The MiSTix board is equipped with four USB ports on board available from the back panel (see below). The blue USB port you see between the audio ports and the VGA is in fact not a USB port: it is the MiSTer ‘user port’ which just happens to commonly use a USB connector. Above the board in this image are four additional ports which are not mounted to the board itself: these are part of the MiSTix fitting kit. The…
In the previous post I discussed the Daemonbite adaptor I built to add a second DB9 (DE9) port to the back. I showed the following image of the installed adaptor. Next to the adaptor is a memory card extender. This is a ‘nice to have’ addition. The DE-10 Nano board boots from a MicroSD card, and by default all of the MiSTer files are on that card. While you can access everything on the card over the network, sometimes it’s…
The early Atari consoles introduced a standard for connecting controllers such as joysticks, gamepads, mice and so on which saw widespread adoption and lived on well into the 90’s. It was based around a 9-pin D-sub connector. Images below are from the Wikipedia article on the subject. As a point of interest, many if not most aficionados of 80/90s computers would refer to this as a ‘DB-9’ connector. I know I would. This is actually wrong: D-sub connectors are a…
As discussed previously, there are dedicated analogue and digital audio outputs on the MiSTix board. There is a third option: audio can be output over HDMI. So the question is, which to use? In my office all of my audio passes to my speakers through a small digital amplifier (an SMSL Q5 Pro, if you are interested). In general, I would prefer to do my digital-to-analogue conversion outside of a noisy computer case. My only way of putting HDMI audio…
Right, let’s have a bit of a deep dive into the capabilities of the MiSTix board. Here’s the top down view. We’ll start at the bottom and work up. In the bottom left hand corner we have a power connector which will go into the barrel jack of the DE-10 Nano. Moving right we see an ATX power connector, and then a Micro-SD card slot. I haven’t tested this, but I believe this is the second SD card which is…
A delivery! A big brown box with a Checkmate invoice attached. Opening up we find a boxed keyboard. We’ll get to that later. Underneath we find a white box containing the case and all of the associated cables. Popping it out and it really is a thing of beauty. A really nicely put together case with those classic Amiga 3000 lines. But the really interesting stuff is inside… Opening up we find the extras that I ordered. First, to the…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the best looking Amiga of all time was the A3000, launched in 1990. This was the third of the ‘big box’ Amigas and really was the first model to be released that represented a genuine step forward in terms of speed and capability over the original A1000. For these reasons it generally holds a special place in the heart of Amiga fans: even those of us who only ever owned the low-end machines….
I’m still waiting to take delivery of most of the hardware I need, so let’s start with the software install. I do have a perfectly fine install which I’ve been using since 2020, but there’s a couple of reasons to start from scratch with a nice clean install. First of all I will be using a different SD card. The DE-10 runs from a micro SD card mounted on the board, however one thing I want to do is make…
A recent article in Polygon gave a nice overview of the MiSTer system. The typical system looks like the image below, which I copied from the article. What we have here is the De-10 Nano board which is the heart of any MiSTer system stacked between two dedicated add-on boards. At the top is an IO board which provides switches, lights and additional connectivity. At the bottom is a USB hub board which increased the number of USB ports from…
To start with, let me give a brief overview of the MiSTer project. To put it in context, let’s briefly explore the options for enjoying a 1980’s computer platform in 2020. The purist approach is to use original hardware. This may or may not be available to you: if you don’t still have your original Amiga 500 or Commodore 64 such popular machines are readily available second hand, but prices are increasing. Once you have one, maintaining this old hardware…