Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 261: The MiSTer Revolution

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Jeremy speaks to retrogaming curators Artemio and SmokeMonster about their efforts to help preserve and improve the state of classic gaming through projects like MDFourier and MiSTer.

Hey, everyone, this is Jeremy. That's another episode of Retronauts. Jeremy Parrish, that is, not some other Jeremy, that you may have me mistaken for. And I am at a plucky little convention in Cincinnati called Retro Create, and I'm talking to different people who create things for retro gaming. See, it all works out. But yeah, I'm just going to be at this event talking to a few folks about kind of their role in the classic gaming community and the work that they do to help preserve games and to help make people able to better play games, have better experiences. So first of all, we have Artemio. Actually, I don't know your full

name. Would you care to introduce yourself and tell the world what you do? Yes, it's a pleasure to be here, Jeremy. Thank you very much. Oh, thanks for being on the show. It's, well, my name is Artemirvina. I'm from Mexico. I've been into games all my life, as probably all of you. And, well, recently I've been working on the 240P test suite, as you mentioned. I've been involved in Arcade preservation to some degree with the working as a part of the dumping union to dump some ROMs for Maine and document that and measure things on PCBs. And also recently a project called MD Fourier that's intended for audio preservation. Okay. So let's start for the beginning and I'm curious to know how you kind of got involved in all of this in the first place. Have you

been gaming, you said you've been gaming for a very long time. But at what point did you kind of the jump from being a fan of video games to someone who has more of a hands-on role in, you know, programming things or designing things that can be used to supplement the gaming experience? Well, when I grew up, we didn't have as much money to buy every single game, or every console, for that matter. I jump from Atari, $2,600 to Seventh Genesis. Of course, I played at the arcades or, or, you know, NASA trends houses, but I got programmable calculators, and I tried mimicking games in those. So that's kind of the technical part of the start. I kind of understand the world by measuring it or by disassembling things, right? So that approach took me to try and figure out how things worked. And in particular, for tools that are useful for somebody else, I simply wanted to create tools for myself and share them. Okay. So you mentioned programming on calculators. What kind of

games did you try to program on calculators? I tried to program a fancy star, ultra beast, that kind of thing that I saw as a Genesis preview. Of course, they were completely limited because what I did was they were Cassio calculators. So they had catacana in them. So I use those as rogue characters like the O was a person. kind of thing. Okay. I mean, that makes sense. You see a lot of that now with like, you know, online with Japanese, not, it's not emoji, but

you know, it's like it's, it's not asky because they don't use ASCII, but yeah, using Kana characters and kanji, but especially Kana as like illustrations. So you're kind of ahead of the curve. Well, I'm sure they were doing that as well. Right. But that's just,

I found, I was walking in a mall, and in Mexico, and I found a cell the two manual in the floor. I didn't have access to the game, but that prompt me. I use the Omega to present a nocturac, that kind of thing. Okay. Interesting. So, you know, how would you describe the outcome of these games? Do you think they were pretty satisfying despite the limitations? The actual limitation of games was not that good. Not at all. But the things that did work were like horse races and that kind of thing. They were popular among my peers because they

used to play that while they were in class but that doesn't mean they were good they were just something else to do instead of paying attention right but you know I think back to gaming especially handheld type gaming in those days I mean if you're talking about

doing things when you know Sega Genesis was first being previewed that's like contemporary with the launch of Game Boy so I think you know expectations for handheld games were pretty low and just the novelty of being able to do something and have any kind of game that you know was just you know that you could carry in your pocket was still like that was pretty

profound at the time yeah it had an impact yes yeah so I wouldn't I wouldn't discount the work that you did there but beyond that like you know beyond Sega Genesis uh what was kind of your path into to I guess into gaming and getting involved in the maim community well I I jumped from the Genesis to PlayStation, then to PlayStation 2, and that's the time frame I could just, like, work and buy my own stuff. And later on, my brother bought an arcade cabinet for his wedding. Okay? So he wanted it to be there in case people just didn't want to drink or dance. So it was an option for a separate group.

And that got me, I was always afraid to go into arcade hardware, right? Okay, okay. So you have to tell me what the arcade game was. What was the cabinet? It was a generic cabinet. It was a Tekken kind of, like looking cabinet, but it had Street Fighter Alpha Tree. Okay. An original CPS2 board.

Nice. So that got me into trying to figure out how they died. These boards were like, have the suicide keys and are famous for dying. So I tried to learn as much as I could to salvage that game. And, well, that ended up in me helping out in the project to, to the suicide the boards. Yeah, so just so people, I think, have a better understanding

of what we mean. I don't think it's super common knowledge that, what the suicide boards were. But if I understand correctly, Capcom's CPS2 arcade boards specifically that ran a lot of their best games in the kind of early to mid-90s,

they had some sort of volatile memory inside of them that had a battery backup. And if you tried to basically access the memory, to copy it, you'd have to unplug it from the battery and it would just erase the memory, right? So like the contents of the game would die. But the problem is that eventually batteries are going to die no matter what. So there is like this limited lifespan for these cartridges. And I do think that game backup batteries tend to last longer than expected. I mean, people still

have, you know, Zelda batteries that they still work after 35 years. But you can't really count on that. So there is kind of this race against time factor that was informing your work. Did I get the details there right? You got everything right. It's a, it's a, as RAM inside one, inside the CPU, just to, I don't dig into that, but it's, it has like the password for the ROMs of the game inside the CPU. Okay. So it's not the, all the data. It's just that it's encrypted. That's right. Okay. So it's encrypted and uses the, the keys to decrypt the, the, the game on real time. So if you lose those, it won't run, right? But the other issue, the present, the really present issue is that it uses lithium batteries. And those tend to leak.

Lithium is very reactive. So it basically destroys the PCV if it leaks. That's the biggest issue. Okay. So it's not even the battery dying. It's the battery killing everything around it. That's right. But why did they take such drastic measures? Was it because Street Fighter 2 was so heavily pirated? You are completely right. That's the case. So they just basically went all in and overreacted. That's right. But go ahead. No, no.

I wasn't going to say that they even overreacted a bit more with CPS3. Oh, yeah? Yeah, because it's a cartridge with the kind of same kind of protection, but it's just a CH2 processor. However, it's way more sensitive and it kind of dies way easier. Hmm. Okay. So, you know, I realize that they were just protecting their own. basically their own property, their intellectual property.

And they weren't thinking long term. I guess they weren't thinking like, hey, what happens when someone buys this from us and 10 years from now, their game doesn't work because, like, you know, there's meant to be a limited life to these things. It is. But however, they still revive things for you for a fee up until 2009. Okay. So they kept that service until it made sense.

Right. Right. Because up to the time that they lost equipment, that they used. used to revive these boards, or maybe when the person that did this work, stop working there, they simply kill the service. Got it. So then your, I guess, not role, but your project has been to help dump these games, preserve them. Or have you worked beyond that to, like, figure out ways to combat the battery and make people's boards?

I was part of a team, Eduardo Cruz from Spain, made some incredible job to he decap the chip. and took pictures that means scraping off the surface of the chip with acid or just polishing the appa and then dissolving everything and taking pictures with a microscope and figuring out how the silicon works

and I help with the software part and testing on that but the idea is to reinsert the keys the same way that Capcom did so basically restore them to factory settings that's part of the work that I did

I helped do on that. So once you kind of, I don't know, what was the project there exactly? Was it just figuring out what the encryption key was? Mame had already that data, and that was on top of work by several very talented people over the across the years that figured out how it was encrypted, how it was how to get the keys and how to run the code. That was already done. The thing is, how do you, on a physical board, get,

And what's the protocol, the chip uses, so that you can just knock into it, send the data, store it, place a new battery, and you have it back to stock. Okay. So, in effect, like, once you modify a board, is that what you're doing? You don't have to worry about the memory being lost? Well, yes, you have. The goal of our project was to restore the keys. Okay. But it was improved upon by the community.

Once we release it, we release it as open source. everything was out there for everyone to use. However, the thing is, we use an Arduino to restore the keys, okay? And the thing is that Arduino's got cheaper and smaller. So right now you can just buy an Arduino and place it inside of the CPS2 board, and every time it puts up, it restores the keys. Okay. Instead of using the battery.

Right. So it's basically the same project, but miniaturized. There's even a product by somebody else, but on Demp, he's a very talented individual, that created an infinity key. It's a product that you're soldering to the board, and it revives your board every time it puts. And no more battery and no more worries about that. So that's great for people who are specifically arcade board collectors. That's it.

They don't have to worry about CPS2 boards are not cheap. Like great retro games that you would want to own the original board of. At this point, none of those come cheaply. So it's an investment. So basically it's people protecting their investment. Yes. And in a way, preservation for the future, because it's easier to keep this working with just an inside instead of a bump made of lithium, right?

So have you guys cracked CPS3 yet, or is that still? I've not worked on anything regarding that, and I'm not certain somebody else is, but I'm sure there are some attempts. However, they found a solution that you desolder the old CPU, solder and a saturn chip in there, the SH2, because it's a processor. Okay, yeah, S. H2, yeah. And they decrypt stuff, desoldered the rums, solder the decrypted stuff

and run everything, but it's not stuck. But it seems to be a compromise for the community. So you don't leave the Saturn chip in there, right? You do take, you do leave it. Yeah. Okay. So you have to sacrifice a Sega Saturn for that.

That's not a cheap solution. No, those aren't cheap anymore either. No, and CPS3 is even more expensive. So it's not a good solution. We need to find a solution to just plug the cartridge somewhere restore the keys and have it drawn. I have confidence that the community will figure this out eventually.

