MiSTer FPGA Forum 2026: DE25-Nano, 10,808 Members

The MiSTer project does not have a marketing department. It has a phpBB board. There is no launch stream, no press kit, no quarterly call to tell you how the most accurate hardware-level retro platform on the planet is doing — there is a self-updating footer at the bottom of misterfpga.org, and if you want the state of the union, you read the footer. On 28 August 2026 it says 10,808 members, 107,407 posts, 8,083 topics. That is the annual report. It is also, this month, sitting on the biggest piece of MiSTer news in years: Terasic has started shipping the DE25-Nano, the first credible successor to the decade-old board the entire project runs on.

August 2026: 42,092 and Climbing

The live board footer

Read the numbers cold. As of 28 August 2026, misterfpga.org reports 10,808 total members, 107,407 posts, and 8,083 topics, with 399 users active in the trailing ten minutes — 20 registered, 2 hidden, 377 guests. Two weeks earlier the member count was 10,690; it crept to 10,717, then 10,735, then 10,796, then today's 10,808. That is roughly a hundred new registrations a fortnight for a hobby that requires buying a $200-plus development board and learning to SSH into it. For a niche inside a niche inside retro gaming, the board is not shrinking. It is compounding.

What 42,092 actually means

The line the footer is proudest of: most users ever online, 42,092, on Friday 19 June 2026 at 1:20 am. That figure has held across every reading for months, and it is worth being honest about what it is. It is not 42,092 humans debating scanline timing at once; it is a concurrent-sessions spike, guests and crawlers included, almost certainly driven by a core release or a news cycle rippling out from a single thread. But it is also four times the registered membership hitting one small phpBB instance simultaneously, and the admins let it stand as the headline. In a scene that measures everything in cycle-accuracy, the forum measures itself in peak concurrency.

Ranked ninth, and why that undersells it

Feedspot's "Top 15 FPGA Forums" slots the MiSTer board at ninth, wedged between the Intel FPGA developer community and Red Pitaya's instrument forum. Sit with that placement for a second: a retro-gaming message board about simulating a Sega Genesis ranks mid-table against the professional EDA forums where people design radar and medical hardware. The ranking undersells it, because those industrial forums are support desks for chips you buy for work. The MiSTer board is where people show up voluntarily, at 1:20 in the morning, to argue about a console that stopped being manufactured in 1998. For background on what an FPGA actually is, Wikipedia's primer is the least painful on-ramp.

Statistics
----------------------------------------------
Total posts    107,407  ·  Total topics  8,083
Total members   10,808  ·  Newest member  ...
Most users ever online: 42,092
  — Fri Jun 19, 2026 1:20 am
Users active (last 10 min): 399
  20 registered · 2 hidden · 377 guests

Anatomy of a phpBB Board That Won't Die

News and Announcements is dev-only

The board's spine is its News and Announcements group, and the house rule there is unusually strict: it is reserved for MiSTer project updates only, and the people permitted to post are the developers releasing cores. The flagship thread is "MiSTer Updates and Changelog," a running megathread that has cleared 960-plus replies, with fresh entries landing as recently as late August 2026. Alongside it sit "Discussion About The Forum" (f=37) and a pointer to the project wiki. This is not a place for hot takes. It is a changelog with a login.

New Users, Hardware, and the Sellers ghetto

Below the announcements, the layout reads like a well-run help desk. The New Users Forum (f=30) is a first-class, top-of-index destination — a deliberate choice, given that the on-ramp for this hobby is genuinely steep. The Hardware group (f=7) hosts "FPGA development boards discussion," which explicitly names the ecosystem's clones and consolized builds — Retro Remake's MiSTer Pi, Heber's Multisystem, QMTech — plus a "Hardware Setups" showcase and a tightly policed "Sellers" corner reserved for official add-on boards. Under all of that: per-system Console, Computer, and Arcade core forums, the arcade section alone carrying on the order of 891 topics.

Read-only captures and bot hardening

Anyone who scraped the General Discussions section in late 2025 would have seen a phpBB permissions notice: no posting, replying, editing, deleting, or attaching. That is not a frozen sub-board; it is the logged-out guest view, the board telling non-members that participation is gated behind registration. The gating got more aggressive in 2026 — the forum now hard-blocks automated fetching entirely, a mitigation that went up in May 2026, which is why so much MiSTer coverage, including this piece, is reconstructed from search snapshots and mirrors rather than direct crawls. A retro-hardware forum hardening itself against AI scrapers is, depending on your mood, either ironic or exactly the point.

