SG-1000 FPGA Core Released for Mister

Less than three months ago we first heard the news; Analog's next console, the Mega SG, would support SG-1000 games by means of an adapter. While that system wont be with us until at least April, with the adapter coming later in the year, an SG-1000 FPGA core for a different device has just been released.

The MiSTer project running on the D10 Nano FPGA board. 

MiSTER is an open source project that runs on the D10 Nano FPGA board. A group of highly skilled programmers have been working away porting old FPGA cores from the previous project MiST and creating all new cores exclusive to the new format for over a year now, with the total number currently standing at over one hundred. The vast majority of these are arcade, but there's also a healthy number of home computer and console cores now available. One of the more mature console cores is that of the Colecovision.

Those of you familiar with the specs of the Colecovision probably already know where this is going...

You see, the SG-1000 specs are almost identical to that of the Colecovision, the only difference being a slight variation in VRAM speed. With the Colecovision core complete, a programmer by the name of Slingshot has successfully managed to implement support for the SG-1000.

After the initial release, I went about putting the core through its paces. Out of ten or so titles, some Japanese versions of ROMs refused to boot, but the games that did, appeared to play flawlessly, both visually and in terms of audio. This issue was sometimes fixed by simply loading up the Taiwanese version of a ROM, but thankfully, the core has since been updated and now seems to be capable of running anything thrown its way.

Having said that, it's definitely worth pointing out, MiSTer is developing platform still getting regular updates to many of its cores to add features and iron out bugs, so don't expect the entire SG-1000 library to run flawlessly at this point, but everything I've tried thus far on the updated core has run flawlessly. Take a quick peek at this captured footage from Youtube user NML32.

For those who'd like to try MiSTer, you can order the D10 Nano board directly from the manufacturer here for $130 plus postage. Some of the cores will run on the base unit, but for the Colecovision/SG-1000 among many others, you will need to purchase an SDRAM addon board for around $25. This will give you full access to every core MiSTer has to offer. All information required to get set up can be found on the MiSTer GitHub page.

With MiSTer continuing to grow and new cores seemingly being added each week or two (largely down to the hard work of Alexey Melnikov), the system is quickly becoming easy to recommend. Mark III, Master System, Game Gear, Megadrive and now SG-1000 are all supported so as a Sega fan, I'm a very happy bunny.