A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

OMG, Becky, look at that cat. It’s so…creepy. Ugh.
It looks like one of those goth guys’ cats. But, ugh, you know…
Who understands those goth guys? Ugh, they only take care of it because it looks broken and destitute, OK?
I mean, that cat, it’s just so sinister.
Ugh, I can’t believe it, it’s just so demonic, it’s like DOWN there.
I mean, ugh, gross, look, ugh, it’s just so BLACK!

I like black cats and I cannot lie.
You other kitties need not try.
When a kitten hops in with that itty bitty purr and a dark sheen to their fur…

You just melt.
So sleek and svelte.
Lemme just pet that pelt.

A couple pats’n that motor’s whirrin’.
On my lap this cat is purrin’.
Oh, kit-ty, you wanna get wet food?
Where is the pet food?
Lemme just cross this gantry.
Kitchen remodel’s blockin’ the pantry.

Oh, Rumpleteaser…
You say you want me to squeeze ya?
You roll and you roll, but I know that it’s just a troll.
I see you plannin’, tryna lure my hand in.
Then it’s slash! Scratch! Bunnykick and bite your catch!

I’m tired of YouTube scenes sayin’ orange cats are the thing.
Take the average cat man and ask him that?
And it’s grey or black!

So felines (meow), felines (meow)
Is there a dark hue to your coat? (meow yeah!)
Then let’s brush it! (brush it) Brush it! (brush it)
Brush that healthy coat. Kitty is black.

(Panther face with that kitten cuteness)
Kitty is black.
(Panther face with that kitten cuteness)
Kitty is black.

I like ‘em dark. And cute.
Throw the rest down the chute.
I just don’t have the time
for ugly, stupid animals.
‘K, maybe a Serval.

I’d wanna take that home.
But (ugh) ugly cats? (ugh! ugh!)

A tabby’s not OK, boy.
Nor calico, manx, or dons’koy.
I want ‘em short haired and swarthy.
Like the one at this party.
Nametag reads Malarky.
Time to go find my car keys.

So I’m doom scrollin’ on my phone.
Mangy orange tabbies in ugly beige homes.
You can keep them tabbies.
I’ll keep my Bageera-toned babbies.

A word to the sack cloth kittehs,
I just wanna stroke ya.
I won’t kick or choke ya.
But I gotta be straight when I say I wanna (Awww!)
Un-til com-mer-cial BREAK!
Then, kitty gotta be awake!
All my joints begin to ache.
Unlike most, I won’t pet it and jet it.
I’d rather stay and play.
With this thing, on a string,
And a suction cup mounted spring.
Hey dummy (meow?) dummy (meow?)
You want me to pet your tummy? (MROW!)
Then lay down here. On your back.
And don’t you dare attack.

KITTY ATTACKED.
KITTY ATTACKED.

Yeah, kitty, when it comes to felines
Pedigree got nothin’ to do with my selection.
That Morris on the cover of Meow Mix? Haha! Only if he’s dyed gris.

So your furfriend rolls up biscuits.
And it’s date night, so you risk it.
But Triscuit’s claw got a stocking and you cannot fix it.
Your fab-ric mix-es don’t like runs and now you’ve got tons, hun!

You can hack hairballs and throw-ups.
A noir chat god forgives.
Some others wanna pure bred Scot Fold.
Or mangy, tawny cats, real old.
So they gram it, or they Red-dit,
A black cat won’t get the same credit.

Some think that you’re bad luck. Well I don’t give a fuck.
‘Cuz your back is scratched and your butt is liftin’.
Behind your ears I’m scritchen.

To the fancy cats with the squished up face?
You stay in your place.
Give me a mix, then, with a hint of Nyx, then.
Be sure and have the doctor fix them.

Those other cats always hiss.
Or they roll around in piss.
Have no shame, really just should bin ‘em.
Have Garfield take Heathcliffe with ‘im.

So kitties, if the fur is black,
Just jump in my sack.
“Oh, you’ll adopt? That helps a lot! I’ll get this one it’s shots.”
Oh, I take it back.
I take it back.
I was a little razzle dazzled ’cause I like black cats.
I was a little razzle dazzled ’cause I like black cats.
I was a little razzle dazzled ’cause I like black cats.
I was a little razzle dazzled ’cause I like black cats.

There’s a long-standing marketing technique in games. I think it’s in other, it’s in games, and it goes like this. Fool me once…no, wait. It’s the idea of marketing a game as putting you in the place of your favorite character. “Become the Bat!” “You are Daredevil!” (Once I get to the thesis, this would be the cheapest game in the world to make…) “Wowie Zowie, you cal almost FEEL Wolvie’s claws come out!” WRONG.

No game you have ever enjoyed has made you feel like the character. They’ve made YOU feel like what YOU think YOU’D feel like if you suddenly had all of that character’s abilities and were thrown into a world made of bowling bumpers. Feeling like the character is horrible. Tedious. Not fun in any way. The opposite of ‘free.’ And you know it. Search your whatever you et cetera. You probably kissed your sister. Gross.

And that’s a GOOD thing. If you’re a comic fan, you’ve caught on and are now nodding and probably making a little side smirk about how heavy handed this allegory is becoming. If you’re scratching your head at what I’m getting at, read on.

