After more than a year in development, a preliminary iteration of the Saturn core for the MiSTer FPGA was released over the weekend.
An alpha build was uploaded to the Unstable MiSTer GitHub on Sunday and can be compiled and tested now. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, check out the MiSTer FPGA Discord group and download the unstable MiSTer core in the #unstable-nightlies channel, and the Saturn core itself (either the single or dual SDRAM variants) in the Saturn Stuff thread within the #mister-core channel.
The full FAQ and instructions on how to do so can be read here.
As Shiro’s friends at Retro RGB reported earlier in the week, many games load and are playable but there are still many bugs to work out. The core even works with a single SDRAM chip, although two are recommended.
The core is being worked on by Sergey Dvodnenko, aka SRG320, despite being in Ukraine while a war rages there.
There’s no word on when more stable builds of the core may come — Dvodnenko’s last tweet was March 17, owing to spotty Internet access amid the fighting.
If you’re interested in supporting Dvodnenko, check out his Patreon here.
He posted his first video showing the progress he’d made in February 2021:
And his most recent video was posted in February of this year showing off Virtua Fighter, Duke Nukem 3D and other games:
To see how a few games look on the newly released alpha build, check out Shiro’s own TraynoCo’s walkthrough video at the top of this article.
The MiSTer is a field-programmable gate array, a chip that can be changed by programming it to physically emulate retro video game consoles. It includes an SD card reader from which cores and games can be loaded.
The cores are the programming that tells the FPGA chip how to configure itself to reproduce the performance of a console. There are cores for a wide array of consoles, from the Atari 2600 to the PlayStation — and now, at least in a preliminary form, the Saturn.
An Ultimate MiSTer PRO loaded with all the bells and whistles comes in at a hefty €449.90, which is about US$480, and can be bought from the Ultimate MiSTer site here. MiSTer units and accessories can be bought from MiSTer Addons, too.
Are you going to check out the core? Let us know what you think of it and which games you try out!
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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