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FPGA Based Videogame System


kevtris

Interest in an FPGA Videogame System  

682 members have voted

  1. 1. I would pay....

  2. 2. I Would Like Support for...

  3. 3. Games Should Run From...

    • SD Card / USB Memory Sticks
    • Original Cartridges
    • Hopes and Dreams
  4. 4. The Video Inteface Should be...


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In B4 everyone selling their NT Minis when the Z3K is out :D

I know 100% I am gonna buy the Z3K , and it will likely cost, AT MOST, the same as an NT Mini anyway so I can wait patiently.

I already have an RGB NES toploader, so that plus knowing the Z3K is coming at some point is what's keeping me from pulling the trigger on the NT Mini.

To be honest, I'll just wait for the Zimba 3000 since I've already got an AVS, which is 40% as expensive compared to the NT Mini, and played nearly everything NT Mini did, well it used to before Kevtris hacked it! :grin:

 

Seriously Kevtris, you worked hard and teamed up with some guys on designing a great piece of kit, then a week after it's released, you hack it to bits behind their back. That takes guts, man! :evil:

 

The other reason why I didn't bother with the NT Mini was the added cost due to the milled aluminum case. I honestly curious what the actual BOM (Bill of Materials) is on the NT Mini, and how much the case adds to it. If you're not at liberty to answer that question, I totally understand.

 

The other thing, did you discuss the jail-brake with Analogue before you released it, or did you just release it out of the blue? What were their reaction? It seems they've accepted your "unofficial" upgrades since they updated the warranty to include it. ;-)

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...

 

The other thing, did you discuss the jail-brake with Analogue before you released it, or did you just release it out of the blue? What were their reaction? It seems they've accepted your "unofficial" upgrades since they updated the warranty to include it. ;-)

 

I read Analogue was telling certain reviewers to hold off on reviews until the unspecified announcement, so I'm guessing they were pretty enthusiastic about it. Also, they were re-tweeting the news on the official company twitter.

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Darn-it - almost crumbled and ordered it. :) If another popular console had been added before they had sold out, say the VCS , I wouldn't have known what to do with myself. ;)

 

Though, any of the funky, slightly-lesser-known systems, like the Channel F or any of the odd variants, would be sweet, too. :D

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Straight from the first post it seems this would be the candidate list of supported cores:

 

* Sega Master System

* Game Gear

* Colecovision

* NES/Famicom

* Atari 2600

* Atari 7800

* Intellivision

* Odyssey^2

* Adventure Vision

* Supervision

* RCA Studio 2

* Fairchild Channel F

* Videobrain

* Arcadia 2001

* Creativision

* Gameboy

* Gameboy Color (not 100% yet, still debugging. runs 99% of games so far)

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I preordered the NT Mini on the same day it was announced only because I knew that Kevtris was involved with the product.

I already have Kevtris's Hi-Def NES HDMI kit from Game-Tech.us and know what to expect from his work. I've just played with the NT mini for a few days, and so far

it's the best thing since sliced bread! I'm professional developer myself however I'm more on the asm, c, c++, python, x86/x86, microcontrollers side of things. My knowledge of verilog and FPGAs are quite limited.

However, I know a lot about what kind of work that goes into this. I did write my own simple NES emulator in early 2000... and it was mainly all the different mappers that

stopped me from getting to a usable state. It was only able to run a few games partially with glitches... I never released it.

 

Thank you Kevtris for all your fantastic work! I will continue to follow everything you do!

And as someone else said, you need to setup some kind of channel so we can give you all our money :)

 

-Eicar

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Straight from the first post it seems this would be the candidate list of supported cores:

 

* Sega Master System

* Game Gear

* Colecovision

* NES/Famicom

* Atari 2600

* Atari 7800

* Intellivision

* Odyssey^2

* Adventure Vision

* Supervision

* RCA Studio 2

* Fairchild Channel F

* Videobrain

* Arcadia 2001

* Creativision

* Gameboy

* Gameboy Color (not 100% yet, still debugging. runs 99% of games so far)

 

There are a bunch more he's worked on like the Gamate, but they're probably so obscure/terrible that they're little more than a novelty.

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Kevtris - wanted to join the bandwagon to express appreciation for the terrific work on the Nt mini.

 

One suggestion for the instructions regarding the SMS core. Your instructions indicate a location for the SMS bios to be saved as a .bin file. All the bios versions I've come across are available in .sms format. Simply renaming the file as smsbios.bin seemed to work in terms of getting the os to recognize the bios. But I wanted to point this out since some users may be confused about the file extension mismatch. Not sure if this is an obvious point or not. Thanks again and keep up the great work. Looking forward to upcoming versions (and obviously the Z3K).

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Two questions for you, Kevtris:

1) The simulated FDS audio is quite different (less warm) than the real thing, and I seem to recall you mentioning something about difficulty implementing a low-pass filter for it. Am I remembering correctly, and could you elaborate?

2) The Nt Mini does not appear to support expansion audio directly from the cartridge, since it requires the user to select the appropriate audio chip in the menu. Could you talk about the reasoning behind this? Is there an ADC in the console that could enable real expansion audio in a future firmware update?

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There are a bunch more he's worked on like the Gamate, but they're probably so obscure/terrible that they're little more than a novelty.

Well, some people really enjoy this obscure stuff (especially here), and the Nt mini/Z3K might actually be the only affordable way to test such hardware/games. There is also a matter of preservation, and besides it seems that kevtris simply loves reverse engineering various exotic systems (just check his video channel, everybody).

Edited by retro_fan
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[...]

 

Thank you Kevtris for all your fantastic work! I will continue to follow everything you do!

