Classic Home v5 beta 4 — SNAC cores included, and a way to close a game
Pre-release
Classic Home v5 beta 4 — SNAC cores included, and a way to close a game
Still a beta. Beta 4 is beta 3's front-end with the SNAC-modified cores in the same
archive, a working Close Game, a faster menu on HDMI, and disc copying. If you run any v5
beta, take this one. If you want a quiet life, stay on v4.
Installing
ClassicHome-v5-beta4.zip unpacks to a folder called SD-CARD-ROOT whose contents mirror
your card. Copy that folder's contents into the card root and let it merge:
SD-CARD-ROOT/
MiSTer replaces the firmware in the card root
menu.rbf replaces the menu core - new in beta 4
classicui/disctitles.txt the disc name table - a new file, replaces nothing
linux/classic-home/ the update_all boot hook's worker
Scripts/classic_home_protect.sh installs the hook
Scripts/classic_home_unprotect.sh removes it again
_Console/ _Computer/ _Arcade/ 271 cores rebuilt with PSX-controller-over-SNAC support
Back up MiSTer first — copy it beside itself as MiSTer.backup. That is your way back,
and it is one copy.
Then turn it on in MiSTer.ini, under [MiSTer]:
classicui=1
The section matters as much as the line. MiSTer.ini is divided into sections, and on a
card that has been in use a while the file usually ends inside a core or video section — so
adding classicui=1 at the bottom scopes it to that one core and it looks like the release
simply does not work. Put it under [MiSTer].
Delete these six files before you merge
Six of the cores in this archive differ from the ones in earlier waves only in letter case.
A MiSTer card is case insensitive: copying NeoGeo_20260731.rbf over Neogeo_20260731.rbf
keeps the old spelling, and the core stays broken. The list is in CLEANUP_wave3.txt inside
the archive. Delete those files from the card first, then merge. This was proven on a real
exFAT card, not assumed.
Surviving update_all
Unchanged from beta 3, and still the thing that matters most. Run once:
/media/fat/Scripts/classic_home_protect.sh
update_all replaces MiSTer with the official build and puts yours in .MiSTer.old,
silently reverting the front-end. The hook puts yours back on the next boot. It only acts when
the installed firmware is not one of ours, so a newer build you copied on by hand is left alone
rather than quietly downgraded. classic_home_unprotect.sh removes it.
What changed since beta 3
The SNAC cores are in this archive now
Beta 3 shipped the firmware and told you to fetch the cores separately. In practice that meant
people installed Classic Home, plugged in a PlayStation pad over SNAC, and found it dead —
because the cores on the card were the stock ones. 271 rebuilt cores ship here, and the
front-end you install is the front-end that supports your pad.
The PSX core is deliberately not among them. SNAC on PSX has a problem nobody has looked
into yet, and shipping a broken PSX core would break disc playback — which does work. PSX stays
on the official build. Everything else on the card gets SNAC.
If you only want SNAC and not this front-end, the
wave 3 release is
still the download for you; nothing there has changed.
Close Game
There is now a Close Game row at the bottom of the in-game Options panel. Press it twice —
the row turns red and says so — and the core is put away.
It was written for beta 3 and nobody on a 240p television could reach it: the panel drew as
many rows as fitted and quietly dropped the rest, and Close Game was the eleventh of eleven. The
list scrolls now, with a bar down the side showing where you are, and the warning sentence under
it wraps instead of being cut off mid-word — that was clipped at every resolution, not only
the small one.
A faster menu on HDMI
Settings ▸ Menu Resolution, new, and set to Fast out of the box.
Fast draws the menu into a canvas half as wide and half as tall, so a quarter of the pixels. The
layout does not change — a 720p display keeps its five-card shelf, same sizes, same
positions — so what Fast costs is sharpness and nothing else. Games are not affected in any way;
this is the menu's own canvas.
Choose Sharp if you have a big panel and prefer crisp text to a smooth carousel. On a 240p
television the setting does nothing at all, by design: the request is refused below 320×240, so
analog output is byte-for-byte what it was.
The disc actually spins
The disc on the disc screen turned in 64 steps a turn and repainted about 16 times a
second — which read as a stutter, not a spin. It now turns in 256 steps and repaints 62
times a second at every resolution: a new angle on every single frame.
That is more drawing, not less, so it is paid for rather than wished for. A rotated disc is
expensive to compute, but a quarter turn is not — rotating about the point between pixels
rather than on one makes 90° an exact rearrangement of the same pixels. So one quadrant is
computed and the other three are quarter-turns of it, cached, and the cache is
byte-for-byte identical to computing every angle the slow way. That was checked, not
assumed, at every quadrant boundary.
