

SmokeMonster

MiSTer Popeye & Commando Arcade FPGA Cores by Jotego

Jotego released Popeye and Commando arcade FPGA cores to his patrons, for both MiSTer and MiST. Both cores are open-source and will be made publicly available once complete. I debuted them live and found Popeye to be especially impressive. It is a very early application of interlaced graphics, which looks a little strange via HDMI, but […]

SmokeMonster

Big MiSTer Arcade Core Refresh & New Additions

Many older MiSTer arcade FPGA cores have been left behind from the overhauls and updates that console and PC cores received over the last year. Several were still on the old scaler and lacked new features. Alan Steremberg has made it his mission to bring every single one of them up to date and on […]

SmokeMonster

Arkanoid Arcade FPGA Core for MiSTer by Ace

Last month Ace joined me on a live-stream to reveal a preview of his impressive new FPGA core for MiSTer, Arkanoid (1986) Arcade. The core is now publicly released after a very long development cycle that required transposing several PCBs of real arcade hardware (a mix of arcade PCBs, old ICs, and other soft-core donors) […]

SmokeMonster

Racketboy’s MiSTer Omnibus Article

Racketboy contacted several people involved with MiSTer asked them to contribute to an in-depth article he wrote about the MiSTer FPGA Multi-Platform Console. It’s very well done and offers exciting views of what lies ahead, the state of things now, and it also works as a great introduction to FPGA-based hardware emulation in contrast to […]

SmokeMonster

1942 Arcade FPGA MiSTer & MiST Cores by Jotego

Jose “Jotego” Tejada, who ported the Ghosts ‘n Goblins Arcade PCB to FPGA a few weeks back, just finished a 1942 Arcade core for MiSTer & MiST. Once again, he used the black box method to translate the arcade PCB into Verilog. Verilog & VHDL are hardware description languages, and are also the languages used […]