Being a super hero sucks in almost any interesting situation

The common marketing trope of promising ‘putting you inside the mind of your favorite character’ is inherently flawed and is the core of why we never get Superman outside of Mortal Kombat reskins. Let’s lay out how a Superman game that made you really feel what it was like to be Superman would play out. Not a game made to be a game; a game to simulate feeling like Superman. First, 1/3rd of 5 days a week would be spent doing absolutely tedious office work. Keeping up your secret identity is non-negotiable. You’re a mid-level reporter at a big newspaper who won’t work overtime. You’re ALWAYS on thin ice. You’re also in an office romance and there are like 50 HR guidelines you need to dodge. It’s not fun, like Papers Please. You have to deep dive into microfiche to fact check stories. You have to get legal to sign off on verbiage. You’re basically God and you have to do your election paperwork for benefits enrollment because turning down health insurance would be a red flag. You, Superman, have to find ways to come up with leaving the office to save people or straight up listen to them die.

You punch out and head out to job 2. Saving the world. Oh, look! A filthy poor stealing food at a MegaMart! Better apprehend him! I hope you are able to squeeze the right trigger at exactly 0.01% of its travel path. Any more and you crush him into a fine paste. In front of kids, no less! You used your X-Ray vision to see if he was armed. The lady an aisle over lost her baby! Best of luck pushing that thumbstick within a range that doesn’t spin the world backwards and cause a car to rise out of the ground, but somehow not cause Lois to not have dirt in her lungs. It’s a good movie, but don’t fuck with time. It never works out.

OK, well, how about a Flash game? No, not NewGrounds. Wally and Barry and all their bullshit. We’ll stick to comic physics, otherwise he basically couldn’t see and would anhillate anything he touched with the energy of a trillion suns, igniting our atmosphere and killing us all by taking a step. What are you left with? The slowest point and click adventure you’ve ever played. It would take days to get to your front door, just to leave. You’d have to spend a year every 16 years eating. Your great-great-great-grandchildren will finally turn in the first quest, knowing nothing of how the game began or why the family insisted they take up this ancient suffering. You do not want to play a game that makes you feel like the Flash.

I can hear the batarangs being sharpened and the smear campaign payoff envelope being mailed by Alfred now. Surely, the Arkham games - which place you in a character that’s human and not beholden to all that pseudo-magic nonsense - does succeed in making you feel like The Bat. Haha! I’ve been got! Except not even a little bit. If this were character accurate, you wouldn’t be out there very much murdering people (And real talk, you ARE murdering people. Lucius told BatGPT to show you dead bodies as ‘unconscious’ but they haven’t moved for 6 hours and aren’t breathing, Bruce. Bruce…you know what you did, Bruce), you’d be PLANNING. The game would be a goddamned RTS if it were accurate. Hours and hours of pouring over databases and looking through schematics, all while a little video of pearls dropping on the cold ground plays in the corner of your screen. The last level would be one fight with one big-bad who you hand over to the cops, knowing full well that there’s no legal system in this country even now that wouldn’t immediately release them. A job well … well. A job anyway. At best, the Arkham games are an exercise, but BatFans know, feeling like Batman would require therapy.

Spider-Man, or Spiders-Men…s, comes the closest to making you feel like the superhero simply by taking $150-$300 bucks out of your pocket in total. That’s the most on-brand a single one of these games has been. The fact you have to jump back and forth between your work and the work adds a lot to the realism. But it’s still mostly the good with nearly none of the bad. It makes you feel like Spider-Man feels in a moment, and that’s saying something. The first game, in particular. It FEELS lonely a lot of the time. Getting the Iron-Spider gadgetry diminishes it and I’d love to see a mode where you don’t get tracking and all the bells and whistles, but even letting that slide, the thing you DO get that immediately makes it an escapist fantasy for Peter, were it offered to him, is time. You literally don’t start the clock until you want to. Peter’s character is built on not being able to stop everything. His character growth comes from realizing that while it destroys him that he knows he couldn’t be two places at once, being in one place mattered to someone. And that’s something. But in the games, you are free to leisurely take photos, high-five fans, solve silly NPC mysteries, visit your uncle’s grave, or see a marriage proposal that didn’t go so well. And it’s another game where you’d have to La Croix-touch the button to do a punch that doesn’t turn Otto’s brain to a thin soup the second it contacts. This is NOT an authentic Peter Parker Perspective.

None of this is to say this is a bad thing. Not at all! Every one of these games has been played and utterly enjoyed by me, your humble, totally reliable narrator. Spider-Man has a feeling of freedom that is unmatched by anything but maybe Forza Horizon, and you can’t web swing in that (Get the fuck ON this, Playground Games!). The Arkhams created an entire subgenre to brawlers because their flow was almost a dance and they were absolutely genre defining. Before the franchise became a weird bumpercar game. Even (one of) the old Hulk games had merits, mostly directly related to NOT making you feel like The Hulk. That would suck. The control would be taken away from you and you’d just be watching Hardcore Henry but way uglier? No thanks. See where I was going with the Daredevil thing in the opener? Or, rather, don’t see?

Insomniac has, however, gotten closer to putting you into the actual experience of a superhero with Wolverine. It’s still a long way off. You don’t feel the sting when your claws come out. Your camera isn’t three apples above the ground. Smell-o-vision hasn’t been invented yet, so you don’t smell all of the piss and feces and bile from the people you’ve shredded. And pennies. Don’t forget pennies. But you are constantly bombarded with sensory information. It tells you where to go in a way that’s very realistic to what Wolverine’s experience would be like. Too intense to ignore. Getting in the way of his rationality. Always on. From that perspective, it’s one of the very few games to actually succeed in the marketing promise to make you feel like you ARE a character. And it sucks. You can’t connect with Logan the way you can connect with Spider-Man simply because, in making the experience accurate in one vector, they’ve removed the negative feedback loop that acts as an analog for some of the impossible-to-translate negatives the character has to deal with. That’s a very long-winded way to say this very long-winded thing: “Taking away confusion and discovery, while accurate to what the hero would experience, takes it away in absence of the accurate negative experiences the character is having.” You need the negatives to appreciate the positives in praxis. Taking away the smell trails, or even just making them optional like Detective Mode, would have better served the game than accuracy to the experience of the character. You can make Wolverine invulnerable but still have a decent story reason that you ‘die’ in a fight. Insomniac’s ludonarrative dissonance-omancy is legendary, so surely weaving a small series of game-over cut scenes with non-death reasons you’re out of the action would have not been out of their wheelhouse. And it would have been more interesting than having three Phoenix Downs on auto in your inventory. QTEs having consequences validates them. But it would have been less accurate to the character. So all they do is waste a tiny bit less of your time if you engage. And that feels hollow. What’s making it hard for Wolverine is the constant, screaming voice in his head, the constant pain he’s in as his body never stops healing and feeling, every bone still screaming like the day it was infused with a metal that is eating him alive. Capturing super powered characters’ actual struggles is not what anyone is signing up for when they play a game. And I’m tired of pretending like it is.

