Thunder Force V Among Games Working With New MiSTer Core Update

The developer of the Saturn core for the MiSTer FPGA, Sergiy Dvodnenko — aka SRG320 — pushed out a new build yesterday to make improvements to a variety of games’ performances.

The update comes less than three weeks after the last update, a big one that added save game functionality.

His Patreon page listed all of the latest improvements:

• SCU:
  • -rework interrupt status bits reset
  • -correct Timer0 comparison, fix Timer1 sync mode (SimCity 2000)
  • -fix unaligned DMA write to BBUS (Contra)
• VDP1:
  • -fix CEF/BEF flag (Cyber Troopers,Thunder Force V)
  • -fix Color table load (NHL 98)
• VDP2:
  • -fix pattern read from incorrect VRAM bank (Sonic R)
  • -fix ODD bit for non-interlace mode (DoDonPachi)
  • -add Extended color calculation
  • -fix VRAM access timing
• SCSP: fix Loop control with maximum (64k) sample size (Defcon 5)
• SMCP: add support for Time optimization (INTBACK command) (Loaded)

The latest version of the core, which comes in two versions for one or two sticks of RAM, can be downloaded from the “unstable nightlies” channel on the MiSTer Discord server.

In that server, a person named AdventureTaco was excited to find Thunder Force V, which was called out in the patch notes, is playing on the MiSTer now.

“OMG THUNDERFORCE V IS WORKING! We got full visuals and sound now … Aside from some minor stutters the game runs great.”

— AdventureTaco

Another game mentioned in the patch notes, the shmup DoDonPachi, was tested out by a person in the Discord server named 230-V, who said, “DoDonPachi is running faster on this build, had a lot of slow down before IIRC.”

230-V also tried out Cyber Troopers Virtual-On, which the patch notes mention, and exclaimed, “Wow, Virtual-On working really well on dual ram!”

Others in the server found more games newly working or working better than before.

“Outrun is running extremely well,” Batty said. “60fps Outrun on MiSTer achieved.”

“Guardian Heroes is rock solid for me,” Kuba said. “Gameplay and music.”

“If [Castlevania: Symphony of the Night] wasn’t working for you before, try it now, it may work, as it did for me,” said Pixel Cherry Ninja, who tested a handful of games with the new build of the Saturn core in a YouTube video:

The core is still plagued by a problem that cropped up in the June update in which it’s looking for “boot.bin” instead of boot.rom. MiSTer owners still need to rename their boot.rom file to boot.bin to make the core work, although that still will throw up an error screen that reads “CD Bios not found.”

To save a Saturn game with the MiSTer, the memory card must be initialized. A member of the community, Vampier, detailed how to do that on his page dedicated to the Saturn core.

Dvodnenko continues to live behind Russian lines in Ukraine amidst the war there, making core updates — and communication — from him fairly infrequent.

He released to the public a playable build of the Saturn core for the first time in May last year, with a flurry of updates coming between late September and mid-November. A lull in updates after that was broken in mid-April this year, followed by another at the end of June and then two this month.

If you’re interested in supporting Dvodnenko, check out his Patreon.

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 an early form, the Saturn.