System: SuperStation One
Price: $224.99
Release Date: Whenever the luck of the shipping queue smiles upon you
Prelude
We’ve covered a few FPGA systems on SFG by now, namely the Analogue Pocket and Duo. Both of those I liked, but they both had drawbacks that made them hard to slam dunk recommend for everyone. The Duo was just niche in general and launched with very few features and some nasty CD bugs that would stop games from loading further. Those got fixed later on, but one of the big advertised features of that unit never came. (DAC support)
The Pocket is what I argue is the most popular FPGA system by far, and while it was universally acclaimed around its original launch, I was a little more lukewarm to it. The poor D-Pad, cracking of the back shell from tight screw, and a baffling incompatibility years after launch made me feel that while it was a pretty excellent way to play GG/Lynx/TG/NPG/GB/GBC games, it could have been better and GBA was rather awkward for it. Yet again, DAC support promised, never came.
Now we have the SuperStation One, which is another form of what I dubbed last time “A MISTER thingy”. This is the Mister FPGA system, consolized into a PSOne shaped outer shell. Yes, the acronym is as dumb as you think it is, but it seems to stem from other products on Retro Remake being having Super as a common prefix. I’ll just call it S1 from here on out, so I don’t just say SS or SS1 or SSOne over and over again and get increasingly uncomfortable doing so. Not only is this focused on PS1 games, but being a Mister in a new shell, it could theoretically play all kinds of games, including some from systems that’ll never ever get a modern HD replica! Is this the perfect gateway into the Mister realm, or is it just a tinkering headache? Let’s dive in.
Presentation
First things first, the system itself looks gorgeous. The grey color I picked (to be akin to a real PSOne) is excellent, and the port placement on the S1 is all smart too. You have a side panel for AV, a side panel for component, and power/HDMI are on the back. If you’re a maniac crazy enough to have multiple TVs near each other, you can even plug this thing in all kinds of devices at once. Outside of RF only TVs (which would be useless), this device can play on every TV possible and does so mostly well.
The front part of the system has SNAC modules for the PS1 Memory Card and PS1 Controller. More on SNAC later, but the TLDR is it 1:1s the PS1 ports so exactly that anything the PS1 could use in those ports will work here… Kinda.
See, the Memory Card port has some problems that make certain memory cards not play nice on it, and I’m not just talking about the “oh no, my ugly Lara Croft memory card doesn’t work because it was a junk third party brand!” issue you may or may not have. A closer examination from people not afraid to open this up seems to indicate the Memory Card SNAC port here is really picky and seems to have a hard time reading any card where the pins aren’t perfectly at the tippy top of the card.
Most OEM cards that are well tightened should be fine, but if you say, have a OEM card that maybe took some minor damage and their pins can wiggle around a little, or the screws got loose over time and you don’t somehow have a means to tighten them, you will go insane trying to get the darn thing to work consistently on the SNAC port. Even the most pristine cleaning imaginable got my plastic damaged card to only work if it was never ever touched, since the plastic damage my old owner gave the memory card messed with the screw holes and just made things a tad, and I mean a tad loose, pushing the pins a bit to the back compared to the frontward way they normally are on a non damaged card. This means unless my pins were near the top as per a normal OEM card, it will just randomly disconnect with so much as a slight touch applied to it.
Compare that to the tight grip of a real PS1/PS2’s memory card slot. where I could wiggle that thing around and it’d never lose connection, and I had to resort to buying a better condition OEM card to get it to work on the Superstation’s SNAC port, and even then it was pickier with it than my PS2, which also was fine with the newer card. At least once you have a normal condition card, cleaning the contacts should have you good to go, and my newer non plastic damaged OEM one worked fine on S1 after that point.
All this means is that if your third party card is shaped even slightly different than a normal OEM card, it might not work on the S1 less due to compatibility, and more because the slot just doesn’t reach the pins all that great, which seems to also be impacting compatibility with the Memcard Pro to the point these SNAC ports are the only memory card slots that do not work with them. (combined with a silly stubbornness to admit there’s even a problem with the ports from Retro Remake’s part, and that it’s the memory cards that are inaccurate), Quite the shame. Thankfully, the controller port works with zero problems, meaning you can also use wacky things like the PS1 mouse on your S1 without any hassle, and even a Dualshock 2 will work on this, much to my surprise!