What most people enjoy when they say that a game made them feel like a superhero is a feeling like you have all of the tools to solve a problem in a style that matches the character you know and love, while still having some stakes and failure conditions to keep it interesting for your normal, mortal self. Classically, that has been what marketing meant when it boasted a game “put you into” a character. But it seems Insomniac has done just that, and what could have been a fun experience (and likely will be if someone with sense gets approval to let us shut off a few of the forced tracking options in a future update) feels like an insult and plays worse for its accuracy. This isn’t touching on some of the other mechanics choices that are questionable - I feel like those were all made with intent and probably solved a problem we don’t know about. But the constant sensory bombardment? Sure, our Canadian Danzig Impersonator is acccurately represented here. But it makes the final product worse.

One more datapoint on this thesis. One other game has done this, in my experience. There are probably a few more, but one stands out to me as the most relevant expression of this phenomenon. The Animated Adventures of Superman/Superman 64. The controls were twitchy but the puzzles were precise. The time limit was always your biggest enemy. And apart from Lex? You were alone. Solitary, in a world of flat, cardboard people. In a world of cars that explode if you grab them wrong. A world where if you don’t precisely navigate the obstacles, the city is lost. Superman 64 is, in my opinion, the most accurate branded Superhero simulator ever made. And it’s as fun as eating salted sand. Lex Wins.

Let’s go ahead and set the temperature by stating a couple things. First is that this applies to a group that is, by and large, very privileged in society - but don’t confuse that privilege with being an elite, because, as the saying goes, you are far closer to being homeless than you are to being a billionaire. And second, the undeniable fact is, your labor bought that pizza to begin with. Your value to any company that’s at the “Throwing a Morale Pizza Party” stage of moral decay is a well calculated formula in an Excel cell in someone’s network share. Calling it a reward when you are a net profit for the company is disingenuous at best and an outright picking of your pocket in most cases.

White collar work has long been propagandized away from unions, on the whole. A few pop up here and there and they are not to be discounted. They are a triumph and, in fact, should be well celebrated! But let out a box of wild bats into a room full of cubicle jockeys and most of your rabies vaccines are going into non-union arms. But hey, at least you got to let out a box of bats!

Most jobs that fall into this slowly-diminishing category are not represented by unions and are often actively discouraged from forming one. Office cheerleaders will offer, unsolicited, that a union would result in a pay cut for everyone because of dues and bonuses would disappear in favor of lower-yield yearly cost of living increases. They will say they love having the freedom to negotiate on their own, but you know that worm said yes to the first offer and has been licking boot ever since. HR will play the ‘family’ gambit and, you don’t ask your family for contracts (you absolutely should, by the way - in any business dealings). Don’t rock the boat! Nobody else is thinking about this. You’re ALL ALONE. You know, the same shit cults and abusive partners say. One of the things they will bring up is the disappearance of perks. Perk. PERK! Wow. I bet they have lovely plumage. Do tell if you ever spot one in the wild!

A perk, again, falls into compensation. Whether expected or unexpected, a perk will not tip the company into the red on your output at any level that doesn’t have a VP in the title. And at that point, you don’t get pizza parties. You get coked up and regret saying ‘yes’ to that island vacation. Well, you would if you had a soul. But since that’s not on the table inside most of modern capitalism’s extraction probes’ boardrooms, it’s very unlikely. You don’t get to sit with us.

So, you’ve made it. You’ve graduated from college a few times and have 50+ years of high-level experience at 24. What’s this enscribbled down here….or equivalent. What’s equivalent? RIGHT! Your dad knows a guy! Sweet! Or maybe you’ve legitimately worked your way to a desk job at what you think is a stable company. However you were able to enter this brutal work-scape, you’re here. And once you get your bearings on that, that’s when a company generally starts trying to make sure you know you’re here on their terms. All of that unlimited PTO you were told about? Nobody is brave enough to take it. The stack-rank they swore they no longer used when you asked about it in a 3-day, 16 hour interview you had to do on 2 hours of sleep? Well, there are 25 heads and 10 heads worth of bonus budget…how does that get distributed? Not evenly, that’s for sure. A rose by any other name is still a competitive incentivization strategy built on outdated psychological theory that discourages teamwork and introduces stressors to a work environment which reduce productivity and cause attrition of the smartest people since jumping jobs once you’re IN the system is often more lucrative and less stressful than trying to maintain a hostage/captor relationship with the people who get to say whether you have a home or not.

You strive to become salaried, which now ties your performance to output but no longer pays you for hours worked beyond your standard forty. You are pushed to complete menial tasks that have nothing to do with your job, eating up countless hours of productivity. Concentration and cognition have limits and you can’t squeeze more work out of less time without breaking something. So you stay longer. And you get more responsibility. And that takes more time. So you stay longer. You start getting calls on your time off. You start taking half-weekends. You are part of the hustle! Not BEING hustled! Right? Right? Hey, anyone…right?

