kevtris

well there's a booming business renting luxury goods to "influencers" on tik-tok and friends. You can even rent a fake "private jet" for your videos. this is just a slightly older school method of that, I guess. Most actual rich people do not flaunt their wealth, because they don't waste their money on things like sports cars the depreciate faster than a cybertruck in a car wash. Tommy was kind of the epitome of "conspicuous consumption" like that. This guy is the low-rent version of him.

that pcb is not running any games, and cannot run a single game. it is missing... everything. there's no power supplies to run the FPGA. there's no RAM (they do show a DDR3 or DDR4 RAM module plugged in, but it is not connected to the FPGA, and it is simply too far away from it to actually function if it was even hooked up (dat speed of light). There's no HDMI drivers of any kind. Just... EVERYTHING is missing that is required to make it work. Checking out the videos (I downloaded and saved all of them in case they poof), they show decent shots of the PCB front and back at various points, and there aren't even any traces going to most of that stuff! There's no connections to the cartridge slots, controller ports, video ports. The two HDMI sockets on the back appear to just be connected in parallel to each other, like a passthrough. The front USB connects to the back USB like a passthrough, which is how he can run a controller through it. It is not connected to the FPGA in any way. I laughed so much at their "demonstration" video- you can see him turn the computer on behind the monitor at the start! And then he fakes the whole "blowing in the carts" thing, and hits a button on the controller to make it display the cart is installed. Then there's that obvious jump cut when the game starts. come on. who are you fooling? If you look, the board isn't even on. The fan's not turning (we'd hear it easily, with all the other ambient noise) and the LEDs aren't lit. It's just a fancy USB passthrough for the controller. There is only a single 5V supply (lol) on the board. The FPGA will require something like 1V at 10-15 amps, along with 3-4 other voltages for RAM, HDMI, and other doodads. There is a CF card and an SD slot on the left, but you can see that they are both connected to an arduino and CPLD each and nowhere else. There's another arduino CPU and CPLD by the FPGA which appears to do nothing; it does not seem to be connected to anything. The FPGA is literally not connected to anything either- there is a shot where the chip isn't present and it's just a bare footprint. A couple big ceramic caps around the FPGA for... some purpose. The FPGA needs a lot of decoupling capacitors around it- and more importantly UNDER it- probably 40-60 or more. Those obviously aren't present. The LEDs make me laugh. There's 8 LEDs and two chips to run them, probably something like a 555 timer and a binary counter or similar to make blinkenlites. They do not connect to anything except 5V. Also, the PCB is 2 layers. a real board to use that FPGA would need to be at least 8 layers probably. I bet the PCB house that made and assembled it was like "wtf" when they saw it. Going by the videos and PCB, this cannot work as it sits, and never was designed to work. They just threw some random parts onto a PCB and made it look like they knew what they were doing. They don't. I noticed too that the heatsink is way too high up off the pcb, so it's probably just hovering over that FPGA. But that's fine- the FPGA isn't even connected to anything so it won't be getting hot or anything. It is debatable if this is a step up or down from the retroPOS. They did make a cardboard "PCB" and glued electronic parts on it. This is a real PCB, and has parts soldered to it, but those parts aren't even connected- at least the "important" ones (controller ports, cart ports, RAM, FPGA). If you give these dorks money, you most likely are not going to see it again, and you won't be getting an FPGA system that works unless they totally redesign it.

I wonder if 2026 is as late as amazon will let you push the date at one time right now. that animated running man graphic with the 2020-2025 will need to be updated soon!

maybe. it says it's under contract right now.

that evel game is probably the most well tested one they have. first it was released a decade ago as a freemium title so it would've been debugged then, and second they showed this game off on nearly every video with 4 people playing the minigame. what else is left? I guess custom controller skins with button function hints! "press a button to jump" "press another button to accelerate". it isn't like this game is difficult to figure out.

