We Might Be About To Lose A Powerful Force In The World Of Video Game Preservation.

Part 5 of my series walking through the history of MiSTerFPGA is here, covering the year 2021. Lots of great stuff that year! classicgam.ing/mister-fpga-...

Trying out a new thing this year - renting Lego instead of buying... Honestly I just like the building bit so this works quite well for me!

Since the reviews for my previous articles were so positive, I've got another #MisterFPGA History article for all of you, covering the year of 2020: classicgam.ing/mister-fpga-... . This is the year that, in my opinion, the MiSTer really started to resemble what it is today in most respects.

Little more MiSTer admin done today (if nothing else this is easing my brain onto the return to real work tomorrow 😆) - more framework updates on my old cores Dottori-Kun and Blockade... Feels crazy that those were from nearly 4 years ago now!

Started the new year with some light admin, updating the BBC Bridge Companion MiSTer core with joypad support and a framework update.. bit out of the loop so not sure what the latter gets you though 😅

Travel woes aside, Finland sure is lovely this time of year 😄

Finally back home after a much longer trip than expected.. Pea soup at Gatwick meant landing in Birmingham, getting a coach which broke 5 mins after leaving the airport, getting another back to Gatwick, then picking up our car and finding it had a flat tire 😅. Enough adventure for one year thanks!!

Merry Christmas to all that partake... No retro dev for me this holiday as I've popped off to somewhere a bit colder than the UK!

Here's a classic example of the last 10% trap - realised I hadn't tested the cocktail cabinet mode, so forced the screen flip on to see how it looks. Oh dear 😢 Even more annoying that it would probably be used by 1% of the 1% of MiSTer users who'll even try the core, but I gotta try and fix it 😅

I think I can now finally see the end of my 'get back in to MiSTer' core project!
I've been working on Vanguard (SNK/Centuri 1981), based on a chunk of HDL by another dev, but it has taken a lot of effort to get behaving on MiSTer due to static RAM, discrete audio, etc.
All the usual excuses :D

Trying to decide what to use to make this platform game... Vacillating between giving Godot a shot and booting up the MiSTer and trying to remember how to use AMOS Pro! Maybe there is a middle ground? 🤔

My daughter decided she wants to make a platform game together. I now have many pages of stream of consciousness notes about a monkey with boxing gloves fighting anthropomorphic burgers in a forest. Also the floor is lava, but avocados make you lava-proof! This kid is scope creep incarnate 😅

I exist here now I guess, new beginnings and all that. It happens to coincide with some amount of renewed FPGA dev effort, which I'm trying to keep at a sustainable level of effort this time!