DE25-Nano: The Successor Ships

What Terasic actually put on the board

Here is the news the footer is sitting on. Terasic — the Taiwanese maker of the DE10-Nano, the board that has been MiSTer since day one — has started taking orders for the DE25-Nano, and by late August 2026 forum threads had moved from "DE25-Nano Coming Soon, A Valid MiSTer Successor?" (t=9620) to a flat "New Terasic DE25-Nano is Out!" (t=9642). Per LinuxGizmos, the board carries an Intel Agilex 5 SoC FPGA with 138K logic elements (up from the Cyclone V's roughly 110K), a dual-cluster ARM processor — two Cortex-A76 plus two Cortex-A55 where the DE10 has two ancient Cortex-A9s, and, crucially, 1 GB of LPDDR4 plus 128 MB of SDRAM on the FPGA side with a further 1 GB of LPDDR4 on the HPS side that can be shared with the fabric. USB-Blaster III and a microSD socket round it out.

$248 against a $225 DE10

The price is the part that should stop you. Terasic lists the DE25-Nano at $248 retail and $207 academic, with an optional $8 USB Wi-Fi dongle. The DE10-Nano it replaces has hovered around $225 retail and roughly $190 academic for years. So for about a $23 premium at retail — call it the price of a single boxed game — you get a generation-newer fabric, a modern quad-core application processor, and native dual-bank memory the DE10 never had. Generational hardware leaps are not supposed to arrive at last-generation prices. This one effectively does. Our companion piece on the DE25-Nano landing against the 42,092 peak digs further into the ordering mechanics.

Support is not automatic

Now the cold water, and the forum is the one pouring it. A board being for sale is not the same as MiSTer running on it. As RetroRGB put it bluntly, there is "absolutely zero guarantee it will be supported until the entire framework and cores are ported over," and that porting is a volunteer effort dependent partly on Terasic's cooperation. The DE25 is not a drop-in; the entire Linux-side framework and every core's memory map has to be rebuilt for a different fabric and a different HPS. Early adopters are buying a very nice Agilex 5 dev board that might become a MiSTer. Everyone else should wait for the changelog thread to say the word.

Dual-RAM and the Accuracy Ceiling

srg320, the 3DO, and one-third of the VRAM

To understand why the DE25's memory layout matters, read the most important interview the scene produced this year. Sergiy "srg320" Dvodnenko — the developer behind MiSTer's Sega Saturn core — shipped a beta 3DO core in March 2026, then told ReadOnlyMemo the uncomfortable truth: "the core cannot be accurate on the MiSTer." The problem is not logic; the core uses only about 55% of the FPGA's resources. The problem is VRAM. Accurate 3DO video memory needs a page-copy buffer fast enough that it has to live in the FPGA's internal block RAM — and, as srg320 explained, that internal memory is only large enough for about one-third of the total VRAM. The rest gets shoved into external DDR in burst mode, which is where the timing slips in.

The DE25 shopping list

Line that constraint up against the DE25-Nano's spec sheet and the coincidence is almost too neat. srg320's ceiling is a shortage of fast internal and near-fabric memory; the DE25 answers with a bigger fabric and a native second RAM bank wired to that fabric — the exact "dual-RAM" arrangement consolized-MiSTer reviewers have been asking hardware makers for since the original Multisystem. Community coverage (Metal Game Solid among them) frames the Agilex 5 fabric as materially faster on clock-sensitive cores, useful for the AO486 and Amiga camps that live and die by achievable clock — though nobody has published a controlled MiSTer-to-MiSTer benchmark yet, so treat any hard multiplier as an estimate rather than a number.

What dual-RAM doesn't fix

The reframe here is the interesting part: the 3DO's "impossible" accuracy was never an FPGA-inherent limit. It was a DE10-Nano limit — a specific, decade-old board running out of a specific kind of memory. Better silicon plausibly lifts that ceiling. What it does not do is rewrite the cores overnight: every existing core targets the Cyclone V's exact resources and timing, and moving them is real work, not a recompile. The DE25 is a promissory note on accuracy, not a delivered feature. But for the first time since 2017, the note is written on hardware that exists and costs $248.