I feel like you put enough smart people together with the goal. They will eventually crack it. I hope so. So what projects have you moved on to beyond that? Was that your first kind of big project that you worked on? It kind of happened in the background because I got this board. I felt like I had a time bomb in my hands. And that progressively through the years, I came back to that.

and joined and retired from several projects and eventually came to that in like 10 years. But I worked on other stuff in the meantime. Since I started collecting arcade PCBs back then, I joined the dumping union and started like, well, recording whatever. Because, you know, as a collector, it's something that most collectors don't understand that the only way to repair their pieces in their collection is to have them documented. it's in their own interest to go out there and dump their stuff because if it gets damaged the only way to restart it is by Maine you know because or the new mystery project because you can't find documentation how these boards work and how to be repaired if you don't have the data from the ROM PROM GAL chips and you can simply repair it so that kind of made sense

to me I started documenting my stuff I started finding a lot of out of a Hispanic, that's the name Capcom gave to the Latin American and Spanish versions. I started finding them, dumping them, documenting them, and that's what I mainly did. I found also that many PCBs were assumed to be like two Redudes. It was assumed that the graphic ROMs were the same across versions. But you go over it again, you dump it, and you figure out that it wasn't. It's different. It works with the original Japanese run.

but the graphics were different the American version because nobody had bothered to check that the work was right and we need to do that a lot right you need to go and read up the stuff and check verify yes it matches

it's not a new version right so it seems like a pretty involved and arduous process it is it's tedious yes but the good part of it is that in case it gets damaged you can restore it

Have you done work directly with MAME, like contributed to the MAME source or anything like that? Basically, measurements, dumps, and reporting box, or just working with the developers. I've not committed code to MAME directly, just documentation around MAME. But that's valuable, too. I mean, I guess people are something to work off of. Yeah. So, yeah, MAME has really come a long way over the past 22. 23 years. Oh, yes. I mean, I remember when it was just a little baby program that could run a few

arcade games, and now it's, yeah, like, it's a real testament to the value of open source software, because so many people have contributed, uh, modules to it and knowledge and information. It's really, uh, just an impressive piece of work. And it's always surprising that there's still so much more to be done with it. Yes. There's so much information that still needs to be plugged in. You know, people only see MAME as the product, as something to run the ROMs off. But if you go into the source code, there's so much information about each PCB on every one of those text files, you'll find how it's laid out, cheats, debug modes, how to repair

them, how video works. And we're not even close because video is mostly high-level emulated. That means they don't go into the details. They just get the digital data and push that using the data. the computer as a better way, right? But it tries to document as much as possible. So you're kind of talking about the difference between emulation and something like the mister, where, like, Mame is really just trying to present the game as opposed to

trying to reproduce the actual workings of the arcade boards. In reality, Mame tries to do the same thing. The problem is that there's not enough power, knowledge, or documentation to do it. If Maine have the information, Maine would try to do the same thing. As a matter of fact, they both have the same kind of goal that reproduces the thing as faithful as possible. And playing the game is just a side effect. But simply, it isn't as viable in software to do all the low-level emulation. And Mr. Even Mr. has different approaches by different developers.

There are developers that just go for perfection, right? They take the PCB, they document every single TTL in there, every single gate, and try to transplant that. And there are those that do an excellent amount of work creating, you know, MAME is a block-driven machine. You have like the CPUs in one part, you have video chips, you have ROMs in one part, and you kind of, kind of, assemble some PCB out of those parts like they did back in the day. They bought off-the-shelf components, made some customs, and glued them together. And maim is kind of the same way. And in that sense, it helps mystery in a way, because they can view that as a map of what to do and correct things back to maim that, no, it doesn't work that way, right? Yeah, I was going to say,

I feel like the knowledge that's been gleaned through maim and has been contributed to, to the source documentation that you were talking about is really invaluable for something like Mr. Because that's an attempt to actually simulate how the machine worked as opposed to emulating the game. Which I realize that's a really hard distinction to make if you're not technical. And I can't really put it into words myself. But I understand in abstract terms that there is a difference.

There is a difference. And those differences are noticeable in small details. Like if you're output into a CRT, you probably notice some things, right? Or the frame rate kind of things. But there are different approaches, and what you mentioned is completely true. That's the way it works. It's a difficult distinction to make, but it's important in terms of preservation and documentation. If you want to repair a PCB, a good enough approach is useless.

You need to know how it works in order to do. repair that. And, well, there are guys like Hotego or Ace that go through the PCB and find mistakes in the schematics, mistakes in maim, and then they can tell. That's, that's kind of an interesting point, because if you go by what we've done, you have to revisit it and you have to document everything again. Yeah, so it actually might be good to sort of explain what Mr. Eden is, because it's a really kind of a big deal. And it's not something we've really talked about on Retronauts. I'm really hoping to get a chance to get Smoke Monster in here to talk about Mr.

Because he can really give the rundown on it. But even beyond that, it's one of those things that I keep meaning to address on Retronauts and never do. But it's a really fascinating project, and it's evolving rapidly. It reminds me of the early days of maim in a lot of ways. It is. And it's a very interesting parallel project. Also, the developers are very enthusiastic, and, you know, I made this other program that's called Endifuria that's intended to, you digitize two audio signals from a target console, and it can contrast them and tell you where the differences are. Okay?

So the idea behind that was to figure out if two genesis were the same or two demographics or wherever, or if emulation was correct or incorrect and how to fix it, how to improve it. The idea was to give that, and that's been used on mystery. Yeah, yeah. I've talked to some people a little bit who have explained what Mdiforia is about to me, but it really kind of seems, did it come out of the Genesis specifically? I made it first for the Genesis, yes. Yeah, because the Genesis did specifically have, what, three or four different audio chips or different audio builds to it?

Yeah, it was a perfect platform to start with because it was complicated. It has the FM chip, the Yamaha, 2612. has the PSG that's from the master system, and then you have the PCM chip from the Sega CD and the Sega CD audio. You have four sources, and it's complicated to mix them correctly. They have different filters. But even the stock hardware had different Yamaha synthesizers, didn't it? Yeah. So the FM chip would differ depending on when the system was made. You are completely right. And also the amplifier and architecture of the audio circuit is different. Okay.

So audio changes. And part of the idea was to document how those changes affect the sound if they exist, if they are relevant. And maybe how could you match a model two to sound like a model one? Is it possible? So how many different possible permutations of Sega Genesis sound are there? Have you calculated that? We don't have a big enough database yet. We have like 100, 155 maybe recordings.

but what we found is that they're pretty consistent. I mean, maybe we can tell what version a Genesis is just by an MD-4-A recording. It's almost just, we can do that, but I want to assure it, right? But we figured out that model one and model two, well, version version one and version two of model one, they have some box in the design, so it kind of distorts. and that would be one kind of value. Then you have B.A.3 to B.A.6, that they are consistent. They have small differences, but they are pretty consistent.

And then you have the model twos, and there are like three or four variations there because they use a different chip. They went back to the original chip. And then you have the model trees, CDX, WonderMegas also makes a different. Mega Jet? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The nomad also has a very different. sound and hardware. So mixes are different. Levels are different. The mix between PSG and FM is

different. And the curves will follow too. Yeah, I feel like that must be maddening for anyone trying to emulate Siggenesis or even do, you know, like the Mr. Core for it. Because what do you target? That's very interesting question. And the idea has been, let's target two or three models that are representative. But the whole thing here is that now you can target any and have it just match by digital filtering after you emulate. That would be a good approach. And Mr. is taking that approach.

They've made impressive work with filters. And right now, Mr. matches a real BA3 up to, I don't know, 97, 99%. It's really, real close. You can tell from an MD Fourier graph right now.

If it's a real or a scientific version. You can't tell? Yeah. Oh, wow. From the graphs. Right. Yeah, just really close.

Well, there's like that gapaway, the noise floor. It's too clean. Right. I mean? So there's not enough, there's not static coming through because it's not an analog circuit. That's right. Right. Okay.

But other than that, it's pretty accurate. Yes, it is. So has any of this, you know, the work you've done with MDphoria, has that made it into other projects besides Mr. Like analog is mega SG, because that's not an open source project, are they allowed to use the information you? come up with? Yes. Everything I do is open source and the data is public. Right. So open source is public. It's Creative Commons where they'd have to share it back with the community, right? Yeah. I do it by GPL. So yes. If they contribute it to the code, they have to, but they don't need to go there. They just need the data. And the data is free. So yes, they could use it. Okay. So that's great

for anyone who wants to do their own Genesis projects. And I know it's definitely been like is a point of contention anytime a sort of Genesis cloned device comes out. I mean, you look at some of those at games systems. It was just like terrible. It's absolutely awful. It's another thing. It's not the Genesis. But yeah, like, you know, with MegaSG and with the Sega Genesis Mini, both, like, I know a lot of people were really concerned about the audio quality and the accuracy. And I don't know Genesis well. enough to be able to say, like, oh, yeah, this is spot on. And there's so many different variants of Genesis sound. Like, yeah, it's just kind of a headache. I'm reluctant to weigh

in on any kind of Genesis sound to say, like, this is it. This is accurate because I, it's, it's beyond me. So it's, it's awesome that this exists where it can say, you know, like, well, no, check the graph. It's right on. Yeah, that's, that's the whole idea. And now you can tell many things about that. Regarding the, the analog, it's, it's, it's close but it didn't match and it doesn't match right now because we discovered that frame rate affects sound but in terms of uh not not because it's it's physical problem okay it's it's and with physical i mean physics right it's because if you uh linger the note it changes the timber eventually okay so that was something because because we discovered that i i hold it back the

PC engine version that I released just this week because I wasn't sure if it was my math or if it was a real issue, because Palm Mega Drives didn't match an American Second Genesis. But if we substitute the crystal and do the region map, they do match.

