Playing classic games, whether they are games from the golden age of arcades or simply games from consoles that are long out of production, tends to exist on a spectrum. At one end is grabbing a game’s ROM file, finding an emulator, and kludging together some controls on a keyboard and mouse with your average PC. At the other is meticulously restoring classic hardware for the “true” feel of what the game would have felt like when it was new. Towards the latter end is emulating the hardware with an FPGA which the open-source MiSTer project attempts to do. This build, though, adds ATX capabilities for the retrocomputing platform.
The ATX standard was developed as a way to standardize motherboard mounting points in PC cases. This one uses the Mini-ITX version, allowing the MiSTer FPGA board to mount to a PCB which fits into a Mini-ITX case. All of the ports on the board appear where the I/O would normally be if this was a standard motherboard, but filling the otherwise empty space with blank PCB is where this project really shines. This allows the seamless addition of breadboards, other single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi, or any other headers or custom circuitry to be directly included.
What you’ll end up with is an open-source PC with plenty of room for expansion that fits into a standard PC case, which could go a long way to recreating older PC games an ..
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