When it comes to the software itself and how games run on this thing, after the whole setup deal (and going through a really, really basic looking UI, although you can get one of two frontends to make it a lot nicer) you’ll be using the PS1 core, which has been a thing in the MISTER community for a long while now. Because it’s a core that’s been around for so long, it looks and sounds incredible. HDMI has the core looking sharp with tons of visual options to tweak if you so choose, and the audio emulation is pretty damn accurate. This means if you throw the PS1 games that would vomit on a PS2 at this thing, it’ll work fine and dandy on the S1 since it’s emulating the hardware of the PS1 more closely. Throwing this on my CRT TV it plays pretty good in mono too (I don’t own stereo AV cables), and no game I threw at it acted up badly. I did notice post an update the colors on the CRT mode got a bit wonky, so editing a text file was needed to restore proper coloring. More on all that later.
When it comes to any other core, those are a MISTER thing, and thus whatever core you can think of will work as it does on the Single RAM Mister. The built in Indie games here are from across various systems, and the PS1 uses an open source BIOS for understandable reasons, which ran a lot I threw at it well with a couple of exceptions that caused crashes. Thus I was able to easily try out the Genesis/NES/SNES cores, and they all look and play great across my CRT/HDTV, as they would on an ordinary MISTER device. It wasn’t until I had to tinker around with Itch games to get more homebrew that I found out some cores didn’t play nicely on a CRT, with cores such as the Atari 7800 and Colecovision showing up in black and white on a CRT, although a very recent update to those cores led to that getting fixed. Basically, if you hear of a core having a presentational issue on a normal MISTER, it will have one on this too, and some cores aren’t updated well to work on the S1’s CRT mode. You can work around any cores that are black & white by flipping up Dip Switch 3 and switching the menu video option to SVID, however, so it’s not completely hopeless if you want to play your MSX games on the CRT.
The innards of the system aren’t normally a thing I cover in SFG reviews; most of my audience wouldn’t or shouldn’t need to go deep into a system to begin with, and I am beyond hesitant to open up any console unless I know what I’m doing and it requires no soldering. Thankfully, the S1 is super duper easy to open up for installing a tiny 1220 battery, (if you plan to take this on vacations and maintain the real time clock, I sure do!) and I’m pretty impressed with how nicely the board is assembled.
SNAC Memory Card screwup aside, nearly everything here is assembled incredibly well and marked in a way that makes it pretty easy to repair something if you need to. (which makes me hope a more accurate PS1 SNAC converter piece can be bought/mailed to people who buy this and have issues with their cards; I heard standalone SNAC adapters read various types of cards with a wide tolerance for them, so the on-console one needs some work.) When it comes to the FPGA consoles I currently own, the S1 is the console I like the outer look of most.
Gameplay
You might think, from my prior reviews of Analogue stuff, that setting up this thing would be pretty simple, or at least so if you follow a step by step. Unfortunately if you’ve never MISTERed or tinkered with folders a lot on say, a Steam Deck before, this will be a nightmare to setup and maintain; it took me two full days as a MISTER newcomer to get this thing to work to the point I didn’t have to tweak stuff.
First off, you gotta take out the included card, format it with the newest image from the Superstation site, and then turn the system on via HDMI in order to have it properly build out the file system. (use a good power adapter too! The Steam Deck AC adapter worked good for me) Then you have access from the getgo to a bunch of homebrew games built on the system and even advertised on the back of the box, delivered to you in the incredibly simple, ancient PC-looking UI. Unfortunately, most of these built-ins are demo versions, and the ROM names don’t make that clear for a lot of them. Astebros here is the demo build, but Demons of Asteborg is the full game, yet both are titled as if they’re full games, instead of say, Astebros (Demo).
Understandably, indies don’t want to give away their stuff for free. which they absolutely have every right to stick to, but I don’t think it was cool to at not mark the distinction between a Demo/Full game, which the Retro Remake team could have easily done by adding a (Demo) to the ROM names, to help people sort through the built in homebrew library. In fact, a lot of these demos are on itch with Demo specifically in the file name, so why that got scrubbed from some of these built in games is a mystery. You think you’re in for the long journey of Goodboy Galaxy based off the back of the box? Nope, just the Chapter Zero demo for you. Even some super short games like Soko Banana are only here in demo versions, which just beg the question as to why they were included to begin with.
Anyhow after opening and closing a bunch of the homebrew to find the real games, you’ll also get to grips with how Cores work and how SNAC on the PS1 controller works, or rather it doesn’t outside the PS1 Core. See, using the cute tech demo game that comes with the S1, I was able to get the SNAC port to work by opening the menu and configuring port 1 to be SNAC, which turns on the SNAC port and thus lets you play with whatever you have plugged into the PS1 SNAC, and I mean anything. That cursed Hello Kitty PS1 controller is all yours, my friend. In-game, the controller ports work like a dream, and you can even use a menu option to switch between a virtual memory card or the SNAC slot for the card, depending on how you like accessing your save files.
Because I have a bunch of my games from a real PS2 and my PSN buys from years ago, I was able to easily get those save files onto my real memory card and play away, whenever the card didn’t have issues reading, that is. Still, the virtual cards work A-OK (but you must remember to enable autosave and open the menu before you quit, or else it won’t actually write any progress you made in-game), so if you really wanted to you could forget about any memory cards and just stick exclusively to virtual ones, which work much better if you say, have one of those sports games with a kajillion blocks used up every time. Either way, the choice is up to you.
So you go to open the menu and… Oh yeah, how did you get to the games with that pad? See, the MISTER was never intended to just be a thing you plug a SNAC controller in and play everything with, so if you think all you need to do is turn it on, plug in a PS1 controller and you’re gaming, nope, you’re wrong. Gotta get out a bluetooth controller or keyboard of some kind and navigate the menu that way, and only when you’re in the PS core with SNAC enabled can you play the games with the controller, but not operate the menu. The eject button on the S1 is another menu button, which is handy, but without being able to control it with a PS1 pad, you’re still needing an extra controller to be the menu one. See where I’m going with this? If you’ve never used a MISTER, you’re probably having a violent headache right about now, and I can’t blame you; this ecosystem wasn’t really meant for anyone besides the techie type, yet the S1 is sold as and in a shell that really wants to be akin to the analogue systems, for an ecosystem that is the opposite of such.
Anyway, toss that PS1 pad aside as you go check out the other cores and menu options, since yes, you can only use the PS1 pad for the PS1 core. I personally don’t mind that, (You think Demons of Asteborg would work on a PS1 memory card?!?) but it does mean that if you want to strictly play PS1 games, great, you can do so with a menu controller and a PS1 pad, even if it’ll take some tinkering to do so, and they play really damn well. Finally, an easy way to play JP import games without having to slog through an ancient Japanese PSN store on dying PS3s! But it means that if you want to use this more like a mister, and play all kinds of cores, you’ll more than likely just stick to a bluetooth controller and have it do everything. Nothing’s stopping you from not using the SNAC port and going all virtual for max compatibility and consistency, and for me the SN30 became my best friend in the entire world for this thing. Hold the menu button on the system for a while and you can easily pair bluetooth controllers, which is a super useful shortcut.
Now I would use my N64 controller from NSO on this thing, and it does pair fine, but hmm, turning it off doesn’t seem to retain the bluetooth connection and I have to reset the pairing. Oh well, how about the SNES pad? Same thing. Switch Pro Controller? Ditto. Thankfully my M30/SN30 did keep memory after switching the device off and on again, but it seems upon further inspection the bluetooth module in these devices just do not like the Nintendo controllers for whatever reason (other MISTER devices with bluetooth modules you buy and install yourself do remember them properly), so if you have those as your only bluetooth controllers, prepare for a looooot of pairing, or just use a USB controller. Thankfully, my Hayabusa Arcade Stick was another great choice for menu navigation as I waited for my SN30 to arrive.
Playability wise, the other cores on the unit played great on both my CRT and HDTV; outside of the B/W quirk I noted about some cores like MSX, I don’t have much to say about the common cores you’ll likely flock to with this thing due to the built in games being for them. Game Boy/GBC work surprisingly fine on a CRT, NES/SNES/Genesis work so damn well it feels like I just got multiple flash carts in one device and have my second dream retro indie machine next to Evercade, and even throwing some C64/MSX games on it worked pretty OK. (though you’ll need a keyboard for C64 stuff, and most of the other computer cores) Lots of fun to be had going through Bobl, Spacegulls and Demons of Asteborg on here, along with whatever else I could throw up on this from itch.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, “hey, wasn’t this thing supposed to come with a dock? How did you get those games on? Did you eject the SD card in and out over and over again? How does the CD reader work?” and whatever other questions that aren’t “I still don’t know what the heck a MISTER is, I just wanted to pop Tomb Raider in this tray and call it a day”. Regretfully, as of the time of this review, you cannot use the Superdock to read games; it’s just a glorified USB hub with a memory slot underneath it for extra storage. Not a single core uses CD reading, or CD dumping, so if you get the SuperDock this second and hoped you could play PS1 stuff like the good old days, prepare to stare at a brick. Will they actually add the functionality for CD play? Well, we’ve seen video proof of it working, so probably, but for a device out for five months now, and a dock out for just under a month, it does feel a little cruddy that some people might have bought the combo only to realize the disc drive needs an update to even function, and we still don’t know all the features and mechanisms of the CD reading.