It gives the CPU back when something else needs it. While a disc is being copied, the
library is being scanned, or cover art is still decoding, the disc steps only through angles
it already has cached — which cost nothing to draw. At the shipped default the whole turn is
cached, so there is nothing to give up and nothing changes. It goes back to full smoothness
within a frame or two of the other work finishing, not seconds later.
Copy a disc onto the card
With a disc in the drive, the disc screen's Options now offers Copy to PlayStation (or
Mega CD, or whichever system the disc belongs to). It writes a .cue and its tracks into that
system's games folder in the layout the core expects, and the copy appears on the shelf.
While it runs, the disc art fills the dialog and un-dims like a pie as the copy advances, with
the percentage under it. Unreadable sectors are counted and reported rather than hidden.
The row is only offered for systems that have somewhere to put the copy. A disc whose system has
no games folder configured gets no row, which is a real answer rather than a copy that lands
nowhere.
The CD consoles are systems of their own
Saturn, Mega CD, PC Engine CD and Neo Geo CD now appear in the systems list in their own right,
instead of being folded into their cartridge siblings. A folder of tracks — a .cue with its
.bin files beside it — is one card on the shelf, named after the folder, rather than a
shelf full of "Track 02" fragments.
Browsing by letter
The shoulder buttons L and R jump to the previous and next first letter, not the
previous and next page. Pages were small and jumping by them was barely faster than walking; in
a 900-game library, getting to M now takes one press per letter.
Typography
Three new rows in Settings, all live as you turn them:
- Font — pick a
.pffont off the card, or Built-in. Same glyph table the stock OSD uses. - Letter Spacing — −2 to +2. Positive spacing fits fewer words per line, and the help line
says so, because several panels were written to exactly the width the stock font gives. - Capital Letters — Off draws titles and labels as they are written. Worth having if you put
a font on the card for its lowercase.
One card per version
A title you own in several versions is one card wearing a stack of frames in its corner —
so you can see at a glance that there is more than one, and pick between them on the card
instead of hunting the shelf. A disc you copy merges into the card that was already there rather
than starting a second one.
Everything else from the
beta 2 notes still
applies — physical CDs, artwork from ScreenScraper, per-system core settings with Y. Read
those for what the front-end does.
Credit
Physical CD playback is Anime0t4ku's work, from
Main_MiSTer_Physical_Disc — the
streaming sector reader, the read-ahead worker, the drive-speed cap, the recovery when a USB
drive drops out, the disc swapping. Used here whole rather than rewritten, GPLv3 as this tree
is. None of the disc support would exist without that author; see
support/physical_disc/CREDITS.md.
Known limitations — please do not report these
- SNAC on the PSX core does not work, and that core is not in this archive for that reason.
Every other core here has it. - On S-Video and composite the menu is black and white. Games keep their colour. The colour
encoder in the shared FPGA framework sits only on the core's video path, not the one this menu
goes out through, so it cannot be fixed in firmware. RGB SCART and YPbPr are in full
colour. - With an HDMI display attached the front-end deliberately leaves the analog output alone,
so a CRT shows the game rather than the menu. Unplug HDMI to see the menu on a CRT. Making
that a choice is on the list, not in this build. - No still picture behind the in-game menu over a disc game — you get black. Mostly hidden
by the disc screen now. File-launched games are fine. - Everything above 240p is verified in the test harness only. There is no HDMI display here,
so the 720p and 1080p layouts have never been seen on a real panel. Still the single most
useful thing to report — including whether Fast looks acceptable to you on a big screen. - Mega CD, PC Engine CD and Neo Geo CD disc playback is untested on hardware. Saturn
likewise.
What was actually tested
The front-end changes in this release are verified in the host test harness only — 1875
checks, 0 failures. The device was switched off while beta 4 was assembled, so nothing here has
been seen on real hardware.
What has been on the device, from the beta 3 cycle and with the same code: the shelf with
cover art, the disc screen reading a real PlayStation disc, a real disc copied onto the card and
the copy launched. The photographs in
GUIDE.md are
those runs.
The firmware in this archive is md5 ea91d850, and it carries the ScreenScraper application
credentials — a clean rebuild had silently dropped them, and the packaging tool now refuses to
build an archive whose firmware is missing them.
Reporting a bug
Include your MiSTer.ini (remove your ScreenScraper password first), how your display is
connected and whether the set is PAL or NTSC, what you saw in your own words, and
/tmp/debug.txt after setting debug=2 and reproducing. Say whether it also happens with
classicui=0 — if it does, it is not this front-end.
If it goes wrong
Copy your MiSTer.backup over MiSTer. classicui/disctitles.txt can stay; nothing else reads
it. Or set classicui=0 for the stock menu with this firmware.