Lu

MiSTer FPGA News – Sharp X1, Jaguar CD, X68000, MiSTer Portable & More

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Sharp X1

A new Sharp X1 FPGA core is in developement by JasonA. Sharp X1 is a Japanese home computer released in 1988.

The plan is to first create a core for the first model of the X1, which is the CZ-800C. JasonA then plans to move on to the X1Turbo once this first version is working. At the moment, all parts are integrated but some parts still need more work. The core is still at the simulation stage so no MiSTer release has been compiled yet.

 

Sinden Lightgun Guide

If you are an owner of the Sinden Lightgun, you wil be glad to hear that the MiSTerFPGA officially supports the light gun. If you need a guide to get it up and running, you can check out Pixel Cherry Ninja’s guide on the Sinden put together by terminator2k2.

Recently MiSTer added support for several modern light guns that include the Sinden, Retroshooters and OpenFire guns.

Ranny Snice Wallpapers

Ranny Snice released more wallpapers for the MiSTer FPGA. There are wallpapers for:

  • Rolling Thunder
  • Gryzor which is what Contra was known as in some places outside the US
  • Capcom’s Magic Sword

You can obtain these wallpapers by enabling Ranny Snice wallpapers in the UpdateAll script.

 

QMTech Portable

QMTech showed off a MiSTerFPGA IO board meant for a handheld. It was inspired by the design created by “What’s Ken Making”. QMTech says that the IO board is almost ready, but the manufacturing plans will be delayed due to chip pricing reaching unreasonable rates.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2

The Coin-Op Collection team have released a core for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Turtles in Time, thanks to help from furrteks reverse engineering efforts.

The core supports all known variants of Turtles in Time and there is high score saving support.

Downloader Bin

MiSTerFPGA updates are getting even faster. After finding a CPU bottleneck in the interpreted Python script, theypsilon decided to compile downloader. That solved the CPU bottleneck and increased update speeds.

Right now, the compile binary is at the Release Candidate stage so it must be run manually. More testing needs to be done for a stable release.

 

Arcade Save States

An unstable build of MiSTer main now has save state support for arcade cores. This doesn’t mean that every core will all of a sudden have save states. A core still has to implement saves states for this option to work.

 

Rolling Thunder

Jotego has released a beta core for the Rolling Thunder arcade game. This is a popular run and gun shooter made by Namco and released in 1986. Since this is a beta it is only available to Patreon subscribers but as soon as the core is stable, it will be released to the public.

 

Other Jotego Updates

Jotego also implemented the following fixes to some current cores.

  • Fixed misaligned sprites and quiet SFX’s in Aliens
  • Fixed a crash on the end sequence of Bay Route
  • And Fixed some low music and sound effects in some s16b games

Work on the Sega System 18 and Namco Systen 86 cores also continues. There are some things that need to be done first, but Jotego is hoping to release a mix of games for these systems over the next few weeks.

 

Jaguar CD

There is a Jaguar CD core in development. Currently, the core requires a dual RAM setup, but efforts are being made to get it working for single RAM configurations. To get the core head over to the Atari Jaguar channel on the MiSTerFPGA discord.

 

MiSTer alternatives not shipping to the US?

I recently contacted Retroremake support due to some issues I’m having with their website. While looking into my issue they’ve told me that due to the tariff situation in the US, they have temporarily closed the sales window for the US.

I also checked to see the QMTech situation, and they are not shipping to my address in the US even though they show stock of their full MiSTer FPGA kit.

It looks like US customers will have to wait to get low cost MiSTer FPGA kits.

 

X68000

If you want an easy way to launch Sharp X68000 computer games, the team behind the Amigavision and the 0MHz DOS collection have released Neon68K, a similar project for the X68000.

You can get all the details on the MiSTer FPGA forum post.

 

Other MiSTer FPGA Updates

Other miscellaneous MiSTer fixes and updates are:

PCXT
– Fine adjustment of CRT vertical and horizontal offsets

In addition, the selected CGA mode (hres_mode) is taken into account internally so that the offset values do not have to be readjusted according to the mode displayed on the screen.

MacPlus
-Audio fix: when sound output is disabled, drive output high (darylrichards).
– Update keyboard scancodes.
– Updated framework.

Linux:
In addition to the Retro Shooter lightgun support, the Linux update addressess long standing USB issues. The release contains USB fix from Martin Donlon. Hopefully it will help those having issues with some USB devices. Release also contains tweaks to improve WiFi connectivity.

Zaparoo:
Zaparoo Core v2.3.0 is now available. It adds stable support for Batocera, revamps the playlist feature and adds heaps of smaller improvements.