Will those weird FMV Sega CD games desync via this method, and how will swapping discs mid-game in a RPG work? Who knows, and that’s why I opted to skip the dock to bring you the review of the main unit, and I might do the dock by itself when I get my standalone dock in however long it takes to do so. Needless to say with it as a pretty paperweight, I’m not in any hurry. I could go on about the cool things promised and stuff that would be rad if they implemented it all, or mention how Console Mode might mitigate a lot of these UI gripes for more casual players, but I review the present, not what’s currently a fantasy. Just imagine how I’d feel today if I hyped up the Analogue Duo’s upcoming DAC support in that review.
So, about actually getting games on this thing; you’ll have to either manually insert the card over and over again, or set up a FTP via a script; scripts are handy tools that can be accessed to do things like update cores, clear pairings of bluetooth controllers, and set up various other things, and downloading the SSH toggles are what I recommend doing first. Filezilla was the one that became my go-to for S1 usage, so turning SSH on and connecting via Filezilla, and eventually I fumbled my way into the correct fat folder to move games around and throw in various games from a variety of consoles; discs I dumped, games I extracted from the VC/PSN, and a lot of homebrew titles acquired via Itch and other places over the years. Once I got the hang of it, it was a pretty breezy process, but I had to tinker around every now and then.
And that’s the main crux of the MISTER project; it’s a tinker machine at heart, and the S1’s goal and design seems to be trying to force a square peg into the round hole that is the open sourced MISTER project. You come in wanting to do all this tinker stuff or at least are familiar with Steam Deck linux tinkering like I was? It gets real annoying, but you’ll probably get the hang of things. Now if on the other hand, you come in assuming you can just either pop in and play a PS1 disc and get to playing on your original memory card/controllers with little hassle, like you pretty much can on a Super NT/Mega SG, then you will be in sheer agony, troubleshooting and messing up nearly every step of the way. Trying to find every script by itself or every new core by itself is pure hell, and if it wasn’t for the very recent release of Mister Companion by the MISTER community, I’d even have given up on most of it.
Thankfully, it’s a helpful windows app that installs the most popular scripts and changes options on the MISTER for you, since otherwise you’d have to edit an .ini file to get anywhere. Yes, seriously. And yes, that bit I noted earlier about weird color issues I had to fix by going on the MISTER discord (nice folk there, hi robby) copying some mumbo jumbo numbers for proper color banding for the PSX core, then opening up a yc.txt file, edit some mumbo jumbo numbers out with the newer mumbo jumbo I copied, and then I was able to fix my color issue. It wasn’t the worst color issue in the world, but the Update_All tool caused it to show up, and that I only installed because it gives you even more scripts and options to tinker with, along with bugfixing every single core on the MISTER anytime anyone commits to a major update. The built in updater you get out of the box only does so much, and this is where I have a sinking feeling of a future problem this device might get.
See, because CD loading isn’t real yet, for it to be real you’d have to update the core. But to update the core, you’d either have to download a fork of it (ie; Retro Remake would use the open source, add the feature in themselves), or hope it gets added to the main Update_All script for easy updating. It seems pretty clear from poking around in the MISTER community that the wider MISTER community isn’t exactly one to be jumping up and down for nostalgic CD tray loading, which makes me worry we’ll end up in a situation where the PSX/Sega CD/TGCD/Saturn cores gets misc updates, then Retro Remake has to fork that, but with their CD disc drive in mind, with their forked core conflicting/bugging out in the process from the main branch, essentially leading to a tug of war between the two versions of the core. Add in the fact that there’s also talk of trying to make the PSX SNAC controller operate the normal Mister menu, along with cores like NES/GB, which would also require forks, and you can see why all the notes I took for this review almost gave me a god damn stroke.
