The MARS team was talking about Dreamcast/Naomi/Atomis Wave/CPS 3 type systems to be released for the MARS unit. I am quite excited as some of my favorite games are in the dreamcast level of systems. I have 3 MiSTer systems set up in arcade cabinets and I would love the ability to play more modern systems in there. I also imagine that with enough time the current MiSTer cores will be ported over the the MARS platform. Also the concept front end looks quite nice.
Quite apart from what mister already does, the cores that are in development, or hinted at for later are keeping me hooked.
Consoles/Computers :
N64 - I have a real one, but the video output is horrible by modern standards without expensive/risky mods
Saturn - used to own one, wish I hadn't sold it, srg320 is doing a great job on this
Atari Jaguar - one day jotego will do this, and I don't think he'll struggle too much with it
X68000 - puu-san has been working on this forever, but has dropped it for FM-towns in the last year or so
FM Towns - just look at how much a real one costs
There's a lot more I'd wish for from the arcade cores though.
Arcade Wishlist :
Space Harrier/Hang-ons
Salamander
Operation wolf/thunderbolt
Enduro Racer
Sega System 24 - Hot Rod, Gain Ground, Bonanza Bros
Sega model 1 - virtua racing, Virtua Fighter, Star Wars Arcade - might be possible, just
Sega model 2 - Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally.... - might be possible, just
Sega ST-V - Virtua Fighter, Die Hard, Golden Axe : the duel.... - it's a saturn, with some bits moved about, riiiiight? ;-)
Hey I like that you were on camera for this video! I don’t recall you doing that in the past. I think you should keep doing that.
I hadn’t actually seen this new core work before your video on it, only read about it. I’m about to have my arcade cabinet’s CRT repaired partly because of this core. I can now see that it’s probably not something that I need to rush to get done since the core is still a work in progress (that’s not a swipe at it though).
I’m very interested in this system because of some nostalgia around Bonk’s Adventure and Altered Beast but how is this product sustainable? If it doesn’t work by running ROMs and requires original game disks/cartridges, how can you play these games? Are there enough of these old disks for this to be worthwhile for them to stake a business on this console, especially at $250/unit? Is someone producing new game disks that work on this? Can you make your own game disks?
Very valid questions. There are a lot of collectors out there with working games, but non-working systems. I would say they’re half of the target audience.
The other half of the audience seems to be the people who will buy it and hope that a jailbreak comes out allowing the loading of ROMs from external media. That’s been common on this company’s products for a while, though as I’ve never owned anything from them, I can’t say it’s always happened.
I have a MiSTer FPGA computer, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying PCE/TG16/CD/SG for a while in it now, but of course I don’t care about loading games from original media.
First, I think products like this are mainly geared towards the hardcore audience who already owns a lot of these physical games. A lot of those people are already spending a lot of money on things like mods, upscalers and CRTs, making HD-ready systems like this relatively reasonable price-wise. Retro gaming can be an expensive hobby if you start going down the rabbit hole of owning a bunch of real carts and physical gear to make them play as nicely as possible.
Second, and granted this is a bit iffy, a lot of these Analogue devices have un/official "jailbreak" patches that expand the possibility beyond just physical carts. (They don't really advertise this a lot, presumably for legal reasons...? I'm not totally sure.)
I have their FPGA SNES, the SuperNT, and I use it to play both the physical carts that I own as well as my collection of SNES roms via the jailbreak firmware. I also have an FPGA NES called the RetroUSB AVS that I have equipped with an everdrive. In both cases I did the math and found that buying these systems is still a more affordable alternative to getting into things like RGB modding authentic hardware and buying a HD upscaler to play on a modern TV.
Without a doubt, the best bang for buck in the FPGA realm is the MiSTer, which of course is still much more expensive than software emulation.
That just doesn’t seem like a big enough audience to me. If you need the ROMs and jailbreaking in order to be able to use this, why wouldn’t you just play with the ROMs on a normal PC?
I'm also not really in the market for this puppy, but I guess I'd prefer this one over the RetroTink 4k, If only because it's less expensive and open source.
If you plan on using dual SDRAM on MiSTer and want to connect to a CRT, you'll need to use Direct Video. The video guides you through the process and even shows you how to mod an SOG circuit which is required for component.
Neat, for sure. Hope something good comes from this. Though have worries about fragmentation of effort. It kinda feels like mister still isn’t quite 100% even for the cores it has today. Hopefully, that effort can be unified a bit, at least.
Also, with 4k scalers coming in around 1k, and now this at hoping for $700… it’s all getting a bit rich for my hobby budget.
That's an expected $700 right now. How often are those estimates not realized by the time production begins? I wouldn't be surprised to see a launch price over $700.
Though have worries about fragmentation of effort.
This is a common concern around open source communities, but I feel like it's rarely a big problem in my experience. As long as there are people with MiSTer setups there will almost certainly be some group of people developing for that platform and pushing it as far as they can.
Since the MiSTer is already pretty popular and relatively affordable, I think it'll continue to be the main focus on developers' time even after the MARS comes out.
Also, with 4k scalers coming in around 1k, and now this at hoping for $700… it’s all getting a bit rich for my hobby budget.
Yeah... $700 is a pretty big hit... but then again it's always been pretty easy to blow a grand on the retro gaming hobby. I'm honestly not sure whether I'll be able to justify buying one unless it really goes way beyond the MiSTer.
All in all, I think this thing sounds pretty cool and I'm excited to see a potential path forward beyond the DE-10 nano.
Yeahm current MiSTer setups are still viable. You can do a lot with them. For MARSFPGA, I'm more interested on what kind of PC implementations it can do and if it can handle high-end 486 or Pentium CPUs.
This is a common concern around open source communities, but I feel like it’s rarely a big problem in my experience. As long as there are people with MiSTer setups there will almost certainly be some group of people developing for that platform and pushing it as far as they can.
Since the MiSTer is already pretty popular and relatively affordable, I think it’ll continue to be the main focus on developers’ time even after the MARS comes out.
hmmm i gotta disagree. I’ve been working in and around open source stuff for a stupid long time, 15 years? 20? too long.
Development effort goes not towards where the users are, but towards where developers have interest. this is always true unless a third party is sponsoring to push development in a specific direction.
Development effort is going to go towards the platform where developers are interested. Maybe developers will be interested in the less powerful platform where you have to squeeze every LE to make cores fit, and don’t have a unified large set of memory. Probably not is my guess.
So what we have is will people bother porting mars cores and enhancements to mister? we have a pretty good /analog/ in the analogue pocket to look at. that got a bunch of cores ported from mister to it, but those cores haven’t really been updated much these days and new cores have mostly dried up outside of patreon things.
This isn’t terrible, everything is succeeded some day, But I mentioned that mister does not feel like it’s 100% finished yet for the cores it does support (outside of a few) so it feels a little sad.
So it's got a open source software stack and it seems like they want MARS to operate as kind of a spiritual successor to the MiSTer, which all sounds great to me.
I guess the big question is how much of a market will there be for a $700 MiSTer-like console?
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