You give up a little more of you every day. At a rate that far exceeds your compensation, even if you are a money weirdo who obsesses over your net worth. People are let go, but the workload doesn’t change. You sink that cost for free, as far as your employer is concerned. New merger? Gotta trim the fat! Oh, you survived the culling! Congratulations, you’re so very lucky and would be wise to remember that. Look at all those sad goodbye e-mails from people you called ‘my buddy at work’ or ‘work fam’ or if you’re a trash person with lifetime middle-manager written all over you, your ‘work spouse.’ That’s if they’re lucky enough to get to say goodbye. Sometimes you’ll just see them marched out with a box of shit they didn’t care enough about to leave at home anyway. Or in the Work From Home days, they’ll just not appear in a call one day. Like some guy you used to raid with who died IRL but nobody told the guild. They said “have a great weekend!” on Friday and today their profile picture is just their initials and you have all of their tickets in your inbox.

So instead of getting fair market value for your labor (you’re not getting the fruits of it…not in THIS economy), you’re getting some fraction of a savory pastry that, ironically, requires pi to calculate. What toppings would you like on your wage theft? Just kidding, shut the fuck up. We’re getting whatever the “office VP of FUN!” has in their quick-reorder cart at the middlest rated floppy-slice joint in town. It’s probably going to be a single pepperoni, one plain cheese, something with broccoli and red onion bullshit going on, a supreme that has so much vegetable matter on it that it’s four times thicker than any of the other pies and feels like eating a pineapple upside-down cake made from the Veggie Tales after they finally drink the Kool-Aid, and the wiltiest Caesar salad you’ve ever drank, complete with chicken that has sharpied-on grill marks. I’m just playing the odds here.

What would have been time and a half is now two greasy triangles of your third choice and Carl definitely pawed at one of them and he definitely didn’t stop at the sink on his way out of the restroom. But by this point, the fight has left you like a 1940s cartoon ghost, so you pretend to consider getting a salad bowl for half a second, grab a third slice - the broccoli bullshit, god dammit - and go eat at your desk because even chewing should have some guilt for not toiling. You then have to spend 15 minutes looking for paper towels because Carl - christ man, please just stop being…all this for half a second man! - dropped them all in the pepperoni oil when he took his four slices after pushing to the front of the line. Pizza…the perfect food for people whose primary job is pushing buttons on a keyboard. It’s 8:45pm, you have heartburn already and you’re pretty sure it’s sticking around for the rest of the evening. You’ve shaved another crescent of flesh onto the flesh heap and you get an e-mail that says ‘Thank you, team! You really came through. This is a big deal and people will notice! - Your Boss, Probumbus Morklefleeb.’ And you’ll say to your SO, “oh, I really think this is going to look good for me! I really think this might be my ticket up!” And you’ll bang like you used to before you started spending 10 minutes in the bathroom crying into a wad of one-ply that looks like it fell off of a truck in the bad part of the Exclusion Zone every day. And at the next All-Hands, Prombumbus Morklefleeb will get a little golden whozit on a chunk of fake wood with a little bronze sticker that was laser-printed to read “For Solving A Problem By Throwing Bodies At It, And He Did It All Himself.” And he’ll say he couldn’t have done it without his team and he’ll point to someone who isn’t even in your department and smile then wave to the whole crowd like he was about to be played off stage. He’ll get twice his salary in stock that will probably bust before it vests and a trip to Sheboygan for a conference where he’ll try to make a pass at a mascot for one of seven startup AI companies with an anus logo, knowing full well it was a robot. You’ll get a T-shirt with the company’s logo on it to be a billboard for them when you’re looking for a TV at Best Buy to put in one of the only two rooms left in your condo with no screen - you just really hope the shower won’t steam it up too badly. You get a room-temperature La Croix and a bunch of fake numbers that make it look like your company that makes fax software for minidisc distributors’ customer database ingestion look like it’s about to be purchased for a majillabillion dollars and NOT audited even a little bit! Your CEO is Zoomed in from somewhere that looks like Thailand. When your review comes around, you get stacked dead center and two of the people who pulled all-nighters were let go. One right after she got back from parental leave and another just before they started chemo. “Poor team fit. Remember, you are never safe! Thin ice breaks under many feet…CYA, IYKWIM!” It’s not said, of course. But it’s implied.

Once or twice a month, the janitor gets to risk getting fired for stealing the last piece left instead of throwing it out (it was the supreme, but Carl took all of the meat off of the slice and this time he had toilet paper stuck to his shoe, so god only knows….). A few hundred bucks that’s likely got some tax-deductable classification to replace thousands of dollars - again, just the market cost for your labor, not the value of the product of it. Getting forced to go curling or play whirlyball or get tick bites on your buttcrack or get shot in the throat with a paintball isn’t a reward. Some luke-warm spaghetti and de-breaded chicken nuggets with a little oyster sauce dabbed on them and a handwritten label reading “pod tie” isn’t a bonus. If it was, they’d have already stopped doing it.

Gaming has never been so expensive. OK, that’s not true, gaming is - weighed against inflation - the cheapest it’s been since the $1 shareware bin days at the local supermarket. Dedicated gaming HARDWARE targeted at the average consumer has never been more expensive. There have always been elite consoles that were the stuff of school yard legend - NeoGeo, 3DO, The Turbo Express, just to name a few -, but predictive search algorithms holding up the entire fake economy have demanded so much silicon that now entry level consoles, which no longer get the benefit of walled-garden subsidy, are coming in at prices that look like cruise packages. “Our hands are tied” say the giant corporations who are literally behind the Ozian nightmare curtain, shoveling coal into the Furnace of Occasionally Almost Correct Things. “You must bear the burden of the problem we caused because the solution we *absolutely* posses won’t drive shareholder value the way the human suffering engine does.”