But they don't match if either of those is not matched. Okay. It's interesting. Honestly, you've kind of lost you with this. No, it's fine. It's just, it's extremely technical. But to me, it's interesting to talk about this, even if I don't entirely grasp it because it does really get to the heart of what makes

emulation and preservation so difficult. Because eventually these original consoles, they're going to die, no matter how many times you recap them. You know, it's just, it's going to happen. So there has to be a way to reproduce them as accurately as possible. And that's not possible without, you know, tools like the ones you're creating. So, you know, it's super valuable. And it gives people a better understanding of, you know,

what they're trying to do, Yeah, thank you. That's the whole idea. And well, when you try to replicate them, you need as much data as possible. And that's something that we didn't have access to. I mainly did this to understand because I had the same doubts that you mentioned. I didn't touch on saying, having an opinion on how a genesis should sound. It was my own way to deal with that. Now it creates something that creates subjective measures that I can. just present. And people that really know about audio could just use those to tweak the stuff. You know, when people kind of have to commit to creating or simulator or reproducing Genesis sound, at some point, they just have to say, like, this version is going to be it. So like when data disks does LP releases of Sega Genesis soundtracks, they basically come up with like their capture solution, which involves real hardware in some capacity or like real boards. I don't know exactly what it is it's proprietary they don't talk about it but basically they're like

this is it like it's this combination of things and you know we worked with yuzokoshiro and he said this this is the sound that i wanted so to them that's good enough and you know it is kind of hard not to you know look at someone who was composing for the system and saying this is what i was after like if they say that's good enough that that's good enough i completely agree but the idea again it's still the the question is like you know how do you nail that down The idea here, and that's part of what I say in the documentation for the project, is the intention is not to discredit anyone. It's to give variety. And the point, that's why it's a tool that compares two versions and you give one as reference, because you choose your own reference.

You get to the side. You can say that the original Genesis audio appears version one, even if it distorts, because that's canonical, right? Or you could argue that the latest revision of a Genesis is canonical because they revised it. Right? So instead of sticking with one in particular, the tool gives you the power to compare whatever you want. And also you can contrast equipment or cables like this console that we're using. You could record the Genesis through it and without it and run those comparisons between MD-Fria and it will tell you how the console affects the audio. Or a cable, right? That's part of the extra functions that the MD-Fria has. So kind of an amazing suite. Is that something that is available for people to use freely or just data? That's it. It's completely free. And it's part of the 240P test suite right now.

Integrated into the Genesis and PC engine versions, I plan to move on to SuperNAS and elsewhere. So let's talk about the 240P test suite because it's much bigger than just the audio tools. I haven't used it myself, but I hear it talked about a lot. and maybe it's something I should make use of, especially once you start doing like NES and Super NES. But what is the 240P test suite exactly? Well, it's a complete random arranged, randomly arranged because I grabbed whatever I think

or the community tells me that they would need to evaluate either the console or emulator or monitors. It's a set of patterns. Okay, that's what it is, and you can use it for several things. One of them is you got an upscaler or a capture card, and you want to configure it so that colors, geometry are correct. Okay, that could be one of use. Or you want to configure your PBM,

or you want to evaluate if an emulator is putting out the same analog signal. As a matter of fact, the suite has been used by Risha to check if mystery is doing the same analog output as an original console. So if you got that reference pattern, you recreate it with the synthetic reconstruction of the console, and you can tell if they give the same output. They should, right? That's the idea. So is it just like an eyeball test?

Like you look at it and say, this looks right, this looks wrong? Or do you have to put them side by side? What's the methodology here? There are several. Okay. As a matter of fact, they have every single part of the suite has like a help file. You press start in that test, and it shows you some text. And there's a wiki that explains each one of them.

Some are intended for eyeballing because it's intended to be practical for any user, like grid. A grid is just an array of squares, right? And you can just take that to a punch-up and evaluate the monitors and check if, well, straight lines or straight lines, right, right? Or circles or circles. That kind of thing helps in that scenario. but also there are color patterns that you could use professional equipment if you wanted to

or color films if you want to match them or temperatures it has a wide range of tests in that matter what were some of the tests that were included in the 240P test pattern and were there any that were particularly challenging to implement well it's a matter of learning if i had the knowledge that i have now none of them would have have been difficult, right? That's a matter of learning. But the challenging part was feeding everything into memory with some constraints. Not exactly doing the tests.

It was measuring stuff because I tried to match TV broadcast standards to a console that was using those standards, but they were not complying. So the color bars from a Genesis won't match a TV broadcast pattern. Right, right. Neither is this or any other, because levels are kind of different. So it was a balancing act. I had to learn some things, but equipment, oscilloscopes, TV equipment. I had some background experience on that, but I didn't have the equipment myself.

So it was like putting it out and being held responsible for saying that those patterns are correct. So it was more like validating my own work than challenging the particular implementation. Right. Okay. So do you have future plans for the 240 piece test suite? I mean, I noticed that you, you mentioned super NES and so forth, but like you've got a physical version here that's been pressed. So it seems like that's kind of saying this is feature complete at this point for a PC engine. Well, that particular version is not feature complete because I published a new version on Tuesday. Okay. But it always gets updated. It's kind of a, you can't close La Poreocles. like this when something comes up like somebody tells me we should do this test and it makes sense. It would

help people then we simply add that. But adding it to one console right now it supports well I have versions for Dreamcast Genesis, Sega CD PC Engine, PC Engine CD, both versions. SuperNess and

what else I've made? GameCube Wee. And there have been ports by other talent people like Ness and Game Boy. So every single time a feature crawls in, I have to update every single one of those, if it makes sense, to backport it, right? So right now I'm in the middle of getting Md4EA on every single one of those platforms. So that's a lot of work.

Yeah. Because I have to understand the other hardware, check out what the response is for every one of the scenes and create a test and then the analysis tool. So if someone is listening to this, and they're not familiar with 240P test pattern or test suite and MD4A, like, how would you explain to those people, like, what the value of these is? Like, why should they be interested in it? What use does it have for them?

Well, the easiest path or the most simple path of using it is it would help you get the most out of your equipment. If that's something that interests you, then this is for you. I don't recommend it using it like in an OCD manner because you won't get the perfect settings ever, right? That's not the spirit of this. It's to elevate and try to improve, learn, right? So if you want to capture from real hardware and want to know if your capture equipment is set to digitize every pixel correctly or the colors, then you should use this. or if you want to calibrate your TB or your PBM,

this will help you. Or just improve the geometry so that circles are circles, blue is blue. That's the kind of thing that it helps with. Got it. So if someone wants to check out the work that you've done, where can they go online to find that? Oh, Junker HQ. Junker HQ, okay. You probably know this.

Yes, I do. Absolutely. There's lots of great information there. Were you the one who put together the information on a framemeister for that site? I host the wiki. Okay. But no, I didn't put everything.

I started the wiki. But it's a wiki, right? So I invited people and they create everything around it. So yes, that's it. And the Polisnell translation project, that's the same site. Okay, I didn't put two and two together. But yeah, I've made a lot of use of your work over the past few years. You know, trying to get things working for my setup.

And it's been a great, great help. So, yeah, anyone who is really interested in getting the most other classic systems and getting them running on, you know, vintage TVs or finding ways to make them run on contemporary TVs and just, you know, maximizing their classic gaming, classic console experience, like Junker HQ is a great, great resource. Thanks. So, Artemio, besides Junker HQ, where can people find? you online if they want to follow your work. Twitter, Artemio. Okay.

That's... You want to spell that out just to make it easy? Yeah, it's A-R-T-E-M-I-O. Okay. I mix tweets in between English and Spanish. Well, you know, they've got the translate tweet function now, so... Yeah. There's no excuses.

Everyone can follow. Or polisnots. Polisnots.net. Everything links everywhere there to. When we did translation, I placed that link to as well. Do you have a YouTube channel? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

It's linked from the Twitter account, so you search for... for that same name, and it will appear in YouTube. It's in Spanish. I try to create content in Spanish because they're so little. So I try to stay that way. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for stopping by the podcast.

And thanks for all the great work that you do to help make classic game better. Oh, thank you. I'm a big fan of your work. And thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Well, let's go talk to some more people.

Yeah. Do you know, do it, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Do, do, do, do, do. I'm going to be able to be. So for my second segment here at Retrocreate, I am talking to the one and only Smoke Monster. Yeah, hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, do you just go by Smoke Monster online? No, you can call me Mike.

Okay, Mike. Yeah. That's a little easier. I have very distinct associations with the term Smoke Monster, which I'm sure is where you got the name from. Too much lost? I did, yeah. Okay. How did you end up picking that name for yourself?

I was watching Lost when I just registered on some forum. I think there's no big story behind it. I like the Smoke Monster a lot on Lost. And yeah, it's like my first couple choices, I think were taken already. Sure. So I was Smoke Monster. And then, you know, that becomes your like forever name. Yeah, yeah.

No, I understand. I picked the name Toasty Frog as a joke and people still call me that 20 years later. Oh, no. So you have the same problem I do where everybody thinks that you're like making a reference to smoking or something probably. Oh, yeah, no. it was before, I think anyone ever used the term Toasty to talk about getting okay. Yeah. This was the 90s. It was in more innocent time. Even Bill Clinton did not inhale, at least not that you could improve. Yeah. Yeah, I don't. That's the fun. That's the disappointing part for some people.

Yeah, my advice is gin. Yeah, I got some good recommendations from you. Yes, absolutely. I'm always happy to offer advice on the finest of liquors, the most noble of liquors. Very nice. Anyway, so yeah, I just have been. wanting to get you on the show for a long time because you've done some really great sort of archival, you know, organizational work that's been invaluable to the retro gaming community. And these days you're especially involved with or, you know, kind of hands on with the Mr. Project. I don't know that you actually necessarily create, contribute, cores or anything to it, but you're very much an advocate for the Mr. Project. And it's something that we really just need to get more information about on the show because it's such a great

concept and it's it's something that i think is going to be really really you know super important going forward yeah well thank you i'm honored to be introduced that way but yeah i'm just a guy who was interested in kind of the nitty gritty parts of things that other people weren't in it into at the time so i got my start making these packs and like my contribution to mr besides like hype is uh i do like i came up using my same ever dry pack scripts which if you don't know they like it's an open source project to basically define ROM, to identify ROMs, and to sort them into folders into structures that make sense for like a SD card for a flash card.

