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An extra option or two has been added to the DIP settings on “Gorf” and “Gorf (Program 1)”

Both now have an “Autocoin” option. This can be used instead of freeplay and it will automatically insert the correct number of coins when you press Start 1 or 2 to let you start with 2 (low) or 4 (High) ships (depends on the ships per credit setting)

“Gorf” has an addition “Rank” option. This will allow better players (not me!) to start at a rank other than “Space Cadet” for practising those advanced moves. You can select any of the ranks or certain Mission numbers.

Grab the updated image here. (updated 21st July 2026)

The Kagi 13” and 19” CRT chassis (KB240162), which seems to be used in Gremlin and Nichibutsu cabinets has now been added to the monitor capacitor list page.

If you need schematics for this, they can be found in the Nichibutsu Moon Shuttle manual. (available as a PDF on several sites – if you cannot find it let me know and I’ll add it here)

The classic shoot’em up Space Firebird has been completed as a core and added to MiSTer.

It uses the weirdest video hardware of any game I have ever seen, and this core was created in an attempt to understand the circuitry a little better.

The sprites are in 3-3-2 colour, via a lookup table (same as Galaxian and many others), but then there is a separate circuit that can pull these colours to ground via different resistors which adds 4 levels of intensity that is used when the ships appear to make them look like they are fading in.

Stars are static but a register under CPU control can vary the intensity of them a little to give the appearance of them flashing.

Incidentally, when in cocktail mode and the picture is inverted for player two, the stars stay in the same place as they did for player one. That circuit is not aware that the screen has been altered.

Following a request from a user on the MiSTer forum and since I was looking at making some changes to the Scramble core anyway I decided to add support for the game Cavelon.

It uses rom banking which had to be added in, and once I got that working I discovered that I also needed to add a new sprite banking method as well.

Once the pull request has been merged you will be able to play this difficult game on the MiSTer.

(well I have not managed to complete the first level yet anyway)

The original sound hardware for Cosmo has been reverse engineered from schematics generated by The Guru of Mame fame and has been added to the core on MiSTer

The original hardware runs at 333Khz which is way too fast for the audio output on MiSTer (maximum 96Khz) and sounded wrong at the correct speed. (due to lost sample changes, and trying to resample it at different rates did not improve it much)

So I have changed this clock to 192Khz and averaged the output to the DAC over two samples.

This results in the effects being about 4 notes lower and slightly slower than the original, however in comparison to a video of the real thing I didn’t notice a difference!

I decided to reverse engineer a bootleg of a Century playpack, as used on their conversions for Galaxian, Scramble and Donkey Kong hardware *

For what I found out see the information page in my repair log here

* Each hardware variant would have a custom memory mapping IC at position 3