ROM Article/Dev Interview - It's amazing! It's here! MiSTer's Saturn dev breaks down his new 3DO core and why it may never be *quite* perfect

Plus: Catching up with a spring blossom’s worth of recompilation progress in just the last 2 weeks.

Preview:

When I see the words “The 3DO Company,” my mind goes to a very specific place: Battletanx. The arcadey masterpiece that was 1999 sequel Global Assault probably spent more hours slotted into my teen years N64 than any game this side of Goldeneye or Mario Kart, thanks to a genuinely inventive array of asymmetrical multiplayer modes, tank archetypes and impressive-for-the-time destruction.

The second place my mind goes is Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes, the shittiest videogame I’ve played in my entire life (and my best friend in first grade owned E.T.).

So, y’know. Win some, lose some.

I have no personal affinity with the 3DO itself, an oddball console that the company launched in the early ‘90s, but by all accounts it falls into the “lose some” category. It only lasted a few years before The 3DO Company shifted to just developing and publishing games for the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and PC. Despite shutting down in 2003 (should’ve made more Battletanx and fewer Army Men), the company legacy does live on today in a few forms. 3DO originally published pioneering online 3D MMO Meridian 59, which I wrote about last year on PC Gamer because it’s one of the oldest videogames in existence still being updated today. It came out in 1996!!

Also, more relevant to this newsletter: the 3DO console now has a MiSTer core. Somebody get Trip Hawkins a MiSTer Pi, stat.

Light gun fans on MiSTer and SuperStation One will be delighted to know they can play two more games without flashes thanks to privateye! Gregori has the details and links to the patches in his story:

https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2026/04/08/jinzou-ningen-hakaider-scud-the-disposable-assassin-receive-quality-of-life-patches/

#sega #saturn #segasaturn #retrogaming #retrogames #videogames #セガ #セガサターン #lightgun #patch #mister #misterfpga

Presenter: "Mister Missus, meet Missus Mister."

Missus: "Missus."

Mister: "Mister."

Missus: "No, I'm a Missus."

Mister: "No, I'm a Mister."

#mister #missus

My MiSTer Multisystem² Analogue has arrived! 🎉

https://multisystem.uk/products/mister-multisystem-2/

This is my first MiSTer, or FPGA-based retro gaming device for that matter. It's a whole new world of discovery for me. ✨

The case is 3D-printed, but feels solid and looks nice. At normal playing distance you can't even tell it's 3D-printed. It kind of tempts me to customise it with a pair of "toxic green" side covers...

https://multisystem.retrofied.uk/

#retrograming #fpga #MiSTer

Dead or Alive runs deadly smooth on the Saturn MiSTer core after today's update — but it was almost too much for the DE-10 Nano's silicon to handle. Find out why in my story:

https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2026/03/20/saturn-3d-fighters-run-better-on-mister-single-ram-after-update/

#sega #saturn #segasaturn #retrogaming #retrogames #videogames #セガ #セガサターン #mister #misterfpga #fpga #tecmo #fgc #deadoralive #doa

I’ve had so much fun with the 486 SX-33 lately that I haven’t even touched the Switch 2 I got over the weekend.

I’m putting together a devkit for the MiSTeR FPGA ao486 core, and more generally an environment for retro game and demo-style projects. Toolchains in this space have been fairly grim so far: DJGPP, Turbo C++, or Watcom C/C++.

• GCC and LLVM support. COM output is supported through a linker script, and EXE output is supported as well. A Lua script prepends an MZ header to the EXE.
• A chain loader switches to protected mode and loads the program into extended memory.
• Rather than relying on DOSBox or 86Box, I tuned QEMU very carefully. It now feels surprisingly close to the ao486 core in practice.
• If this were a 386 SX devkit, I would probably have gone with flat real mode or so-called “unreal mode”. On a 486, though, the 0x66 and 0x67 prefixes used for 32-bit instructions already eat into performance on what is still a fairly modest CPU. The pipeline is only 16 bytes long.
• There is a small proof of concept included, but only the bare minimum. I’m saving the more interesting material for my own retro projects. The idea is to provide a blank canvas built on a much better SDK.
• 486.md covers 486-specific assembly optimisation details. In practice, it is quite a different beast from either a 386 or a Pentium. This is the sort of material that is fun to read on its own, so it felt worth writing.
• The package includes the Unscii font, apparently pulled from GitHub, though I can no longer find the exact source URL. The original project is here: http://viznut.fi/gfx/fonts/
• It also includes tmodplay, a MOD player. Unfortunately, the Sound Blaster 16 implementation in ao486 is pretty awful. For that era of PC hardware, the only really good option was the Gravis Ultrasound.
• The target configuration has 16 MiB of RAM. That would have been an unusual combination back in the day, but those are the ao486 defaults, so I’m leaning into a kind of retro-modern setup. The other default was some completely absurd number.
• There is also a proof-of-concept demo with a four-layer parallax scroller and various informational texts.

I’m not really a game or demo developer myself, but I can at least provide much better SDKs, so I felt like fixing one long-standing problem in the retro scene. It is released under the MIT license so people can do whatever they like with it.

I should also check whether that FPGA core supports VESA 2.0, because that would allow 320x240 with chunky pixels. VESA 1.x was awful.

#Intel #486 #ao486 #MiSTeR #FPGA