MiSTer FPGA Forum 2026: DE25-Nano Lands, 42,092 Peak

On June 19, 2026, at 1:20 in the morning, 42,092 people were logged into a phpBB message board about a retro-gaming development kit. The number is not a typo, and the venue is not a Discord or a subreddit — it is misterfpga.org, the board where the MiSTer FPGA project actually lives. In late August 2026 that board shows 10,796 members, 8,081 topics and 107,345 posts, and it spent the summer arguing about three things at once: a new circuit board that might retire the old one, a 3DO core its own author calls impossible to get right, and whether letting a language model write your cores is progress or capitulation.

The new board is the peg for this piece. A thread titled, with the forum's usual flatness, New Terasic DE25-Nano is Out! is the most consequential hardware news MiSTer has had since the original DE10-Nano in 2017 — and it lands directly on the two fault lines the community has picked at all year: accuracy and effort.

DE25-Nano Lands on the Forum

The thread that broke the summer

For nine years, MiSTer has effectively meant software running on a Terasic DE10-Nano — a $200-ish Intel dev board with a Cyclone V FPGA that Alexey "Sorgelig" Melnikov adopted precisely because it was cheap, mass-produced and had HDMI. In late 2025 Terasic quietly announced a successor, and by August 2026 the forum's hardware section carried three live threads about it: DE25-Standard Terasic Inc Press Release, DE25-Nano Coming Soon — A Valid MiSTer Successor? and finally New Terasic DE25-Nano is Out!, which by its second page had become the year's most-read hardware argument. RetroRGB ran the story as "DE10 Nano Successor?" and Metal Game Solid called it, hopefully, "the upgrade we are waiting for."

What the DE25-Nano actually is

The specs are a generational jump, not a refresh. The DE25-Nano carries a 138K-logic-element Agilex 5 FPGA against the DE10-Nano's roughly 110K-LE Cyclone V, with a fabric Terasic rates at about 1.5x faster, a dual-cluster ARM Cortex-A76/A55 host processor in place of the old dual Cortex-A9, and — the part that matters — a dual-bank memory layout: roughly 1GB shared with the ARM host and a second 1GB dedicated to the FPGA. Price is $248 retail, $207 for academic buyers, in the same footprint. The DE10-Nano, for comparison, hovered around $225 in 2026.

Why the forum actually cares

Not the clock speed. The RAM. MiSTer's hardest cores — Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and now 3DO — have spent years starved for memory on a board with a single SDRAM channel, and the community's dual-RAM add-ons have always been a bolt-on hack. A board that ships with a second FPGA-dedicated bank as standard is, potentially, the thing that lets the most demanding cores stop apologising. The catch, stated plainly on the forum: MiSTer support is not automatic. Developers are in contact with Terasic requesting specific changes, but, as one thread notes, it is "up to Terasic to decide." Nobody is promising you plug-and-play in September.

What the Forum Actually Is

The board taxonomy

misterfpga.org is not a general retro-gaming hangout; it is a filing system with opinions. The index splits into News & Announcements (the dev-only "MiSTer Updates & Changelog," a "Discussion About The Forum" housekeeping area, and a pointer to the project Wiki), General (a "New Users Forum," "Development for MiSTer," and "Guides & Videos"), and Hardware (an "FPGA development boards discussion" that name-checks Retro Remake, Heber and QMTech, plus "Hardware Setups" and an official-only "Sellers" board). Below that sit per-system Console Core, Computer Core and Arcade Core forums, one thread-cluster per machine.

"MiSTer project updates only"

The News & Announcements area states its remit in four words — it is for "MiSTer project updates only" — and the changelog megathread is where developers releasing cores post their release notes and nowhere else. This is the opposite of the everything-in-one-firehose model, and it is why the forum stays legible years later: the changelog is a canonical record, not a feed. As of August 25, 2026, that megathread stood at 963 replies, its most recent post from a user named meauxdal.

Read-only by design

An October 2025 capture of the "General Discussions" view showed the standard phpBB permissions block — you cannot post, reply, edit, or attach — which reads as either a guest view or a deliberately locked archive. Either way it fits the pattern. The UK support site misterfpga.co.uk, which explains the forum for newcomers, describes it as having "an intuitive structure with an excellent newcomers forum for asking questions" and dedicated sections for consoles, classic computers and arcade cores. Curation over chaos. It is a decision, and it is why the place still works.

