Improvements keep getting made to the highly anticipated Super Station One MiSTer FPGA by Retro Remake. This time, it improves the disc-reading speed. See below a full list of the mentioned features and improvements.
General Performance: Disc reading performance on the SS1 has been significantly improved to be indistinguishable from loading from an SD card across almost all CD-cores.
PS1 Core Exception: The only core with a noticeable difference is the PS1 core, where performance can be less than <1% slower in edge cases.
PS1 Slowdowns: This minor slowdown in the PS1 core manifests as a slow CD error message appearing 1-2 times over a 10-minute period in select games.
Pause Option Impact: If the “pause core” option is enabled, these slowdowns will cause a sub-1-second pause in the core. If the option is disabled, the difference wouldn’t be noticeable, though disabling the pause is not recommended for some games.
Alternative Linux Solution: A separate SS1 version was created that modifies the MiSTer Linux backend to support direct disc reading, bypassing the existing API.
Linux Solution Performance: This modified Linux version appears to be indistinguishable from loading from an SD card in all cases, with no noticeable slowdowns.
Requirement for Linux Solution: Using the highest-performance Linux solution requires a forked Linux backend.
So glad I didn’t cancel my order! The dock is what makes this unique.
At first I misunderstood how it worked when pre-ordering it.
And was disappointed to find out that you had to rip the disc and then play the resulting ROM.
So I was thinking about cancelling the order, but then it was announced it could play the disc directly.
And look where development has gone from there, this and the fact it can now play discs from other systems than the OG Playstation. It’s becoming what I envisioned the potential coould be! Maybe even carts in the future, wow
Can’t wait for my delivery, but I’m in batch2 so it will take a bit of more waiting 🙂
It’s gone a long way further than originally intended. We are looking forward to testing the SS1 out.