I have no cash, and I must game.

Owing to the Enshittifiplaystation 6 being one step away from a set-top streaming box, the X-Box following suit immediately on the heels of their announcement with Helix the Discless being confirmed, the GabeCube being as powerful as a 7 year old mid-tier gaming laptop and costing a number that shot so far past $799 as to actually cause a globally heard record scratch, Nintendo doubling down on weird digital dongle cart blanks with online-required patches making up the bulk of the software, and any myriad of other depressing, AI-filled, late-stage suck gaming news, the landscape for the hobby is as bleak as this sentence was run-on. The aluminum lining on this Vanta-Black cloud is that it’s becoming cheaper, easier, and better than ever to play the unimaginably vast existing galaxy of games.

Emulation is a no-cost (minus a few things you likely already have, such as a PC newer than 2013 and a VPN…stay safe!) entry to a library of games so large it would be impossible to even sample it in any meaningful way in a lifetime. There are emulation handhelds that put enough power to drive perfect emulation of up to 5th gen hardware into hardware you can have on your doorstep in days for under the cost of a single AAA game that you can never own. There are new preservation methods for old hardware that put real-hardware-only buffs into a place where restoring old hardware is cheaper than buying new, even if a bit limiting, platform-wise. Powerful single-board computers make a DIY emulation wonderland cheap and easy enough for almost anyone, and with enough juice you can even get into some light 6th gen gaming on something like a Pi5 or an Iota. There are just tons and tons of options.

One choice people can make when deciding on their ‘primary’ device for retro gaming is FPGA. “Why the what and how? Also…a little…whom?” I hear you asking. Don’t worry about it. I took a pill I found on the floor at a gas station. It’ll go away. But I’ll answer the voices anyway. FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is a now somewhat genericized term for support hardware and software systems built around a chip that allows hardware simulation in a fabric of logic units. In a massive oversimplification, the silicon is recreated electronically, making the output functionally identical to the original chip it’s simulating. This allows many parallel, individual components to be created in the array and wired together, creating an electronic copy of a physical component. These “cores” (a compiled layout for the entire simulated system targeting a specific FPGA architecture), when wired to I/O through host boards, simulate much hardware so well, their components can be screened into ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) as drop-in replacements for real failing hardware. Why is this important? Honestly, it’s not in the slightest these days. Emulation has gotten to a point where anything an (affordable) FPGA can recreate, a desktop, laptop, or even handheld gaming PCs like the Deck can run frame-accurate with room to spare. BUT, a small number of CYCLE accurate (all memory states, registers, frame buffers, etc involved in a cycle of the main clock on a system matches what real hardware would read if probed at that moment in execution) issues could potentially come up on any emulated system due to host conflicts, performance, system priority, and so and such forth on cetera et and whatnot. Whether or not that would ever be perceptible to a human doing human things humanly is up for debate, though almost every emulator will experience some hiccup at some point due to system stress or memory leaks somewhere upstream. A quick reboot will, with 5 9s of Old Guy on the Internet certainty, fix the issue. FPGA has a consistency advantage simply through its function of simulating hardware at an electrical level. The silicon lottery is not part of the equation. You know what you’re going to get every single time you load a core. Their timings are so precise you can play lightgun games and other games which require analogue timing down to beam-chasing (using the clock to update video signals being sent to a CRT’s beam driver mid-scan) fidelity. Provided, of course, you have a CRT display and the FPGA has been harnessed to outputs it supports. It sits in a niche between hardware purity and emulation accessibility, with a lower price tag than the former, but a higher one than the latter.

Weapon(s Manufacturer) of Choice

If you’re in the target demographic for FPGA solutions, you generally know, but if you’re window shopping, the landscape can be overwhelming. The term gets plastered on tons of hardware and it has many different levels of integration over the entire hobby of retro gaming. So please, come along even if you’re not fully decided on FPGA at all - seeing the differences in offerings may help you make up your mind. Or confuse you more. I dunno, humans are weird.

The choices range from extremely cheap drop-shipped DIY to fairly expensive full ‘modern console unboxing events,’ designed to restore a feeling more holistically, amping everything up to break through the calloused dopamine system of burned out adults and rekindle a spark of joy felt on some holiday morning decades ago. From open to guard-railed to fully locked off. From buck nekkid circuit boards to elaborate or whimsical cases. There are a ton of options which, under the hood, deliver the same experience. They differentiate themselves through additional features, integration of menus and subsystems for development and output hardware often, and occasionally they have an entirely different platform, being built out independently from large public projects like MiST, MiSTer, Tang, and OpenFPGA*. Little separates the performance of the cores themselves on any of these platforms until you get to some of the 32bit systems. Even then, there’s little between them at stock performance. None of the 32bit systems are truly cycle accurate on any of the current FPGA platforms anyway. Don’t @ me. They aren’t. The closest is GBA. And I could go into about 20 pages on why that’s true but I don’t allow comments here anyway, so why bother? It’s my truth. It just also happens to be THE truth. What you do get is, again, consistent, usually frame-accurate performance that isn’t tied to a host OS’ system queue. The point is, once you start bending a little on the hardware accuracy, bending a little more becomes easier and most of these systems have QoL improvements that throw accuracy out of the window (and that I do recommend using, personally). Things like overclocking, post processing toggles - for N64, these are key-, expansion hardware, extra RAM for homebrew, and a lot more are on the table and allow for some differentiation amongst the available higher-end options. Separating them further are the ethics of supporting an actual IDF arms dealer because you like translucent plastic versus not…doing that.