"a tradition of firsts". Making and selling games, or at least their boxes, for a system that doesn't exist is definitely a first. not a first that you would want to be known for, however.

hey, that really works. someone did it and a car tried to drive through it with expected results.

they obviously aren't very serious about things, because they STILL don't have a new name for their so-called business. normally you'd have a new name lined up and paperwork filed before the deal goes through so you can continue to operate uninterrupted.

yeah but I am not sure if that was released. it is very possible!

I never hacked any ROMs to make them work, except the FA ones, I added an extra empty bank with a single bankswitch to make them 16K but that was only for my own "bankzilla" use and I never released those. I don't think I released a hacked smurfs image but who knows, it was 25+ years ago now.

unfortunately I don't remember a whole lot, but I do remember tracing the pcb out. it used 4 TTL chips and an EPROM from what I recall. Checked around and I can't find the PCB right off the bat so I might've given it to a friend (I put it back into the cart shell, it didn't work when I got it since a trace got eaten away somehow so I fixed it). the NOP padding could be a "landing zone" so that a slow bankswitch wouldn't crash it, switching halfway through the next instruction or similar. They could've just been overly cautious of speed limits on the bankswitching hardware too.

it is the outline of zimbabwe

I wonder if they are counting the 30 or so NES ports of intellivision games, as seen on those TV game plug and play doodads from the early-mid 2000's in the 200 total.

I did a little investigating and cornhole was first mentioned on page 40 (well it was on 26 but only in passing and not as an amico title) and tommy was very quick to follow up with a probable lie: then some lame "poll" designed to drive tons of posts from the hopefuls... still almost nothing about it yet. guessing he was talking about it some on "interviews", however. (page 114) when I re-read some of this stuff I just have to shake my head. uttered again by tommy on page 149. card games are the most played genre on earth! woowwww things really take off on page 151 about it when the hopefuls finally notice it and tommy has to go on about it. so maybe it wasn't a cheesy suggestion after all and I was wrong on that. I just remember there being a big explosion in interest that seemed odd. looks like tommy laying on the bullshit thick was the reason. Note the search hashes on the right in the scroll bar. Fastest growing sport in the world, don'tch'a'know! weirdly it doesn't get mentioned again until page 203 or so with just a mention in passing and no followup. On 207 drops this one: Never minding the fact tommy is only 50% italian at best (mom is canadian, dad italian, born in the USA), apparently tommy only thinks people celebrate holidays during winter months and that is perfect time for amico! No one celebrates easter, 4th of july, labor day, or memorial day and plays outside games then. No one ever gets together on weekends in the summer either. nope! We never did hear more about bocce ball, shuffleboard (lol) or horseshoes again. People overlooked these since there's very little interest compared to other games. You're not going to see esports contests for bocce ball or horseshoes.

I member how someone mentioned cornhole being a "killer app" (lol) for amico, and everyone glommed onto it and that's how it came to be. "NO ONE makes a good cornhole game!" which isn't true, there's several decent ones and they are better and cheaper than the turd that amico got. They talked about horse shoes and bocci ball too (it's italian, don'tcha'know!) but cornhole won out for some reason.

I checked out the video and paused it and single stepped it to get a good look at the FPGA. it seems to actually be the same FPGA that's on the DE10 after all. my DE10 here has a -7 speed grade rated part, and the clone board does too. One interesting thing about the DE10 board's FPGA is it is specially marked. the part number ends with 7NDK while the one on the clone is just 7N. the "DK" stands for "development kit" and you should only find these on dev kit boards like the DE10. I wonder if intel does this to detect grey market chip sales? Since it is using the same speed grade FPGA after all, theoretically it should be compatible with all the cores, at least the FPGA should be. Jury's out on the rest of the board but that shouldn't be difficult to get right. It's a mystery to me where they are getting the chips. The problem with pulled/reballed parts is they have been used once, and it's a big hassle to pull and reball them, and also the supply is uncertain. you might get a bunch of them when i.e. telecom equipment is retired and never get more. also, reliability might not be great since they will have 10-20K hours on them, and were heated up three more times to pull, reball, and install them on the new board. the RAM module seems in line with what I'd expect. the RAM chips are a few bucks each and the PCB is pretty cheap, so $15 seems reasonable.

