How has this not been posted yet? Retro VGS

[phoenixdownita]

 

....

I also don't think $350 is a lot of money for the console. Consider that most of us are grown up by now and have settled into $40+ hour jobs nowadays. The whole shebang would run us a day or two's work.

...

 

 

350US$ is a lot, the amount you make per hour is not a measure of how much is a lot for the rest of us.

By your measure then a movie ticket should be 100US$, just half day worth of work isn't it?

[+5-11under]

After mortgage, bills, food, $300 is a lot of money, especially for a SNES that only plays a handful of games that cost $20 to $50 each.

/ducks for extreme cover.

[PlaysWithWolves]

I don't agree with some of the design decisions, but I do like the idea of being able to pop a game in and it won't be bricked due to some software change -- or disappear altogether. I've had both happen on either my phone or thanks to Windows version upgrades.

 

I also don't think they're running a scam but, as I wrote before, I do think it's always caveat emptor with Kickstarter. Sometime honest crowdfunded plans fail. Hearing from the hardware guy (Carlsen) instead of the idea guy (Kennedy) boosted my own confidence that they're putting ducks in a row.

 

Also, I wish Mike could have secured some VC and subsidized a cheaper console with more expensive cartridges.

[+madman]

Regardless of one's income, there is still the concept of the value of a dollar. Do I have $350 to drop on this thing? Absolutely. Would I get $350 worth of entertainment from it? It doesn't appear so. I've gotten way more entertainment from some of the comments on this thread than I think I ever will from the console.

 

This post was presented in limited edition translucent blue.

[Keatah]

I'm wondering why everyone is in a hissy fit over the initial release titles. When Intellivision and the VCS and Astrocade were in vogue, we were more than slap-happy with whatever was available at the time. And every new game seemed like a bonus! It only got bad when all the me-too publishers popped up and diluted a catalog.

[Keatah]

I've always said I want my videogames to look like videogames. And be permanent. No hyper-realistic graphics games that have to be constantly in touch with a corporate server. Forget all that. And I'm happy to have skipped over the Xbox, SonyPS, and Wii shit.. 8:50

 

Mike also has the right idea regarding DLC and DRM and longevity. Physical releases are king compared to disposable consoles and phones.

 

He also talks about limiting the number of titles and avoiding dilution - serious problem with the mobile ecosystem. And mobile games are just a way to get into your wallet, giving you shit in return.

 

[Keatah]

I hope this can be the savior for us from mobile gaming. Mobile gaming is infected with in-app purchases something fierce.

[Keatah]

That other guy is not a fan of emulation, hardware or software, he says to just go buy a used NES if you want to play Mario. In the same sentence he says we offer a new way to enhance the original hardware by way of FPGA.

 

Now WHAT THE FUCK did I just hear? If you're recreating the hardware in FPGA you are emulating that hardware!

[Andromeda Stardust]

Retrogames should be small, in the range of a few kilobits, Not megabits!

Many NES games are megabit or larger in size. Not retro enough for ya?

 

That other guy is not a fan of emulation, hardware or software, he says to just go buy a used NES if you want to play Mario. In the same sentence he says we offer a new way to enhance the original hardware by way of FPGA.

 

Now WHAT THE FUCK did I just hear? If you're recreating the hardware in FPGA you are emulating that hardware!

Not quite the same thing. FPGA duplicates the hardware. Software emulation only approximates it.

 

 

I also don't think $350 is a lot of money for the console. Consider that most of us are grown up by now and have settled into $40+ hour jobs nowadays. The whole shebang would run us a day or two's work. Some of us have reached independently wealthy status to where the price is not a consideration. Those would be the lurkers. And there's enough of us to make the venture work.

Pretty sure a majority of forum members do not make $40 /hour.

Edited August 31, 2015 by stardust4ever

[Keatah]

Are their cores accurate to gate-by-gate with all the appropriate internal delays?

[+madman]

I hope this can be the savior for us from mobile gaming. Mobile gaming is infected with in-app purchases something fierce.

That's because the games are either free or cost a couple bucks to download.

[+CyranoJ]

 

Not quite the same thing. FPGA duplicates the hardware. Software emulation only approximates it.

 

Err, no. I suggest you read up on this.

 

FPGA cores are written... which makes them software. I think you'll find, for any given platform that has both FPGA and software emulation, that the available software emulation far surpasses FPGA emulation as far as accuracy goes.

 

This post presented in limited edition My Little Pony pink, to go with the rainbow fairy dust promises being sprinkled around.

[phoenixdownita]

Both right and both wrong regarding FPGA.

 

The core are written but in something more akin to the netlist of spice, HDL (=Hardware Description Language), than a programming language even asm.

In reality the program gets converted once and for all in LUT contents (Look up tables) and interconnects routing all the way to the exposed pins.

