The biggest thing for me was just being brave enough to go for it and give it a try, and then learning how to undo your mistakes. Re-do things you’re not happy with with braid, reflow things with flux, etc. I’ve torn vias out of old valuable boards doing restoration, and I learned trace repair and fixed it.
I think it’s the contrast that’s the problem, rather than the choice of font (although serif fonts can be slightly harder to read). Lighten the background slightly, and darken the text slightly, and it would be much more readable.
(But I too love the project, and am interested to see the result when the BBS is available via packet radio.)
The $64k question! The very first title on the list f. e., Falcon 3.0, only requires it for the "hi-fi" flight model. Quake certainly needs an FPU. Don't know about the others.
So or so, the info needs to be verified for accuracy, e. g. if a 486DX-specced title really needed (or profited from the the presence of) an FPU, or if was just a speed requirement/recommendation. And some of the game covers's spec boxes don't mention anything about an FPU at all. Etc.
It’s a neat core, but z386 is where the action is right now (https://github.com/nand2mario/z386_MiSTer). Interestingly this core doesn’t output a proper analogue signal. I always wondered why until I recently tried to implement a real EGA pixel clock on the PCXT EGA core. Basically, video cards with dual (or more) pixel clocks are not realistic on MiSTer. The PLLs are there, but once you get too many clock sources the routing becomes quickly impossible. MiSTer framework’s pipeline also forces pixel clocks tied directly to video output (for good reason) and switching that clock at runtime gets very tricky.
Thanks for mentioning z386. Much of its recent progress was made possible by the reverse engineering and disassembly of the original 80386 microcode (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247004), which z386 uses as its control program. That work has been especially valuable for reproducing obscure protected-mode behavior correctly.
With correctness helped greatly by that, development is now focused mainly on performance. In Doom, z386 is currently about 30% faster than ao486 on the same MiSTer setup, with benchmark performance roughly comparable to a 486DX2-66.
Can you describe why z386 is much faster than the supposedly highly optimized ao486? Is the original microcode (and corresponding chip architecture) that good?
It was actually both in one executable. Pretty neat. But I will agree that OP might have played it in Microsoft Dos on a PC, so the original point still applies.
The ConsoleMods wiki[0] has a list of games that contain standard CD-DA tracks, which doesn't include any Tony Hawk Pro Skater releases (nor Crazy Taxi).
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