I suspect these are pulls from ewaste and have been cleaned up and reballed. Not that there's anything wrong with that- they probably got them for practically free on something like cell phone equipment when it was upgraded. The problem with this, though is they might not be the same speed grade. The de10 has a -6 part which is the fastest; the picture I saw strategically covered up the chip's markings so I cannot tell what speed grade it is using, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the -8. This means that certain cores might not work or will be flaky if the speed grade is slower. I noticed the on-board jtagger is gone too and has been replaced with a plain old jtag port. this would save some cash and unless you're a developer this doesn't matter too much. I don't know what RAM it is using, it looks similar to the official board so the DDR3 is most likely fine. There could be other minor things changed too to save a bit of cash. So I suspect it will work fine for a lot of things but might fail on the more demanding applications. there might be other things like lower spec power supplies too. If people know what they are buying I don't see a problem with it, just hope it doesn't cause a support issue. IF they can obtain -6 parts it would be possible to have essentially a 1:1 clone though. so it will all hinge mainly on which chip is on there.

but at least he can play boogie woogie on the piano! that takes what, 3 fingers max?

I was unaware that some cartridges might take awhile to become ready, so I just test once. it's been changed to test for 2 seconds, and show the error screen, but it will keep rescanning continuously and will boot if the cartridge ever becomes ready eventually. the fix will go out with the next update.

ask and ye shall receive. here's my exchange with tommy. (tommy's reply, cut off my post he quoted) (video links removed) (removed where tommy quoted my entire post) since that, several more products have been released, while amico languishes.

they would need to probably start ordering parts today if they hope to have it all. then figure start assembling in august at the very very latest. so they got some time to debug it, but they'd have to hire another engineer probably to redo the design; guessing lots of parts are EOL/not available/long lead times so they will need to do some major redorkulating. also, the extremely poor battery life and constant disconnections need to be addressed. the former probably is not fixable without hardware changes (bigger battery, etc) and the latter SHOULD be fixable with software, but that'd require debugging and someone to do that work. I'd be surprised if the controller gets made at this point. yes, those will need separate tests. they will need a total of four tests I think: safety test (battery, charger), emission test for bluetooth (intentional radiator), emission test for wifi (intentional radiator), and general EMI/RFI emissions (unintentional radiator).

pretty sure it'd need safety testing since it has a lithium ion cell in it.

yeah the only real way to ID games would be to CRC the upper 8K or so but even that isn't bulletproof- many mappers can start up in any bank so that means you'd have to store a CRC for every possible bank. though, for this application it isn't quite that bad- it only has to identify a fixed set of games and not the entire library. still it doesn't help the flash cart situation. it would be possible to have some kind of register that can be written to enable the required expansions, but that'd require flash cart devs to add that to their code. I actually do have that feature in there- the NSF player hack I did for the powerpak uses it, and automagically turns the correct expansion chips on for you.

that wasn't a bug, it was conscious design decision. the reason is someone will turn one of those on, forget about it then wonder why there's weird noises coming out of their tv. so the solution is to make them reset when the power is cycled. there isn't a super good solution to the problem, and that was the one I came up with. (playing non-expansion sound games with one or more expansions turned on can cause the expansions to still make sound anyways, when the games write to their mapper chips which tend to mapped into similar areas. the best solution would be to somehow ID/fingerprint the game first and automatically turn the correct ones on, but that won't work for flash carts since their menus run first and would defeat any kind of identification. also I was totally out of space in the FPGA. it's a bit over 95% full right now)

I know one thing. I would've liked to have been a fly on the wall when mike saw the super nt come out. The first real live FPGA SNES that didn't need a SNES jr. stuffed into a jaguar shell.