And as someone else said, you need to setup some kind of channel so we can give you all our money :)

 

-Eicar

I have mentioned Patreon, but maybe there is a better platform? It seems that kevtris also accepts hardware donations, he could make a list what he wants the most. For instance, kevtris created a Gamate Core because someone was nice enough to send him the console. I wonder when kevtris will start accepting arcade boards... :)

 

BTW, Eicar, as a professional programmer, you might be interested in the earlier discussion in this thread regarding a bug-tracker choice for the Nt mini/Z3K and other projects. I have also proposed an idea to create a guideline for effective bug reporting.

Edited by retro_fan
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Well, there's many different systems to choose from. My expreience is primarly with GitHub and Jira (part of the Atlassian stack). However, Jira is an overkill commercial solution that I don't think will fit here. (Trust me, I use it daily.....)

There's also Trac and Bugzilla... The nice thing about GitHub is that it's quite easy to use, and it's a system that alot of people already know. The actual issue/bug-tracking part of GitHub might not be

the most advanced, but it's quite easy to use. Kevtris could also put his binaries here for his releases and we could create issues tied to specific release versions of his firmware and cores.

 

Maybe, sometime in the future we could also get some sourcecode in there as well :)

Then more people could contribute to the project, and Kevtris could shred our noob-FPGA pull requests into pieces :)

 

As far as I can see, "kevtris" is not a registered GitHub user so the username is still available. (Hint... hint... Kevtris, go and register, it's free!)

 

-Eicar

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Two questions for you, Kevtris:

 

1) The simulated FDS audio is quite different (less warm) than the real thing, and I seem to recall you mentioning something about difficulty implementing a low-pass filter for it. Am I remembering correctly, and could you elaborate?

 

2) The Nt Mini does not appear to support expansion audio directly from the cartridge, since it requires the user to select the appropriate audio chip in the menu. Could you talk about the reasoning behind this? Is there an ADC in the console that could enable real expansion audio in a future firmware update?

You can actually pass audio through from the cartridge via an ADC and adjust the volume for it. The option is right above the menu for the digital audio chips :) Works great on my end

Edited by rezb1t
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Just fixed the link for you! ;)

 

FYI - My system is also on order and I now need to get caught up on everything! Lots of reading to do tonight! :)

thanks for the fix :-)

 

Signed up to the forum just to say thanks Kevtris

 

Picked up the NT Mini after reading what it had the potential to do, and have no regrets at all.

 

Have been playing Bionic Commando and Zelda this weekend, and even dumped my first ROM :)

 

 

UPS is delivering my NT mini tomorrow! I've already starting prepping the SD card... ;)

 

Thanks a million, Kevtris. Amazing work, man!

 

-R

thanks for the kind words all!

 

Kevtris - wanted to join the bandwagon to express appreciation for the terrific work on the Nt mini.

 

One suggestion for the instructions regarding the SMS core. Your instructions indicate a location for the SMS bios to be saved as a .bin file. All the bios versions I've come across are available in .sms format. Simply renaming the file as smsbios.bin seemed to work in terms of getting the os to recognize the bios. But I wanted to point this out since some users may be confused about the file extension mismatch. Not sure if this is an obvious point or not. Thanks again and keep up the great work. Looking forward to upcoming versions (and obviously the Z3K).

 

yeah I could put something in there about that. I just standardized on .bin because the ones I downloaded a long time ago were .bin Changing the extension doesn't change the file in any way (regardless of what windows warns).

 

Two questions for you, Kevtris:

 

1) The simulated FDS audio is quite different (less warm) than the real thing, and I seem to recall you mentioning something about difficulty implementing a low-pass filter for it. Am I remembering correctly, and could you elaborate?

 

2) The Nt Mini does not appear to support expansion audio directly from the cartridge, since it requires the user to select the appropriate audio chip in the menu. Could you talk about the reasoning behind this? Is there an ADC in the console that could enable real expansion audio in a future firmware update?

Yes, I don't have enough resources in the FPGA to add a lowpass filter. I did fix all the bugs in the FDS channel, though (that I know of). The lowpass requires too many logic elements though, unfortunately. If you want real expansion audio, it is already in there. It's under the audio menu. "Cartridge audio & microphone" lets you turn it on and change the volume.

 

 

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Awful lotta single post members signed up just 2 congratulate you Kevtris... Kudos, u earned it!!!

That is quite something! I'm glad this is happening too. Like I said, Kevtris' work is gonna become the world's favorite way of classic gaming.

I am a member of this forum just because of the Z3K :D

I remember when someone talked about the AVS NES on another forum, and then there was talk about FPGA, and its advantages over PC emulation.

I think in my research to see what FPGA was, I searched "fpga videogame console" and it led me to this forum. I was too excited and registered just to post here :D

Then I preordered the AVS NES solely and explicitly to test its input lag against Mike Tyson in Punch Out and decide that the Z3K is the definite gaming project of the future.

 

 

Thank you Kevtris for all your fantastic work! I will continue to follow everything you do!

And as someone else said, you need to setup some kind of channel so we can give you all our money :)

 

-Eicar

 

He actually said (I think) that he wouldn't want money until the product is fully funcional and it exists physically / etc.

Unlike kickstarters for example. Really a noble thing to do, even if I would pay for the Z3K today if it was kickstarted.

Edited by veelk55
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He actually said (I think) that he wouldn't want money until the product is fully funcional and it exists physically / etc.

Unlike kickstarters for example. Really a noble thing to do, even if I would pay for the Z3K today if it was kickstarted.

It's the proper oldskool way of doing things. Kinda like getting a classic console from TurnStyle or Venture back in the day!

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Bob from RetroRGB just put up his NT mini review and there is an interview with Kevtris at the end and they discuss some pretty exciting stuff. Here's a link.

 

damn, I didn't think that stupid yellow box would be on my head the whole time. I'm a noob. lol

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