From Atari-Forum Subsection to Standalone Board

Sorgelig, MiST, and June 2017

The lore, for the newcomers the forum keeps courting. MiSTer is the work of Alexey "Sorgelig" Melnikov, who put the project on GitHub in June 2017 as a port of Till Harbaum's earlier MiST — an Amiga and Atari-ST FPGA machine with analog-only output. Sorgelig's bet was to target Terasic's DE10-Nano specifically, because its Cyclone V SoC gave the project HDMI and, just as importantly, a mass-produced board anyone could buy off the shelf. The Wikipedia entry is the tidy version; the messy version lives in the forum's oldest threads.

The board that outgrew its host

The forum itself has an origin story that explains its culture. MiSTer discussion began life as a subsection of the Atari-Forum, the long-running Atari-ST community, and, as the misterfpga.co.uk history puts it, "MiSTer in my opinion had long outgrown the sub section of the Atari-Forum the project ... started out at." The move to a standalone board was a coming-of-age. That same writeup credits the result with "an intuitive structure with an excellent newcomers forum for asking questions, a hardware discussion section and forums for specific consoles, classic computers and arcade cores" — which is precisely the layout still standing in 2026. The board was designed by people who remembered being lost.

FPGA64 and the 2002 lineage

How deep does the lineage run? A Commodore 64 thread on the forum, still active in December 2025, notes that MiSTer's C64 core descends from FPGA64, first released for the C-One FPGA back in 2002, with ongoing maintenance credited to Sorgelig. That is not a typo. Pieces of the code simulating a 1982 home computer on 2026 silicon trace to hobbyist FPGA work from 2002 — a reminder that this scene has been quietly grinding at hardware simulation for over two decades, long before it was fashionable, and that the forum is the institutional memory holding those threads together.

The AI-Slop Schism

Jotego's three-count indictment

Not every 2026 story is a triumph. The nastiest fight on the board is about AI-generated cores, and the most credible voice against them is José "Jotego" Tejada, whose JTCORES arcade cores are built the hard way — reverse-engineering original PCBs into hardware-accurate schematics. When a wave of new arcade cores appeared apparently generated by pointing AI at MAME's source, Jotego posted the receipts on X: "All these are AI-generated ports of MAME using the JTCORES framework." His indictment, relayed by Time Extension, is that AI slop "turns the platform into a second class MAME, that tries to emulate what the emulator does" — lazy, inaccurate, and corrosive to the reverse-engineering culture that made MiSTer worth using.

You might as well play on a Raspberry Pi

The Time Extension headline quotes the argument's sharpest edge: if a MiSTer core is just an AI transcription of MAME, "you might as well play on a Raspberry Pi." That line cuts because it attacks the entire value proposition. The whole reason to spend $248 on an Agilex 5 board instead of $80 on a Batocera install is that FPGA simulation is supposed to be the hardware, not approximate it in software. A core that merely re-implements MAME's approximations in gateware throws away the only thing you paid for. It is a philosophical schism with a price tag attached.

The update_all problem

The practical grievance is distribution. Users who want to avoid AI-generated cores can't easily, because the cores get folded into the community update_all script without clear AI-generated labelling or, critics say, thorough review. theypsilon's Update All reached version 2.6 in March 2026 (it added, among other things, a five-level CRT-overscan control), and it remains the default way most people pull cores onto an SD card — which means the labeling fight is really a fight over the one piece of tooling everyone runs. Whoever controls the updater's metadata controls what the median user thinks MiSTer is.

The 2026 Core Firehose

Virtual Boy, 3DO, Dreamcast

Set the drama aside and the raw output is staggering for a volunteer project. 2026 alone brought a beta 3DO core (srg320, March), a Virtual Boy core (kitrinx, 6 August, with both anaglyph and side-by-side 3D output), a Macintosh LC update (10 August), and the DreamSTer/Dreamcast effort (skmp, first release around 17 July) — the last a hybrid ARM-plus-FPGA design its own author is careful to call "not a MiSTer core," because it leans on the HPS in ways the purists reject. Capcom's CPS-3 and Street Fighter III arrived around June. The forum is the release wire for all of it.

RetroAchievements and Update All 2.6

The tooling matured too. An Odelot fork of Main_MiSTer brought RetroAchievements support to roughly 13 cores in April, hashing loaded games by MD5 and polling console RAM at around 60 Hz — Time Extension's write-up was headlined "Wow, That Was Fast." PICO-8 got a native audio/video core in April; a two-player Game Gear core (GameGear2P) landed on 31 May. None of this ships through an app store. It ships through forum threads and the update_all script, which is exactly why the board's role as coordination layer keeps growing even as chat migrates to Discord.

