How has this not been posted yet? Retro VGS

[Algus]

European retailers will be instructed to lobby against socialist European politicians so that VATs may be eliminated. Simple as that.

[+madman]

 

OK, first in foremost - do these guys think anything through? I've imported as a manufacturer into the EU from the US consumer products for retail. VAT still has to be paid at the point of importation. So if you buy something in the EU from another country, the importer doesn't just get to skip the tax. If the consumer imports it themselves they pay the VAT directly. If a retailer imports it from a manufacturer, the retailer pays the VAT upon importation at port customs. No retailer will just absorb the VAT they pay to import the goods, it will be factored into the price at the register.

 

I won't even touch on their target adoption rates... They're just nuts.

I also love that they say they make games on demand and "typically" ship the games out within one day. My question: Which games are they making on demand and shipping today?? It took me over 2 months to get the Jag cart shells I ordered and I received ZERO communication from Mike. I was close to filing a PayPal claim.

[+madman]

Also, Mike Kennedy is really, really, really proud of his acquisition of the Atari Jaguar console shells. It's probably going to be the thing for which he is most remembered in the gaming community.

It's funny that a couple months ago he was saying they saved $500,000 by buying those Jag molds. Now it's down to $250,000-300,000. You cannot believe a single word that comes out of his mouth. Is his name really Mike Kennedy??

 

I REALLY should've taken notes as I read that transcript as these were all things I originally wanted to say in my original post. Oh well.

[triverse]

They just lost about $1,800 in funding. This is bad.

Edited September 27, 2015 by triverse

[Andromeda Stardust]

There may be more patents, but AFAIK the only time they actually mentioned them was at Game On Expo in late August. Carlsen talks about the proprietary cartridge interface and at a bit after 0:25:10 says, "I'm actually hoping we'll pursue a little bit of patent protection on this. I'm already listing out a number of claims for our patent attorney."

 

 

 

I'll still watch, but I hope triverse doesn't take too much longer to get the video out.

That it's apparently almost ninety minutes long is disheartening. I just hope it isn't sixty minutes of hearing Kennedy speak and twenty minutes or so of everyone else.

I could see them patenting the cartridge port. This would make unlicensed homebrews difficult or impossible, but given the niche market and trying to court homebrewers, do they really want to stifle unlicensed games production? Secondly, if the patent revolves around FPGA based consoles or cartridge adapters ala Kevtris, I hope their application gets rejected. There is so much prior art and so many reasons why this is bad for the community, it's almost unthinkable.

 

Someone removed the link to this discussion from the project's Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Retro_VGS&action=history

Perhaps they have a mole working for them? They have deleted tons of Facebook posts, but are powerless to moderate content on privabe forums like AtariAge or NeoGAF.

 

New video, not seen yet:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZwNCLC0tU

 

EDIT: It's pretty good, he speaks calmly and concisely and covers most things really well. His steps to recovery is nicely pitched, too.

Thanks for sharing this. One of the better made videos regarding the RetroVGS and what they could do in the future to curb the clusterfuck that is the RetroVGS. They should definitely pull the plug on the IndieGoGo campaign ASAP and say "look guys, we messed up. We are open to your suggestions and will get in touch with you when we have something more to offer..."

 

= = = = = = = =

 

Aside, I'm calling it a day right now. I'm up to page 110 and will be leaving for church shortly. My pastor is scheduling a trip to a local observatory to view and discuss the bloodmoon tonight. I plan on going. So any of you reading/posting this thread tonight, I suggest you take a break and go outside to gaze at the heavens. Thank you and GOD bless...

[AE35]

 

Also, Mike Kennedy is really, really, really proud of his acquisition of the Atari Jaguar console shells. It's probably going to be the thing for which he is most remembered in the gaming community.

 

Yes, it is strange how much he leans into those cases. It is a nice design, but why does he use it as a crutch?

[dommie]

It's funny that a couple months ago he was saying they saved $500,000 by buying those Jag molds. Now it's down to $250,000-300,000. You cannot believe a single word that comes out of his mouth. Is his name really Mike Kennedy??

 

I REALLY should've taken notes as I read that transcript as these were all things I originally wanted to say in my original post. Oh well.

 

I don't do injection molding, so maybe I'm off-base, but I do do cardboard stamping/die cutting. It is the same tooling materials I believe for the dies. Custom CAD-designed stamping/cutting/printing dies for cardboard in complex shapes larger than the Jag (albeit with probably less cavities) cost me between $1,000-$2,000. Not sure the $250k-$0.5M is remotely accurate. Anybody in the plastics industry confirm this suspicion?

[rob_ocelot]

Carl, were the three all in the same room for the interview or were these different Skype connections from different locations?

 

They didn't really seem to know what each other was going to be talking about.

 

Woita not knowing who Kevin was.... OMFG, priceless.

 

Edited September 27, 2015 by rob_ocelot

[jaybird3rd]

They just lost about $1,800 in funding. This is bad.

Yup. They lost two more backers in the last hour, so they're now down $2,412 for the day. I've updated my previous post.

[triverse]

Carl, were the three all in the same room for the interview or were these different Skype connections from different locations?

 

They didn't really seem to know what each other was going to be talking about.

 

Woita not knowing who Kevin was.... OMFG, priceless.

They were not obviously in the same room. If they were even in the same house then someone has a decorating problem as the walls/rooms behind them didn't go together at all- completely different color schemes and the like. I don't know if it matters but you can hear in the audio where one would drop out due to Skype while the other two were perfectly fine. I think only John came out of it without any audio issues.

 

Anyone that has an N4G account, I have the interview linked over there and could use some help getting it approved.

 

http://n4g.com/news/1796810/retro-gaming-magazine-interviews-the-retro-video-game-system-team

Edited September 27, 2015 by triverse

[PlaysWithWolves]

triverse, what's your indiegogo link again?

[dj_convoy]

They just lost about $1,800 in funding. This is bad.

Watch out or you will be blamed, next.

[tcdev]

My money would be on the system for mixing the two video streams from the FPGA and the ARM's GPU.

 

The only problem there is that about 7 years go I worked on an FPGA design that mixed two video streams from PC sources, and even added a 3rd from the FPGA itself. Altium (FPGA vendor) even have a video IP suite with a mixer in it. So I hope (for their sake) that's not it either.

[triverse]

triverse, what's your indiegogo link again?

I don't have one. I posted a link to my perler bead Kickstarter a bit ago. It ended last night at $21 (2,100% funded).

[triverse]

Watch out or you will be blamed, next.

I don't think I can avoid being blamed at this point. My interview is the only one that has not come out "happy" and go lucky for them. I didn't plan that, I just intended to get to the bottom, well, deeper, in this than others. I have no agenda in this, still don't. I find it saddening that this has turned out like it has but well, it is all there in the interview. Just sad.

[kevtris]

 

Steve: Wait, he doesn’t want to work with us? I don’t get it [sounding concerned].

John: [chuckles] Yeah, I don’t know.

Steve: No, no, I am not reading the forums. Carl, I want you to understand, Carl, I don’t understand these forums at all. It takes too much to process. So, did he leave it at a state that he was not working with us? I thought he was.

Mike: Yeah, uh, he threw us under the bus and that was it.

Steve: But did he say he didn’t want to write the cores?

John: [trying to explain]

Mike: John, no, Steve, he is saying that he is going to come out with a competing product and that was the gist of it.

Steve: Whatever, that is fine. But he doesn’t want to license any cores to us? That is money he is…he could have done both.

 

Wow. Just wow. I don't even have the words.

 

This isn't IBM here. How the hell can Steve not know what's been going on for the last week? I get it that he doesn't read anything about the project, but to not know that the entire project's been changed from what was discussed months ago? Like, it's only going to have a CPLD now (going by John's video) and that they will run software emulators?

 

I felt like I got thrown under the proverbial bus when there was no communications for 2 months and then the last meeting got blown off at the last second.

 

As said before, I will gladly license my cores to anyone. Just give me some cash on the barrel head and we're good to go. I would still even license it out to the RGVS crew.

 

Mike has been stressing up and down how he wants to play "new cartridge based games". I am not sure how my FPGA board competes with their "new" ARM based games. I am not courting game developers and trying to run Tiny Knight.

 

Money wise, I am not in this for the money (though some of that green stuff WOULD be nice)

 

 

Mike interjects: Yeah, he could have done both. We had no, I mean, we didn’t back out on him. Word has gotten around that we let him go. He was a contractor that we were going to use if and when we were funded. We didn’t want to waste his time, upfront, you know, ’til we knew this was a done deal. We all agreed he was going to do these and we were going to pay him his asking price. That was it. Then a few days ago, he is basically, I think he saw us raise a good chunk of money that first day and all of a sudden, ‘Wow, I can do that!’.