The Forum by the Numbers

42,092, and what it means

The single most quotable statistic MiSTer has is its all-time concurrent-user record: 42,092 online at 1:20 a.m. on Friday, June 19, 2026. For a hobbyist FPGA forum, that is a genuinely absurd figure — more accounts loaded into one board at once than most mid-size subreddits see in a day. It is almost certainly inflated by crawler and bot traffic (more on which below), but even discounted heavily it signals a community an order of magnitude past the "Over 5000 Members!" milestone the forum pinned not long ago.

10,796 / 8,081 / 107,345

The steadier numbers, read off the board index in late August 2026: 10,796 members, 8,081 topics, 107,345 posts. That membership has climbed measurably across the year — it was a shade over 10,700 in mid-August — which for a nine-year-old niche project with a five-figure hardware barrier to entry is a pulse, not a plateau. Feedspot's Top 15 FPGA Forums list ranks misterfpga.org ninth, seated among the likes of Intel's own FPGA community and Red Pitaya, which is either a compliment or a comment on how small the FPGA world is.

Hardened against the bots

If you try to fetch the board programmatically, you get a 403. That is deliberate: after a wave of what a May 30, 2026 moderator notice called AI-bot attacks, the forum hardened itself against automated scraping — an irony worth savouring, given that the year's biggest internal fight is about AI-written cores. The table below maps the structure and the live figures.

Total posts 107,345 · Total topics 8,081 · Total members 10,796
Most users ever online: 42,092 — Fri Jun 19, 2026 1:20 am
MiSTer Updates & Changelog: 963 replies — latest Aug 25, 2026

From an Atari-Forum Subsection to 10,000 Members

MiST, and the man who ported it

The lore, per Wikipedia: MiSTer began as Sorgelig's port of Till Harbaum's MiST, an earlier, analog-only FPGA board that recreated the Amiga and Atari ST. Sorgelig introduced the MiSTer project on GitHub in June 2017 and made one decision that shaped everything after it: instead of designing custom hardware, he targeted the off-the-shelf Terasic DE10-Nano, which had the two things MiST lacked — a modern HDMI-capable SoC FPGA and a manufacturer who would keep making it by the thousand. The Verge's 2021 primer introduced the whole idea to a wider audience.

Outgrowing the Atari-Forum

The forum's own origin story is a fragmentation story. MiSTer discussion started life as a subsection of the venerable Atari-Forum, and, as the misterfpga.co.uk explainer puts it, "MiSTer in my opinion had long outgrown the sub section of the Atari-Forum the project ... started out at." Sorgelig spun up the dedicated board to give the project one address. The residue remains — Atari-Forum still carries a MiSTer subforum — but the centre of gravity moved, and the 42,092-user record is the receipt.

Why a dev board and not a console

The DE10-Nano bet is the whole reason there is a forum this size to argue on. A mass-produced Intel education board meant no engineering cost, no minimum order quantity, no waiting on a boutique PCB house — anyone with ~$200 could buy the exact same hardware every core was written against. That homogeneity is why cores "just work," and it is why the DE25-Nano question is so loaded: change the reference hardware and you either drag nine years of cores forward or fork the community in two.

The 3DO Core and Its Ceiling

srg320, the accuracy machine

If MiSTer has a marquee developer, it is Sergiy "srg320" Dvodnenko, author of the project's SNES and Sega Saturn cores and, since late 2023, its in-progress 3DO core. A beta reached testers around March 2026, and by mid-April Lon Seidman reported it running on single-RAM machines — Road Rash "consistent with the original hardware, though perhaps slightly less fluid than a stock console."

The VRAM problem

What makes the 3DO core notable is not that it works but that its author has been unusually honest about its limits. In an April 2026 interview with ReadOnlyMemo, srg320 laid it out: "The main problem is VRAM emulation. This is likely what prevented other developers from working on the 3DO core. Accurate VRAM emulation requires a certain amount of internal FPGA memory, which it doesn't have. Therefore, unfortunately, the core cannot be accurate on the MiSTer." The core, he added, "does not consume a lot of FPGA resources (it currently uses about 55% of the resources)" — the bottleneck is memory, not logic. Only about a third of the 3DO's VRAM fits in the Cyclone V's internal blocks; the rest has to live in slower external DDR.

What the DE25 changes

Now re-read the DE25-Nano's spec sheet. A larger, faster fabric with more internal memory and a dedicated FPGA-side RAM bank is, almost line for line, the shopping list srg320 wrote in that interview. The DE25 will not retroactively make the 3DO "accurate" on the DE10 — but it reframes the ceiling as a property of one specific 2017 board rather than of FPGA emulation itself. That is the quiet significance of the summer's hardware thread, and it is why a $248 dev board became a philosophical argument.

