Anyone else play with the Next186 SOC core?

[eightbit]

I have spend the past two days playing with the core on my MiST (it is available for MiSTer as well) and man is it awesome! It is not fully compatible with everything (no DOS4/G stuff) but I have already 175 DOS games working fine with it....a whole lot of classics. And, Norton Commander and some extensions for it to play back MUS and MIDI files. Very very cool stuff!

 

Here's the thread on the Atari Forums for the MiST port I am currently using:

 

https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=40714

 

and Github page (MiST port):

 

https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-binaries/tree/master/cores/next186

 

 

Anyone else try this with either their MiST or MiSTer FPGA? If not, you should. Really added a whole new level of fun...at least for this old timer

Edited February 19, 2022 by eightbit

[carlsson]

I've got a Next186 core on my FleaFPGA. I found it hit and miss which games will play, mainly due to graphics mode. I'll check the links later for more clues on what might run.

[eightbit]

11 hours ago, carlsson said:

I've got a Next186 core on my FleaFPGA. I found it hit and miss which games will play, mainly due to graphics mode. I'll check the links later for more clues on what might run.

 

 

There's an ongoing compatibility list here:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r07Ubfzquz2FxnKp4GROk8_Kq6kTlVW7YxVTmBDR_c4/edit#gid=0

 

Outside of the games I have tested After Dark v1.0, Dazzle, MS Word 5.5, Norton Commander, DOS Navigator, some midi and mus players. Everything there works as expected although the screen corrupts when exiting an active AD screensaver...and is fixed by opening the AD control panel and then exiting. Not sure what that is. But, still, seeing those old screensavers was a trip!

 

On the games side I have found the best luck with EGA and VGA games (CGA versions do not display correctly) and games that do not use any DOS extenders. Even still, there's a whole lot that actually works to my surprise.

 

 

Edited February 21, 2022 by eightbit

[+Gemintronic]

Do MiST cores work on the MiSTer?

 

My main gripe with x86 cores is only real mode DOS HDD access.  Without proper IDE or SCSI Win 95 gaming and other operating systems are sketchy if at all possible.

[eightbit]

46 minutes ago, Gemintronic said:

Do MiST cores work on the MiSTer?

 

My main gripe with x86 cores is only real mode DOS HDD access.  Without proper IDE or SCSI Win 95 gaming and other operating systems are sketchy if at all possible.

 

Short answer is no, MiST and MiSTer cores are not interchangeable, but IIRC there should be a MiSTer core of Next186 as well.

 

I am using a 3GB .vhd formatted with one 2GB active partition and one 1GB secondary partition ...just in case I need it. But with MS-DOS 6.22 installed and 250+ games on here along with a bunch of DOS software and I am using 1GB

 

EDIT: Not finding a Next186 core for MiSTer so maybe it has not been ported yet. There is ao486 however which feature-set looks great although I have never tried it:

 

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer