How has this not been posted yet? Retro VGS

[InnovaX5]

Jaybird3rd, you seem to forget that everything in Retro Land is possible. I heard that Half Life 4 is going to be exclusive to the Coleco Chameleon because Gabe Newell never thought his game could get on a CARTRIDGE.

[triverse]

Radio silence challenge accepted. Guerilla warfare tactics enabled.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

I have one of these consoles. SMS/MKIII ROMs are recognized from the SD card; the adapter is only if you want to run/dump original carts.

 

It does not run flash carts, but it would be redundant since you can dump roms in the SD card.

 

Xbox 360 controllers do not work but I'm hoping they will release a patch for it (they release firmware updates from time to time).

 

Also you can switch the menu to English. The XML file for cheats and the webpage for firmware updates are still in Japanese but you can fiddle with a translator to figure things out.

 

Edit: the adapter for legacy controllers is a bit pricey but is very good. It works on Windows and each controller comes up as a separate device, meaning you can use it as a "multitap" for several players.

We may need some tutorial on how to navigate the website without being able to read Japanese. Most translation services break down or quit working when they encounter an encrypted page.

[Andromeda Stardust]

True, but can you execute code directly from a memory device on a serial bus, or does it have to be loaded into RAM? My understanding was that if you have (for example) an SD card with a large binary on it, that binary can't run in place from the SD card; it has to be copied into RAM first, which means that there's going to be some load times involved.

RAM is cheap. Assuming this game has say 1Gb of cheap RAM, the entire game could be copied into memory and executed from there. Smaller games would have more RAM available to work with. Assuming the thing multitasks, the title screen and other pertinent things could be loaded first, and then the first level, while the rest of the game is seamlessly copied into the background. A multicore CPU should be able to stream data into memory while running parts of the game already loaded.

 

Smart devs make loading seamless. Lazy devs put a "loading..." screen on the display, like many early PS1 games. Look at most first party Game Cube games. Data is prefetched from the disc while the game is running, before it is actually needed. In a quiet environment with the sound muted, you can hear the disc scanning before the level starts. It's just there is a lead in before the stage actually starts. Modern flash is very fast even for serial reads; it is writing that is slow. Since the storage is designed to be permanent, writes to main storage will be disabled except to store game data. Flash media can easily read 10x faster than writes.

[jaybird3rd]

Oh, I'm sure it's very fast, especially for relatively small games. I'm very happy with the performance of my MicroSD card on my NVIDIA Shield (although I don't usually run apps from it). My only point was that, if it ends up using inexpensive serial flash memory to cut costs, the RVGS/Chameleon "cartridge" would still be different from the cartridges for the older systems that they are constantly making comparisons to, just because there would be loading times involved. Smart prefetching would indeed minimize that, however, assuming those indie devs working in Game Maker or Unity know how to implement it properly.

 

The bigger implication is that it would put the RVGS/Chameleon right back in the same category as every commodity Android device on the market with an SD card slot. If an expensive "cartridge" can load data at the same rate as a cheap SD card, or only slightly faster, why even bother at all with the cartridge slot and all the added expense that comes with cartridges? Why not just let people use their SD cards? Again, it wouldn't be such a big deal if they didn't make CARTRIDGES such a key selling point of the system, but it hurts them because that use of cartridges would add cost faster than it would add value. There's also the question of what kind of shelf life these flash memories will have, since long-term data retention is another stated goal of theirs.

[Atlantis]

If their master plan is to create a new cartridge based console why not stick to that plan? It all rests on that. And someone is destined to pic up that challenge sooner or later anyhow.

Next, I think what he said in the *honest* confession-like interview pretty much can be read that they have pinned the size of the carts to 100 MB. Lets make it the challenge for dev teams to fit their games into that. Retro games were space limited, so it goes along pretty well. Keep it simple. Less is more.

The more they shut up the better, it builds buzz and indirect and direct interest in this system, happening or not. They know and learned by their error from letting the community in, and what did it give them?

The answer is yes to a working prototype in February so until then, we can only berserk on the matter of this being true Coleco or not, or if that even matters. The buzz is on,, the hype is on, I find this situation to be ideal for their project. Kickstarter will decide.

[jaybird3rd]

Next, I think what he said in the *honest* confession-like interview pretty much can be read that they have pinned the size of the carts to 100 MB. Lets make it the challenge for dev teams to fit their games into that. Retro games were space limited, so it goes along pretty well. Keep it simple. Less is more.

 

The more they shut up the better, it builds buzz and indirect and direct interest in this system, happening or not. They know and learned by their error from letting the community in, and what did it give them?

I wouldn't exactly call that interview "honest." I've been pretty hard on John Carlsen, but I don't think it was fair of Mike to lay all the blame on him (I know he said he'd "take responsibility," but that means nothing). If Carlsen really derailed the entire project by going nuts and building a "Rolls Royce console," it was because Mike didn't have a firm enough hand and didn't reel him in and insist that he keep the costs down, as a competent manager should (sheesh, he didn't even know Carlsen was making that bizarre video until after it had been posted). On the other hand, if Carlsen was simply following orders and doing his best to build something that satisfied all of Mike's requirements, it's still Mike's fault for being unrealistic.

 

I also don't think their error was "letting the community in." Their error, as documented by others, was every one of the following:

Name dropping potential devs

asking for money to fund a company, not build a console

placing emphasis on the collectibility of the console itself (and the games) as opposed to being worried about selling fun games to people

aggro deflection of criticism / blaming everyone but themselves (for awhile, it was all AA's fault, then Kevtris, now Carlsen)

feature creep / making promises that were impossible to keep

instructing devs to release "bug free games"

the whole concept being a classic solution in search of a problem

"The community" is the core audience for this system; if anybody in the world would be crazy enough to want this, it would be hardcore hobbyists like us, so why shouldn't they let us in and solicit our input? But from the beginning, we've seen serious flaws in their business model and in the whole concept of the project, and we've gotten nothing but grief from Mike (and Carlsen when he was still working with them) for pointing them out. Pat and Ian of the #CUPodcast (see here) are good examples; they presented a reasoned dissection of the project and of the campaign, and they get called "drunkards" right on the official RVGS Facebook page. Mike's conduct in particular was highly unprofessional throughout the entire campaign, lashing out at honest critics and evading questions and deleting dissenting comments and laying blame and flinging accusations like thunderbolts, which is why any goodwill he might have had has long since been spent. Even if they somehow manage to come up with a great product and a well-structured campaign with a more realistic goal, he's not going to get a second chance from a lot of the people who have followed the project, and that's not unfair. He stole fizzy lifting drinks, and now he gets nothing. Or, as one of the Ars Technica commenters said, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and he failed. Spectacularly.

[phoenixdownita]

...

Kickstarter will decide.

That and whatever hardware they really have under the hood.

 

Let's not forget the disaster of the NeoGeo-X, they had brand (NeoGeo), games on cart (a haphazardly modded SD card lol), a hell of joystick and .... a fuxxing emulator ... ouch!!!!

 

Let's see if history repeats itself once more.

[dashv]

I was waiting for a review of that one before pulling the trigger since the majority of information has been in Japanese, and sparse at that. Do you know if it works with flash carts? You're indicating that it loads ROMs from microSD directly, i.e., without any workarounds?

 

EDIT: Just ordered the Premium one. I was able to confirm that it can run ROMs for supported systems directly from the microSD card. Hopefully the Japanese language thing is not too impenetrable.

There is an option to set the entire os menu to English.

[Atlantis]

I think we can separate:

-Good intentions (I believe the have it)

from,

-Making a mess out of it. (and the intentions got run over by the harsh realism that this project is all about)

Yes, as a manager I see him as very soft, and that might damage firm direction. They got caught in a negative feedback loop that hurt them badly. I see it as a good sign that Mike does the talking and not everyone from all directions, that is more firm management.

I guess that Carsen became the scapegoat here, it's always the same when things get messed up, someone has to go for it to continue. If Mike is the center of this project, it would have been "funny" if he been lift off his own project, and the third guy is an engineer so what could he be responsible for at this point.

I'm just trying to understand them here.

I know lots of people cant take the heat and frustration of the info starvation, but in the end they better focus on stuff other than tackle the community (which is a major psychic vampire) and get the actual work done.

I believe they got good directions now, or at least better than before. Games devs will come to the party, hey, if I were one I'd love to get my game on a classic cart.

If they get the prototype running and have one game to demonstrate with, or even better two carts to swap between to get the feeling for cart swapping going, this might work being a 50-50 chance thingy.

Edited December 23, 2015 by Atlantis

[InnovaX5]

There is nothing to understand, Atlantis. Mike bought Jaguar injection molds with the only intentions of using those molds to make a machine that printed him money. Mike claimed he made all the money he spent on the molds from selling people clear jaguar shells. He then went to crowd funding to fund his dream company to make the Xbox One and Playstation 4's new cartridge based competition. Zero risk of financial failure to him because he invested nothing into it, he wanted community money to build it all.

 

All this was under the guise of it being for the retro gaming community. For the children so they could have cartridges to show off when they get old. For the collectors to have limited edition cartridges in their collections. For the greater good of instant gratification non-internet connected gaming. For making him millions of dollars. No passion was put into making this console, no specs exist, no prototype exists, no games exist. Just an empty shell, some 3d renderings and the cheapest usb controller that he could buy in bulk.

 

Now, because that plan failed miserably, he bought the COLECO name to slap on it. Even went as far to pretend that COLECO was coming back from the dead to the console market.

 

So please, tell me where the good intentions are. I'd love to know.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Next, I think what he said in the *honest* confession-like interview pretty much can be read that they have pinned the size of the carts to 100 MB. Lets make it the challenge for dev teams to fit their games into that. Retro games were space limited, so it goes along pretty well. Keep it simple. Less is more.

Sorry, but if the games are limited in size to 100Mbytes, the system is as good as dead. WiiWare had a 40Mbyte limit due to the extremely small size of the internal memory, and tons of games either skipped the platform or cut content. Even N64, with Conker's, Pokemon Stadium 2, and one other game being a whopping 64Mbytes, had larger games than the WiiWare limitation. Please tell me how you could make a game like Conker's Bad Fur Day or the upcoming Yookaa-Laylee, in full 1080p HD, and have it limited to 100Megabytes. To pull this off, the polygons and texture resolution / compression would be shit. Any in game audio would have to be MIDI synth or limited to small SFX samples like most N64 games were. It is nearly 10 years past the Wii launch, 20 years past the N64, and multi-gigabytes or storage can be stored on a single chip for a couple bucks or less. If they limit this thing to 100Mbytes, they might as well kiss all those indie devs they are currently courting goodbye.

[phoenixdownita]

... Even N64 had larger games than that....

Err, nope, it was 512Mbits = 64Mbytes (like RE2 and others).

Point taken though that artificially castrating devs may not pay off.

 

EDIT: well now there's an inline editing on the mentioned post so this makes no sense anymore.

 

EDIT2: but the games Mike hints to care about are generally non 3D in nature, so no 1080p need either (a 640x400 screen at 8bits is 256K uncompressed). In any case moot points until we know the hardware specs.

 

EDIT3: if you take away the CD music from the original PS1 Ridge Racer it all fit in the 3.5MB of the console [models, SFX, textures and all], you could take away the game CD and use your preferred music with no further loading .... so it really depends (yeah it was 320x200 at 30fps with low res textures etc...etc... 20Y ago or so).

