Battye Tech's Atlantis Safely Secures Your MiSTer FPGA, and More, in an ITX, ATX, or AT Housing

Australian vintage computing specialist Battye Tech has launched a carrier board for the popular MiSTer FPGA-based retro gaming emulator that allows it to be installed in ATX-style PC cases — with or without a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to keep it company.

Launched by Alexey “Sorgelig” Melnikov in 2017 as a port of the MiST Atari ST emulator project to a low-cost and readily-available Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA development board, MiSTer has expanded to offer emulation of a range of classic games consoles and vintage computers. It has also spawned a healthy ecosystem of compatible accessories and add-ons, which is where Battye Tech's Atlantis comes in.

"About three years ago I got my first MiSTer (first of what is now a collection of at least four DE10-Nanos) and, like many, immediately started imagining the possibilities for housing this gaming beast," explains company founder Shane Battye of his creation's origins. "In my view, PC cases offer the ideal housing. They're cheap (as little as $20 on AliExpress), high quality (extruded steel and injection molded plastic) and functional (USB ports, power switches etc). Or they can be recycled and nostalgic — how great is it to see a MiSTer running out of an old beige box, saved from the dump!"

The Terasic DE10-Nano, however, was never designed to be crammed into a PC chassis — which is where the Atlantis comes in. Designed, in Battye's terms, to be "as bare bones as possible," the Atlantis serves as a carrier board which allows a DE10-Nano to be mounted inside any ITX or larger PC case — or, if you don't mind only using two screw mounts, even older AT-style cases. Space for a latching push-button switch is provided, along with a place to mount a connector for an ATX power supply.

With the DE10-Nano being considerably smaller than an ITX motherboard, there's also plenty of space spare — which Battye has filled up with a prototyping area, allowing for additional hardware. "One of the neat features about having a solderable breadboard layout on the Atlantis is that it allows you to stack additional proto boards using rows of pin headers which can in turn be used to mount additional devices," he explains, "for example, a full size Raspberry Pi or Arduino. [This is] perhaps a neat way to mount an MT-32 Pi [Roland MT-32 emulator] next to your MiSTer FPGA."

The Atlantis carrier board is available on the Battye Tech website now, usually priced at AU$20 (around $13.37) but currently on sale for AU$15.44 (around $10.30) plus shipping.