Dated builds, dated threads

The forum's fingerprints are literally in the filenames. A 2025 mirror of the board references an AO486 core build named ao486_GUS_20251015.7z — a Gravis UltraSound update stamped 15 October 2025 — the kind of dated artifact that ties a downloadable binary directly to the thread announcing it. That is the whole workflow in one filename: someone posts, someone builds, the build carries the date, and the SD card gets a little more capable. If you want to dump your own cartridges to feed these cores legally, our Retrode cartridge-dumping walkthrough covers the boring-but-legal path.

Why YouTube Points Back Here

Video descriptions as a coordination layer

The tell that the forum still runs the project is where the video creators send their viewers. The MiSTer FPGA News channel — one of the scene's most-watched — repeatedly links its video descriptions back to specific forum threads for ongoing updates: an April 5 2026 video pointed viewers to a thread, a May 26 2026 video did the same, and a May 25 2026 segment on Atari 2600 core testing likewise routed discussion to the board. YouTube gets the reach; the forum keeps the record. In an era when everything supposedly moved to video and Discord, the durable coordination still happens in numbered forum posts.

The changelog megathread

The single most valuable object on the board is the "MiSTer Updates and Changelog" thread — 960-plus replies deep, actively appended into late August 2026. It functions as the project's canonical release feed: every significant core update surfaces there, in order, permanently addressable. Discord scrolls away; the changelog thread does not. That permanence is why forward-looking hardware threads like September 2025's "Future FPGA Ideas and Discussion" still matter — the board is where speculation about boards exactly like the DE25-Nano got hashed out months before Terasic shipped one.

Self-updating trackers

The community has even automated its own reporting. A relatively new resource posted in General Discussions, misterzine, maintains a self-updating tracker of core and arcade releases — a machine-readable changelog on top of the human one. It is a small thing, but it signals a scene that has outgrown "check the thread manually" and started building infrastructure on top of its own forum. The board is no longer just a message board; it is the database everything else reads from.

The French Silo Problem

mister-fpga.fr, four years brand new

Centralization has a shadow, and it is called fragmentation. There exists a French-language MiSTer forum at mister-fpga.fr, billing itself as "le 1er Forum de discussion dédié au MiSTer FPGA en Français" — the first French forum dedicated to MiSTer. Its own stats tell the story: 32 forums, 21 topics, 34 posts, 54 members, one user online. Launched back in September 2022, it still describes itself as "encore tout neuf" — still brand new — roughly four years on, asking visitors to register and help keep it active. It is a near-dormant national silo, and it is not alone.

Atari-Forum, Discord, and Reddit

The MiSTer conversation is genuinely scattered: the ancestral Atari-Forum still hosts an active arcade-cores subforum, r/MiSTerFPGA runs on Reddit, several Discords carry the real-time chatter, and language-specific outposts flicker in and out. Each fork splits attention and duplicates answers. A newcomer with a display-sync problem might find the fix on the main board, in an Atari-Forum thread from 2021, in a Discord message that vanished into scrollback, or nowhere. The main forum's excellent newcomers section is a partial answer, but it can only index what lands on the main board.

The centralization paradox

Here is the paradox the scene never quite resolves. The main forum's gravity — its changelog thread, its dev-only announcements, its status as the release wire — is precisely what makes competing venues wither into 54-member ghost towns. Yet that same gravity is a single point of failure: one phpBB instance, one admin team, one bot-mitigation config standing between the project and its institutional memory. Software-emulation ecosystems spread their bets across wikis and distros; the reference platform for MiSTer is one board that hardens itself against scrapers and hopes the backups hold.

Kits, Clones, and Where DE25 Fits

The Ultimate, MultiSystem, and the €600 tier

The forum's "Sellers" and hardware sections orbit a small ecosystem of ways to buy into MiSTer without soldering. At the kit end, listed prices run to roughly €349.90 for an Ultimate MiSTer PRO, €309.90 for a MultiSystem kit (which omits the DE10-Nano itself), and up to €599.90 for the loaded RED and ZERO tiers — all ex-VAT. These are essentially consolization harnesses: RAM board, I/O board, USB hub, and a case wrapped around the same DE10-Nano the whole project standardizes on.

