Sony recently caused a stir by announcing a range of PS1-style designs for its console range to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation brand.
The series includes the PS5, PS Portal and the new PS5 Pro, all clad in the iconic grey colour scheme and sporting the classic multicolour PS logo.
MiSTer Pi creator Taki Udon has taken this opportunity to tease a PS-related project of his own – an FPGA-based system which takes design inspiration from the original 32-bit PlayStation and runs games as accurately as possible.
FPGA chips – which stands for "Field-Programmable Gate Array" – allow developers to replicate the performance of classic systems on a hardware level rather than using software, as is the case with traditional emulation. This ensures a much higher level of accuracy and removes issues like latency and input lag.
He notes that it will also play games for other systems, unlike Analogue's range of home console FPGA clones.
PS1 games on FPGA isn't a new thing – the MiSTer PS1 core has been around for a while – but it seems that Taki Udon plans to include support for original PS1 accessories, such as controllers and memory cards. It seems unlikely that it will run original discs, however; games will need to be loaded on flash memory.
"For those who haven't been following the series, this is a consolized MiSTer FPGA system designed to faithfully play PS1 games (as well as many other systems)," says Taki Udon. "Now you will know why the R2 logo uses these four colors."
Taki Udon is working on a series of FPGA-based devices, as well as an open-source handheld. Unlike his MiSTer Pi project, this PS1 system will be "a fully custom PCB assembled at the factory. The end-user doesn't need to do anything." It will also come with TapTo support, as the logo contains an NFC reader.