Well, that's very complex. Well, on top of that, you've also kind of winnowed out the garbage, right? Because, you know, you look at like an NES ROM and there's going to be, you know, Rev A, Rev B, Rev C, U.S., N.EU. Yeah, I have a whole, yeah, I have a whole system for dealing with everything to where it doesn't, it's still there, but it's not going to like, it's not going to, like, it's not going to get in your way, basically. Because if you were to just go out and, like, download some pack of 10 billion ROMs and put them on your flash cart, then you've got just one huge list of stuff

to sort through. Yeah, I think anyone who's used in EverDrive or a other sort of flash solution has kind of come across that where they're like, you know, I've got this massive directory and it's actually 20 games, but I have 200 files in here. Yeah. And so my, in Mr. I make a pack like that for Mr. basically, which helped out to, because Mr. can be, it can either be very complicated and difficult, or it can be very simple, depending on whose advice you take on how to set it up. But my pack makes it very simple to where, like, I can explain in three sentences how to set up a Mr. in about 10 minutes to have every single core set up perfectly with every ROM. So that was my kind of contribution was to step in and do the, handle the folder

structures and things like that. Right. And then I worked with Locudis 73, who makes the updater script. He tailored it to my file structure. And then I tailored my file structure to his updater. So we worked back and forth. And he came up with this thing now where, like, if you had jumped into Mr. a year and a half ago, keeping everything up to date, it was very difficult. Nowadays, it's just you go in and click a button in the menu. And everything is automatic. You know, like it connects to GitHub, downloads all of the updated core. puts them where they need to go.

And so it's actually very simple, especially for probably the people who are listening to this podcast, who are more technical. It's like a walk in the park. For your general audience, people, it's still nothing at all

like an analog kind of plug-in-play device. Right. Yeah, I don't know how technical the audience is. Speaking for myself as the host of this show, I am not very technical. Like, to me, Mr. is pretty... But, I mean, what I'm saying is,

you don't have to be super technical. Like, maybe in the early days of Mr., it actually did have to be fairly up to... Like, it took me a lot of... time to even get a handle of how it worked in the early days. Whereas now, it's just very, to considering the complexity of what you're doing, it's very simple to stop. Yeah, so actually, why don't we talk a little bit about what Mr. is?

I've discussed it a little bit on the show, including in our previous segment with Artemio, but I really feel like we haven't done it justice to explain just, you know, what it is, how it is, how it is, how much of that you can actually speak to. Yeah, I can give the full, I'll give the full general. rundown of what it is. Let's do it. So, but I'll start from a different angle than what most people would do. I'll describe what the difference is between the way that Mr. works and the way that a traditional emulator works.

So Mr. is FPGA-based, which is a new term you might have heard, analog products or FPGA-based. And FPGA-based emulation is hard. We call it hardware-based emulation as opposed to, let's say, running maim or something on your computer that's software-based, where there's another layer in between you and the emulator, the operating system and things like that. The way then FPGA works is it's a completely different type of processor that's made up of an array of gates that you can program just basically to work as logic the same way as

an actual PCB. So FPGA chips get a lot of use as prototyping units for people who are developing, like, the new GPU for the new, or the new processor that's going to go on like the PCPS5. You know, they'll buy them a $50,000 FPGA. dev kit and they'll develop the chip in the FPGA there because you can make changes to it on the fly which is good for them so they'll prototype it on there and when they get their complete when they're at their final step then the exact same language that you wrote your FPGA implementation of the chip in you just send that straight off and have it fabricated and it's an actual chip it's the same it's called

hardware description language HDL so the same language basically that you would use to make actual chips is the language that you use to program for Mr. And so why that's important is, so software-based emulation, the problem with it is that it doesn't work exactly the same as an actual PCB. So, like, inside of an NES, you have your PCB with a whole bunch of different video and audio circuits, and they all work in 100, you know, exact timing,

doing things at the same time, doing multiple processes at the exact same time. And with software-based emulation, you can approximate that, but things always have to be ran sequentially. So no matter what, your timing is always going to be off. And, of course, you can throw bigger and bigger processors at it and get finer and finer timing. So even with a multi-core processor, you still have to do it sequentially. You can't do everything in parallel. Yes.

But you can do extremely good software emulation, you know, like what Hygien, BSNs do. So I'm not denigrating that. I'm just talking about another way of doing it is this FPGA-based where an FPGA is a much, you might say it's a much less powerful processor in general, but it can do with, like, so if you were going to do an NES, a perfect NES in software would require just a massive, massive computer setup, you know, a huge CPU. But if you were doing it in FPGA, it just requires a very simple FPGA. Even the really older ones can do it, no problem.

with an FPGA, you actually write the chips. Well, there's different ways of doing it, but you can write the chips from the original NES in HDL, put them, connect them in your, in the FPGA itself, and you can do multiple things at the exact same time, exactly the same as a PCB. And in fact, an FPGA chip, there is the logic that you put into it. So you can make an exact 100% perfect theoretically. implementation of an NES and an FPGA, everything that's digitally based. So why that's important.

So Mr. is an FPGA-based emulator. And so what that means is that the cores on it, like, especially a lot of the arcade cores are basically, I mean, they can get to the theoretical point of being a one-to-one approximation of the actual arcade games, like to the point where, like, if you were, like we heard from a big time burger time player, the arcade game, when the Mr. Core came out, he said, oh, the Burger Time Corps is running a little slow. Like, something's off in it. And the reason why they thought that was because they were practicing in Maim at home. And Maim runs very slightly quicker than the actual arcade PCB. But if you take the Mr. Burger Time and put it like side by side with a real arcade cabinet, it will stay in, it will stay in sync basically forever. Like the timing is that perfect. And so for people who are worried about things like lag or, you know, input latency or whatever from hitting a button and before you get a reaction, an FPGA-based

device can be very good in that respect compared to like running an emulator in your computer where you have lots of different things to deal with. Has Mr. had been integrated into like score, you know, scoreboarding contests? Like Twin Galaxies, you know, they have the different categories for real hardware versus emulation. Like is there a third category at this point? No, maybe one day. I can see why they would be hesitant at this point. But Like Twin Galaxy now is just even coming around to flash carts in real arcade hardware. So I think it'll be a while. And it would really require a solid case, I think, that you would present to say this is actually.

Because, I mean, like in the King of Kong, I mean, they're worried about capacitors being changed as it seemed like back then. So you would need some convincing. And I understand that because, like, if somebody says a course cycle accurate, or in other words, it's 100% exactly the same as the original system, which some course claimed to be, until someone really does a scientific test of that it's kind of like you're just taking someone's word for it you know like there's a cycle accurate 68,000 core okay but that requires 75,000 tests of all of every single

every single operation that you can feed it and we need to get a 100% match in the exact same timing in order to actually say that it's cyclical accurate so and that's probably what twin galaxies require right since they want to be in the Guinness Book of World Records and all that kind of stuff right well I was saying more like a third category as opposed to like, you know, try to replace arcade hardware, but just say like, you know, because do they allow emulators? Do they have like a category? Yeah, they do. I mean, you know, the whole controversy with Billy Mitchell a couple of years ago

was not that he used an emulator because that's allowable. It's that supposedly there's good evidence that he tried to pass off emulator based footage as arcade like hardware footage. And if he had just said this was, you know, on an emulator and he got like some crazy high score, then he would, you know, top the leaderboards for the emulator boards. But, you know, because of the claim and the discrepancy, that's what caused the scandal. So they're cool with emulation. So I feel like, you know, it's something that could be explored in the future. Although I guess at this point, Mr. is evolving so rapidly that, you know, you'd have to get to a point where they nail it down and they're like, okay, this is this core is, is feature frozen. It's done.

And I don't know that all ever happen. Yeah, I mean, I could see it with a lot of, like, the simple arcade cores in the game. What's in this complex arcade core that Mr. currently supports? Right now, it's NeoGeo. FurTech. And coming back to what I said about HDL, this is a really interesting story.

So, FerTech is a French preservationist of NeoGeo hardware who, for years. Also, the guy who designed the virtual tap that I created virtual. boy works with. Yes, okay. So he's, he's a great man. Yes, yeah, that's right. He did do that. Yeah, he's all over the place.

