Over the past few months the MARS team has been teasing a new FPGA-based system: Multi Arcade & Retro System. The concept is similar to the MiSTer, but running on its own custom, more powerful hardware. They’re expecting to launch it early next year at a $700 price point…
Neat, for sure. Hope something good comes from this. Though have worries about fragmentation of effort. It kinda feels like mister still isn’t quite 100% even for the cores it has today. Hopefully, that effort can be unified a bit, at least.
Also, with 4k scalers coming in around 1k, and now this at hoping for $700… it’s all getting a bit rich for my hobby budget.
That’s an expected $700 right now. How often are those estimates not realized by the time production begins? I wouldn’t be surprised to see a launch price over $700.
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Though have worries about fragmentation of effort.
This is a common concern around open source communities, but I feel like it’s rarely a big problem in my experience. As long as there are people with MiSTer setups there will almost certainly be some group of people developing for that platform and pushing it as far as they can.
Since the MiSTer is already pretty popular and relatively affordable, I think it’ll continue to be the main focus on developers’ time even after the MARS comes out.
Also, with 4k scalers coming in around 1k, and now this at hoping for $700… it’s all getting a bit rich for my hobby budget.
Yeah… $700 is a pretty big hit… but then again it’s always been pretty easy to blow a grand on the retro gaming hobby. I’m honestly not sure whether I’ll be able to justify buying one unless it really goes way beyond the MiSTer.
All in all, I think this thing sounds pretty cool and I’m excited to see a potential path forward beyond the DE-10 nano.
Yeahm current MiSTer setups are still viable. You can do a lot with them. For MARSFPGA, I’m more interested on what kind of PC implementations it can do and if it can handle high-end 486 or Pentium CPUs.
This is a common concern around open source communities, but I feel like it’s rarely a big problem in my experience. As long as there are people with MiSTer setups there will almost certainly be some group of people developing for that platform and pushing it as far as they can.
Since the MiSTer is already pretty popular and relatively affordable, I think it’ll continue to be the main focus on developers’ time even after the MARS comes out.
hmmm i gotta disagree. I’ve been working in and around open source stuff for a stupid long time, 15 years? 20? too long.
Development effort goes not towards where the users are, but towards where developers have interest. this is always true unless a third party is sponsoring to push development in a specific direction.
Development effort is going to go towards the platform where developers are interested. Maybe developers will be interested in the less powerful platform where you have to squeeze every LE to make cores fit, and don’t have a unified large set of memory. Probably not is my guess.
So what we have is will people bother porting mars cores and enhancements to mister? we have a pretty good /analog/ in the analogue pocket to look at. that got a bunch of cores ported from mister to it, but those cores haven’t really been updated much these days and new cores have mostly dried up outside of patreon things.
This isn’t terrible, everything is succeeded some day, But I mentioned that mister does not feel like it’s 100% finished yet for the cores it does support (outside of a few) so it feels a little sad.
So it’s got a open source software stack and it seems like they want MARS to operate as kind of a spiritual successor to the MiSTer, which all sounds great to me.
I guess the big question is how much of a market will there be for a $700 MiSTer-like console?
The MARS team was talking about Dreamcast/Naomi/Atomis Wave/CPS 3 type systems to be released for the MARS unit. I am quite excited as some of my favorite games are in the dreamcast level of systems. I have 3 MiSTer systems set up in arcade cabinets and I would love the ability to play more modern systems in there. I also imagine that with enough time the current MiSTer cores will be ported over the the MARS platform. Also the concept front end looks quite nice.