*OpenFPGA is currently only implemented in a single Analogue-branded handheld. While it does provide a fully featured framework, making porting cores from other projects easier, it’s essentially a single-product framework owned by a company. But it does exist with an avenue for deploying it elsewhere, despite nobody choosing to.

Ride the Cyclones

Let’s start off with the biggest, but most ubiquitous options out there. The MiSTer project, built on the Intel nee Altera Cyclone V. The project started in 2017 when a developer got fed up with trying to get usable video out of the MiST project (more info). Driven, like so much of humanity’s progress, by frustration with the stupid choices of our forebears, dev Alexey “Sorg” Melnikov turned to the Terasic DE10-Nano; an educational project board which had just released. This new hardware provided an affordable, widely available, off-the-shelf solution to developing for the MiST project that provided things like USB and HDMI support. Sorg started work on the framework which became most of the projects in this section. Some products consume the project directly, which is allowed, while others fork it and add some of their own customization.

DIY MiSTer

The DIY set has a number of options. First is the OG, the DE10-Nano. This board is still available directly from the manufacturer or through suppliers like Mouser or DigiKey. Quoted lead times are often high directly from Terasic, though just as often they ship much faster upon order. The price at the time of this writing is $225USD or $190USD with academic ID, putting it at the current highest-priced spot for DIY options, though easily the most consistently available. Additionally, it comes with a lot of packaging and additional cabling and software for FPGA development. If this interests you, this may be the best option for the educational support built around it by default. If you just want to play games, this is all landfill.

In addition to the board and its shipping fees, expect to buy a few add-ons to get the most out of it. A 128MB stick of DDR3 expansion RAM, a USB hub, and a larger microSD card (the included 8GB card is very low quality and it’s recommended you just throw it in the drawer you throw things to forget) are a bare minimum for most people. I like to do a ‘full stack’ build which is the DE10-Nano board, a USB hub board in the same footprint that connects with onboard pogo pins or an S adapter, and an I/O board with buttons for power, reset, and menu, as well as optical audio out, analog audio out, and analog video output via a DE-15 connector with options for composite sync, sync on green, VGA-compatible RGB, and a ton more. There are a series of jumpers and power bridges and occasionally HDMI rerouting depending on the I/O board you go with. Some have features like 24bit color or arcade JAMMA hookups. If you have a use case for anything special, odds are someone has already solved it and it’s readily available. There are options for passive cooling, active cooling, water cooling, 3D-printed cases, acrylic cases, themed cases, milled aluminum cases, ITX cases, retro cases, boards to fit these cases, all-in-one boards that provide RAM, I/O, and more USB all hooked up through GPIO pins, expansions for a realtime clock, an audio input for tape drives, expansions for MIDI, expansions for original controllers and accessories via SNAC/SNAX (Serial Native Accessory Convertor).

DIY MiSTer is extremely customizable is what I’m getting at. You can basically turn one into a candy cabinet with a few extra parts. Providing, you know, you own the candy cab. It can be a bit overwhelming because there are so many options and they all have similar names and depending on where you live in the world, the entire ordering process and accessory supplier chain changes. The DE10-Nano is the compatibility gold standard and will just work with nearly anything calling itself ‘MiSTer’ such as IronClad, MiSTerCade, or this monstrosity from across the pond.

Fiberglass board 3D terrorbox puzzles aside, you’re not stuck with the Terasic board for MiSTer. There are a number of alternate options, with . Taki Udon offers a clone board which is generally around $100 alone or $150 in a kit that includes some common upgrades. Full kits with cases occasionally show up as well, but he has shifted most of his manufacturing to the SuperStation and its follow up hardware, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. If you follow his social media accounts, he does announce restocks and it’s a dash, but not a MAD dash to get them before they’re gone.

Another option is QMTech, who came in with another ~$100 offering as a drop-ish replacement for the Nano. While the formfactor is mostly the same, ports have shifted, cable headers have moved, dip switches and GPIO pins have shifted alignment. This means compatibility is usually something that needs to be explicitly called out on accessories. Some, such as the IronClad case, come with adapters specifically for the QMTech design. Some cases have a QMTech faceplate option. But not all accessories support it, making it the least universally compatible option of the major clones. All available clone boards also use a slightly different version of the Cyclone V, rated for a wider temperature range, but with a slightly slower internal cache on the ARM core. This doesn’t translate to any performance issues that I’ve seen.

As with anything that presents itself as open, camps have formed that are a bit of an annoyance when you’re trying to get into this stuff. And DIY generally requires eventually interacting with the community. The Linus of this whole endeavor, Sorg, is notoriously prickly - to the point where the forum actively warns you about this when you visit it. This, of course, emboldens the ‘annoying prickfaced fuckknuckle,’ as we call them in the community. The takeaway by non-geniuses from a gruff, stubborn genius in a position of authority is always that the gruffness and stubbornness is why they are where they are. So you get a lot of …just read my previous post. Beyond that barrier to civility, there is also a strange culture war going on right now that I won’t get into, but believe me when I say it’s some playground frolics hijinks nonsense.

