
Stock photo of the DE10-Nano development board, the heart of any MiSTer build. It’s a retro gaming platform you assemble yourself, but one that continues to evolve thanks to a dedicated community of brilliant hobbyists.

This is where a lot of the confusion and complexity, but also the fun and excitement, of the MiSTer project comes from. Because it’s built on a standard, commercially available base, it’s expandable in lots of interesting, open-source ways.
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The MiSTer project picks up from that earlier project, but is built around a more powerful, readily available development kit with an FPGA - plus HDMI, USB, microSD, and more - at its core. If you’re familiar with Analogue’s Super NT and Mega SG clone consoles (which are designed to play 16-bit Nintendo and Sega games accurately), then you’ve got the idea.Īnd you can type it however you’d like! The capitalization conceit, and the title itself, comes from an older FPGA-based project called MiST that was designed to run retro computers like the Amiga and Atari ST. While most processors have a fixed architecture, FPGAs are designed to be reconfigured to clone whatever old gaming hardware they’re programmed to. To do this, MiSTers use FPGA (field-programmable gate array) technology. MiSTer is an open-source project designed to recreate the functionality of classic PCs, arcade games, and consoles as accurately as possible.


And though my colleagues no longer answer their doors when they see me knocking, you, my dear reader, clicked on this story voluntarily! And I’m glad you did, so I can share this definitely-not-a-pamphlet explainer with you about why MiSTer is so exciting and why I think, maybe, you will find it exciting too! What is a MiSTer and do I have to type it that way? I’ve gotten a reputation around here as something of a proselytizer when it comes to the MiSTer project.
