Creating new Cores for MEGA65

How can I create an alternative MEGA65 core?

The MEGA65 team welcomes any additional Cores. Fortunately for just about every retro home computer or video game console most of the work has already been done by the MiSTer community.

The MiSTer Project currently is the world’s largest retro computing FPGA project. A full list of Cores already developed can be found here: MiSTer’s list of cores.

So, there is a lot of interesting projects not only for MEGA65 enthusiasts but also for students and professional developers. Porting a MiSTer core is a great start to learn FPGA computing. Many of the Cores for the MEGA65 started out as MiSTer projects, like the C64 and Game Boy Cores.

To make your life easier, the MiSTer2MEGA65 Framework simplifies porting MiSTer cores to the MEGA65 by doing a lot of the hard work of adapting to a new hardware platform. The MiSTer2MEGA65 Wiki offers a tutorial and all the information you need to successfully contribute to MEGA65’s growing library of cores.

Last but not least there is a friendly MEGA65 community on Discord. If you are new to porting Cores or to FPGA development in general, don’t hesitate to join our #learn-fpga-dev channel on Discord.