Terasic DE10-Nano

Pros:

• Availability
• Consoles Supported
• Can be used with analog accessories
• Customization
• This IS the development platform where most cores start
• Active dev community with lots of support resources
• The most mature platform
• Built on Linux, remote management
• Dual-RAM digital-only options exist, but are sparsely utilized

Cons:

• Price fluctuation
• Higher priced than the clones
• “Stack” formfactor can be limiting/cumbersome in the livingroom
• Older architecture
• Bad actors in the community
• Overwhelming for novices

QMTech

Pros:

• All of the DE10 pros except compatibility
• Price
• The most mature of the clones

Cons:

• All of the DE10 cons except price
• Compatibility. By far the least compatible of the DIY boards
• Availability fluctuation
• Exacerbates confusion by having limited support for accessories

MiSTerPi

Pros:

• All of the DE10’s pros
• Price
• 32GB MicroSD included

Cons:

• All of the DE10’s cons
• Availability

Consolization Prize

The pricetag on pre-assmbled MiSTer kits is generally pretty high if you can’t catch one of the clones during a production run. Still south of whatever the next terror Sony spits out will cost, but not far enough south for many people as to make this a more attractive prospect than emulation. Enter the consolized MiSTer clones. There are a fair number of these available from dubious sellers on AliExpress, eBay, and Amazon Marketplace, none of which I would personally buy from. But YMMV. So for this I’m going to stick to the major players. We’ll go chronologically for this first entry because it’s the one with an image I already had uploaded. The Multisystem² MiSTer consoles. These are from The Retro Collective (formerly Retro Man Cave) and use a custom PCB in an injection molded plastic case.

In addition to a standard MiSTer setup the board includes the 128MB RAM expansion, passive cooling, USB hub, and an NFC reader for Zaparoo/TapTu* support. A second analog model also includes a 24bit analog video out, D15 port with the same customization options as on the MiSTer analog I/O board, 9pin mini-DIN, and an exposed expansion port for proprietary interface with the user port on the MiSTer via modular upgrade carts. This is fun and for SNAC adapters, it can be a much more elegant solution than a cabled mess, but ultimately it’s another proprietary bit, so worth thinking about for future repairs and replacements. The current price is ~$230USD (without export/VAT) for the base digital system and ~$300USD (without export/VAT) for the analog system with the additional connection options and ethernet. There is, additionally, design built into the console specifically so a generic screen can be mounted to turn it into a slightly ruggedized ‘portable’ party system for tournaments, gaming events, expos, computer get togethers and the like.

*Zaparoo and TapTu are NFC-based loading systems for games to replicate the ‘ritual’ of putting a game in the console by bypassing menus.

Multisystem²

Pros:

• Availability
• Price competes with clones, not Terasic
• Sleek console design
• Zaparoo integration is central to the design (complimentary)
• Lots of connection options on the analog version
• Optional screen integrates well, despite being designed for other systems

Cons:

• Zaparoo integration is central to the design (derogatory)
• Limited to UK without steep fees
• Proprietary expansion cartridge slot limits future support
• Non-customized MiSTer OS experience (If this is a pro for you, feel free to PRO…mote it)
• Shell feels less premium than other offerings
• No included MicroSD card
• No option for dual RAM
• Digital version requires wifi dongle or removing the microSD card for management

The SuperStation from the previously linked Taki Udon is another consolized MiSTer solution with a much more compact footprint than the Multisystem. It also runs a custom PCB and has 128MB of built-in RAM. A quick aside, the RAM tests faster than any other Cyclone V FPGA I’ve tried, locking at the initial 167MHz of the RAM test and never dropping. The aesthetic is pure PSOne. Specifically the miniaturized, late-life re-release of the first Playstation that looks like it got jumped by Sanrio and hammered into something sold in a blister pack.

Apart from knowing in advance it was a MiSTer at its core, you would be excused for thinking it was a single-tasker like the Analogue3D, which I’ll eviscerate later. The system comes after a very reasonable year and change of development time. The build quality is solid and the board design is well executed and very professional looking. The homage to the PSOne continues as we go down the feature list for the console. It includes two PS1 SNAX ports* and 2 SNAX-based memory card slots built into the console. This may trap customers who are new to MiSTer since, because they are built into the console, it feels like you should just be able to plug in a PS1 controller and go. SNAC, however, cannot be used to navigate the MiSTer menu. It is directly wired into the I/O of the core so it must be enabled through the menu with another controller or keyboard. Moving down, the MicroSD card slot is on the front in the center and leaves some edge overhang so the card can’t be lost inside - the bane of the DIY MiSTer case. The USB ports are cut down from the standard 6-7 on most hubs and the Multisystem to 2 on the back and one on the front. A powered hub can be attached, but it’s very limiting if you want to use wired controllers or have a keyboard and mouse hooked up for PC gaming. There’s an expansion port on the bottom for use with the optical drive (hold that thought) and, one would hope, future SNAC controller modules. What it lacks in USB connectivity it makes up for in video output options. It has a fully implemented composite, s-Video, component RGB, D-15, DIN10 “Saturn” 24bit out, and an in-built composite gun-con sync port (again, showing the design DNA of PSOne extends beyond just the aesthetics). Audio is available over HDMI, analog stereo, or optical. An Ethernet port, wifi, and Bluetooth round out the additional connectivity over a stock MiSTer stack. At $210, it’s currently the best value prop on this list. That is, if you’re willing to wait. And…there’s something else we need to discuss.

The discus. Must be discussed. And the discourse is thus: shit don’t work.

The SuperDock, which was planned to release with full support for reading and backing up Playstation games from real media can’t read anything right now. The add-on still functions as an additional 4 USB ports, has an M.2 drive port, and does some IR nonsense for remote control (and for $40, so temper your temper), but the core functionality as an optical disc reader for Playstation (and one would assume other cores, potentially) just isn’t ready. This comes in parallel with the news that the custom console-mode OS is also not ready. All of that said, if you want a MiSTer and you like or don’t mind the PSOne look, this is a hard one to not recommend at the price it’s being offered.

