MiSTer FPGA update wave adds Hard Drivin’ core and Sega arcade board progress
A broad MiSTer FPGA update batch brings a new Hard Drivin’ core, early SGI Indy bring-up and Sega G80V and Taito F3 progress, though Y Board and Model 1 detail stays thin.
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MiSTer FPGA's community has pushed out one of its heavier update rounds in a while, according to a roundup on RetroRGB. The batch touches Sega arcade hardware, a brand new Atari core, an early stage SGI workstation project and the usual pile of fixes to the framework every core sits on.
MiSTer is the open source FPGA (field-programmable gate array) platform that recreates classic hardware at the logic level rather than emulating it in software. Because each core is a fresh reimplementation of a specific board, adding support for an obscure arcade system means someone has effectively redrawn its schematic in hardware description language and proved it runs the original code correctly.
Sega's odder boards, and how far they've got
The roundup's headline promises progress on Sega's Y Board, the hardware behind Power Drift, and the Model 1 board that ran Virtua Racing, both named on the site's own graphic for the story. What is actually detailed, per the same report, is work on Sega's G80V core instead: it has gained support for Zektor (revision B), including spinner controls, speech, AY audio and what the roundup describes as a schematic-derived discrete sound board, meaning the analogue sound circuitry has been rebuilt from the original schematics rather than approximated. Taito's F3 board, a separate long-running project, has also moved on: the roundup gives per-game completion percentages, putting Ray Force (US) at roughly 90 percent, Elevator Action Returns at 80 percent and Puzzle Bobble 2 trailing at 35 percent.
Hard Drivin' gets a full core, SGI Indy gets a heartbeat
The clearest new arrival is a dedicated core for Atari's Hard Drivin', the 1989 driving cabinet known for its cockpit view and force feedback wheel. According to the roundup, the core reimplements the main processor, the graphics and math processors, the geometry processor and the sound board, and supports analogue steering, gamepad pedals, wheel input and both sequential and H pattern gear selection, with settings stored in MiSTer's NVRAM.
Further from arcade territory, developer danifunker is building a core for the SGI Indy, the entry level Silicon Graphics workstation from 1993 aimed at CAD and multimedia work. The project's own status note, quoted in the roundup, is blunt about where things stand: “This is early. It draws and it boots; it is not yet a machine you can use. No IRIX, no mouse pointer, no sound, no network, and nothing you change survives a reset.” It is a reminder that MiSTer cores do not appear finished; they are built in public, badly at first, and improve in view of anyone watching the repository.
The rest of the pile
Elsewhere, the Atari 800/5200 cores picked up PokeyMax support and VBXE fixes, the Game & Watch core added SM530 support and full CRT/DV toggling, and Data East's Night Slashers, a 1993 belt scrolling brawler, got its own release with CRT adjustment and sixteen save slots, according to the roundup. The main MiSTer framework itself was patched for Bluetooth pairing lockups, HDMI hot plug bugs and IDE fixes, which in turn unlocked smaller improvements in unrelated cores such as the C64 and ZX Spectrum. Update All, the community's script for keeping everything current, moved to version 2.10 with four new hybrid cores, per the same report. On the fringes, a Reddit user posted 3D print files for adapting a laptop CD/DVD drive into a Heber MMS2 slice tray, a small but useful bit of hardware tinkering also noted there.
What is missing from this round is confirmation of exactly how far the Y Board and Model 1 work has actually got. The roundup's own graphic flags both, alongside Power Drift and Virtua Racing artwork, but the detailed change notes available cover G80V and F3 instead, so anyone hoping for a working Virtua Racing core should treat that as still unconfirmed rather than shipped.
Sources
Image: RetroRGB -