I’m not gonna blow smoke up your arse and tell you FPGAs are magical and superior, but I have been thoroughly enjoying my time with the MiSTer-based SuperStation One since I got it; having access to consistently-performing, distraction-free, HDMI-optimised (no frame drops between interlaced and progressive modes, with no expensive scaler!), TV cabinet-friendly PS1 and N64 (and way more) is great!

I grew up with the PS1, so NES emulation has never really been my jam¹, but having instant access to the best (and, in some cases, worst :P) of the 32-bit era from the couch with comfy modern controllers, and access to a whole library of quirky retro ones? magic.

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Back on our honeymoon in 2019 I picked up a NeGcon from Game Tanteidan: Retro TV Game Revival 『ゲーム探偵団 RETRO TV GAME REVIVAL』 in Nippombashi, Osaka. I used it a few times, but only having a PS2² at home my options for exploring it were limited, and sadly in my experience it doesn’t play well on PC emulators unless you have very particular adapters, but with the SuperStation I am finally able to pass it through to use it how it was meant to be enjoyed!

Yes, it’s a quirky, very unusual controller from an era where we didn’t quite know what to do with the concept of analogue input yet, but I think it’s charming and honestly underrated despite largely being the forgotten underpinnings of the PlayStation’s support for racing wheel controllers. And for something so full of plastic mechanisms it’s still working fantastically 30 or so years on! Namco cooked on this one, it’s really quite remarkable.

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There’s a core memory of mine of playing Crash Bandicoot on a family friend’s gigantic rear-projection TV, and the sight of the titular bandicoot wiping out on a turtle and spinning in a black void on that big, slightly-fuzzy TV has never left me.

I am delighted to say that the MiSTer core with a nice scanline effect and in HDR (to compensate for the brightness loss from adding scanlines) on our lovely LG OLED TV is about as close as I have gotten without making a regrettable purchase of an³ enormous and difficult to maintain relic of times past lmao.

For a long time I’ve been a staunch adherent to integer-scaled, hard-edges for retro games on modern displays, but this is the first time the softer side has truly appealed to me.

If there’s one major critique I have of the MiSTer experience it’s the user interface. It’s not especially intuitive to navigate for someone more used to PC emulator frontends. Rather than pick a game and launch it, it instead asks you to select a “core” first, and then pick a game within that core. It’s fine, but it leaves a lot to be desired. You can create “shortcuts” which point at a combo of core and ROM, but it’s rather clunky and manual effort. I remain hopeful that the “Console Mode” interface that Retro Remake have been working on will be a big quality of life improvement there; adding box art, metadata and familiar categorisation would be really lovely here.

Got any fun or odd or interesting retro games or MiSTer tips you’d like to share? Hit me up! Or go check out the PAL and Japanese region-exclusive PS1 title “Fluid,” (a.k.a. “Depth” in Japan, (a.k.a. “Sub” in France 😅)) it’s really something!