Lu

MiSTer FPGA updates – PSX Sound, Saturn updates, Zero Wing and more

Posted on by Lu

Hello everyone, below are this week’s MiSTer FPGA news.

Playstation Core Updates

A lot of progress has been made with the Playstation core. Earlier this week, the developer tweeted that he had 60% of the SPU implementation done and showed off some Metal Gear Solid cutscenes playing with full music, sound and speech. Then several days later he had the SPU feature complete! Two RAM sticks were required to get sound but Robert, the developer, said he will start to get it to work with one RAM stick.

Well, just a day after getting the SPU feature complete, he got sound working with one RAM stick. I’ve done some quick tests with two games. Return fire played sound effects but seemed to not play music. and a full motion video sequence was silent. I also tried the Resident Evil 2 demo disc and sound and music played just fine. These are early builds so I expect there to be issues. You can try out the build for yourself by heading to the MiSTer discord test build channel.

Sega Saturn Core Updates

srg320 has updated his MiSTer Saturn core. He’s made fixes to the SCSP, VDP1 and the SCU and also implemented more features to VDP2.

Atari 2600 Core Updates

The Atari 2600 core has been superseded. Don’t worry, you are still going to be able to get your Atari 2600 gaming fix, but from now on, you should be using the Atari 7800 core, which is fully compatible with the Atari 2600.

The 7800 core already has some quality of life improvements for 2600 games that are not in the 2600 core.
For example, some games with special mappers require to be named with specific file extensions. On the 7800 core, the mappers are automatically detected, therefore, all your Atari 2600 games can all have the same file extension.
All future updates regarding the 2600 console are to be done on the 7800 core so be sure to use that core if you want the latest 2600 updates.

New Standalone MSX1 Core

There is another MSX core being worked on that is dedicated to the MSX1. The current MSX core is a general core that supports the MSX1, MSX2 and MSX2 Plus. There are users who prefer a standalone core, so this new core should make those users happy. It’s still in development so right now you can only get it from the projects github.

New Tatung Einstein TC-01 Computer Core

A new computer core for the Tatung Einstein TC-01 computer is now available for MiSTer users. This was a UK computer released in 1984 that was aimed primarily at small businesses, but did have games developed for it.

WIP Zero Wing Arcade Core

A new core for the arcade game Zero Wing has been made publicly available. Darren, the developer, hasn’t had much time to work on it, so he decided to release it to the public, but you will need to obtain it from the projects github.

theypsilon MiSTer Downloader

MiSTer downloader is an alternate script that will update your cores to the latest versions. It offers some features not available in the standard update script. On this latest release, a stand out feature is filters. You can now specify what specific cores you want downloaded and ignore all other cores. This is great if you want to keep your MiSTer setup to only show the cores you care about.

Other MiSTer Updates

And finally, other cores that have had some fixes and updates are the Acorn Electron core, the Acorn Atom core and the Coco 2 core which has also added floppy support.