 

So FPGA is hardware simulation using LE (logical elements) that can be configured to do pretty much anything you want a reasonable hardware block to do. Regarding accuracy I can't speak, for both it's hard as exact specs for the original chips are hard to come by, but there are fairly good cores for tons of CPUs and other components .... making them 100% clock accurate is hard though. Software emulation sometimes can get by with hacks (most emulators are not cycle accurate and yet still OK as they focus on the games they cater to).

 

Anyway enough with the lecture. 350 is not even in the radar.

Edited August 31, 2015 by phoenixdownita

[Keatah]

FPGA does NOT duplicate hardware, not even close. Not unless they do it on a transistor by transistor level.

 

FPGA appears to have an advantage over software emulation because it is not running on a PC processor that is constantly being interrupted by other processes and windows. Eliminate and reduce that stuff and software emulation really shines.

[phoenixdownita]

<TL;DR>

Of course they do but not at the transistor level, which by the way is insignificant, they do it at the level of logical blocks and interconnects.

 

For example registers, adders, multiplexers, comparers etc... and the way the output of one block goes in the input of the next one/few.

 

Once you have the blocks (and you can configure the LEs of the FPGA to be anyone of a very large kind of blocks) and you interconnect them AND you can run at a higher frequency than the original, then you have the luxury to focus on what is visible of the original hardware behavior at the outside level (buses) and inside (instruction visibility of per cycle temporary states).

 

The fact that even to this day we have cores that only simulate 99.7-9% rather than 100% of the original CPU (for example) is due to the fact that most of those CPUs design is still non public and in some cases the effects were not even intended hence there's no real design for them.

In this regard transistor level equivalence is not needed and actually it is not even wanted given that a modern transistor does not resemble that much one of 20Y ago wrt of all the relevant electric characteristic ... but they do act according to largely similar principles.

 

Anyway SW emulation reaches a very high level of accuracy and we seem to understand it way better than FPGA based simulation, alas it requires hardware that is way more powerful as well ... case in point Higan SNES emulator is a marvel but to be accurate it needs a CPU that is 3GHz or better and with a lot of modern optimizations, FPGA are much slower in that regard and have far less resources than a modern CPU of that class can sport, as the prices drop though I'd see the tide rebalancing.

 

The future seems to be a mixed world were SoC host one or more ARM cores to perform glue and easier in SW computations while FPGA (especially enriched with "DSP" blocks) takes on highly specialized tasks that are much faster in HW (or if you prefer they require a much lower HW simulation frequency than an equivalent SW on a general purpose CPU would need).

 

Many years ago the Vax architecture by DEC used a CPU that had "special" re-configurable instructions that could be reprogrammed via microcode to do other custom tasks, the GPU of the N64 also is in the same boat (you can actually reprogram some of its instruction set with alternative microcode implementations). Those were the seeds for extreme reconfigurability that now the FPGA offers.

I know that the FPGA lineage goes thru maskROM (as giant lookup tables), then PLA, PAL, GAL, PLD, CPLD then somewhat FPGA, but the dream to be able to rewire the hardware as needed (a little like neurons in the brain seem to be doing via new synapses) has been a long time coming dream, with FPGA being the closest step on that direction. The analogy with the brain brakes down pretty soon as FPGA have limited amount of interconnects while the brain seems to be able to create them out of nowhere .... still it's a nice step.

 

I really admire how far those devices have come and wait for the day that any CPU has an integrated one (Intel was supposed to buy Altera and start an integration effort, not sure where we are at with that though).

 

So definitely having an FPGA interconnected right with the rest of the components is a very good thing, but that alone is not enough if 100% accuracy of the simulated hardware is required. Many software emulators stop very short of that although as we keep on refining them they get better and better every year. Many SNES emulators cannot play correctly a few games via seemingly minor glitches which in turn instead underlie a completely wrong emulation of the supporting hardware, I'm fine with that, I'll cut the same slack to the FPGA.

 

Needless to say FPGA can be used to create something completely new as well, and in that regard they hold even more power as they can be used to bypass completely layers of software that is usually too slow to accommodate the kind of processing needed (usually because once you start thinking in hardware rather than software, it's all happening in parallel, or at least way more than in the current SW models although they are evolving as well).

</TL;DR>

 

I wouldn't want to use an FPGA to store my favorite initials on an USB, that's for sure, but to add 3D dolby effects to an otherwise flat audio why not? If I can use it to replicate a 68K with the Genny VDP features and a Z80 with the Genny FM+PCM sound capabilities then I wouldn't mind be able to play Genny games on it! Even if not all of them.

Edited August 31, 2015 by phoenixdownita

[Keatah]

 

At 32:20 They talk about DLC. And they describe it accurately. And it's nice they won't be doing DLC, and it's nice there is no operating system. But when the chips are down and sales start slowing, you can bet your bottom dollar that DLC and microtransactions will be implemented to do exactly what they say they dislike doing.

