it is rare that I am so excited about something that has a name so misleading
Mr piie true false it is not a pie
product not a raspberry or such fruit uh it is in fact a clone of the Mr fpga
Project you may already know but the Mr fpga Project aims to make emulation as
simple accurate and comprehensive as possible and at the core of this project
has been the d10 Nano a development fpj
board that is inside of every Mis system
the problem with that is that since it's Ryzen popularity it's more than
doubled in price which made buying a Mr
system uh with all the accessories which we'll get into later quite expensive
until today tacky udon a retr modding
console Enthusiast YouTuber has commissioned the creation of the de10
Nano clone board the Mr pie which in
theory is supposed to be a drop and replac for the de10 Nano with a couple
changes that actually might make it the better option even though it's less than
half the price I am so excited I've been excited about this thing ever since I've
heard about it I genuinely didn't know if it was ever going to hit the market I
thought that this might just be one of those not a wet dream a I guess I have to take apart one
of these misters these ones are just shells um this is my personal Mister
that I have for a different reason here I'm just going to pull it apart and
they're the same here's the Mr piie and this is the de10 Nano uh different color
PCB Green's usually the cheapest uh the io is mostly the same
although the big upgrade in my opinion is going from a barrel Jack for power to
type c and that is Type C with PD so it
can accept 5 to 12 volt power and it'll lower the voltage if you're giving it
more than 5 volts very convenient uh especially if you start to accessoriz
your Mis with a bunch of boards you could have just one USB power block and
kind of split out your power that way huge fan of type-c I know that was a
question uh early on but I'm glad we are doing away with the barrel Jack you'll
notice a few other changes with the iio we still have Ethernet but next to that we have type c instead of mini which is
a very nice upgrade I haven't had a mini device since a PS3 although I guess that
is kind of retro and then we have a type A instead of micro b that one is also
very nice micro B sucks micro and mini Beast suck got to say type-c for the win
this side mostly the same on this side we have our type-c instead of barrel
HDMI which is great I believe it's up to like about 1500p without any of the scan
line effects which is very nice and then instead of our debug we have what I can
assume is some kind of serialized pins
if you know what that is you let me know in terms of their primary fpga processor
we have the Altera Cyclone 5 on both uh I've heard rumors that these might be
poles from recycled chips but uh I haven't seen that confirmed so who knows
I also haven't seen any big reliability issues except for one thing which we'll
get into on the top we have the same dip switches toggles uh and then serial
connectors or the expansion ports so that you can install upgrades for RAM
which is necessary for some of the consoles very nice the only thing I'll
point out is that the SD card slot is the same spot on the bottom mine has its
SD card in it ours we will have to configure once we've installed all the
rest of our accessories let's take a look first off I glossed over it a
little bit before this packaging is adorable this Master System themed inner
boxes and even the PS1 inspired retro
remake logo I'm a fan of committing to the retroness let's start with the io
board which at first glance looks pretty similar to the Mr add-ons similar
purpose board that I have uh slightly
different connections again green PCB instead of the black PCB I like the look
of the black PCB a little bit more but if your case isn't transparent that isn't going to matter we have our
buttons I don't want to spend the whole time comparing it there's a million options this is the Mr Pro add-on board
and the reason you would add something like this on is you know power buttons
instead of having it hard switch off your Mister on and off with an external
switch you can do it with this board that'll connect and control this uh
using these buttons but also you can have analog output and so a big
advantage of Mister is that you can get really clean digital signal to a Modern
Display and so you get games rendered at their native resolution but then they're
upscaled very cleanly or not even you can even send like the native resolution
through HDMI to a digital connection and then do whatever you want with it
digital is great for uh signal splitting capture all kinds of stuff but there's a
lot of cases if you're a retro Enthusiast you want an analog connection
and that's where this VGA port comes in if you want to connect to a CRT or an
older display it's a lot easier to have
that conversion happen inside of the Mr Box and to have a separate box although
those separate boxes can also be excellent this gives you high quality
analog video as well as 24-bit audio which is great if you want the absolute
most out of these retro systems it also includes a cooling fan uh which is nice
you can passively cool the Mis and I'm guessing as well the Mis pie but you