Edited December 23, 2015 by phoenixdownita

[Atlantis]

[1] There is nothing to understand, Atlantis. Mike bought Jaguar injection molds with the only intentions of using those molds to make a machine that printed him money. Mike claimed he made all the money he spent on the molds from selling people clear jaguar shells. He then went to crowd funding to fund his dream company to make the Xbox One and Playstation 4's new cartridge based competition. Zero risk of financial failure to him because he invested nothing into it, he wanted community money to build it all.

 

[2] All this was under the guise of it being for the retro gaming community. For the children so they could have cartridges to show off when they get old. For the collectors to have limited edition cartridges in their collections. For the greater good of instant gratification non-internet connected gaming. For making him millions of dollars. No passion was put into making this console, no specs exist, no prototype exists, no games exist. Just an empty shell, some 3d renderings and the cheapest usb controller that he could buy in bulk.

I can always try to understand them, and their facebook support.

 

Why does 1 exclude 2, if 2 being the intentions and 1 the first start, or investment, on a project that ofc will include the concept of money, by me called the harsh realism?

 

99% of you work hard to prove that this is impossible, so what damage would it be for me representing the other 1% here? There are people at their facebook supporting this, that can be understood beyond calling them all idiots, imo. Yes, we have all made up our minds, and that is hard to change since we put the most effort into prove our own point: that is I won't be able to prove THEIR good intentions to you. It's only what i BELIEVE they got.

 

Didn't Atari do the same (as did Nintendo and all the others), trying to get money out of us? And here we are 30 years later............... Why do modern systems have decent intentions while some few indie guys fighting giants don't??

 

This is just an answer to you question.

[InnovaX5]

No. Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, Sony, no one has asked for their consumers to buy their product and fund their company before they have a product to sell and a company created. You can preorder consoles and games from them, sure. However, you aren't asked to pay upfront and you know exactly or very close to the product you'll be getting.

 

Ouya is the perfect example of how to properly crowd fund a console. They laid it all out for their consumers and they were massively successful. They're dead now, because they didn't have enough games to keep them a float in a sea of android devices.

 

But, mike really didn't like being compared to the ouya. He really felt his dream was way better than that thing. Go back and listen to the interviews he did. Pull up the old images of the IGG before he started ripping stuff down. They're in earlier pages of this thread.

 

All of it was smoke and mirrors. Bashing and lies.. All of it was for trying to get a quick buck and cash out. Yet everyone but that 1% can see through it. Weird.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Err, nope, it was 512Mbits = 64Mbytes (like RE2 and others).

Point taken though that artificially castrating devs may not pay off.

 

EDIT: well now there's an inline editing on the mentioned post so this makes no sense anymore.

 

EDIT2: but the games Mike hints to care about are generally non 3D in nature, so no 1080p need either (a 640x400 screen at 8bits is 256K uncompressed). In any case moot points until we know the hardware specs.

 

EDIT3: if you take away the CD music from the original PS1 Ridge Racer it all fit in the 3.5MB of the console [models, SFX, textures and all], you could take away the game CD and use your preferred music with no further loading .... so it really depends (yeah it was 320x200 at 30fps with low res textures etc...etc... 20Y ago or so).

Sorry about that. I always proofread my posts for clarity and make corrections afterwords. I was comparing N64 to WiiWare limitations, not to the 100Mbyte Chameleon limit. Being we are ten years into the future and designing indie games in HD, and the prices of flash storage have dropped to an all time low, the 100Mbyte limit is even more ludicrous today than 40Mbyte was ten years ago.

 

All of that is moot anyway. Assuming the storage is serial instead of parallel, it shouldn't be limited by size, unless Mike and team make a serious design oversight. Assuming 32-bit address space, 2-4Gbytes should be achievable.

[roland p]

I think 100mb is retro enough

[StopDrop&Retro]

ONE HUNDRED MEGA POWAR!!!

 

Also, here's a video with my thoughts on this Coleco queer eye for the retro guy makeover.

