I’m back with another of Hackerspace Gent’s NewLine conference talks, fresh from my weekend of indulgence drinking good Belgian food and beers while mingling with the hacker community there. This time it’s preview [Michael Smith] of the MiSTer project, a multi-emulator using an FPGA to swap implementations of everything from an old PDP minicomputer to an 80486SX PC.
At its heart is a development board containing an Intel Cyclone SoC/FPGA, to which a USB hub must be added, then a memory upgrade to run all but the simplest cores. Once the hardware has been taken care of, it almost seems like there aren’t any mainstream platforms for which there isn’t a kernel, because a quick overview of the MiSTer forum attests. We’re treated to seamless switching between the SNES and NED platforms, and even switching between different versions of SID chips while running a Commodore 64 demo.
There are many different paths to a decent emulator setup, whether they use hardware, software, or a combination of the two. It’s unlikely there will be one as versatile as this, and we suspect that as it evolves it will become a device under any gamer’s monitor or TV. It’s a step up from single-platform FPGA emulators, that’s for sure!
