MiSTer and FPGA

The problem with the high score saving for Gorf and Wizard of Wor should now be resolved.

You can now see the settings menu when the OSD button is pressed, although background will be black or just stars, which allows you to change the settings once more.

Reloading the scores will no longer cause other unwanted side effects.

I have removed the downloads for the images with High Score saving for the moment as I have found a couple of problems during further testing.

• The CRT blanks out when the game is paused, which makes it very difficult to change the settings. (HDMI continues to work but not many people have HDMI monitors in their cabinets)
• The save file also interferes with other functions of the game depending upon when it was saved. (speech does not work, automatically starts the game etc.)

They will be back when I sort out these problems!

I have added two new images to the “Putting it Together” page (here) that now implement the NVRam that could be used with the hardware. The games that support this are “Gorf” and “Wizard of Wor”.

These versions will allow you to save the high scores to the SDRam card whenever they change.

To do this you need to press the OSD button before you switch off. (I prefer to do this on the attract screen) and if the scores have changed since they were loaded you should get a “Saving ….” popup before the normal menu appears.

As a side line, when in the OSD menu the game will now pause. So if you need a quick drink (or something else) in the middle of a long session you can affectively use this to pause the game and resume when you return with a second press on the OSD button.

There are a few new DIP settings added to Gorf, so I decided I may need to explain them. For further information see the “Changing the Settings” page (here)

It seems that Coin Op Collection have completed a Snow Bros core for MiSTer before I did. Not really surprising since I have taken ages on this one. I had suffered from one of the same problems as they did, so at least I was on the right track.

For the moment I will look into the missing sound circuits on Cosmo (Space Invaders hardware) and then better analogue sound for Galaxian.

The 68000 based core I was working on is not totally redundant as it may be revisited later with a view to running a different game!

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I have made a change to the checkout form for the shop, a phone number is now required. This is because shipping to some countries with Royal Mail now requires this and it saves me having to email you to ask for one.

Just a quick shot as it appears I have finally got the code for the Pandora graphics chip to work as intended. This is not running game code, I just grabbed the memory content for the colour and sprite registers and load it for testing, but after several false starts it is finally behaving itself. (I did have a previous version that worked and was much quicker, unfortunately it required about 80,000 LUTs)

Ignore the rows of numbers at the top of the screen, I used them for debugging things. The only important one is the 83, which shows that the screen was complete on the 131st vertical scan line, so plenty of room to manoeuvre for extra sprites.

I used one of the Astrocade PCBs recently to make an adapter to allow me to put a MiSTer setup into my Crazy Climber cabinet.

I populated the video, a single sound channel and the regulator, added an amplifier and then wired an edge connector and video pins to plug into the cabinet.

End result – I can now use the MiSTer to let me to select between Crazy Climber and Crazy Climber 2. Plus I can always add other games if any actually use a horizontal monitor and two joysticks!