The AI-Slop Schism

When the language models showed up

The year's ugliest fight has nothing to do with hardware. In mid-2026 some developers began using large language models — Claude Code, Codex — to translate MAME's C source for arcade hardware (Gaelco titles, among others) directly into FPGA cores, shipping working games in a fraction of the time the traditional method takes. The traditional method, for the record, is: buy the real board, probe it, draw KiCad schematics, and simulate at the hardware level. One is fast. The other is what "FPGA accuracy" has always meant.

Jotego's three-count indictment

The loudest objector is Jose Tejada — "Jotego," author of the JTCORES arcade family. His verdict on the AI-ported cores was blunt: "All these are AI-generated ports of MAME using the JTCORES framework." His argument, as relayed by Time Extension, runs three counts deep: the cores turn MiSTer into a second-class MAME that emulates what an emulator does rather than the silicon; they crowd out and demoralise the humans doing hardware-level work; and they discourage the original research that made the platform worth trusting. It is, at bottom, a fight about whether MiSTer's brand is availability or accuracy.

Segregate, or ban?

The forum's response is a thread whose title says everything: "Segregate Ai-Slop Cores to a Dark Corner of the Forum or Ban Them Altogether," which by August 2026 had run to a fourth page without resolution. We dissected that argument at length in our breakdown of the AI-core schism; the short version is that a community built on the premise "this is not emulation" now has to decide, in public, exactly how much emulation it can tolerate before the word stops meaning anything.

The 2026 Core Firehose

Consoles: Virtual Boy to Dreamcast

Set the controversies aside and the raw output is staggering. 2026 alone brought a Virtual Boy core (released August 6 by developer kitrinx, with anaglyph and side-by-side 3D modes), srg320's 3DO beta, and — most improbably — DreamSTer, an early, experimental Dreamcast effort from skmp of Reicast fame that is a hybrid ARM-plus-FPGA contraption its own author warns "is not a MiSTer core." The impossible machines are falling.

Arcade: CPS3, Midway, Kaneko

On the arcade side, Capcom's CPS3 — the board behind Street Fighter III — landed around June 2026, and the pace has not let up: as recently as the last week of August, the forum's work-in-progress boards were tracking a Midway Wolf Unit core, a Vastar core, and Kaneko 16-bit hardware. Some of these are the very AI-assisted efforts the schism is about, which is precisely why the fight matters — the firehose and the controversy are the same water.

Tooling: achievements and one-click updates

The infrastructure grew up, too. RetroAchievements support arrived via Odelot's fork of Main_MiSTer, wiring roughly a dozen cores — NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, PlayStation and more — into the achievement network by hashing the ROM and polling emulated RAM about 60 times a second; a stock core without the mirror module simply stays silent. And the community's one-click updater, Update All, reached version 2.6 (announced via the r/MiSTerFPGA subreddit in March 2026), finishing its CRT-focused overscan work. A new self-updating core tracker, misterzine.fyi, now indexes the whole moving target.

What the Experts Say

Fahey: the argument is already over

The clearest statement of why any of this matters came from Kotaku's Mike Fahey, who refused to hedge: "the MiSTer is the right-damn-now of retro gaming," he wrote, because "by many metrics, FPGA hardware simulation surpassed software emulation a few years back." The mechanism, in his framing: "Instead of tricking a game ROM with software, you can program an FPGA to more or less be the original console hardware." The payoff is the thing every emulator chases and misses — "some of the problems inherent in software emulation, like hard-to-avoid input lag, just go away" (Kotaku).

srg320: the honest ceiling

Against that, srg320's admission that the 3DO core "cannot be accurate on the MiSTer" is not a retreat — it is the discipline that gives Fahey's claim its weight. A platform whose developers tell you exactly where the accuracy stops is one you can actually trust when they say it holds. Contrast that with the AI-ported cores, whose entire selling point is that nobody had to find the ceiling at all.

Sorgelig and Jotego: why it's a forum

And the reason all of this argues itself out on a phpBB board rather than a corporate roadmap is baked into the founding: Sorgelig built the forum because MiSTer had "outgrown" its borrowed corner of someone else's site, and people like Jotego keep the standards conversation loud precisely because no company owns the answer. The governance is the forum. That is a feature and, on the AI question, a bug.

