Part 1: Introduction and what you’ll need
Part 2: Hardware assembly
Part 3: Setting up the micro SD card
Part 4: Setting up a USB game controller
Part 5: Adding games to the SD card, and using some common cores
Part 6: Extra Settings, Features, and Hardware
Although it’s possible to transfer data to the MiSTer over the network, I find it easier to just put the SD card back into my computer, so let’s do that one last time. Power off your MiSTer, remove the micro SD card, and put it back into your card reader.
One of the most common questions people have about setting up a device that uses ROMs, be it an Everdrive, Raspberry Pi, RetroArch, OpenEmu, or a MiSTer, is where to get the ROMs. While it’s easy to assume that those of us in-the-know are simply hoarding the information, the simple fact is that a good source for ROMs is an ever-changing thing, and any link that I post will likely not be good for long. The easiest way to obtain ROMs is to download entire sets for each console. Your best bet for this is The Internet Archive, which is a non-profit, community-driven repository of all kinds of things. Using the archive’s search function, you can find complete ROM sets for just about anything.
When you insert your SD card into the computer, the root directory of the “MiSTer Data” partition (which is the only partition that your computer can see) will have over 60 folders in it. The folder names that begin with an underscore are where the cores themselves reside, and generally do not need to be messed with. With a few exceptions, the rest of the folders are where your games go. For instance, the “Genesis” folder should contain your Sega Genesis ROMs, and the “Mega CD” folder is where you’ll put both your Sega CD disc images as well as the Sega CD BIOS ROM.
There are so many cores for the MiSTer, each with their own features and settings, that it’s not feasible to go over all of them here. I highly recommend that you watch the excellent series of videos put out by SmokeMonster, who does a much better job of describing many of the system’s most popular cores.
We’ll use the Sega Genesis core as our representative cartridge-based console core. In the above picture, I’ve copied the complete North American launch lineup into the “Genesis” folder. Let’s eject the SD card, pop it back into the MiSTer, and turn it on. From the main menu, using your freshly-defined controller, select “Console” and press whatever you defined as your “Menu OK” button.
You’re now presented with all of the console cores available on the MiSTer. Select “Genesis” and press OK again. You are now in the MiSTer’s Genesis core and have core’s main menu presented over a black background.
Before we play a game, we’re going to set up some core defaults and then save the settings. Select “Region”, and then set your default region, which will be “US” if you’re in North America, by cycling through the options with the OK button. The next option down is “Auto Region”. I like to set this to “Header”, which means that the MiSTer will check the ROM header to see what region the game is from. Last is the “Priority” option, which sets the region priority for multi-region games. I like to have mine set at “US>JP>EU”, which means that it will always load as a North American ROM when possible, followed by Japanese and finally European. Those are the only settings we’re going to change on this page, although I encourage you to explore what the others do, as this core is quite customizable. Press right on the d-pad to bring up the second page of settings.
Highlight “Define Genesis buttons” and press OK. Much as you did when defining the controller in the MiSTer’s main menu, here you will set the button assignments for the Genesis core. Unless you change controllers down the line, you only need to do this once. At the end, when it asks if you want to “setup alternative buttons”, just say no. If you are not happy with your button configuration, or pressed the wrong button somewhere along the way, you can repeat this procedure to overwrite the old settings. Hit down on the d-pad a few times to highlight “Save Settings” and hit OK. The menu will automatically flip back to the first page, with the “Load *.BIN,GEN,MD” option highlighted. This is how we load a game! Press OK, and you’ll be presented with a list of whatever ROMs you copied into your “Genesis” folder. If your ROMs are organized into subfolders, then you’ll see a list of those folders, instead. Highlight one of the games, and press “OK”. The game will load up in just a couple of seconds, and off you go.
At some point, you’re going to want to do one of three things; reset your “Genesis”, switch to a different game, or exit back out to the MiSTer’s main menu. Either way, you’ll need to bring the core menu back up. To do this, just hit the button (or button combination) that you set for “Menu” when you did your initial controller setup in part 4. The core menu will pop up, but note that your game will not pause unless you hit the pause (start) button before bringing the menu up. To change games, simply select “Load *.BIN,GEN,MD” again. To reset your Genesis (to start your game over, for instance), scroll to the bottom of the first menu and select “reset”, or just re-load the same ROM. To exit the core and return to the main MiSTer menu, go to the second page of the menu and select “reboot”. You can also jump straight into a different core by selecting “Core” at the top of this page, and then selecting the new core.

The NeoGeo folder on the MiSTer SD card, showing the required system BIOS files, along with one game.