need an aluminum case that has the heat sink going all the way down to spread
that heat uh and even then I'm a big fan of fans and this one's an RGB one it
looks like that's really nice one of the advantages of the Mr pie and that
ecosystem is that it's the cheapest of everything available and I know it's
going to be compatible so you get that piece of mind my Mis doesn't need this
but this one occupies one of the expansion slots to connect to the io
board not a huge deal I kind of like the look of that actually it's like a tasty
ass sandwich next up we have the USB expansion which adds seven USB ports
with two power ones these are really really nice if you want to keep your Mis
size down I used to have one that was kind of split into two boxes where my
USB hub was separate and then it's just more cables going in this is very very
very clean uh these pins just go into
this which is really nice oh it looks so
tasty I just want to take a bite I need to install standoffs as it is right now
this sandwich Bea toplin also metal touching pins on the backside is usually
not ideal oh there they are there's my standoffs and my screws let's see what
else is in this box we got our Wi-Fi dongle which is really nice the Mis can
actually update over the Internet so you don't have to do an SD card update each
time you can also set it up as an FTP server to drag games over very easily
and this will also act as a Bluetooth dongle so that you can connect your Bluetooth controllers although in terms
of latency wired or a 2.4 GHz dongle
will probably give you a better result but that's nice flexibility we also have
our RAM upgrade I have never used a Mis
without the RAM expansion they are basically essential for PS1
N64 and Saturn you know all that modern fifth gen stuff that's just going to
slide on there once I remember what the orientation is fist side faces outward
that is so helpful take a look at that I
have heard that there are QC issues with the RAM in the sense that they are
supposed to go up to 150 MHz and some were having troubles cracking 125 130
the good news is the response from Taki seems to be absolutely excellent they've
tried to replicate the issue and the issue seems to be less a RAM specific issue and more of a combo board RAM
compatibility issue they've been an absolute Champion for making sure people are getting what they pay for even
though what they paying is just a fraction of what competitors are offering the last two things in our box
are an acrylic base as well as a this is
a really nice type c cable dang this does not have all the pins this is going
to be good for power which is fantastic that's all I need for this the acrylic
base is nice it allows you to run this mis without any extra add-ons uh I would
recommend in the long term getting a shell either the acrylic one that they
sell for $15 uh as part of this kit or
there's tons of options that exist Mr f is a pretty mature ecosystem at this
point retro Castle is great I like the Mr add-on stuffs there's also the Mr
multistem stuff and the nice thing is that the primary product the Mr pie will
work with all of them and that's what's freaking awesome about this just cutting
the cost helping the consumer making Mister a much more attractive option for
so many people man let's get this thing installed and play some games but not
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circuit for 20% off in free shipping finishing the assembly now they include
extra standoffs which is actually a very nice touch I've had the issue before
where I lose a screw or something and you kind of have things floating a
little more than you'd like you don't need the acrylic it looks like it has
its own little feet I don't love having no case but for testing it out and
taking a look at it it's pretty cool to see all of these different pieces of
tech just sandwiched together it's pretty nifty one thing I didn't mention
because I thought the accessory came with this package is this blue USB port
this is because this isn't actually a USB port in the sense that it carries
the same data it's actually a snack port snac and this is great for latency free
conversion of a an old controller to
something the mister can understand there's adapters that exist that go
directly from Super Nintendo port to snack or PS1 to snack the turbo pack
does come with the Super Nintendo to snack adapter as well as a shell that
would definitely be the pack that I would select for myself but that is sold out and I expect that this is going to
be sold out for a long time just because of the value proposition but how does it
play let's find out with the Mr assembled all we had to do was follow
the guide on GitHub get the software updated games that we've legally backed
up onto this system and we are away playing one of my all-time favorites
unlicensed Nintendo game because this is the unboxing of the Mr pie not the pie
we're not going to go too in depth into the features of the Mr ecosystem which
is what this is still using that software that open source project but I
can tell you it's a legless experience
it's visually Flawless there's tons of options I mean let's look at it a little
bit so we can change you know our aspect RTI show we can put uh different scaling
