I’ve had my MiSTer FPGA since pretty much the beginning. I bought my DE-10 Nano back in the day when you didn’t need to sell a kidney, but to be honest, in recent times, …I hadn’t turned it on… since 2023.
- Dedication to the core
- To slop or not to slop
- Not that simple
- Elitist vibes
I’ve cranked it up recently for a feature I have been working on, but I was surprised, dipping back into the scene, how much it has changed.
Back in the day, there was a pleasant vibe around the work being done. Sorgelig, the project’s creator, would pop in and out and briskly dismiss anybody’s opinion – but that was fine, it was just Sorg being Sorg.
Dropping into the subreddit or onto the MiSTer Forums in the last couple of weeks, it’s obvious things have changed dramatically. I shouldn’t be surprised; the whole gaming landscape has changed over the past couple of years. Mainly because of the dirty AI word.
Dedication to the core
You see back in the day new arcade cores for the MiSTer project had to be developed by hand by a bunch of trusted, dedicated volunteers. The key aim was not so much preservation as accuracy. Using the FPGA chip on the DE-10 Nano meant that, as far as possible, and that is always the caveat, cycle accuracy could be achieved. While emulators had spent years patching out things like Metal Slug’s infamous slowdown, MiSTer kept it in. It was accurate to the core – literally.
It’s not all as simple as that; there are cores on the MiSTer that are not perfect, but they may still be constantly in development to push them forward, as long as the dev or the community remains interested. Of course, cores could still be abandoned; life takes over sometimes.
When I dropped out of the scene it seemed as though the core that played Cave shmups was dead in the water, and I really wanted that to be perfect.
Having returned, the genius MIDI implementation of the MT-32 Pi has fallen by the wayside, with the hugely talented dev stating the community’s toxicity and the effect it had on his own mental health. Sometimes making nice things for other people brings out the worst in folk.
The problem, and it’s not really a problem, or at least wasn’t prior, is that MiSTer is not MAME. You can’t play 27,000 or so obscure arcade games on it, flicking between them for three seconds each, pretending to be some retro guru. You kinda have to hope your fave game from back in the day is there. Most will be, many of the massive ones are covered, certainly up to the point where the hardware begins to choke, but the lay of the land cannot possibly please everybody.
To slop or not to slop
So now, two camps have formed – the purists and the, well, couldn’t care lesses. As more people have picked up MiSTers, or the numerous spin-offs, some of that initial purity has been diluted, and we are now seeing a swathe of MiSTer cores being knocked out with the help of AI vibecoding,
The above post appeared yesterday from prominent FPGA core genius Jotego – who for clarity has worked on many of the project’s best cores, but does use a Patreon and DRM, which many believe is against the spirit of things.
The expectation that good things should always be given away for free has long been a policy in the retro space, but until recently, business models like Jotego’s seemed more tolerated by most because of the ridiculous amounts of work he and other key people have put into making their cores as close to perfect as possible.
Now though, as AI cores start to appear the split is more prominent – some people don’t want to wait months for Jotego and co to release a core for an 35-year-old arcade game and it be perfect – they want it now and if Claude Code or Codex can help them bash out a working version based on what’s already in MAME then that’s what they are going to do.
Is it unfair, though, as seems to be the way with all the “IT’S JUST ALL SLOP” merchants, to accuse people using AI as being careless, talentless and even dangerous for bringing more games to the system. Is it just gatekeeping by the established order? Referring to anything that has been close to AI as “Slop” is a lazy narrative that is unhelpful to the true discussion we need to have.
Not that simple
That’s not for me to say but I thought I’d see how difficult it actually was to create a core in AI from a position of knowing a ton about the MiSTer and MAME and not much more about how cores work.
One of my favorite games from back in the day is Atari’s Warlords, a four player castle/breakout type thing that I still love today. This is one of those cores that is (unfathomably) not available on MiSTer, so I asked Codex’s new 5.6 Sol model how we’d go about making it.
Within five minutes, I had lost all interest. It was way too complex for me, and I have managed to use Codex to create a decent little game, and port mini versions of it to the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive and Amiga that play just fine on my MiSTer system, so I am no mug.
But it’s not a one-prompt “make Warlords work on the MiSTer” scenario. I could have persevered, but as I would have been doing it just for me, I’ll just play it on MAME.
One of the accusations thrown at the vibe-coders is that they won’t stick around to continue to develop their cores and they don’t understand the code in the cores they are making. See above for humans that did not do the same.
I mean, I don’t understand how my coffee machine works, but the coffee tastes great.
The argument that vibecoders should leave the MiSTer alone is elitist to the core. There was a post on the subreddit lambasting somebody for sticking up for an AI core and telling them they should leave the subreddit if that was their viewpoint. The internet is wild, isn’t it?
The system is such that nobody holds a gun to your head to play an AI core. If you are so anti AI that you dream of “slop” just don’t download it. Stick to what you know.
The harsh fact is that there are not enough talented coders with the spare time it takes to please everybody. Only a few have managed to turn it into a business, the rest are hobby projects anyway, and any could need to step away at any time.
Elitist vibes
MiSTer FPGA was always tinged with that elitist shimmer. It wasn’t a knock-off Chinese hand-held with 40,000 games on it. Early takers like me saw it as the true way to play retro games that was out of the reach of the masses, but when something is successful, and more people come along, they often find ways of working that may not suit the taste of the originals.
And that’s where we are now. And it’s pretty off-putting.
The MiSTer project has changed beyond recognition in my years away from it – but just like car manufacture, clothing manufacture and everything else around us, it’s not all good, but it’s not all bad.
It does however need to calm down before it starts driving people away.