Well, he had this project basically for years where he was doing, he was making custom chip, so the custom chips on NeoGeo MVS and AES are notoriously bad, like they'll fail. And the only way to get the custom chip is to harvest it from another MVS. So you need a sacrificial donor board. But what he did is he just started decapping the original. chips, which means you use a laser or acid to remove the top layer of a chip, and you can use a microscope and actually see exactly what the circuit was inside there. Translate that to HDL, send that off to a fabrication place, and you can make the custom chips for dirt cheap,

you know, like six or seven bucks each, really. And so his goal was to completely reverse engineer the NeoGeo. This was way before missed or anything. It was just a preservation project, but it just so happens that because HDL is the language that we use in FPGA, that he had basically a Mr. ready Neo Geo on his hands when he was done with this. So we the Mr. people got a hold of him. And all he really needed to do is take his chips that he's already done

and tie him together and then you have a Mr. Corps. So that's just, that's a really good example of like the accuracy of what we're, or the potential accuracy of what a Mr. Core can be. And his is also, in addition to being the most powerful, it's the most hardcore as I call. Like I call that

the hardcore method where it's decapping the original chips and literally creating the logic in FPGA. There's really three ways that you can do FPGA programming. One is a black box approach, which is like what Keptris uses on the analog stuff, where you don't necessarily need to decap a whole Super Nintendo, actually. You can create, you can even create using the Blackbox method, a cycle-accurate Super Nintendo by looking at the way the Super Nintendo reacts and logic programming it and creating

that an FPGA without needing to know the exact circuit. So you're recreating the circuit. your own way. Right. And that's, that's called black box because it's basically like a legal kind of protection for yourself. So you don't, you're not accused of. And because you don't actually see inside the box. Right. Right. So you're seeing what comes out of the box and you're recreating that. Right. But it's kind of like, you know, you're taking not, not a blind approach, but you're not using source code or, yeah, or documentation or anything like that that would be, you know, patent protected. So you're able to reverse engineer that way and legally release something and

the creators of the original product can't say, hang on now, that was proprietary. Yeah. And then kind of the second approach, which no one really uses, but it's a theoretical approach, is that you could actually create a really bad emulator in FPGA. That's something most people don't really think about is so you could take nesticle

or something and actually recreate the same way that it did what it did in FPGA. So nobody really takes that approach. And then there's the hardcore approach, as I say, which is actually decapping the original chips. And that's and looking at the original PCB, And then basically, because when you code an FPGA terms in HDL,

you aren't really coding in a traditional sense. You're using the language of coding, but you're creating a schematic, essentially, in a PGA. And so the hardcore, and the reality is that everyone uses a combination of the black box approach and the hardcore approach, except the only person I know is, like, totally adamant about the hardcore approach is Ace, who did, like, the Arconoid core. He wants to create, you know, like every single resistor that was on the original circuit board needs to go into the FPGA exactly as it was, which I think is cool.

But it's not totally necessary. You can still have a cycle accurate hardcore PCB without doing that. But it's a cool way of doing it. And someone named Jotago, who does a lot of arcade cores for Mister, also always makes a – he owns every PCB that he's going to do in Mr. and he basically recreates the original schematic in Mr. Terms. But he does it in an efficient way where he'll create the whole block for the video circuit, for example, in one section. And that's nice because then other arcade boards that use that exact same video circuit, like all these parts, the cool thing about Mr. is it's like we're building up a parts database.

So once one person creates the chip, every single console ever that that chip was in or a system, you can reuse that HDL for it. So it's totally modular. And that's why we started with Donkey Kong, you know, and we started with these really simple things, and you work your way up. And as you get to more complex systems, those parts are all reusable, everything but the custom chips, basically, the custom ICs. Is there an upward limit to the complexity possible with Mr. I mean, I'm not sure. I know it's like an open source project and, you know, you can use different parts for it. But, you know, I feel like there's a limitation with the processors themselves. There's two answers to that question.

Okay. One is that because Mr. is a long-term open-source project for FPGA cores, there's no limit to that. So Mr. can go on forever and it could do a PS4 one day. Is that going to happen? No. Because, you know, we would need a bigger team of engineers than the people who made the PS4. You know, we need like twice as many people to make the Mr. Corps. But it is theoretically possible and it will go on forever.

But there is some point it will eventually happen. It could. And especially if the schematics leaked or something. Right. But I mean, you just have, it's an open. source community. So you have the community, a lot of people putting their heads together and that gets kind of whittled down over time. But the real, the actual answer to your question is that the limit we think of what Mr. runs on now, it's running on the DE10 Nano, which is

a FPGA dev kit that has a Cyclone 5 FPGA on it. And just based on the logic elements that are on it, we think that the upper end is about N64 is the cutoff, whether it probably can't do N64, but maybe it could. But so anything after N64 is kind of off the table on Mr. as it is right now. But like PS1 could be possible. Saturn? Saturn could be possible, but

it's a Razz Nest. Yeah, I was going to say it's a god awful. There's actually, there's an open source Saturn FPGA project that has one chip done, I think. Okay. That's part of here. But yeah, Saturn could like definitely like several people have said that

Saturn would be possible. It's just that like right now the limit that we're at is not necessarily the limit of the hardware. We're facing two limits. One is the RAM and the connection between the SD RAM and FPGA isn't perfect on Mr. And then the other limit

is just a complexity limit of just how many people, because most people work on things either individually or with one or two other people. And so for something like Saturn, it's like we'd need all hands on deck for a year to pull off something like that. So I have a question about the, you said, The RAM interface with the Mr. Core is not perfect.

What it is, is that, so we have on the DE10 nano, we have like a gigabyte of DDRRM, and you're like, wow, that's a lot. But it's not directly accessible by the FPGA super fast, which is what we need for consoles, especially for something like NeoGeo. NeoGeo, it streams tons of data at a really high rate. and so we originally didn't even know if it would be possible it did turn out to be possible but the problem is that so we can add on like a 128 megabyte

RAM chip but it's not close enough to the FPGA it's the distance between the RAM and FPGA is the problem there basically like the actual physical distance yeah okay so even just the short amount of distance that it has to run there creates all sorts of issues I guess

whereas if you were going to build like a Mr. product that had an actual, everything was laid out perfectly for Mr. that would not be an issue because you would just put it right next to the FPGA. So how exactly does RAM factor into the way the Mr. runs? Because it's a circuit that's, you know, running the program and then it's simulating or emulating a console that, you know, would have two megabytes of RAM. What we do is, so the way they do it is the D-10 Nano has I-O inputs on it. and so we can and so the other thing is that there's like different parts so what we want

everything running in the FPGA part of the DE 10 now it also has an arm side which is traditional like a traditional see processor and you can use that for certain tasks that aren't really time sensitive like uh sending large amounts of disk data over you would do that from the arm side and little things like that but um like we need the like if you wanted to do like a latency free controller input, for example. You would need to do it through the I.O. ports because the FPGA needs to access the controllers directly. The way we do it now, most people connect USB.

So there is a tiny bit of latency there. And the same with the RAM. We stick on a RAM board. When you build a mister, you stick on your SD RAM add-on. It was 32 megabytes originally now. It's 128, which doesn't seem like a lot. But that's what we need for NeoGeo, basically, in order to stream the ROM data that the NeoGeo needs

in the same way that the original. console did, which is like a mass at a very high rate and a very high amount of memory that it's transferring, I guess. With that complexity in mind, does the NeoGeo core work correctly yet? It's very good. I mean, it will be perfect when it's done. Right now, they're just kind of working out the kinks in it. But yeah, if you were to fire it up right now, you would be very impressed by it.

And it's 100% support now if you have the 128 megabyte RAM. Okay. So from a player perspective, it's near perfect. But, you know, it's going to be tweaked and perfected through time. Is the NeoGeo CD possible with the mister? Yeah, and Firtek was talking about bringing that over too eventually, which I think would be cool. And you could even do like interesting things like hybrid NeoGeo CD and MVS, you know, combining the features of both through ROM hacks or something to get, you know, get like the NeoGeo CD exclusive games or the NeoGeo MVS games. but with the CD soundtracks, but playing the MBS version, things like that, just weird stuff.

So kind of like the, the, the NeoGeo version of those ROM hacks for Super NES, where they add orchestral sound, that's the SA1 hack, something like that. MSU. MSU, that's it. Yeah, that's a one is the chip, right? Yeah, that's really interesting. Is the Mr. capable, do you think, of doing like a tower of power, Sega Genesis, CD and 32X? It's, it's capable of doing it. And I kind of have a feeling that somebody is actually working on Sega CD right now, just based on some of the changes that they've been making to the Sega Genesis Corps behind the scenes.

So that's my hunch is that somebody's working on Sega CD. Well, you know, having a Sega CD in an FPGA is possible since the mega SD exists from Terra Onion. But I realize that's not open source. So you can't just say, let's just slap that end. It's a huge project too, yeah. Yeah. But then what about 32X? because that had the weird analog audio mixing

and introduced a lot of other factors. Yeah, it's all theoretically possible. My question would be is if someone is actually going to take the time to do 32X, I don't really know, just because it would be such a huge endeavor with very little payoff. But I mean, maybe one day we'll see that.

I mean, but in terms of like, will it fit on FPGA, yeah, definitely it will with tons of space to go. I mean, we can fit an entire Amiga computer on here

with space to spare, with all of the upgrades and everything. So, like, yeah, we've got a ton of logic helmets to work with. It's more of a manpower kind of situation, human power. If Amiga is possible, does that mean the X68,000 is possible or a Mac and there? There is an X68,000 core. Oh, is there? I didn't realize that. It's just, uh, it's not, it's one of the earliest

cores and it's not really working. But the project, because the project that this F68,000 on it, uh, runs on is a different FPGA dev kit. And those are Japanese, uh, devs who actually have a really tight version of it and that runs like Darius. It's, running games now. Very exciting. And that just needs to be ported back to Mr. to update its X68,000 core. And actually, Sorge, who runs the Mr. Project, said he would look into that. So that's a very, very exciting core. X68,000 is going to be when that happens. It's a godlike machine. Massive. Yeah. It's amazing. And it brings together, you know, retro computers, classic computers and classic gamers all into the same kind of. Yeah. And it crosses

is over between Japanese computers and arcade, too. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I have an X68,000 that I'm trying to figure out how to get working properly. But, you know, every time I'm at Long Island Retro Expo, they always have like the full kit set up with the speakers and everything and the controllers and the MIDI card and such an amazing machine. Yeah. So having, you know, without the physical element of it, just having the ability to output games like, that and create those sounds would be fantastic. Yeah. And that's the other cool thing about Mr. is that you have the option of, if you're just going to be doing like HTML output, you, all you need is the DE10 nano and an SD RAM.

