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Welcome to the DE1-SoC Edition of MiSTer - Main_MiSTer!

MiSTer Cores including VIP versions ported to Altera DE1-SoC FPGA Board (Cyclone V)

DE1-SoC is a rich hardware to run MiSTer Menu and most of the MiSTer Cores including scandoubler, which means you just need a micro SD card and no need for any memory expansion or vga/audio daughter boards.

This port leverages all built-in hardware capabilities of the board:

  • integrated 64mb SDRAM
  • VGA Output
  • Audio output
  • 2x Standard USB connectors

All ported and tested cores for DE1-SoC will be available under this Wiki main index page.

DE1-SoC

DE1-SoC-pinout

DE1-SoC is a medium sized FPGA, big systems can be created. It's also possible to add support from ARM side. For example TZX tape format can be parsed on ARM and then send to FPGA. Firmware is not limited by code size or available RAM. It'e even possible to emulate some parts of system on ARM which is not available in FPGA (so-called hybrid emulator).

DE1-SoC port of MiSTer scales original video resolution to a standard VGA resolution (usually 1280x720p60), so you don't need to look for some ancient low HZ monitor. (you will have to enable scaler mode in MiSTer.ini)

How does it work?

1. You need to set the dip switches on the board to the following position

You can find the dip switches on the back of the FPGA board:

DE1-SoC-DIP_switch-MiSTer1

Zoomed dip switch status:

DE1-SoC-DIP_switch-MiSTer2

If you miss this step your board is not able to boot-up from the SDCard and not able to load the menu.rbf file and your video output will be blank.

2. Slide Switches to high position

You need to set to high / up position all slide switches:

3. Micro SD card for the project

Tested cards: Kingston/Sandisk 8/12/32gb micro sd.

4. Download SD-Installer-Win64_MiSTer latest release and install to the SD Card

SD-Installer-Win64_MiSTer

5. Configure /media/fat/config/MiSTer.ini

You have to configure the basic things, at least vga scaler mode in order to see picture on a standard VGA monitor and volumectl, otherwise the sound volume will be too high and it will cause audio distortion for Wolfson audio chip on DE1-SoC.

Recommended DE1-SoC MiSTer.ini

MiSter.ini wiki page

6. Download Menu_Mister (Boot Menu) and copy to the memory card / overwrite existing menu.rbf file

Download the latest Menu Core to the MiSTer_Data windows partition of your Micro SD card and rename the release file for example menu_20XXXXXX.rbf filename format to simply menu.rbf and overwrite existing menu.rbf file on the SD Card.

7. Download the wished DE1-SoC compatible Cores and copy to the memory card partition

You can find core list on the right sidebar box.

DE1-SoC ported Cores

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