A white, Saturn-styled box with no FPGA board in it, for €229.99. That’s Mercury, from d3fmod design, the maker of the Ironclad MiSTer I/O boards. Pre-orders are open. Nothing is shipping yet.
Status and price
Batch 1 is estimated to start shipping in Q1 2027. Orders ship in the order they were placed, and d3fmod says a pre-order can’t be cancelled once it’s made. RetroRGB converts the starting price to about $260.
The DE10-Nano board isn’t included, so the headline price buys the shell and the plumbing and leaves the FPGA to you.
What’s in the box
The kit is an assembled system in a white injection-moulded shell. Inside you get the cables and interconnects to mount a DE10-Nano or a Mr.Pi board, plus screws for an optional Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. There’s a 24-bit DAC. Outputs are VGA and a Saturn-style MiniDIN. A passive luma trap means S-Video Saturn cables work. Composite doesn’t.
The name is the Saturn’s original codename, according to RetroRGB. Extras are priced separately. A heatsink is €10 and a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter €15. SDRAM is €55 for 128MB or €75 for a dual module, and a full set of SNAC adapters costs €99.99.
Is the shell worth it?
RetroRGB is blunt about the cost: ‘you’re definitely paying a premium for this amazing-looking kit’. It also says the price lands above a SuperStation One while leaving out the DE10-Nano.
Mercury is openly a MiSTer in a nicer box, which I like. The FPGA board is the same one MiSTer owners already run in plainer cases, so what you’re buying is the shell and the connectors. Pay a premium for looks alone?
