FPGA Based Videogame System

[blzmarcel]

47 minutes ago, Gemintronic said:

There are companies that will sue if another company allows ROMs of any sort on their devices.

Agreed that this is counter to logic, as you might as well sue every computer OEM and OS maker for selling something that can run games and software downloaded from the Internet or bought from a shady bazaar.

[roots.genoa]

9 hours ago, blzmarcel said:

Having a collection of ROMs does not equal piracy. For example, there are many straight forward ways to dump your own cartridges available these days.

That's why I said piracy, not ROMs.

[Steven Pendleton]

I use my Steam ROMs whenever I can. Might as well since I have them. Pretty sure I got most of them for free somehow, too, although I don't remember how. Paid the 500 yen for Sonic 3D Blast just a few weeks ago. Interestingly, you can buy the ROMs for Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics in Japan, but you can't buy Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics itself. I hate region locking so much.

[Keatah]

16 hours ago, blzmarcel said:

These days, ROM support should be consider essential. The ability to use carts is nice, indeed, though it also makes sense to preserve original carts which (especially ones from the '70s and '80s) can start having issues due to age and wear.

Yes. And I've been hearing of more and more cart issues over the past 4 or 5 years. While the Masked ROM chip or Fusible/Diode chip types are informally rated for 200+ years. The rest of the cart, housing, contacts, PCB, and other supporting infrastructure is not.

 

16 hours ago, blzmarcel said:

And especially for the Pocket, it makes so much more sense to have a large library on single flash media than to carry around carts and adapters, especially for cores for non-portable systems like the NES that had carts that were quite large, or NeoGeo (toting a few of those around is like carrying a sack of bricks.)

It does. And toting around a pile'o'carts is so yesteryear. But if that's what you want.. Sure.. Go for it. A good way to enjoy carts is get a cut of 70's shag and sit on it while inserting and removing carts. All day long. Should satisfy any pang of nostalgia.

[Atariboy]

I've been playing a lot of SNES games the past few months on my Super Nt and have found my first severe bug, my first since getting this in 2018.

 

This drums in the rec room song for SNES Wing Commander are completely broken on the Super Nt. They're supposed to sound like this, but on the Super Nt it sounds like a very bad emulator from the 1990's with a broken sound channel.

 

I don't have a way to do a quality recording (And there doesn't seem to be any playthroughs of this on YouTube using a Super Nt), but if any Super Nt owners read this and want to hear it, just start the game and then talk to the three crew members in the rec room where you begin. By the time you've read what each has to say, you'll be at that point in the song where this broken sound effect starts to play. 

Edited June 11, 2022 by Atariboy

[Flojomojo]

Analogue OS 1.1b coming on Friday!

 

https://twitter.com/analogue/status/1551583518374989827?s=20

[roots.genoa]

4 hours ago, Flojomojo said:

on Friday

Hmm, I know how Kev will celebrate then. ?

[RobDangerous]

So https://github.com/spiritualized1997/openFPGA-GB-GBC and https://github.com/spiritualized1997/openFPGA-GBA appeared directly after the firmware update was released, from a newly created GitHub-account without any source-code. I woooonder who made that, thank you anonymous author ?

[spoonman]

4 hours ago, RobDangerous said:

So https://github.com/spiritualized1997/openFPGA-GB-GBC and https://github.com/spiritualized1997/openFPGA-GBA appeared directly after the firmware update was released, from a newly created GitHub-account without any source-code. I woooonder who made that, thank you anonymous author ?

Are those based on the same cores included with the Pocket? 

I wish we could get the Lynx, NGPC, and TG16/PCE cores released for it. It seems like it'll be a very long time before we see those cart adapters released. 

Edited July 30, 2022 by spoonman

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, spoonman said:

Are those based on the same cores included with the Pocket? 

I wish we could get the Lynx, NGPC, and TG16/PCE cores released for it. It seems like it'll be a very long time before we see those cart adapters released. 

That's what he implied, yes, since they were instantly available albeit without any source code. However, the cores have some limitations (for instance you can't use alternate display modes) for now.

