Our friends at Time Extension have reported that a dev named Corn just gave MiSTer FPGA a performance injection that brings the DE10 Nano’s aging hardware uncomfortably close to Analogue’s $250 console.
Corn’s “turbo” core pushes FPGAzumSPASS‘ existing N64 core from 80MHz to 94MHz on both the Reality Coprocessor and memory. That’s a 17.5% overclock, and the results are immediately obvious in games that desperately needed it. Body Harvest, which ran like a slideshow at stock speeds, now plays smooth enough to be genuinely enjoyable. Beetle Adventure Racing picks up extra frames. Even Conker’s Bad Fur Day, which has always been a slideshow, manages to squeeze out 5-10 more frames.
High-res mode games benefit most, which makes sense since those were always the titles that looked great but chugged hard on real hardware. Not every game will see improvements, though. Some lock their frame rate to the refresh because logic is tied directly to it, so don’t expect miracles across the board.
This isn’t an official release. Corn posted the core to the MiSTer FPGA Discord’s N64 channel for testing, and stability is still a work in progress. Some games crash when overclocked this hard, and depending on your particular FPGA chip’s silicon lottery, you might see weird pixels or bandwidth issues on HDMI. The 60fps Super Mario 64 patch freezes after the start screen, but that patch is apparently also dicey on real hardware.
Source: YouTube via Time Extension
For anyone keeping score, this does put the MiSTer in the same performance ballpark as the Analogue 3D in some tests. Whether that bothers you probably depends on how much you paid for yours.
What did you think of this article? Let us know in the comments below, and chat with us in our Discord!
This page may contain affiliate links, by purchasing something through a link, Retro Handhelds may earn a small commission on the sale at no additional cost to you.