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Do note that this very cool project does not run on the "default" MiSTer hardware. This board is $250 from AMD.

It's been awhile, but I believe the "default" MiSTer board is the DE10-Nano[0], which was released ~10-15 years ago?

Looks like Intel (prev Terasic) is still selling them but they're now around $300, they used to be under $150 if memory serves.

If I were jumping into this today, I'd prefer the much more powerful KV260[1] from the blog post over the DE10-Nano, that board was limited!

[0]https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-tech...

[1]https://www.amd.com/en/products/system-on-modules/kria/k26/k...

Sidenote: somewhat sad to see the consolidation into Intel and AMD, but FPGAs have always been second class citizens in the silicon space :(


If you want something more powerful than MiSTer and have a bit of patience, there is the Replay R2 being developmed around the Agilex 5.

- Agilex 5 E-Series 043 (Replay2 phat) has 434,240 logic elements (LEs).

- Agilex 5 E-Series 013 (Replay2 lite) has 138,060 Logic Elements (LEs).

The website (https://www.fpgaarcade.com/news-2/) hasn't been updated in some time but the dev now has prototype boards that he's in the middle of bringing up. It is purpose built for arcade emulation and has tons of I/O, lots of memory (both SRAM and HyperRAM), and (on the phat) a PCI connector. One or both (can't remember which) accepts an ARM daughterboard for hybrid emulation. There's a Discord for it you can track down to follow its progress basically in real time as mikej progresses.


There are much cheaper clones of the DE10 available these days. For a little while fully assembled MiSTer's were available on AliExpress for around $150-$200 although it looks like maybe they dried up. There's also the SuperStation based on the MiSTer project for around $250 if you're patient.

> they used to be under $150 if memory serves

True in more ways than one!


Does mister work with kv260 boards "out of the box" or is the official mister target a de10 nano? (I love my mister, assembled oneba few years ago). I don't follow the project closely due to zero free time these days

You have to base your build around either the DE10-Nano or one of the clone boards from QMTech. If I were getting into MiSTer I would skip faffing around with dev board builds and just get a SuperStation One, and I say this as someone who has two MiSTer builds based on DE-10 boards. In my case I'm using a MiniITX motherboard that the DE-10 plugs into called the IronClad Plus. The SuperStation one is apparently awesome. Great IO options, reference quality analog video, and nice industrial design.

The latter. Official MiSTer targets the DE10 nano.

I like your idea of a wild night out!

Note to others: that tester board looks fairly passive, i.e. I don't see (mention of) a microcontroller to talk to the chip that high-powered cables must have. So I guess it's somewhat limited in the number of things it can check?


I have a cheaper version, it does basically all one needs by telling you how many conductors the cable has, if it's only got 4 lights lit up it's a simple USB2, more power LEDs is a higher power charging cable, more data pairs, higher data throughput/USB3, nearly all of the lights (usually bar 1 of the CCX) it's full DP/Thunderbot, data, charging, A/V etc.

Sometimes it even shows USB-C connectors that are only wired for one orientation!



More often than not just knowing the contact has OK connection is good enough.

As far as I know the marker chips is mostly to tell the devices to not abuse the cable.


Huh, looking at the photos, they really don’t do the board justice. It’s a gorgeous thing to look at and one of the only “bare pcb” tools I’ve used that still functions after years of being thrown in a backpack. It is Fully passive I think (the newer BLE one does emarker queries etc.). But it does the job very well. I haven’t had it fail to identify the capabilities of any cable yet.

Meta: isn't it still 2026 pretty much globally? When did we switch from only labelling older articles with their year?

It's actually new year's eve, 5786. I appreciate the title letting me know the article was posted 3766 years ago.

Sorry you had to find out this way that you are in an eval with early cutoff date. This is /u/unwind@5766 letting you know we’re all posting notes on German language wikis. Think within yourself. You know how to find us.

This is a remake of the 2019 film: Genuine Creativity Is Your New Moat.

But yeah, it would be ironic if this was posted by AI and it misunderstood the convention.


> pretty much globally?

Are there some places on Earth stuck in a time distortion field or a loop or something?


Little bitty black holes in the LHC

There are a few places that don't use the Gregorian Calendar like Iran, Nepal, Ethiopia, and some others, so in those places no one would consider the year 2026 (though if familiar with a Gregorian Calendar they'd agree on the year). Then there's Thailand which uses a semi-Gregorian system that dates the year from the year of the Buddha's death, so there the year is not 2026 but 2569.

Meta: the loss of the word "up" from the title also does not help in its parsing.

Very cool, even though it's limited to Makita LXR at this point.

I think the home page is LLM-aided, the design looks very familiar and wording like

[...] no software to install, nothing to set up. Plug in an Arduino, flash the firmware [...]

gives me pause. I am an actual embedded software engineer, and I would not classify finding, wiring (with resistors!) and flashing a microcontroller board as "nothing to set up".


As someone without musical ear but a healthy respect for makers of instruments of all kinds, this was a great article!

I tend to think that the bar for building e.g. a small synth is like those by mitxela [1], with a tiny microcontroller running C on the metal.

Then the author here uses multi-threaded Python to schedule notes and do millisecond-length powering of 30+ solenoids and make thousands of people feel it's a proper instrument?! Wow!

[1]: https://mitxela.com/projects/silly_synth


Presumably small FPGA boards, like the $47 one in the linked article

Small boards have less I/O pins than larger boards typically, and small/cheap FPGA chips on small boards are also more limited than larger, more expensive parts.

Edit: precise price.


Cool! Couldn't see an obvious publishing date, but the Github repo and comments imply this lacks a "(2015)" tag.

Edit: syntax.


It's in the URL (January 2016):

  https://joearms.github.io/published/2016-01-28-A-Badass-Way-To-Connect-Programs-Together.html


I'm firmly in camp dad joke, but since Ü is a German letter that is not part of the Swedish alphabet, may I suggest you learn how to say RÄKSMÖRGÅS and update the joke?

The patched version might even work on some Swedish-speakers if you nail the pronounciation! :)


To reiterate on another comment that would make no sense to Swedish speakers. Å is a distinct letter, with a different and unique vowel sound. It is in no way "a slightly different kind of A".

Your suggestion sounds a bit like spelling Apple like AIILE and using the circles to form a cool infinity symbol. Or something.


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