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Despite featuring emulation heavily over the past few weeks here at Readwrite, we have not had the opportunity to talk about the MiSTer FPGA, until now that is. Now technically the MiSTer is not an emulation device, it is an FPGA, so is more of an accurate recreation of the hardware it portrays, but for the sake of this, it still allows us to play our favorite games without the use of the original hardware.
Now if you have been following along a lot of our emulation articles, you may have picked up by now it is a passion of mine, also that I collect old hardware and play games on both it and emulators, but I have also had a MiSTer since the early days and have watched the platform grow and mature into the truly special device we have today.
Along the way, you may also have picked up, that I have a fond affinity with the Commodore Amiga, having worked for a couple of magazines based on the machine in my early games journo days. Put them both together and here I am.
A couple of years ago a setup called AmigaVision (it’s a longer story than that, but again, for the sake of this) was released which is basically a nicely packaged collection of just about every Amiga game imaginable, all categorized and ready to run on a downloadable Amiga hard drive file. This was perfect for the MiSTer and its Minimig core, which was basically a recreation of the Amiga 1200, as it was pretty much a plug-and-play way to get the system’s library recreated within minutes.
You could also even install Amigavision on a real Amiga and run it there, such was the accuracy of what was on offer.
Since those days we have had a few new AmigaVision versions but now, after a considerable wait, the new version has been released that has support for Commodore’s CD32 – the Amiga-based console that fell victim to the company going bankrupt in 1994. Now whether the CD32 would have ever gone on to challenge the likes of consoles from Sony and Sega further down the line we will never know, but what we do know is there are some great games for it – including some great enhancements of Amiga classics including games such as Beneath a Steel Sky from Revolution Software who we wrote about last week and Super Stardust.
Now, AmigaVision can play your (legitimate) CD32 ROMs with glorious CD music, bringing another old system back to life. CDs don’t last forever, eventually suffering from bitrot and the original hardware is failing these days, so the chance to preserve this unique system via the MiSTer is super important for all of us videogame historian geeks.
You can check out more at the AmigaVision blog, and if you are lucky enough to have a MiSTer FPGA, you should get on this immediately.
Featured Image: Courtesy of AmigaVision
