Wolfenstein 3D's AdLib music moves onto an FPGA sound chip on MiSTer, and Namco's NB-2 gets a core

An 11 October update to the ECWolf hybrid core moves its music onto a YM3812 recreated in FPGA logic. A new core for Namco's NB-2 runs The Outfoxies and Mach Breakers.

AI-drafted from 5 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Wolfenstein 3D on MiSTer has its music played by hardware. The 11 October build of ECWolf_MiSTer moves the AdLib music and AdLib sound effects onto "an FM chip in the FPGA (a YM3812, the chip of the AdLib and Sound Blaster cards)", where until now the MiSTer's ARM processor worked the sound out in software. The game only sends the chip its register writes, timed to the audio sample.

A new FM Music option in the core's menu switches between FPGA, the default, and Software, and takes effect at once, so the two can be compared while the music plays. The developer's shared framework builds the chip from JTOPL, jotego's open YM3812 design.

What a hybrid core is

ECWolf_MiSTer is the work of a developer who goes by danik, and it is a hybrid core rather than a recreation of a 1990s PC. In the beta announcement on 5 October the developer put it plainly: "the FPGA does not recreate a 90s PC". The game is ECWolf, the source port of the Wolfenstein 3D engine, running on the ARM side. The FPGA core supplies native 15kHz video for CRTs, 44.1kHz audio and keyboard, mouse and gamepad input, and the two halves share DDR3 memory. The README says the game holds one frame per field, 59.64 per second, and carries a note that AI is being used to speed up development.

No game data is included. The core takes the shareware episode or the player's own copy of Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny or Super 3-D Noah's Ark. It is danik's second hybrid core after Carmageddon, and a third, Shadow Warrior, went out as a first beta on 7 October.

Namco NB-2: The Outfoxies and Mach Breakers

A separate developer, kyledlester, published a core for Namco's NB-2 arcade board as a beta on 5 October, with a faster loading update on 9 October. NB-2 ran two games: The Outfoxies, a 1994 two-player arena shooter with zooming, rotating stages, and Mach Breakers, the 1995 four-player sequel to Numan Athletics. The README says both boot and are playable on real MiSTer hardware, that it needs MAME 0.289 ROM sets supplied by the player, and that the core "was created with the assistance of AI tooling".

In a Reddit post, kyledlester says their NB-1 core, which only ran Nebulas Ray, now supports every game on that board, Point Blank included, and that light gun play has been confirmed with a GunCon 2 on a CRT.

Sources

Image: danik on Reddit

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