That's it. And you have a full Mr. set up ready to go. You can plug in your HDTV and it's all, you know, set up. Plug in USB keyboard, USB controllers, whatever, and you're good to go. And if you want analog output, like if you wanted to build an X68,000

setup with an X68,000, monitor and that weird is it 24 it's a multi-sync monitor i think it's like 15 24 and 30 or something like that so mr you add on what's called the i o board and that gives you analog direct analog output with zero latency because it's feed fed directly from the fpGA of whatever the original timing is of the console and it's particularly cool for x68000 where it has the really weird timings or whatever i mean it's a curse and it's a blessing and a curse of course if you don't have the monitor but uh yeah like if you want your super nintendo outputting perfect timing to a pvm, which is how I run it.

Like my mister is just hooked up straight to a pvm and then fed out also to my capture card. So that's the way I like to play is through the I.O. board. And it's just glorious for that. And some of the other cool cores, since you mentioned X-68,000, have you messed around with the MSXXX core much? I really haven't. I've tried some of, like, the consoles and arcades, basically. Like, I think the, the, the coochiest thing I tried so far is Vectrix. Oh, yeah. The Vectrix score has some cool phosphor effects.

Yeah, I was really impressed. So the MSX is another really interesting one. So the thing about MISR is MISTER started as MIST, which was basically the same project, but on a smaller scale, and an older FPGA setup kit that you had to build. But the cores and MISRFGA cores, they're kind of modular, so they get developed by people who code on their own setups that they've either built or maybe they have some weird. obscure dev kit, and they wanted to build an FPGA, whatever. But like the MSX dates back to 2004, 2005, are Mr. Core. So there was, if you know anything about MSX, it's a cool Japanese computer. There's MSX 1, 2, 2 plus, TurboR, and MSX3.

I don't know if there was a 3. Well, the 3 is more like a theoretical MSX that runs all of them. It was also in, it was sanctioned by, it was an official release by, who is it, Microsoft? Microsoft and Askey were the companies that created the spec. Yeah, so they got, there was a licensed MSX called the One Chip that came on, like, 2,0004-ish, FPGA-based. I remember that, yeah. It wasn't perfect, but it did all MSX and basically a mister, but it was just for MSX. I didn't realize I was an FPGA.

I didn't know they were doing that kind of thing back then. Yeah, it was a really early use of it. And that actually was open source. source, and that is our Mr. core. So that core has evolved since the one chip to become the core that's in Mr. And it's really good, and it runs every MSX

game ever, and because we have the capabilities of Mr. You can do exactly the same way an MSX was set up if you wanted to, or you can take advantage of the fact that we aren't limited by, like, the hard drives that you can stick in an MSX anymore.

Like we can have, you know, two two-gigabyte hard drives set up with every single MSX title ever released, and you boot them in this MSX3 core, essentially, which will boot any game. So you can just have a menu set up with every MSX game ever on it. You know, it would fill up a room to build something like that, I think, with real equipment. Yeah, this changes everything. I didn't realize it was so robust and had such a history behind it.

There's even, there's an update coming soon for the MSX core that's even going to make it work more like a console where you can directly load ROMs from the GUI. So, like, right now I have a loader setup from an actual MSX that gives you kind of a front end where you can select what game you want instead of having to use commands or whatever. But in the next update to the MSX core that's coming, it will be able to launch ROMs directly from a menu, which will be sweet. That does sound pretty amazing. It's a very exciting core, that one. And, like, the Amiga Corps is really interesting, too. It's history.

What's the history there? So the Amiga Corps and the MSX are kind of the old timers of Mistor. They date back way before Mist to their own little project. and the Amiga Corps dates back to, it's called Minimig. And it was another FPGA project that was a standalone Amiga remade in FPGA terms. And that's just kept, continued to evolve through into Mr. And now we have this kind of ultimate Amiga setup that can run every, essentially every iteration of the Amiga software.

And I even have another, you know, text loader where every single game for the Amiga is listing. You can just pick what you want, even up to like, the CD32, except that we don't have read of a book audio right now is the only caveat. Wow, that's, I, yeah, I have not looked enough into the computer cores of the mister. It's mostly been consoles and arcade. You know, arcade is really interesting to me because, you know, the arcade capabilities of the mister, because

arcade, like, perfect arcade emulation or simulations are really hard to come by outside of maim or something. And, yeah, just the, the versatility of Mr. is really impressive, you know, even something as simple as the fact that it can output, put vertical resolution and, you know, do that properly for games that were designed that way in the arcade. That's just not something you really come by easily.

Yeah. And arcade games are interesting, too. And I think the classic computers are, too, because I come from console gaming, like you, I think. Like, I didn't really have any. I mean, I had DOS computers growing up for whatever, which Mr. It can do DOS computers and Windows. It has a 486 core that's actually 386.

But, so all this stuff like, you know, like I knew console games and arcade games growing up. And so Mr. brought me into the classic gaming world. And I think that Mr. will bring a lot of people who maybe weren't in the arcade world, but who knew consoles. And to bring them into the arcade world to play the games that we got the home ports of, but in their original form, you know. And arcade games are very expensive. They're really big, and they're difficult to deal with.

And it's hard to get them, especially onto an HDTV. You have to use a super gone and OS to see all this expensive equipment. But Mr. makes it, like, almost too easy to be playing these games, you know. Everything from the Golden Age, right up to NeoGeo now, there's a cave Generation 1 core that's coming. That's going to be a game changer, too. That'll be the most advanced in terms of, like, graphical capabilities, I think, so far. Yeah, I mean, I was kind of. wondering, you know, how far arcade hardware is gone. You mentioned NeoGeo, but like Capcom

CPS1, CPS2 is on there? Yeah, so CPS1 is inevitable because Jotago is going to tackle that as soon as he's done with his, he's been making a bunch, a series of basically, he's basically working up to CPS1. So he's going through the Capcom systems leading up to CPS1 and getting like a parts database built up essentially. So every time you see a new release by Jotago, He's collecting more parts for his CPS1 core that's going to come after he's finished up his most recent projects. So CPS1 is like right around the corner, essentially. And then CPS2 will be right around the corner from that, essentially, once that's out. Because it's not that much different.

CPS3, now that's a big difference. But, yeah, so I think CPS 1 and 2 are pretty much inevitable. And even actually, what was the core? I don't know if I can talk about that one actually But there's some other cool multi-cores that are coming Yeah, I was going to ask like Sega System 16 Yeah, that was one Some of Namco systems

Yeah, okay, well you said Namco System 2 I think is the one that Splatterhouse runs on I think that's right I'm not as in depth with my knowledge Of Namco's arcade boards So there's, yeah, that's one that Someone has proposed And that would bring us a dozen

in really good games. Yeah. That would be a cool one. Yeah. So it's a constantly expanding project. I think I said to Artemio that, you know, where Mr. is right now reminds me of the early days of MAME. It is.

You would log on to MAME.org, like, daily. And it would be like, new version. But, yeah, from everybody from the MAME world has said that this is the way it was. You know, you get a new release. And then that opens up, you know, 100 new games at a time. Of course, with MAME, it's a way bigger project. than what we have right now. We're at the grassroots start of Mr.

So if Mr. I'm thinking back to the grassroots days of Maine, like 1996, 97. Okay. So you were that way a long time ago. Yeah, I was I was a We Sprout who was like, I can play video games on my computer. That's so good. Yeah, so yeah, you're seeing the golden age of Mr.

right now is very similar to that, where it is like Christmas every time you get a new core for some cool arcade game. Like for me, it came recently when we got DigDug, which is my all-time favorite. favorite video game. I have like three. I have two DigDug Arc Kid PCBs and then I also have the DigDug Namco Classics Volume 2 PCB. But I don't really get them out very often because it's kind of a pain, especially being a vertical game. So, you know, having it on a mister is just insane. And it's one of those really good cores too. And that's how it is every time. If you're

following Mr. and you're like, if you're like, if you're like a person who likes cutting edge stuff and getting constant updates, it really does feel like Christmas like every other week, basically. The one challenge I think that, you know, Mr. has that MAME didn't is just the complexity of initially getting started because MAM you downloaded it and it was compiled and you just ran the application. Whereas with Mr. it's not so simple. It's an open source project and that means there is no one who just sells like here is a box with Mr. in it. You have to kind of figure it out yourself and build it yourself. And honestly, I was bewildered by it and it was Mr. Adons. I don't know the guy's real name, but he's...

Porkchop Express. Yes, Porkchop Express. I don't think that's his real name either. I don't think so. But, yeah, like, he helped me get set up and kind of help build a really good version of the mister, including analog output and everything for me. Yeah, and he sells now. You can get your full D.E.10, you can get a full Mr. set, basically, from him, I think. I think he has the D.E.10 nano with the RAM and with a case in stock.

Okay. At least he usually keeps that around, which is a really good way to get started because... I mean, it's just, if you don't want to mess with that stuff, it's a turnkey solution. Yeah, I mean, it's great for people who love to build their own computers who are like, I'm going to, like, figure out the best of every single component. But for those of us, you know, I'm recording on a Macintosh here. So clearly, I'm not the build your own computer kind of guy. I'm like the, oh, it is just bugging things together at this point.

Yeah, yeah. I guess it wasn't so much that case like six months ago or a year ago. But it has, it has come a long way, I realize. But it's still like, you know, once you get it set up, then you still have to, figure out how to update it and, you know, you get the cores, but then you have to find the ROMs for them. So there are kind of some steps involved there. It's not just a matter. It's not like an analog product where you buy the Super NT and you stick it on your, you know, HDMI cable and plug a cartridge in and you're going. Yeah, I do. And I describe Mr. as a hot rod

to analog's Lamborghini. Okay, you can drive the Lamborghini right off the lot and go 200 miles per hour. but a hot rod, no matter what, you're always going to have to piece something together. You know, there's always some maintenance going on. And it can be as crazy as you want to build it or as, you know, minimalist as you want to build it. You don't have to even put, you can put one single, if all you wanted was Amiga, which a lot of people do, that's the only core you need to put on it. You know, or you can put all 55 cores or however may we have now on there. How would you rate the like the NES, super NES Genesis cores, you know, comparable to what analog has put out? I would rate them all at...

