Stephen Smith's Blog
Imagine you could have a small Single Board Computer (SBC) with programmable hardware that can be configured to run as any personal computer, gaming console or arcade machine created before 1990 or so? This is what the ambitious MiSTer project sets out to do and largely accomplished. The project is mainly driven by gaming enthusiasts who want more accurate game play than running in a software emulator, but these systems can run any software these PCs run. I first encountered MiSTer when I purchased a Sipeed Tang Primer 25K FPGA to play with creating RISC-V cores in System Verilog. However, one of the fun things the Tang Primer does, is run a ported version of both the MiSTer SNES and NES systems.
I then attended a session on MiSTer at LinuxFest Northwest and was completely blown away with how much MiSTer has accomplished. Scott Dowdle gave a great session and showed several MiSTer systems in action. He made everything look easy and I looked to set up a working MiSTer system of my own. However it is quite a DIY process. You can buy a complete system, but availability seems to be limited and they are quite expensive. This blog post covers the start of my MiSTer journey.
The official MiSTer FPGA board is the Terasic DE10-Nano Kit. There are ports of parts of the MiSTer system to other boards, but if you want to run everything this is the board to get. Scott Dowdle recommended buying this directly from Terasic, but being Canadian, this gave me a terrible exchange rate and expensive shipping. I found it better to buy from Digikey Canada where I got a much better deal all around, including free shipping via FedEx.
