Rygar for MiSTer (Beta)

I'm happy to announce that the Rygar core for MiSTer is finally ready for beta testing.

Rygar was one of my favourite arcade games as a kid. It was originally built in 1986 by Tecmo, a Japanese video game company, and saw later releases on consoles like Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, Commodore 64, Atari Lynx, etc.

I am by no means a professional FPGA engineer – my career has been in software, with some hardware hacking on the side – so developing this core was quite an intense learning process for me. It has literally taken months.

I  began this project by writing a Rygar emulator, so I could focus on learning how the arcade game works, without having to worry about the FPGA side of things. Once I had a good undertanding of the high-level architecture, I moved on to the actual FPGA implementation.

I managed to keep detailed project notes while working on both the emulator and the FPGA core. I plan on turning them into a series of blog posts, so stay tuned for that if you're interested 👾

Installation

There are  detailed instructions in the README, but this should get you started:

• Download rygar-mister-1.0.0-beta.0.zip and extract it.
• Build the a.rygar.rom ROM file from the MAME ROMs, using one of the build scripts.
• Copy a.rygar.rom and rygar.rbf  to your MiSTer.
• Enjoy!

The full source code is available on GitHub.

Known Issues

There are a few known issues:

• No sound
• Minor sprite glitches
• Background layer renders incorrectly on some levels

If you come across anything else, then please post it in GitHub issues and I'll take a look.

Next Steps

I will cut the final release once I have implemented the sound and fixed the outstanding issues.

I also plan on adapting this core to support some of the other Tecmo games released in the late 80s: Silkworm and Gemini.