[Newsdee]

We may need some tutorial on how to navigate the website without being able to read Japanese. Most translation services break down or quit working when they encounter an encrypted page.

 

Creatrd a new thread for it:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/247050-retro-freak-firmware-update/

 

Hope that helps!

[Atlantis]

No. Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, Sony, no one has asked for their consumers to buy their product and fund their company before they have a product to sell and a company created. You can preorder consoles and games from them, sure. However, you aren't asked to pay upfront and you know exactly or very close to the product you'll be getting.

 

Ouya is the perfect example of how to properly crowd fund a console. They laid it all out for their consumers and they were massively successful. They're dead now, because they didn't have enough games to keep them a float in a sea of android devices.

 

But, mike really didn't like being compared to the ouya. He really felt his dream was way better than that thing. Go back and listen to the interviews he did. Pull up the old images of the IGG before he started ripping stuff down. They're in earlier pages of this thread.

 

All of it was smoke and mirrors. Bashing and lies.. All of it was for trying to get a quick buck and cash out. Yet everyone but that 1% can see through it. Weird.

Yeah I get your point. But still that's of the stupid things from the RVGS' past, of course it's still the last facts we have at this point, but in February if they get a product finished with all the under the hood tech data written in stone I guess people would know what to pledge or not to. We'll see if any change happens, or if history repeats itself.

 

I am of not illusion that retro people are skeptical from what have happened, but I for one are willing to be still surprised. Not being a Coleco fan, I'm more entertained by CC than pissed off by the necro exploitation.

 

Peace out, for now.

[Flojomojo]

I'm confused about what happens next.

 

If Mike K is planning on crowdfunding, why the trip to Toy Fair? What's his pitch? "Here's our concept, I hope you will carry it in stores. We can't produce it ourselves but will be begging for production money on Kickstarter."

 

Asking would-be game developers not to talk about planned hardware in public should be a giant red flag to any reasonable person.

 

Deleting the many negative comments on the RVGS Facebook page to provide the appearance of unanimous support is understandable but fundamentally dishonest and will only result in disappointed backlash when this fails to deliver the second coming of the Super Nintendo.

 

Mike won't be able to delete questions and comments from Kickstarter the way he does on the Facebook site. Even so, the previous campaign collected $80K so it's possible that the new Coleco label will fool enough people to bring him closer to his asking price.

 

Duping people for personal gain is no way to go through life, son

[triverse]

They have just announced that apparently Toys R Us's buying agent has scheduled an interview with them at Toyfair and Double Fine has also contacted them wanting a dev kit as soon as it is available.

[Keatah]

The buying agent should read this thread.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Yeah I get your point. But still that's of the stupid things from the RVGS' past, of course it's still the last facts we have at this point, but in February if they get a product finished with all the under the hood tech data written in stone I guess people would know what to pledge or not to. We'll see if any change happens, or if history repeats itself.

 

I am of not illusion that retro people are skeptical from what have happened, but I for one are willing to be still surprised. Not being a Coleco fan, I'm more entertained by CC than pissed off by the necro exploitation.

 

Peace out, for now.

 

I'm confused about what happens next.

[...]

 

Yeah, I am definitely playing the wait and see game.

 

For it is written:

"A wise man learns from his mistakes, but only a fool repeats his folley."

 

What we don't know yet is if Mike and Co have learned at all from their mistakes.

 

If they reveal something awesome at the Toy Fair, and actually impresses some investors, then I may be willing to try it. If they flounder and make donkeys of themselves, we will all get a very good and hardy laugh, and his reputation will be forever tarnished.

[Andromeda Stardust]

They have just announced that apparently Toys R Us's buying agent has scheduled an interview with them at Toyfair and Double Fine has also contacted them wanting a dev kit as soon as it is available.

This is good news.

 

Triverse, I must ask you, will you be posting a transcript of the unfinished interview that got cut short? Or is it stricken from the books, so to speak?