 

I figured since talks stalled, and with the last message I got about how it might not even have an FPGA any more that I had been let go. No contract was signed, and in fact nothing was written down- not even so much as an email to memorialize any kind of deal.

 

Me seeing their $65K and thinking 'Wow, I can do this!" is patently untrue. I have been thinking about selling an FPGA board for literally a decade. I just didn't think the market would bear what I was wanting to sell. I figured trying to explain the difference between an emulator an an FPGA would be extremely difficult to the layman and even if I could convince people of its merits, it would still be a huge uphill battle. Each FPGA board I developed was developed in a way that I thought I could package and sell it to an end user. The first board was designed to fit into an aluminum Hammond box, the second an NES cart shell, and the third a custom laser cut enclosure. I have plenty of experience releasing 'user friendly' complete and finished products. We do this all the time at work.

 

No, I got the idea this might be sellable because people seem to WANT something like this today. I think part of this is the backlash of how the RGVS is basically dropping support for FPGA cores and relying instead on emulators had something to do with it. After seeing the video, I'm convinced their "FPGA" is really that tiny 256 macrocell CPLD for minor things like controller interfacing and maybe a few other level translation doodads (since it's got 5V tolerant IOs and their SOC most likely won't) After seemingly having the rug pulled out from under me, I decided to pitch my idea and show off the prototypes I have already created to see if anyone cared. Turns out I guess some people might. :-)

 

 

We think our products are completely different, you know, for him to do a polished consumer product with FCC [regulation] and [certification] and the shells, and the controllers, and the pack-in games, and whatever output he is putting on that thing, and making a polished consumer product, we don’t think he can do it.

 

So I'm in competition with you, until it's "completely different"? I'm getting dizzy. Dunno why he keeps harping on those same points. pack in game! (I don't need one- the point is it runs existing games accurately). Controller! (Again, I let the user choose their own). Outputs! (I have proven I literally output every. single. analog video standard right this second, on all my cores and can show them off to anyone at any time). I got over 100 finished products under my belt between work, home, and freelance. I have been through the standards racket for a medical device. As for being able to come through, my track record is proven. I have working prototypes of my FPGA board. I showed pictures of them without a plastic jag shell over the top and highlighted the hardware. What have YOU got? I just see lots of promises and zero specs and hot air.

 

 

Certainly not any cheaper than we can. Again, it goes back to the MIST board and the FPGA Arcade boards that are very similar to the board that he has ‘got’, you know, those are two, two hundred and fifty dollar products. When you add a pack-in game, I mean that adds forty, fifty bucks to it right there. You add a controller to it, that adds twenty, twenty-five bucks.

 

Well, let's see. My prototype costs are 50 times cheaper than your prototype costs. And I have a prototype already. I don't have a freight train of costs being added so the backers can foot the costs of your "I don't want to work any more" dream job. I mean it's a great gig if you can get it, but I think it's bad form to ask for everyone else to basically subsidize you so you don't have to work a day job any more.

 

There it is again with the pack in game and controller straw man.

 

 

You know, just for him to go out and create a shell, which again, everyone poo-poo’s this, but I mean, when I delivered that tooling to the injection mold shop here, I asked them what would that have cost me if I bought it in today’s dollars. They said two hundred fifty to three hundred thousand dollars. That is a big expense and to go in and say that you can do a product like ours for fifty to one hundred dollars less just seems ridiculous, honestly, you know. Hey, if he can do it, great. He may sell a few there in the forums, but to go out and mass market? I don’t see it.

 

If the volume's not there, then laser cut acrylic is a way to go. There's also 3D printing. There's lots and lots of options today that didn't exist back in 1994. My friend got NES cartridge injection mold tooling made this year and he already got lots of parts run through them. It was fairly cheap and about the size of my proposed system, so I assume costs will be similar. Making a large mold for i.e. the Jag (especially if it's a multi-cavity mold) is brutally expensive. This is not what I'm making. Another strawman argument.

 

Looks like your market wasn't the mass market either, it seems to just be game collectors on the forums. Re: 20 or 30 different shells, limited editions of this and that, etc. I do not see a mass market appeal to the RVGS or my product either. This is why I am being more realistic about my goals and end users. Kids don't want cart based dinosaurs today. They want hand held DS' and downloadable content and cheap games on the latest CPUs and 3D cards and stuff. I am not going to fool myself into thinking kids today want literally what I had in 1985 or 1994. It just isn't gonna happen.

