I'm happy to announce that the Rygar core for MiSTer is finally ready for beta testing.

Rygar was one of my favourite arcade games as a kid. It was originally built in 1986 by Tecmo, a Japanese video game company, and saw later releases on consoles like Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, Commodore 64, Atari Lynx, etc.

I am by no means a professional FPGA engineer – my career has been in software, with some hardware hacking on the side – so developing this core was quite an intense learning process for me. It has literally taken months.

I began this project by writing a Rygar emulator, so I could focus on learning how the arcade game works, without having to worry about the FPGA side of things. Once I had a good undertanding of the high-level architecture, I moved on to the actual FPGA implementation.

I managed to keep detailed project notes while working on both the emulator and the FPGA core. I plan on turning them into a series of blog posts, so stay tuned for that if you're interested 👾

Installation

There are detailed instructions in the README, but this should get you started:

Download rygar-mister-1.0.0-beta.0.zip and extract it.

Build the a.rygar.rom ROM file from the MAME ROMs, using one of the build scripts.

ROM file from the MAME ROMs, using one of the build scripts. Copy a.rygar.rom and rygar.rbf to your MiSTer.

and to your MiSTer. Enjoy!

The full source code is available on GitHub.

Known Issues

There are a few known issues:

No sound

Minor sprite glitches

Background layer renders incorrectly on some levels

If you come across anything else, then please post it in GitHub issues and I'll take a look.

Next Steps

I will cut the final release once I have implemented the sound and fixed the outstanding issues.

I also plan on adapting this core to support some of the other Tecmo games released in the late 80s: Silkworm and Gemini.