Not criticizing analog here. I'm just curious how they stack up. Well, it's just two different chefs, essentially, you know. So it's two different recipes for the same thing. I would rate them all A-plus. And that's a big, from... I would have rated them, you know, a year and a half ago, I would have said, like, B, B, C. So, and now they're A-plus.

I mean, they're essentially perfect for our use. I mean, they are perfect. And, like, to the point where, like, if you run MD-Foreer, on the Genesis core, it's perfect, you know, it's almost exact to the real console in terms of audio. And then video, it's, they've been very actively developed too. So like any quirks that might have been there a year, like if you're watching YouTube videos on mystery, you're going to be seeing things that actually aren't there anymore because it's updated so frequently. And any one update can really kill a bug, you know, that people might be complaining about.

Even in my early videos and some other people that we were talking about some of the caveats. Like those caveats are gone now pretty much for the main cores, like the console cores especially. The only cores that really need a lot of work are like the Atari 2,600 and the X68,000 core. And that will come, especially with their Atari 7800 schematics were recently released. And that's going to lead to a 7800 core and also improvements to the 2,600 core. I'm surprised the 2600 is so far behind, given the place that that system has in history and, you know, it's pervasiveness and how much how popular it is among the hacking community yeah and a lot of it like comes down to like i usually say like if the eye of sorge is upon a core something good

will come from it because he kind of has a way of he'll focus on one core at a time and like when he comes to the he came to the genesis recently soge alexei is the guy who's the main mr you know guy russian guy who kind of front runs the project a master fpGA genius basically who can do more before breakfast than some coders could do in a month, basically, you know, like blinking his eyes. And so when the eye of sorges upon a core, you know, it gets transformed. So he really beefed up the Genesis Corps recently. And like when his, when he finally comes to the 2,600 or to the 68,000, it's going to be perfected, you know, basically. But he's just one person, you know.

Right. And there's a huge team of people who work on all this stuff behind the scenes, too, you know, of course, who I won't really mention them all by name. But it's a really cool open source project. Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of what makes it so appealing. Like, you know, like in the early days of MAME, it is just so many people collaborating and throwing their expertise into things and kicking things back and forth until it's perfect. And Mister really is the evolution of MAME. So Mr. is 100% reliant on the preservation work that the MAME team has done through the years. Mame is the biggest preservation project in gaming, essentially, from arcade terms of actual ROM.

data off PCBs. So if you're like an arcade repair person and you need the ROM data for a broken chip, you get it from maim and then you burn your chip using that data. And Mr. is the same way. So the ROM data in Mr. comes from Maine. What's different is the logic and the way it's all tied together. And so, yeah, I really consider Mr. an evolution of maim. I wouldn't call it a perfection of Maine because we'll never get to the point of the compatibility.

idiot like maim will always i mean mister will never at least continuing at the pace it's at now you know maim has tens of thousands of games and mr has around a hundred maybe yeah but it also has 20 years on yeah on mr so you know it's a bit of a time advantage and and exactly like maim too mr is a preservation project so once you have an fpGA open source perfected cycle accurate fbGA core it's forever so a hundred years from now that's still an nes and it's just a reporting that to whatever FPGA devices around or virtual reality or whatever. But, you know, like, that's the thing is, like, once we get a chip in FP, in V8 and HDL, it's there forever. Even to the point where you can either have it physically made and save a console, you can, you could have a PCB.

Like, now that the Atari 7800, full schematics are out, for example, somebody can translate that to HDL and make a new Atari 70800. Like, it's that important. And so even if you aren't, like, going to play all these Mr. Coors or whatever, it should be kind of impressive that they'll be around forever, at least. Even once all the hardware has died or all the hardware has problems, if a Mr. Corps is around and it's perfect, that's forever. Yeah, that's kind of a thread that has become increasingly, I don't know, obvious to me or something that I've become increasingly aware of is just the value that this project has and how important it is for gaming. I mean, like you said, it'll probably never be as big as maim, but it's preserving more than just the game data.

And, yeah, you know, it's become increasingly obvious that eventually game hardware fails, like, no matter how many times you recap your NES or replace, you know, broken parts or fix the pins or whatever. It's all destined to die. Yeah, eventually it will. Everything we have is eventually destined to die. And having this project open source so anyone can, you know, dump it to a Cyclone 5 and run a perfect NES, basically, like that, that really, I think, creates something that it makes, it makes classic games more viable, the idea of preserving games, the idea of documenting them and having them around as sort of like a permanent creation. It's really a, it's a home museum already that you can bring into your house. You can't go out and get a PDP1 from 1959 or whatever, for 1956, bring it into your house and play the first arcade game because your house won't fit it. So if you want to play the first video game, Space Wars or computer space.

The power grid also will not support it. Yeah. But you can have a Mr. Cycle Accura implementation of it, which we have. So you can play that already, Space Wars, the first game ever on your mister in your house, you know, all the way up through the golden age of arcade gaming. Of course, we're still filling in a lot of gaps there, and there's some big ones. But, yeah, it's cool in that sense. And if it ever does become as big as maim, you know, we all say, like, I just can't believe that it could ever be that big. But if it would be that big, it would be unbelievable.

You know, and that's kind of the theoretical thing that we're going towards. So every core, too, a lot of people say, how good is this core, how good is that core? Well, every core, the way I see it is like a skeleton with the theoretical goal of being perfect. And so whether or not it will reach perfection is the question, but it's a skeleton that's there. And once it's there and it's open source, it's forever. So somebody can pick back up work on this in 10 years or in one year or whatever and, you know, perfect the stuff and even improve it because that's the other thing. Mr. doesn't necessarily need to stop at just, you can, you know, you can have the perfect version of an NES or you can kind of add hardware onto it if you wanted to and make your own fork it off and make a new NES, you know, with new capabilities or something.

Yeah, I feel like Mr. has kind of come out of nowhere over the past couple of years to be like some very obscure hobbyist thing to becoming like this really vital, vibrant, important movement. Yeah, the ball is rolling so fast, faster than anyone imagined.

I think when I first found Mr. a little over a year ago, and I was talking to everybody about theoretical capabilities, and we were like, oh, is NeoGeo possible? And it's like, oh, yeah, maybe five years out. And here we are a year later. just the amount of cores we have since then and the amount of work that's gone into the cores that were really, you know, bear skeletons at that point is just insane, you know,

that we have like a basically perfectly perfect genesis on our hands, you know. Right. And it's not super expensive to build a, like a high spec mister. I mean, it's going to cost more than an analog system, but not, not massively more. It's about, so it's $130 for a D10 nano on Amazon, which is actually, actually a really good value because, so a DE10 nano is a dev kit that's made by Tarasic, which is their own by Intel. And it's actually about, if you were to have to build the DETN nano, it's about $300 to $350 worth of parts. But it's subsidized by Intel to bring new FPGA developers into FPGA world, working with HDL. And so they subsidize, you know,

$250 worth of it or whatever. So for your $130, you're getting a really good value, like a value that even analog said it's not fair competition. I've read some conversations about this some debate about how long Intel is going to continue subsidizing it as it breaks away from just developers and it starts becoming a consumer

element, like a thing of interest to them. Yeah, I mean, if they stop subsidizing it, it would really hurt Mr. But it's having their exact goal they set out to do. We brought in dozens and dozens of new FPGA developers through this project and everything. But basically,

If they stop subsidizing, it's just that the price tab would go up. So get your Mr. Now before they stop doing it. That's how a lot of us look at it. But the DE10 nano is just one component of it. You still have to buy the RAM. You have to buy, like you'll want to get a custom case. You don't need a case. So if you just wanted the Mr.

All you need is the DE10 now. And you can even just with the DE10 Nano, you can play about 70% of all the cores on Mr. Without even RAM. But with a 32 megabyte RAM card, you can play everything on Mr. except for like 10 or 15 NeoGeo games. And so if you want 100% of everything on Mr.,

you need the DE10 Nano plus 128 megabyte card. And I actually recommend that even if you're not into NeoGeo because already like the Amiga Corps was updated to support it. And so every core will have support for this. Yeah, it seems like future-proofing basically. And the price difference is like 20 or 30 bucks more. So it's worth it. So you're looking at just under,

$200 for if you wanted a full set up with a case, with the RAM. And does that include the analog out, or is that an additional? And with the I.O. boards are about $40. Okay. So you'd be coming in a little over $200 if you want the I.O. board. But most people, I think, could get by, really, if you're, um, if you don't want to spend a lot of money, I would just say get the D.E. 10 nano and the 32 megabyte card. And you'd be right at about $150. And you can do everything, except for a few NeoGeo games, basically. and you know if you if you commit to like a 32 megabyte card you're not stuck with that forever right

you can upgrade yes you can always grab the 128 later if you need it or if like you know some new core uses it for something yeah i mean it's uh it's an interesting and exciting project and uh like i said we haven't talked about it enough on retronauts but it really does seem like something that anyone who listens to the show should be aware of and would be interested in yeah i think it's great that you're covering it because it does feel like when you're when you find out what it is and you start to appreciate everything it does, you're like, wow, this is like the hottest thing in the entire world of classic gaming. And yet it's not, it is a very kind of niche group of us, a small group, really, relative to something like,

