but yes, it is fairly excessive if you just want to play games, emulation is absolutely "good enough" and even indistinguishable for most. We do it for the love of the hobby ;)
Replicating the physical interfaces does a lot for the quality of the emulation experience. Take, for instance, the C64 maxi: it’s physically a C64 (dimensions closer to a VIC-20, but that’s negligible) and, while the emulation is good, it feels much closer to using a cycle-accurate C64 over a PS/2 keyboard.
I don’t think the potential market for Amiga and ST keyboards for use with MiSTer justifies the investment, but I’d LOVE to see LK-411, Atari ST, Amiga, Sun, Symbolics, and other pre-PC-101 layouts as reasonably priced USB keyboards.
Also, those original components have more than 25 years-old... They can fail anytime. DE10-nano is new hardware with new components which last other 25 years at least.
Yeah, the MiSTer project is really just a loose collection of people with a loose common goal. So the true accuracy of cores does vary a lot. Most users don't really care, as long as they provide a pretty accurate experience. I think most MiSTer owners (myself included) prefer it over emulation due to having no lag. I also really like that the MiSTer does not buffer any writes, so there is no shut down. Just turn it off when you are done, allowing my setup to be very console-like.
Unfortunately the original consoles will stop working and existing outside of museums over time; I see projects like this as archival work, so that in tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of years people can still rebuild and play these games.
Someone elsewhere pointed out that PS1 disks (or any disk based system for that matter) suffers from disk rot, so likewise, what is now considered piracy should also be considered archival work since the original disks will stop working.
something something entropy, something something the inexorable passage of time.
very same fpga chip alone is more expensive than DE-10 nano https://octopart.com/5cseba6u23i7n-intel+%2F+altera-88365716 Be sure to send your thanks to EC, FTC and the Antitrust Division of the DOJ. Altera and Xilinx mergers clearly were super beneficial to customers and the market, competition has never been better with both competing by rising prices and cutting volume in unison.
But I wouldn't place too much blame on the companies - COVID wrecked a lot of supply chains as well - as anyone who runs emulators on RPis will be able to confirm.
Covid showed companies new way forward. Cut supply and bump prices, this is the source of all semi shortages. There was no earthquake, no one ran out of rare ingredients, corporations simply cut fab orders.
rpi shortage is a direct result of Broadcom (Avago) deciding to stop manufacturing chips that dont generate hundreds of millions in revenue a year. FPGAs were same deal, post merger Xilinx/Altera cut manufacturing.
Tho I’m glad this project exists that’s… a huge chunk of change for a 30 yr old console