SuperStation

Pros:

• Price - you get a lot for your dollar
• Most of MiSTer’s pros, except availability and dual RAM.
• Very fast expansion RAM
• Setup is easy for a novice IF they watch the guides
• Video connectivity is very robust
• Solid build quality
• Very sleek console design
• Lots of bonuses for Playstation fans
• Nice packaging, very long USB-C cable

Cons:

• Some of the wider MiSTer cons like community issues and older tech, but it solves many
• No dual-RAM options
• Limited USB ports without dock
• Some things gated behind the dock (User port passthrough, in example)
• No power brick (must be >2Amp)
• SNAC ports for PS1 may confuse novices since they can’t be used to control anything outside of PS1 games, including any menus
• Custom ‘console mode’ OS is not ready, unknown future release date

You had ONE JOB to do. ONE JOB!

Single task FPGAs are a little strange for me. Logically I get why they are stupid. I also, logically, get why they are preservation and part of the story of this hobby. Someone out there with a full N64 collection is going to absolutely be thrilled with the Analogue 3D as is, no notes. For me, personally, they aren’t useful in a world where MiSTer exists. The Rolls Royce of Doing One Thing Kinda OK is Analogue. A boutique retro company, Analogue hit the scene as a player in FPGA in 2017 when they released their Nt Mini. The successor to the Nt, which used real Famicom parts, the mini moved to a Cyclone V, like our beloved MiSTer. Though a version with fewer logic units. The system got a jailbreak making it compatible with a number of cores, but none that required external RAM. They released FPGA versions of the SNES and Genesis/MegaDrive which both also got jailbreaks, opening them up to SD loaded ROMs and a handful of additional cores. In 2021 they dropped the Analogue Pocket, which I would review on this list but I think fits a different niche than the ‘console’ FPGA. The dock not withstanding. The DAC still not working. Zing. I think that if you’re a portable gamer and like FPGA the Pocket is just the only current game in town, so there’s no need to compare it. I don’t like it as a console at all. Double no reason. I don’t own a Duo so I can’t really speak to that. But the Analogue 3D is a Cyclone 10. and I just want to hate on it for a second. The company put a very beefy FPGA in the 3D. Which was likely required because, as I mentioned earlier, N64 is ‘good enough’ on the Cyclone V. But if you want to get closer to cycle accurate, you’ll need more chip than the MiSTer can muster. The irksome bit about all of this is that Analogue is basically the only game in town running the OpenFPGA project. And they won’t enable it on this device, which would be absolutely outstanding at being a MiSTer replacement/upgrade for the $269 price tag. I don’t understand the reasoning, personally, but it’s their company. They’re not selling subscriptions or games or licensed anything, so why throw a limiter on demand up like that? Perhaps it’s just support costs, but what we’re left with is a system that’s got an absolute beast of an FPGA under the hood and can only use it to emulate the worst console shut up THE WORST CONSOLE of that generation.

For what it does and for what it’s marketed to do, it’s certainly best in class at doing that. The overclocking mode is stable and well implemented. The work with 8bitDo (it’s ‘do’ like ‘doe.’ The way of 8bit. Not ‘dew’ like it’s some kind of memory-limited energy drink) on their controller is solid and the system’s build quality is second to none. It feels like premium kit. If the only thing you care about is N64, why don’t you already own one? Otherwise, if you’ve got some cash to burn and just adore the console, this isn’t a bad premium experience. For this one, very silly platform.

Analogue 3D

Pros:

• Great build quality
• Very powerful FPGA for the price
• The best FPGA experience for N64, hands down
• Save states, screenshots
• QoL improvements and graphic improvements
• Upscale (post output)

Cons:

• It just does this one thing
• Still not fully accurate
• Requires carts or an Everdrive, no SD game storage
• Analogue has a moron calculating their shipping costs
• Plays N64 games

Unfortunately, any slight boom in an industry brings profiteers. And profiteers tend to be people of low moral fiber. And people of low moral fiber are anyway this is about Palmer Luckey. Luckey is a giant piece of human garbage and he is releasing the M64. Unfortunately, the N64 core developer on this project is a good person, but holy shitballs, this Smeagol by way of the IDF, Ted Nugent’s Bathtub Raisin Clone, absolute dirt clod of a person running the show makes it an instant no.

M64

Pros:

• Nope

Cons:

• Powered by AMD and the death of thousands of innocent children
• New architecture means cores need to be rewritten, few have been
• Broken initial firmware
• OS has bad HDMI code
• Dude literally makes money from dead civilians

Use Your Conclusion 1

So what’s the best bet if you’re just getting into FPGA? Hands down the winner for a plug and play option, to me, is the Superstation. The RetroPi would be my first pick if it weren’t unlikely to be available any time soon, but for the average person who isn’t in a hurry, I have to go with the Superstation. It’s got a few quirks and is definitely more exciting if you’re a Playstation fan, but even if you’re not, the limitations are offset by the price, the ease of use, and the functionality all out of the box.

If you have the cash and don’t want to wait, the only real game in town is a Terasic DE10-Nano and a build from the various accessory dealers’ available inventories. I’d caution once more against eBay, Ali, and Amazon Marketplace for MiSTer components as in my experience they have trended toward lower quality than I find acceptable. And if you have it in you to wait, go search up the Superstation and get in line. It’s a great deal for what you get. Unless you know you need more USB ports, I’d skip out on the SuperDock. At $40 maybe it’s worth it to you, even in its current state. But never buy anything for the promise of a future update, you know?

Use Your Conclusion 2

Don’t buy shit from arms dealers. No matter how ‘grape’ it looks.