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.romROM file from the MAME ROMs, using one of the build scripts. - Copy
a.rygar.romandrygar.rbfto 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.