 

[Keatah]

Some things:

 

1- How are they going to update the firmware? It is common knowledge (and to be expected) that programmers today cannot deliver solid & bug-free goods. Every device made and sold today needs and gets updates. Fact.

 

2- Emulation, I believe, has a significant head start regarding development when compared to FPGA. PC emulation of other systems began in ernest in the early 1990's and hasn't stopped since. FPGA is a relative late-comer to the game.

 

3- Emulation can be conducted with what you buy from Wal-Mart. And it can be distributed and given away for free. FPGA has a specialty hardware entrance "fee" in that the developer and his audience must both buy the same hardware.

 

4- Emulation can scale nicely as the industry pumps out faster and faster chips. And not all your hardware need be replaced at one time. FPGA requires a re-purchase of development tools and complete replacement of target hardware platform.

 

5- There is a technical knowledge barrier for the end-user who wants to set up FPGA. Not so with plain jane emulation. Nearly anyone can download the files and get them going on a PC.

[phoenixdownita]

1. no firmware (like the Sega Genesis) would work

 

2. it depends on who does it. There's plenty of soft cores available, maybe it's enough maybe it's not.

 

3. decent emulation requires powerful general purpose CPUs, not sure how those ARM stack up, but these days everything we have seems enough to emulate all the way to 16 bits ... 32 bits is still not entirely there (no fully compatible Saturn emu exists for example but we're getting there)

 

4. been there done that, industry stopped pumping faster and faster CPU for a while, now it's all about core counts. Sure speed has marginally increased but long are the days that literally in 6 months you could buy a CPU twice as fast. Either way this console will have fixed CPUs/media processor and FPGA so there's no such thing as repurchase of anything (unless the tools these days suck so bad that is)

 

5. ? It would be the same, load a file. Look at the Everdrive series of flash cards (example N8) that load different files depending on what mapper to load (same thing for SD2SNES that emulates special SNES chips, CPU and embedded firmware) ... so no barrier for the final customer unless he wants to make his own stuff at which point it's hard no matter what ... very few people can make a solid software emulator same as very few people can make a solid FPGA core.

 

 

In conclusion, if done right an FPGA is a very welcome addition to the system, but it is no guarantee of anything in and on itself obviously, no more than choosing CPU X instead of Y was any good predictor of console power

Edited August 31, 2015 by phoenixdownita

[+rdemming]

Can someone enlighten me to what the 9VDC port is for? It's not an input, apparently.

 

It is to power the (never to be released) prototype of the 3D headset thereby recreating the full Jaguar experience.

[+rdemming]

A list from yesterday's panel. $300+ confirmed for system.

 

In the article mentioned above there is also a list of games that might come to the system.

Two of them caught my interest namely Gun Lord (Turrican clone) and Kraut Buster (Metal Slug clone) both NeoGeo games from NG:Dev.Team. As the NeoGeo versions of these games sold originally for €399 and €549 respectively, the RetroVGS might even be a cost-effective way to play these two games (as cheap flash based RetroVGS carts must be less expensive to produce than Neo-Geo carts).

 

As they are not available for modern systems, these two games could be the RetroVGS system seller. However it seems these games are scheduled for funding by a separate KickStarter at a later date (implying conversion will only be considered if there are enough RetroVGS consoles sold, thus the chicken and the egg situation).

 

 

Robert

 

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9OEt-3CMXI

[PlaysWithWolves]

Some things:

 

1- How are they going to update the firmware? It is common knowledge (and to be expected) that programmers today cannot deliver solid & bug-free goods. Every device made and sold today needs and gets updates. Fact.

 

 

Even my wife's 2014 car's "communications and entertainment system" has had at least two software updates. Her car. It's the most excruciating update I think I've ever done myself (car has to run for about thirty minutes, then takes another ten or fifteen to update). But the latest update added some nice functionality and stability improvements.

 

I still don't think the ability to update is a bad thing, but they haven't asked me.

[Keatah]

Those improvements should have been there from the get go.

[PlaysWithWolves]

Those improvements should have been there from the get go.

Are you suggesting that everything that requires firmware updates should have been taken care of before it was released?

[Keatah]

Yup. Alien concept, isn't it?

[PlaysWithWolves]

Yup. Alien concept, isn't it?

Unrealistic concept, IMHO. I doubt the Crucial M4 SSD 5000 hour bug could have been found, or that LG's bluray team could have foreseen YouTube not supporting older API (man, I really wish they'd update it -- but at least they have the ability).

 

I'm also curious who wrote this ( ) :

 

Some things:

 

1- How are they going to update the firmware? It is common knowledge (and to be expected) that programmers today cannot deliver solid & bug-free goods. Every device made and sold today needs and gets updates. Fact.