 

 

We are going to keep adding to it, we have a lot of interesting things we can announce and show, but we are going to be doling it out and hopefully get that snowball rolling down the hill and it will get really big.

 

So.... announce and show these interesting things. Frosty's been melting under the bright light of exposure.

 

 

It is all because of what we are trying to bring out and, um, you know there are a lot of people that are now being influenced by some of this negativity and a lot of it has nothing to do with the system. From day one on AtariAge, people were bashing it and bashing me and dragging me through the mud and I don’t know what–

 

I think there was a lot of support up until the total lack of information available. Then it turned into a circus of "well, we don't have anything concrete to show. oh hey look! it's a green one! and translucent ones!" I don't think it's wrong for people to wonder what this thing that's going to cost $MONEY costs, or what kind of CPU or FPGA or whatever it will have in it. If that's negativity and dragging you through the mud, then you're in the wrong business. People want to know what they are going to get for their money.

 

 

Carl: Yes, sir. There is a lot of concern because there is no prototype available. That is what a lot of people are citing…

John: Well, yeah, we are not showing a prototype. I have a lot of stuff that is working sitting on my kitchen table. So far, we have shown none of it.

 

Well, I did see a lot of stuff sitting on a kitchen table...

 

 

John: We have been developing this on our own dime. I have been full time on this for more than six months already. Working these long hours to get this together, when we are not showing stuff…I have to bite my tongue here.

 

6 months full time to attach some headers and ribbon cables to two dev boards? Seriously? There has to be more to it than that. I mean I did see a single Altium screen shot and all but didn't see any copper on there.

 

 

John: –circuit boards, bundles of wires and test equipment and it is an ugly ugly process that I am sure most people are not even going to understand if they see it. If they see a bundle of wires, they are going to say, it works but it doesn’t fit in the Jaguar shell.

 

Some of the people on Atariage and elsewhere sure seem to understand it, and even identified what the dev boards were, even under the Jag Curtain. Of course it doesn't fit in the shell- no one is expecting it to. It's a prototype. It's going to be dirty, unreliable and a huge mess. That's what people expect to see. The more blinkenlites and wires hanging off the better!

 

 

Mike: Not bringing Ouya into this, but they used crowdfunding and that is where the similarities stop. Right off the bat. They didn’t show a prototype either, she said they had one and they showed a dev board.

Mike: I know, we are not going there, but we are being compared to that so I wanted to quickly say, go watch their video. No prototype, it was smoke and mirrors.

Mike: John started as a small business that grew into a large business.

 

So, in other words, exactly like the RVGS. They used crowd funding, didn't have a prototype, showed off dev boards, and made a slick video. Totally different things.

If John's running a large business, why can't he float some of the costs of making the protos? If he's got a large business, 2 million dollars (or even 100K) is small potatoes. He could invest in himself or something.

 

After reading all this, I am still not sure what Steve's role is in the RVGS dream. What does he do? John's doing hardware and Mike's doing.... marketing. Steve didn't even know I was out of the picture until this interview. I harbor no resent for him and hope for his sake he quits the project and finds something more fulfilling to work on.

[+madman]

If anyone is interested in automating data from the IGG campaign I wrote a quick curl line to make a basic output:

 

curl -s https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retro-vgs# | grep window.utag_data | awk -F"," '{print $13; print $24}'

It can be cleaned up with sed and put into an hourly cron job, but thought I'd throw it out there for anyone tracking the campaign. Output looks like:

 

$ curl -s https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retro-vgs# | grep window.utag_data | awk -F"," '{print $13; print $24}'
"campaign_raised_amount":"62733"
"campaign_funders":"189"

[kevtris]

Is that a freakking dental Xray in the background? Who the hell has one of those just lying around?!?!

Hahaha, nah that's a Mantis 3D microscope. I use that for repairing and inspecting surface mount stuff.

[jaybird3rd]

If anyone is interested in automating data from the IGG campaign I wrote a quick curl line to make a basic output:

It can be cleaned up with sed and put into an hourly cron job, but thought I'd throw it out there for anyone tracking the campaign. Output looks like:

Great, thanks! Works perfectly on my system!

[+wood_jl]

Special thanks to StarPath, quoting this for posterity!