modes depending on the TV I'm on I actually like these uh HQ modes there's
an hq3 mode you can get uh it's not installed by default that I actually
quite like on a real CRT it kind of makes it look extra HD for some reason
but it's a very much a personal preference thing and on the system level
you can set direct output which means that the games will output at their
native resolution meaning that you can have upscaling happen 100% outside we've
done a video on the Retro tank 4K which the is a perfect pairing for you go
native resolution of your Mis HDMI to your retrotink at Native resolution and
that does all the work and it gives you the best result overall but that becomes
a very expensive combo the nice thing is that this is going to be cheaper than
doing the original Mis and it's going to be cheaper by large amount than the Mars
fpga project when that comes out there's not much to say the Mis experience is a
Flawless one it takes a little bit of setup to get going but the Mr Pi Project
actually simplifies it over figuring it all out yourself all the information is
in one place compatibility is in issue uh all that is worried about for you and
so minimizing what I think is you know arguably the weakness of the Mis
ecosystem makes this an even more compelling product let's play some
Tetris attack that's going to be good for you know detecting input latency
although this monitor is a very old crappy LCD monitor and has its own uh
large amount of input latency put
in it's so funny there's just like sweet spots of retro things like you don't
want early LCD you want late CRT and
that's about it wait this is a Tetris I just love the
Mis project it makes it so convenient so easy I definitely miss original Hardware
a little bit I've very recently parted with a lot of my original Hardware but I
think for a lot of people it's the convenience and the Simplicity of it
will Trump getting old analog video formats to work with a Modern Display or
hoarding CRTs and this is really the best way to play retro games the thing I
haven't really done is play more modern systems uh like this and 64 or the
Saturn on a mister and so I'm very curious to try that it's been my like
genesis and Super Nintendo machine for a long time I got to say Game Boy Advance
games do not scale well on 1080p displays they need to be on Tiny screens
speaking of that's kind of the next dream product we're waiting for on tacky
they already have a switch light OLED upgrade kit where you can convert a
switch light to an OLED screen and it looks a lot better and now they have
this Mr fpj clone I want them to combine
and make a handheld Mister to compete with the analog pocket the analog
pocket's okay but I feel like it's a little underpowered for doing some of
the more heavy duty fpga stuff and so I
would really like to see a portable Mis something that was really slick and easy to use uh and I think a lot of people
would like that too chacky please please
like the Super Nintendo there's not too much to say about this Game Boy advanced experience it's great it's Flawless
let's play something a little more challenging we now have N64 working what
we had to do was configure our update all settings making sure we're getting
our boot ROMs downloaded you there's screen cap of that right here that's how
you do that very cool we're playing some N64 baby what I like about it too is
everything just kind of
works I'm joking about that but like my controller just works it the rumble was
compatible like there's a lot of things that used to be a lot of problem solving
and figuring out and the fact that I was able to just change one setting in a
menu and then this seems to be a pretty Flawless experience although there is
definitely the whatever the N64 softening filter is is Hardcore this is
impressive this works pretty good I have no complaints about this although
there's all the analog options uh including the new N64 one that was just
announced the analog 3D where everything just work out of the box there's
something special with the Mis where you pay once and you get everything up to
fifth gen and once it's working it's very easy and consistent it definitely
is a little more tinkery than a lot of other Solutions including an analog
pocket even jailbreaking that's an easier time than this but the value you
get with this thing $160 us that's literally less than the
price of just the de10 Nano and you get the whole solution minus a USB power
brick uh this is absolutely fantastic then you can buy other cases get
something more custom and and fun for your setup but this is just an
absolutely fantastic value a great option that is just a win-win win for
consumers all across the board I am so excited that uh we got to showcase this
and if this is something that interests you I highly recommend that you check it
out I've had a great experience with Mr stuff and if I didn't already have my
de10 Nano I would be getting one of these These are freaking sweet it's hard
to find something to complain about it's this but cheaper and uh that's great
that's just awesome just like you if you like retro short circuits why
not check out the one where I unbox the analog retro Duo which is the turbo
Graphics very very cool I ended up getting one and then I sold it