Multisystem 2 and MiSTer Pi

Two products dominate the "you don't have to build it" conversation. Heber and RMC's Multisystem 2 solders a Cyclone V straight onto a mainboard — no DE10 sandwich — and lists at £216 for the digital model and £264 for the analogue, inc-VAT. At the budget end, Taki Udon's Retro Remake MiSTer Pi is a low-cost Cyclone V clone that undercuts the reference board. Both keep the Cyclone V, which is the point: they are refinements of the 2017 platform, not replacements for it. If a living-room box isn't your form factor, our Retroid Pocket 6 vs Odin 3 comparison covers the handheld-emulation alternative — a different accuracy tier entirely.

Where the DE25 slots in

The DE25-Nano is the first thing in nearly a decade that is not a Cyclone V refinement — it is a new fabric. That is why it scrambles the ecosystem. Every kit, clone, and consolization above was built around the DE10's exact dimensions, pinout, and memory. A successful DE25 port doesn't just add a faster board; it potentially strands a generation of accessories designed for the old one. The forum's hardware section is, right now, quietly working out whether the successor is an upgrade or a schism. For software-only alternatives that sidestep the whole hardware question, there's always RetroPie on a PC — accuracy be damned.

# SSH into the MiSTer (defaults: user root / password 1)
ssh root@192.168.1.50

# Pull and run the community updater
cd /media/fat/Scripts
./update_all.sh          # theypsilon r2.6 — CRT overscan 0/5/10/15/20

# ...then reboot into the freshly built cores
reboot

Next 6-12 Months: Five Calls

Hardware and framework

Predictions, with the caveat that a volunteer scene keeps its own schedule:

1. Official DE25-Nano support lands, but slowly. Expect an experimental "MiSTer on Agilex 5" branch to appear on GitHub within six to twelve months — with a real chance it arrives as a fork or a differently-named project rather than a clean merge, given how much of the framework is DE10-specific.
2. The 3DO core gets re-tested on DE25 dual-RAM, and srg320's "cannot be accurate on the MiSTer" ceiling becomes the headline case study for why the new board matters — the single most-cited before/after of the transition.

Community and tooling

3. update_all gains an AI-generated flag. The pressure from Jotego's camp is sustained enough that theypsilon's script — or a competing updater — adds explicit labeling or an opt-out for AI-derived cores before mid-2027. The metadata fight gets resolved in tooling, not in threads.
4. Membership clears 11,000, and if DE25 support materializes, a fresh concurrent-online record beats June's 42,092 on the announcement-day spike. Successor hardware is exactly the kind of event that pins the footer.
5. The French forum stays dormant. mister-fpga.fr does not cross 100 members; consolidation continues on the main board plus Discord, and the fragmentation problem persists without resolving. National silos remain a rounding error against the main index.

Verdict: A Message Board as Infrastructure

The forum is the product

Strip away the silicon and the real MiSTer platform is not the DE10-Nano or the DE25 or any consolized kit. It is the forum. The hardware is commodity Terasic silicon anyone can order; the irreplaceable asset is the accumulated, dated, cross-linked knowledge sitting in 107,407 posts and the volunteers who keep appending to the changelog thread at one in the morning. Mike Fahey called MiSTer "the right-damn-now of retro gaming" in Kotaku back in 2021, noting that "FPGA hardware simulation surpassed software emulation a few years back." Five years later, the thing keeping that lead is not a chip. It is a board with a login.

The DE25 test

The next year is a stress test the forum has not faced before. Migrating a decade of DE10-specific cores to a new fabric is a bigger coordination problem than any single core release, and it will play out — of course — in numbered threads. If the board pulls it off, the accuracy ceiling srg320 hit on the 3DO lifts, and MiSTer buys another decade. If it fractures into competing forks and abandoned accessories, the June 2026 peak of 42,092 may end up looking like a high-water mark rather than a way station.

Read the footer

For now, the numbers say the opposite of decline: 10,808 members and climbing, a successor board that costs $23 more than its decade-old predecessor, and a core firehose that produced Virtual Boy, 3DO, and Dreamcast support inside a single year. For broader context on where dedicated FPGA hardware sits against the mainstream, The Verge's primer and Engadget's Analogue Pocket review remain the best mainstream on-ramps. But the real story was never in the mainstream press. It was in the footer. Go read it.