PSX controllers over SNAC — wave 3 (273 cores, five fixed)

PSX controllers over SNAC — wave 3 (273 cores)

Use a real PlayStation controller on a MiSTer through a SNAC adapter, in every core and in
the menu. Wave 3 rebuilds all 273 cores and fixes five that never worked.

If you are on wave 1 or wave 2, this is worth taking. If you are on wave 2, read the
install order below before copying anything — six of the fixes change only the letter case
of a filename, and on a MiSTer's card that means copying alone will not fix them.

What is in this release

Download	For
snac-psx-pad-wave3-cores.zip	the cores, and menu.rbf. Everyone needs this.
SNAC-PSX-v3-firmware.zip	the firmware, if you want SNAC without the Classic Home front-end

If you want SNAC and Classic Home, take the cores archive from here and the firmware from
the Classic Home release instead — that
firmware contains SNAC too. The cores archive is the same either way.

Both zips unpack to a folder called SD-CARD-ROOT whose contents mirror your card, so
installing is copying that folder's contents into the card root and letting it merge.

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Five cores that never loaded now do

A MiSTer arcade core is not chosen by name. The .mra file names a core, and the firmware
scans _Arcade/cores/ for files matching it — then keeps the lexicographically greatest
filename. Two ways that goes wrong, and wave 2 hit both:

• Nothing resolved them at all. ATetris, GundamSD and RushnAttack were named after
  their source repositories, but their .mra files ask for ataritetris, SDGundamPS and
  rshnatk. No match, so those three games have been running the official build without SNAC
  since wave 2 went out, with no error anywhere to say so.
• Case beat the date. The comparison is case sensitive, so an upper-case letter always
  loses to its lower-case twin. Freeze_20260731.rbf lost to the official
  freeze_20240526.rbf, and StarForce_20260731.rbf to Starforce_20260418.rbf — newer
  builds, dead on the card.

Fixed:

AtariTetris_20260807.rbf     Atari Tetris
RshnAtk_20260807.rbf         Rush'n Attack
SDGundamPS_20260807.rbf      SD Gundam
freeze_20260731.rbf          Freeze
Starforce_20260731.rbf       Star Force

Three more were renamed for the same reason before they could bite: SVI328 was losing to the
official Svi328_20241016.rbf on case, which would have made a bootcore=Svi328 setting boot
the SNAC-less core, and Dcon, Orao and MemTest now follow the rule rather than winning by
luck.

The naming rule, for anyone building their own: copy the basename the official
distribution installs, in its exact case, and use a datecode strictly greater than upstream's.
Not the repository name, and not the Quartus revision — upstream renames the artifact after
compiling, and the distribution strips the Arcade- prefix when it installs.

Twelve cores rebuilt against newer upstream releases

Arcadia, Asteroids, DECOCassette, Gaplus, Qix, SGB, SNK6502, UK101, Salamander, and the three
renamed above. Upstream had released newer versions of these, which would otherwise shadow the
SNAC build and quietly take the feature away.

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Installing — the order matters

1. Delete the old files first. MiSTer_SAM-style clean-up scripts cannot help here: they
remove names they installed, and none of these names existed before. The full list ships as
CLEANUP_wave3.txt in the archive. These six are the ones that must go before you copy:

_Arcade/cores/Dcon_20260731.rbf
_Arcade/cores/Freeze_20260731.rbf
_Arcade/cores/StarForce_20260731.rbf
_Computer/Orao_20260731.rbf
_Computer/SVI328_20260731.rbf
_Utility/MemTest_20260731.rbf

Why this is not optional: a MiSTer card is exFAT or FAT32, which is case insensitive.
Copying freeze_20260731.rbf onto a card that already holds Freeze_20260731.rbf overwrites
the contents but leaves the directory entry spelled the old way — so the file keeps losing
to upstream's freeze_20240526.rbf and the core stays exactly as dead as it was in wave 2.
Deleting first is the only order that works. This was confirmed on a real card, not assumed.

The other twelve entries in CLEANUP_wave3.txt are superseded datecodes and can go whenever
you like; leaving them costs disk and a duplicate in your core list, nothing more.

2. Back up menu.rbf, then copy the contents of SD-CARD-ROOT into your card root.

3. Turn it on in MiSTer.ini under [MiSTer]:

snac_pad=1

Select+Start acts as the menu button. See SNAC_PSX_PAD.md in the repository for the PSX-core
options (snac_psx, snac_psx_fallback, snac_psx_memcard).

Surviving update_all

update_all replaces MiSTer and menu.rbf with the official builds and puts ours in
.MiSTer.old, silently removing SNAC support. That is not a bug in the updater: those two
paths belong to the official distribution database, and no third-party database is permitted to
supply them.

The firmware zip carries a fix. Run it once:

/media/fat/Scripts/classic_home_protect.sh

It stores your firmware where the updater may never write (linux/, which is on the
downloader's forbidden list for every database, official one included) and installs a boot
hook that puts it back if update_all has replaced it. classic_home_unprotect.sh removes it
again. Despite the name it protects either firmware, SNAC-only or Classic Home. Your
MiSTer.ini is never touched by update_all.

Your cores are safe from the updater — they have their own filenames, so nothing overwrites
them. Only the firmware and menu.rbf need protecting.

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Known limitations — please do not report these

• menu.rbf overwrites the official one, and cannot be made to lose gracefully. A core has
  a datecode to compete on; menu.rbf does not. If you remove ours, update_all puts the
  official one back and SNAC stops working in the menu while continuing to work in cores.
• The firmware in this release has not been tested with a pad on this upstream base. It
  merges 26 upstream commits that wave 2 did not have, so both published firmwares now sit on
  the same upstream code. The SNAC pad path itself is unchanged, but nobody has put a
  controller on the adapter and confirmed it since that merge. If you have an adapter, this is
  the single most useful thing you can report.
• Eleven console and computer cores appear twice in your core list because the official
  distribution installs them under a different word — Intv/Intellivision,
  Minimig-AGA/Minimig, Genesis/MegaDrive and so on. Both entries work; ours is the one with
  SNAC. Renaming them would collide with cores we already ship.
• dorodon has an .mra that no .rbf satisfies, ours or upstream's. That is a gap upstream,
  not something this release caused.

Reporting a bug

Please say which core, which adapter, and whether the pad works in the menu as well
as in the game — those fail for different reasons. snac_pad=1 in the [MiSTer] section
rather than a core section, please; a setting in the wrong section silently does nothing.

If a specific arcade game ignores SNAC, the likely cause is filename resolution rather than the
pad: send ls /media/fat/_Arcade/cores/ | grep -i <game> and we can tell immediately.

If it goes wrong

Copy your backed-up menu.rbf and MiSTer back — that is the whole of it. Or set
snac_pad=0 to keep this firmware and turn the feature off.