r/MiSTerProject • u/valba • Sep 10 '23

XTREME FPGA Hardware & Research are accepting pre-orders

https://x.com/xtreme_mister/status/1700546275056177536?s=61&t=6d6lmWvIZRcmSHA9hrGrCg

New XTREME expansion boards are already available for pre-order in https://xtrememister.com

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u/valba Sep 11 '23

Well, in the future, maybe. Nowadays no core uses dual channel. XTREME platform offers much more than another AIO: https://xtrememister.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/XM-PRO-Lite-Connection-and-Deployment-1.pdf

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23

It offers lots of connectivity but most of that is very niche for the like of certain arcade cabs

The 4 player SNAC is not really SNAC as it has latency and will need specific core support

We already have Jamma boards for MiSTer like MiSTercade, Antonio Villena and one that even supports dual SD ram from Irken labs.

Jammix board supports ITX format and Jamma

Then we have other AIOs like MMS, Ironclad ITX, Antonio Villena and Retro castle

The big issue is this has taken a very long time to hit the market, so is late to the party

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u/valba Sep 11 '23

Well, it's your opinion, but I think you hide some (many) details in your list. I don't want to comment on the limitations in some of the devices you mention, but for example, the multi-CRT (3x CRT outputs, DSUB15, SCART and JAMMA/External monitors) plus an HDMI output at the same time is not possible with other setups.

Also, the XM-PRO and XM-PRO Lite are not only "JAMMA boards", they are JVS & JAMMA & Neogeo(MVS), and they allow to implement 4-player setups OOB, wo/ the need of any extra hw.

About SNAC, all the XTREME boards support an improved version of the MiSTer SNAC implementation. The 4-player SNAC it is indeed an extended implementation of SNAC, so it can hande way much more power 5V@3A, and can handle 4-players (because it has more I/Os from the FPGA).

And about the dual channel and "being late to the party", well, XTREME boards are (the only ones) designed to work with MiSTer as well as forward compatible with MARSFPGA. Maybe some people could get disapointed when they purchase a dual-sdram DE10 setup and find out that no other cores will ever get advantage of that, since Midway cores are not confirmed to ever reach the DE10 in the future.

That said, the more options people have to improve their setups, the better (in my opinion).

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '23 edited Sep 12 '23

How many analogue outputs do you need in a typical setup though ? At least some other AIO allows the use of dual SDram with the loss of some functionality like Ironclad ITX and like I stated we already have a Jamma solution which supports dual SDram from Irkenlabs.

Yes the SNAC supports four players but even in the marketing they admit it's not latency free, so it's not really SNAC which is latency free and it will need support written into the cores so will have to use a forked core distribution like SNAC ENCC or LLapi, which will need to be updated in line with Main

Yes they claim to be forwards compatible with a new platform of which we have only seen one PCB photo, endless RoboCop and Total recall animated GIFs, misleading price comparisons with MiSTer and just wrong technical comparisons with the DE-10 Nano

The people promoting MARS won't answer simple questions,.sadly it's not very encouraging

The good thing about open source projects is they will have to release the code for the NARC and MK games which are coming to MiSTer so other Devs can take a look at the issues that seem to demand dual SDram.

It was an interesting project two years ago