Forum vs Discord vs Reddit vs France

Four venues, one project

MiSTer's community is not one place; it is at least four, and they do different jobs. The forum is the canonical record and the place developers post changelogs. The project's Discord is where real-time help and day-to-day chatter happen — the official docs literally send newcomers there for "very active" support and reserve the forum for "classic forum discussions." The r/MiSTerFPGA subreddit is where releases like Update All 2.6 get announced to the casual crowd. Each leaks into the others; none is complete on its own.

The 54-member French museum

Then there is the long tail. mister-fpga.fr bills itself as "le 1er Forum de discussion dédié au MiSTer FPGA en Français" — the first French-language MiSTer forum — and its launch page dates to September 2022. Fetch it today and the counters read 32 sub-forums, 21 topics, 34 posts and 54 members, with the site still describing itself as "encore tout neuf," brand new, four years on. It is a perfect, slightly melancholy illustration of the fragmentation problem: every language and platform wants its own hub, and most of them end up as beautifully organised ghost towns.

Where the forum ranks

For all that, the English-language board remains the one that matters, and the outside world grades it accordingly: Feedspot slots misterfpga.org at number nine on its Top 15 FPGA Forums list. The table below is the honest map of who does what.

The Hardware Market the Forum Sits On

DE10 vs DE25 vs the clones

The forum's hardware section is, functionally, a buyer's guide to a fragmented market. At the base sits the reference board — DE10-Nano at ~$225, or the DE25-Nano at $248 ($207 academic) for those willing to live on the frontier. Below that, Taki Udon's Retro Remake "MiSTer Pi," a low-cost Cyclone V clone from 2024, undercuts Terasic entirely. Consumer FPGA sits adjacent but separate: Analogue's FPGA hardware chases the same accuracy goal in a sealed, no-tinkering box.

Consolized: Multisystem, Ultimate, Zero

The other half of the market puts the DE10-Nano in a case so you never see it. Heber and RMC's MiSTer Multisystem 2 runs £216 (digital) to £264 (analogue). Spain's Ultimate MiSTer sells a PRO build at €349.90 and fully consolized ZERO and RED units at €599.90, with a case-and-extras "MultiSystem Kit" at €309.90 that pointedly does not include the DE10-Nano you still have to source. The pricing table lays out the spread.

Where MiSTer actually sits

Zoom out and MiSTer occupies the expensive, exacting top of a stack whose bottom is a $60 emulation handheld. The forum's own devs have a name for the confusion — critics of AI cores warn you "might as well play on a Raspberry Pi." That is the real competitive frame: software emulation on cheap ARM at one end (a modern Retroid Pocket or a Miyoo Mini Plus that tops out around the PS1), a tuned desktop distro like Batocera in the middle, and MiSTer's hardware-level accuracy — the same target the sealed Analogue Pocket aims at — at the top, for people who measure input lag in scanlines. Getting an update on any of it is, gloriously, still a shell script:

ssh root@MiSTer.local
cd /media/fat/Scripts
./update_all.sh

The Next 6-12 Months: Five Predictions

Hardware: the DE25 question resolves both ways

1. MiSTer main gets working DE25-Nano support within 6-12 months — and stays dual-target anyway. The dual-RAM appeal is too strong for the hard cores to ignore, so expect official or fork-level DE25 boot inside the window. But nine years and an unknowable install base of DE10-Nanos means the project keeps building for both boards well into 2027; nobody is orphaning the reference hardware.

2. The DE25's headline use case becomes the "impossible" cores. If the board delivers, watch 3DO, Saturn and PlayStation cores get re-tuned to exploit the dedicated FPGA RAM — and watch srg320's "cannot be accurate" caveat get quietly amended to "cannot be accurate on the DE10."

Software: honesty and a truce

3. The AI-slop thread ends in segregation, not a ban. The likeliest outcome is a tag or a walled subforum for AI-assisted cores rather than prohibition — the community is too decentralised to enforce a ban and too proud of accuracy to let the label blur. Jotego keeps building the hard way, and the distinction gets institutionalised rather than erased.

4. RetroAchievements graduates from fork toward mainline. Odelot's mirror module is popular enough that some form of it converges on the official build, with hardcore support expanding past the initial NES/SNES/Genesis/N64/PSX set.

Community: the shape stays weird

5. Fragmentation gets worse before anyone fixes it. Discord keeps swallowing real-time help, Reddit keeps getting the announcements, and the forum stays the system of record — while national forums like mister-fpga.fr remain lovingly maintained ghost towns. The consolized-handheld dream (Heber and RMC's Multisystem2 Pocket) shows working silicon but realistically ships in 2027, not this window. The one safe bet: this time next year, the forum's all-time-online record will be higher than 42,092 — and at least half of it will still be bots.