As it currently stands, the Superstation is a decent retro device and really fun if you get the hang of it. If you’re in this with tinkering experience and get things settled in and updated/scripted your way, there’s plenty of fun to be had and the MISTER community has clearly done great work over the years to get to this point. The cores that exist are all pretty well made for the most part, (some Arcade cores are delving into being made via GenAI, so heads up if you want to play Arcade stuff; I stuck to the computer/consoles mainly here) and with the PSX core being the main attraction, I’m very glad that one was easily one of the best from the entire project.
Conclusion
As much as I really wanted to say this was a slam dunk introduction into Mister FPGA gaming, far surpassing the analogue systems due to more system variety and being able to emulate the PS1 pretty much perfectly, I can’t really give that praise to the Superstation. If you thought the Steam Deck was a tinkering nightmare, you’ve seen nothing until you dealt with the headache of the Mister UI as a newcomer. Still, thanks to a pretty great community and years of documentation, there is a light at the end of the tunnel once you go through all the effort, and this thing can do so much cool stuff that it’ll likely be my main go-to for CD based games from here on out. The Zaparoo frontend alone is enough to make this one of my favorite devices of all times for playing retro games… If it wasn’t for the many other gripes of MISTER/S1 in particular that drove me bonkers.
I mean, I already went into a wild ramble about just how weird SNAC is in general, and how selling this device as a thing that one would think would just be “plug in a PS1 controller and play PS1 games” will not prepare you for the mild tweaking you have to do to get this to work. Once you finish all that, you still will have to use something else to boot a PS1 game, and MISTER isn’t really meant to use SNAC controllers for menus and other cores, which to my understanding means RetroRemake will have to make endless forks of every core to use this controller on (not practical), hack the menu somehow (I don’t know how this would be done, maybe Console Mode will let it work?) Or you’ll be like me and have a USB pad on hand to boot games and mess in other cores. Even still, as great as it is to play PS1 games on my CRT with a real PS1 controller, the memory card port is just not fully accurate and I cannot recommend one use it unless you have flawless OEM memory cards. If you have a Memory Card Pro or Pro 2, kick rocks and buy a $75 attachment for the Dock (another expense)’s SNAC port to have a PSX SNAC port that does read that stuff consistently. You can see why I’m bitter about this.
The lack of CD loading (currently) means that yes, even if you get your Superdock, you will not be able to play a game on it. You’ll have to update it, via a method we don’t know about yet, don’t know how it’ll work besides video demonstrations, nor know if it’ll play nicely with the cores. I will likely review the Superdock by itself at a later date when I get mine, but needless to say if you hoped you could just play a game without SD card fiddling on this thing, I regret to inform you the Dock is a brick with USB ports at the moment.
While the Composite support was a little lacking for other cores, this is still a pretty fun experience over HDMI, and while I did mostly buy this to play on my CRT, (and kudos to Retro Remake for doing what Analogue won’t, and to the Mister folk for making so many cores compatible with CRTs even if not all of them are) I had a lot of fun with this thing. I just really, really wish what should have been a slam dunk with those memory card ports didn’t suck so badly, and I still can’t recommend this easily to newcomers of the MISTER.
I cannot stress enough, this is not like an Analogue machine even if it visually will look like one on a shelf. You will have headaches. You will have pain. You will have random core/INI issues that you have no idea how to fix without poking in discords hoping others fixed it first. You might mistakenly give it to your anti internet father and have him run it over with his truck as soon as he crashes out trying to learn what a BIOS is. You have to be prepared to have this take a looooong time to get set up the way you want to, especially if you plan to go outside the realm of PS1 games. Shame there’s currently no easier interface to use for any families who might want to have a kid play some games on this thing; you can’t kid-proof this UI, and neither Console Mode or Zaparoo has a UI that I’d feel comfortable letting an inexperienced with MISTER user goof around with, so if you were hoping for family fun night playing Gubble on the PS1, I’m afraid you might have to sit down to hear some difficult news.
Still, if you just wanted a MISTER for the MISTER parts, and don’t care about the PS1 SNAC stuff and know what you’re getting into, you’ll have a pretty stellar time here joining a fun community of retro game projects and plenty of great cores to check out. Otherwise, be very wary of the immense amount of tinkering you’ll be doing with this thing, for this is not Analogue, it is MISTER, no matter how hard the square peg is pushed against the round hole.
I give the Retro Remake SuperStation One a 6 out of 10.