I don't know, the amount of people with raspberry pies or whatever. So, yeah, it's just a matter of getting the word out there. And it's become, and making it easier to use, of course, for users has had a big difference too. Yeah. I'm excited for the prospect that someday when you talk about, buying like a high-end system or you know something like

modifying modifying you know like an NES for HDMI or buying an analog system instead of saying oh well you know you could just buy a Raspberry Pi now people will say oh well you know you could just buy a mister that'll be a nice change of pace

we'd love to hear that But, yeah, that's, I think that's a pretty great rundown of mystery. So thanks for that. Did you want to talk any about the, the ROM packs you've put together? Like, what was the impetus there? Because I do feel like, you know, they're kind of, they dovetail nicely. And we haven't really talked about that. But I think if people know the name Smoke Monster, aside from Lost,

it's probably because they've come across Smoke Monster ROM packs and made use of those. Yeah, so I'm actually retired from it now. So I put out the final version a few months ago of every pack list. So I call them Pack List because it's not actually, I don't actually, of course, share any ROMs. I mean, that would be suicide. but what I do is I share the file structure and a list of the ROMs that you would have, and I do that through scripts. So what I do is, like, I set up an SD card theoretically on my computer,

and I build a Smoke Monster database file, which is kind of like a maimedat file or something. And so I share that, and what that has is it just has the location in a folder hierarchy of a file, where it goes, you know, and what the name is. and then I take five different checksums of each file to make sure it's the same, the right ROM. And so you're like, oh, that sounds complex. But basically what you do is you dump any ROMs that you have legally obtained into one gigantic folder,

run my script on it, and it will output into wherever you tell it to output, a folder setup that's good for a flash cart. So everything will be renamed correctly, put into a nice folder set up for mostly for fat, or fat 32 file systems. And once you have that, you can just copy it to your car. And you don't have to worry about, it's basically an OCD organization type thing, basically.

Right. But again, it is really valuable because if you're someone with an Everdrive or something, you end up with like five different versions. Once you get an EverDrive, it's the first thing you'll realize. Yeah. It needs to be, it's like you need to hire a maid for it or something. Yeah, it's so tedious to streamline it yourself. So, you know, that script is extremely valuable.

And for Mr. it's really big, too, just because everything kind of needs to go in a certain place. and as we get more and more cores built up, that's more and more stuff that needs to go in certain places. So it's worked for that too. So how many systems did you ultimately put together pack databases for? I think I did about 20. Every time a new flash cart came out, basically I did a list for it.

I think I hit about 20 plus Mr. And then within Mr. That's another, you know, it's like 40 or 50 little individual packs that are kind of in there. And about how many years did it take you to kind of get to the point It was a 10-year project more or less to start to finish from when I used to do it just for me and some friends on forums to the point where I got to 500,000 people using the GitHub stuff. And then the GitHub tools.

I mean, I didn't kill the project or anything. It's all open source. So somebody can pick back up. Some crazy person can do what I did if they want to one day. And the tools are all still there. And they aren't just limited to Everdrives either. I mean, like, this is just a tool that Frederick Mahi, my script guy, I described the operations I wanted to do, and then he came up with this really complex script. But it's a way that you can share any data from one person to another without needing to share the actual ROM files.

So for things where it's, you know, it's not legal to share ROMs, but you can share the description of where you want to tell people where ROMs can go. That's what it basically does. So do you kind of see Mr. as your main focus now? Do you have other things you want to accomplish? Oh, yeah, I mean, I have a YouTube channel. That's my main focus is just to, basically, I want to share, you know, like you're doing, the interesting projects that are going on. And so on my YouTube channel, I cover a lot of stuff. And mostly for the last year, it's been Mr.

And for the time being, it'll be Mr. and maybe some analog stuff. I also do, I run the GitHub databases for the analog jail breaks for the super. and T and the mega SG, and I would continue doing that in the potentially into the future if they want, or if the jailbreaker is up to it. So there's lots of cool stuff out there. But yeah, I'm mostly FPG. I'm just interested in FPGA emulation. I don't know. It's just kind of something that's really interesting to me. I really do feel like it's this cutting edge territory that's really important. Yeah, I started really getting kind of into figuring out how to take classic consoles and get the best possible recorded footage out of them about five years ago.

And the scene, like, there's just the options available have exploded radically in the past few years. Yeah, it's incredible right now. What I started building now is pretty much obsolete. I've replaced a bunch of, like, you know, the NES with an analog NT Mini and Super NES and Genesis with analog products. And, you know, Sega CD has been replaced with a mega SD. And I just, you know, feel like more and more things are going to be replaced with these simulations, and I still feel like I'm not compromising because, you know, what used to be really difficult, like getting HD video out of, you know, a Jaguar or something. Like at some point, someone's going to come up, some crazy person's going to be like, I want to do the math. I want to create an FPGA jaguar,

and, you know, then you won't have to own that hardware anymore. Yeah, and the Jaguar, actually, I think the schematics for the Jaguar are out there, too. Okay. I might actually get that one. Yeah, it's, and yeah, Mr. 2 is a confluence of all of these dark arts from all of these things, you know, PCB makers, 3D designers, and coders are all basically getting under, getting together under one umbrella with Mr. So all these people who do these obscure gaming things, it kind of, it's brought them all together in that sense, too. But yeah, and I'm not, a lot of people ask me to, they're like, oh, why don't you just play the original system? I'm like, but I do play the original system. Like, I haven't thrown anything away. I don't believe me.

Right. I'm not selling, I've sold a few arcade boards, but that's because they're worth a lot of money and they're gigantic. It's not because I want to get rid of them. You know, in a perfect world, I'd keep all this stuff. But, yeah, nobody is saying, like, get rid of your NES because the mister's perfect. It's like, it's just like, you can leave your NES plugged into whatever setup you have it in now and put the mister on your TV on your HDTV because it's super easy. You know, it's that kind of deal. Or, you know, mister, you might know, there's no.

Nobody on Earth actually owns every system that's on Mr. So no matter what, yeah, you might not need the NES core on it because you have a real NES, but maybe you want the Amiga side of things, you know. Like, yeah, I don't think a whole lot of Americans have complete MSX2s. Yeah. Like, you just, all those Japanese computers especially, like, those are really hard to come by. Or Skyskipper, because only one person on Earth owns that cab. Seriously?

Yeah, there's only one left. But we have a core for it. That people know about it or just? It's one, it's the only one that was. It wasn't destroyed by Nintendo, basically. Wow. They must have really hated that game. And I think it didn't go into production or something.

But we have a Mr. Corps for it. It runs on the Popeye hardware. Okay. Which is interesting. So when you get a Popeye core, you know, Mr. is modular like that. If it's the exact same board with different ROMs, I have to do is put the new ROMs in and make whatever tiny changes there were to get motherboard supported.

Interesting. Yeah. So the Mr. Project is, I don't know, just in general. Like, not just the Mr. but kind of Mr. as the poster child, I just feel like we're in a really vital and exciting new era of classic game preservation and access. Yeah.

To me, it's great. Yeah, it's beautiful access finally, you know, to have the perfect preservation of this stuff and access to it. That is the glorious part. Yeah. I mean, for me, like, really the impetus for getting hold of classic consoles and try to figure out how to, like, upscale them and everything was because emulation just wasn't cutting it for me. The experience wasn't quite right.

I wanted to play these games with the actual controllers on a CRT television and get the lag free response. And Mr. can't quite do all of that, but it's so much closer. And, you know, five years ago,

the only option really was to go by, you know, a super NES and to get the the Super Famicom, RGB cable, and run that to a Framemeister and then upscale that.

But that's so convoluted and complicated and expensive. And it doesn't travel well. No, it doesn't. You know, yes. You know, especially if you want to take

more than one console, you fill up your whole carry-on just with video equipment. Right. And, you know, that's just not necessary anymore. There's so many better ways. And, yeah,

it's great to see, I don't know, the fact that Mr. is open source, I think, where, like, as much as I love analogs products, I think they're great, but they are, you know, they're closed. So they're, and they are kind of in limited production. So, you know, they have this. It's a curse and a blessing kind of deal.

It's a curse on a blessing because on the one hand, you have Keptris there, who's a genius, and everything is under his total control. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But also, all the other products is. On the other hand, it's like, it's nice. And that's probably what they're imagining with the pocket, with the dev, the dev side of things. it'd be nice if you had 12 captruses working on the same thing. Yeah, I hope the jailbreaker is like, let's do the pocket because there's some great stuff happening there.

Yeah, I'd be down with that. Yeah, like you said with Mr. 2, another point is that all of the boards and all of these add-on boards are open source too. And so something like you were mentioning controllers, the L.O. Cool Joy, is this idea of a board by Electron Ash, of an ad on board that you would plug in that gives direct controller access to the FPGA for original controllers, which is a really exciting one. And some people are doing that with the blister right now already, which is another lag-free solution for controllers. And yeah, compared to a computer where even with the best emulator on Earth, it feels kind of like a lacking experience because we don't have total control over everything. So one little kink in your system, like

there's latency in your video output or your USB pulling is really bad. Any tiny little thing like that, all of that lag adds up on a computer to the point where you could be four, five, six, ten, eleven frames of lag. And at that point, you've killed the game. You're not, you're not beating Mike Tyson. Yeah. No, no way. You can't even really play Super Alast.

All right. Well, I think that's plenty to go on. I hope everyone who's listening to this and has not heard of the mystery before, that's M-I-S-T-E-R. There's some lower cases in there, but it's just look it up and you'll find it. Look into it because it's a great platform and it's constantly evolving and by the time this episode comes out, it will be better than it is as we're recording. Yeah, it will. Who knows what will be out, you know, in the next week. So, yeah, Mike, thanks. You want to tell people where people, you want to tell people where they could find you online uh you like twitter youtube etc well i'm on i'm on twitter smoke monster tv i

post new i try to post one little news tidbit of something every day and then i'm i also have a youtube channel smoke monster all right okay well thanks for your time and i look forward to seeing uh more of yeah thanks so much you're helping out with it's a great honor to be on here oh no thanks it's all honors all night I'm not going to be. I'm sorry. I'm not. Thank you.

Thank you.