Background#

I’ve been emulating games since finding NESticle in the late 90s. A huge amount of my gaming diet of the early 2000s was spent tinkering with emulators, graphical settings, following dev builds, endlessly hunting for the best gamepad to use, and generally catching up on multiple generations worth of games I missed in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. In recent years, though, I’ve been more interested in having a single device hooked to my TV that can reliably emulate as many systems as possible, in a way I can reasonably fit in with the rest of my consoles.

Every couple years I’d poke around the scene and see what the state of the art was regarding single board computers and emulation, tinker around a bit, but nothing ever really stuck. I’ve played around with various Linux distributions targeting the Raspberry Pi like RetroPie and Lakka, and most recently I’ve also been keeping a close eye on all the AliExpress Retro Mobile Devices like those from Anbernic, but haven’t pulled the trigger on anything.

I’m not really sure why none ever really stuck, it’s probably a combination of a lot of different reasons. I stuck the longest with RetroPie, and it’s good but the emulation is obviously not perfect, and because I only ever ran it on a 3B at max, I was pretty much limited to 8 / 16bit consoles and some arcade stuff. Booting was slow, the full-fat Linux installation was fragile, and eventually I just stopped bothering. All the various mobile devices are progressively getting less janky and more powerful and more productized, but I want something I can enjoy with my kid, and while possible, it’s harder to do that with a handheld device.

Alternatives Considered#

While I was tinkering with Raspberry Pis I was of course aware of the MiSTer FPGA project, but it always seemed like severe overkill. For the uninitiated: The MiSTer project is an extensible Linux-based emulation-focused platform for the DE-10 Nano dev kit, which is a pretty simple SBC… but with a big honkin’ Field-Programmable Gate Array on it. So instead of running software emulators on this board, you instead have “cores” that program the FPGA to just be an NES or a Sega Saturn or an Apple][e or whatever. The “cores” are fully modular, so they can be independently developed and managed, and all roll into a seamlessly unified user experience.

…but the problem is it depends entirely on the DE-10 Nano, and the DE-10 Nano isn’t a product it’s a devkit, so duh it’s going to be priced like a devkit. At time of writing, the bare board is sitting at $225, and it frequently goes out of stock. With all the extra daughter boards you’d need and dedicated RAM and a case you’re up in the $450-$515 range, and as interested as I am, that’s current-gen console pricing. It’s easy to blow $35 on a Raspberry Pi kit for something like this, knowing that if it doesn’t pan out I can find some other use for it. It’s significantly harder to blow $500 on something that’s just emulation.

The MiSTER Pi#

About a year ago the YouTuber Taki Udon came to the same conclusion. His channel’s primary content was reviewing the vast sea of AliExpress Emulation Handhelds, and he seems to like them and all, but he knew the MiSTer ecosystem existed, it was just the on the absolute opposite side of the pricing spectrum from the devices he focused on. Rather than just complain about it on the internet he set out on an adventure to start a company to attempt to clone and productize the MiSTer.

The result of this effort is the MiSTER Pi, a (seemingly) 100% compatible clone of the DE-10 Nano, which costs less than half of the original device. The specific SKU I ended up getting was their “Turbo” pack, which at $180 is right around ~35% of the cost of comparable original hardware. Yes it’s still more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, but it’s no longer so much more expensive that it’s an outright silly price.

Also, it’s worth noting that Taki didn’t just cut costs in half, the MiSTER Pi includes two key functional improvements over the original board:

  1. Power delivery is via USB-C PD instead of a barrel-jack, and UART is also USB-C, instead of USB Mini-B or whatever awful port was on the original.
  2. The USB Hub board is now connected via headers/pins that go directly between the boards, rather than the U-shaped USB connector abomination the old board required.

Out of Box Experience#

Since I bought the “Turbo Pack” I got an SD Card with the core MiSTer software pre-installed, but as best I can tell setup is dead simple. You extract the base distribution to an SD Card, plug it in, drop some ROMs on and you’re done.

Hardware-wise, I hit two minor issues right off the bat:

  1. While yes it takes power over USB-C now, there’s still no reasonable way to remotely turn it on or off. That sucks, but I dealt with it easily enough with a spare Zigbee switch, so now I can just yell at my voice assistants to turn it on or off.
  2. The fan is loud. It’s not too loud from within my Entertainment Cube, but it’s loud enough that I’m considering swapping its fan out with something from Noctua.

Software-wise it’s pretty wonderful. If you’re dumping ROMs directly on your SD Card you just have to do that and supply device BIOS, or use something like Update All to download BIOS automatically.

I’m generally pretty happy with the user experience. Unlike RetroPie (last time I used it), most USB gamepads Just Work with very reasonable defaults for the overlay button. I’m slightly disappointed that the menu system is completely text-based. I liked the browsing UI of RetroPie, but didn’t like maintaining it… but with the MiSTer there’s just no option for a graphical UI. Or maybe there is and I just haven’t discovered it yet.

I was pretty happy to find that – similar to RetroPie – there’s an option to not use the SD Card for ROM storage. So I can instead have it mount a Samba share of ROMS from my NAS on-boot, and it works seamlessly. They have some kind of search-path stuff set up to automatically look for a cifs folder first instead of a _Games folder if one exists… and then it just works. Thankfully I’ve found that even for beefy disc-based games loading them over a gigabit local network is fast enough to be reasonably comparable to a disc drive from 1997.

General Assessment#

  • As expected, MiSTer absolutely rules. Super easy to use, easy to update, easy to manage, performance is amazing, it’s literally exactly as promised.
  • It’s far less fiddly than RetroPie and similar platforms, and boots incredulously fast. Faster than most of my actual consoles.
  • It’s pricey, but it’s not so pricey that it’s unreasonable.
  • It’s more product-y than RetroPie, but still less product-y than any of the AliExpress Handhelds or something from Analogue, but the trade-off is completely worth it.
  • It’s still a Niche Product For Weirdos Enthusiasts, but it’s a really good one, and now at a significantly more reasonable price. Hopefully the cheaper price will expand the user-base, which in turn may lead to software improvements that make this something anyone could use.