Sorry I missed this likely epic post. (I actually slept long and hard last night, and for once attended church this morning). RetroVGS is definitely missing something, and it ain't prototype hardware. Ah, fixed that for you!

retrovgs pinup 640x360.jpg

 

But seriously though, not even six inch models (or six foot consoles) can save it at this point!

I was just funnin'. It was just a parody. In a thread completely *dumping* (justifiably in my opinion) on the thing, all kinds of insinuation that they're scammers, the whole project being called a "joke," ultimate doom and imminent failure predicted, anticipated, and actively being counted-down blow-by-blow along with finger-pointing claims of schadenfreude, and amongst other jokes such as the Retro SH-IT video (posted in this thread here and here) - that I and probably 20 other people thought was hillarious - I was a little surprised that I crossed the line and smacked into the wall of melodrama. What liitle do I know; I don't set the standard(s) here, but I'm happy to abide by 'em so I deleted them. (But I was told it was quite funny.) If anybody wants a chuckle, send a PM.

 

Good day to you all. Each and every one of you!

[rob_ocelot]

I was just funnin'. It was just a parody. In a thread completely *dumping* (justifiably in my opinion) on the thing, all kinds of insinuation that they're scammers, the whole project being called a "joke," ultimate doom and imminent failure predicted, anticipated, and actively being counted-down blow-by-blow along with finger-pointing claims of schadenfreude, and amongst other jokes such as the Retro SH-IT video (posted in this thread here and here) - that I and probably 20 other people thought was hillarious - I was a little surprised that I crossed the line and smacked into the wall of melodrama. What liitle do I know; I don't set the standard(s) here, but I'm happy to abide by 'em so I deleted them. (But I was told it was quite funny.) If anybody wants a chuckle, send a PM.

 

Good day to you all. Each and every one of you!

I bet you $10 a certain someone is going to threaten AA to give up the identities of all the posters on this thread so we can be sued for libel.

 

If that happens we can throw a big 'You don't even know what libel is' party for everyone in the thread at my loft. I'll supply drinks.

[+wood_jl]

I bet you $10 a certain someone is going to threaten AA to give up the identities of all the posters on this thread so we can be sued for libel.

 

It takes a lot of money to sue for nonsense. Perhaps they can use crowdfunding to raise the money, since it works out so well.

[Memblers]

Is that a freakking dental Xray in the background? Who the hell has one of those just lying around?!?!

 

It was kinda surreal to see that picture here, because that's my workplace. So I know what every little thing is in that picture.

The thing you're seeing must be the stereo microscope, it's an awesome tool for inspecting fine pitch solder joints. It can make 0402 SMT part look like a skyscraper.

 

Yes, I work with kevtris and see him every day, and no, he doesn't have his own massive lab with a 20 foot long workbench. But when off the clock, we do get to use all that good stuff for our own projects, some of which kev has built himself, like the reflow oven in that pic for assembling prototypes.

 

That is really annoying how Mike K is still going around saying kevtris "threw them under the bus", what a load of crap. I'm sure he wouldn't mind me saying that we've talked about that project quite often, because we both find it interesting. He's done anything he could have done to help, short of designing the thing for them, and he's just had a realistic outlook on the chances of it succeeding based on the cost going up, amorphous specs, and bizarre marketing (no updates allowed?). And these have been almost everyone else's complaint as well. But I guess that guy is pissed that kevtris dared to speak realistically about it and show his own projects. Which is totally on-topic in this discussion, seeing as how the system was promoted everywhere as being an FPGA console running NES/etc. games. And then going on to say he's launching a competing product, while the rest of the team seems to be emphasizing that no, RVGS is actually for new games. It's completely different..! A few people are saying they want the Z3K instead, probably because it does what they were incorrectly led to believe the RVGS would do.

 

I'll have to listen to the whole interview later, but it seems like John and Steve really know their stuff and are making something great. But it seems like almost no one thinks this fundraising campaign is going to work, there's just not any traction, hopefully they can continue to work towards something that will be funded. If I had a system where I could write in 6502, or C, and make my own hardware add-ons in Verilog, I would really like that.

[PlaysWithWolves]

 

After reading all this, I am still not sure what Steve's role is in the RVGS dream. What does he do? John's doing hardware and Mike's doing.... marketing. Steve didn't even know I was out of the picture until this interview. I harbor no resent for him and hope for his sake he quits the project and finds something more fulfilling to work on.

 

I've been following this closely, and I'm not sure why he's involved either.

[CPUWIZ]

Steve is a software guy and after reading that interview, I feel even worse for him.