Comment by einr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by einr | Hacker News Reader

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MiSTer is an FPGA implementation of the Amiga (and a lot of other cores) based on an easily available FPGA dev board. https://misterfpga.org/

Apollo Vampire V4 standalone is a "modern" FPGA implementation of a 68k Amiga that is nearly 100% Amiga compatible but much, much faster and with updated graphics etc. http://www.apollo-core.com/v4.html

So: MiSTer if you're looking for an authentic Commodore Amiga experience and want to play old games etc, Vampire if you have a lot of money to spare and want to do "modern" things on a classic Amiga (fancier games, MP3 and video playback...)

You should also consider that Amiga emulation is very accurate and fast these days and you could just get a Raspberry Pi running UAE which would be mostly indistinguishable from the FPGA reimplementations once you're up and running.

I think the MiSTer is a good suggestion as it's flexible. Inevitably one day you will decide you want to try something other than an Amiga and then you've got all the cores available for other systems to easily install. The support is also very good from several vendors. Here's quite a nice complete kit of parts to easily make a games console style MiSTer solution:

https://rmcretro.store/multisystem-board-only/

And a review of this set of parts from Anthony of LTT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyDqGdY7ffQ

I haven't compared the two solutions personally, but MISTer is said to have less latency than emulators.

This is true but depending on personal preference/perception and usecase it might not matter. If you really care about latency for twitchy old-school games, a MiSTer (or a real Amiga!) and CRT monitor would be ideal.

It's not so much the emulators that have latency, it's the platforms they run on that have mostly been optimized for throughput and battery life for the past ~20 years. It's possible to get low latency on modern systems, but it requires relatively advanced and often non-portable techniques to fight the system's attempts at "efficiency".

Where FPGA really shines is in producing a consistent timing model and the associated performance quirks (such as slowdown in video games).

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