Update All 2.9

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re having a nice summer. This is a great time to reorganize your living space, and since I know many of you live by, for, or possibly inside your MiSTers, I thought I’d help with some digital housekeeping too.

I’m adding a bunch of new databases to Update All, along with a long-awaited feature: database uninstallation.

Uninstalling a database removes all of its downloaded content from your drive, freeing up space and keeping it from cluttering your menus.

IMPORTANT: Update All updates itself before applying the rest of the changes. Run it once to install Update All 2.9, then run it again to access the new entries in the Settings Screen.

New Databases

When it comes to new databases, the star of the show is the Physical CD Support database by Anime0t4ku.

It allows you to run your original CD games through supported cores, just as their lawyers intended.

But we have more. These are all the new entries in the Other Cores menu of the Settings Screen:

NOTE: Update All will automatically handle any required MiSTer.ini changes, so no manual configuration is needed. However, Update All will not distribute commercial game files, ROMs, BIOS files, disc images, or other proprietary assets. You must provide those from your own copies.

Paprium MegaDrive core by Pezz82: If you bought a copy of Paprium, this is your core! Drop your Paprium ROM and WAV files into games/PapriumMD/

MMS2 GB Core: This fork allows you to play real cartridges through your MMS2, if you have the adapter.

Mega VGM Drive by dai-VGM: This core is a Mega Drive VGM music player. Drop your own .vgm files into games/MegaVGMDrive/ and let the real FM chip do the singing.

RetroAchievements Cores maintained by odelot: These cores integrate your MiSTer experience with RetroAchievements, allowing you to complete achievements and challenges while playing. Remember to create and configure your own retroachievements.cfg file with your credentials first!

New Hybrid Cores

We also have several new hybrid cores.

A hybrid core splits the workload between both chips on your MiSTer board. The ARM CPU runs part of the emulation or game engine, while the FPGA implements custom hardware, usually video and audio components.

Those components generate signals that go directly to your display, preserving the native, CRT-friendly, low-latency MiSTer experience.

These cores will also appear under Other Cores:

DreamSTer by skmp: Dreamcast on your MiSTer. Very rough, but it runs better than we ever thought! Bring your own BIOS files, dc_boot.bin and dc_flash.bin, and place them in games/Dreamcast/

Sonic Mania MiSTer by kimchiman52: Supply Data.rsdk from your own copy and place it in games/sonic-mania/

MiSTer Duke3D by neofreno: Duke Nukem 3D. Hail to the king, baby. Needs your own DUKE3D.GRP in games/DUKE3D/

MiSTer Quake by neofreno: Quake on MiSTer. Copy your own PAK0.PAK into games/quake/id1/

MiSTer Frontier by MiSTerOrganize: Ships PICO-8 (the fantasy console, to run your .p8 carts) and OpenBOR in two builds, 4086 and 7533, for playing legacy and modern PAK game collections.

The Multi Databases repository

Most of these core databases are maintained in a new repository:

https://github.com/theypsilon/MultiDatabases_MiSTer

The repository accepts contributions for new databases, provided that pull requests follow the contribution guidelines.

Its goal is to serve as a directory for new projects that are not yet covered by another MiSTer Downloader database.

Adding a project to this repository does not guarantee that it will appear in Update All, although that may happen in some cases.

Wrapping up

As usual, this post only scratches the surface of the changes in Update All 2.9. To see everything that’s new, check out the full changelog here. It’s a long one this time!

That’s it for today. See you next time!