 

Personally I'm mostly interested in these cores for 1) testing homebrew games 2) playing games that are very difficult to find on carts (original or bootlegs, since most rare GB/GBA games exist as bootlegs) 3) playing games I own for SMS/MD that are too hard for me to play on the Mega Sg without savestates.

[RobDangerous]

Anonymous author also posted on Reddit (he uses the same name on Reddit he uses on GitHub) and said that the alternate display modes are coming once supported via openFPGA (also see "Analogue’s video scaler, which can be customized for best use with each core (upcoming feature)" in the docs) and that the Game Gear core is coming soon.

[spoonman]

I wonder how cut back the OpenFPGA chip is when compared the FPGA chip which  Analogue uses. Could 7 it be possible to port the NeoGeo core, Sega CD core, 32X core?

[roots.genoa]

1 hour ago, spoonman said:

I wonder how cut back the OpenFPGA chip is when compared the FPGA chip which  Analogue uses. Could 7 it be possible to port the NeoGeo core, Sega CD core, 32X core?

According to Kevtris, most current cores could be ported to Pocket except for the PC (486 iirc), and the bigger NeoGeo games might not work. Of course at the time, the PlayStation and Saturn cores were not started yet (or in their infancy), so I guess that would be a stretch too. While on paper the Pocket is less potent than the MISTer, since it has several RAMs like the original systems, it doesn't need to be as "powerful". Pocket cores are usually a lot smaller than MISTer's for instance. Now of course it all depends on third party developers managing to port them right.

[Reaperman]

Well, that sure worked. Shrek's 'all star' intro is choppily playing along from SD on the workbench TV behind me, and I had a couple races of Racing Gears advance before that. Sure enough, drill dozer rumbles. "extensive testing" completed for now 

Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me. I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed

(You can thank me later)

 

 

I sure am glad some mysterious stranger is so good at reverse-engineering all those Analogue firmwares on release day.

Seems like the gba core is a bit quieter than gba via cart--or is that just me? I'm noticing that at least on built-in speakers, haven't compared docked volume yet.

 

But oof, specific 8bitdo controller firmwares for the dock, and 'swap back for other systems'--think I'll just stick with the usb rx on the arcade stick then. I don't think that's officially supported, but it seems to work fine. Anybody noticed if the dock still drops bluetooth every so often? -it's not on the changelog for the firmware, so probably.

 

 

Edited July 30, 2022 by Reaperman

[+adamchevy]

 

 

Piracy-A term for an uncivilized age.

 

 

 

 

 

Preservation- A term for a more civilized age.

 

 

[SegaSnatcher]

14 hours ago, spoonman said:

I wonder how cut back the OpenFPGA chip is when compared the FPGA chip which  Analogue uses. Could 7 it be possible to port the NeoGeo core, Sega CD core, 32X core?

The FPGA is not cut back.  Devs have access to the 49K LE Cyclone V.     Sega CD core and other CD systems relies on the HPS (i.e. Arm Cortex A9) feature on MiSTer which the Pocket doesn't have, but not sure if that means it couldn't be implemented in a different way. 

[spoonman]

4 hours ago, SegaSnatcher said:

The FPGA is not cut back.  Devs have access to the 49K LE Cyclone V.     Sega CD core and other CD systems relies on the HPS (i.e. Arm Cortex A9) feature on MiSTer which the Pocket doesn't have, but not sure if that means it couldn't be implemented in a different way. 

Oh, yeah, that makes a big difference. I guess I wasn't clear on their wording. It sounded as I f they were only allowing OFPGA developers to develop on the 15K LE Cyclone 10...  Analogue:"We added a second dedicated FPGA just for developers to develop & port their own cores.". 

 

It would be neat to see perfect Neo•Geo AES games running on a portable. The RAM might be tight for larger Neo roms, but if Kawaks could pull it off on an original Xbox with 64MB of SDRAM @200MHz, or NJ's Neo•Geo emulator, running on a PSP, with 32MB of RAM, there's hope for larger roms. 

[roots.genoa]

By the way, @Albert, I think it would be time for an Analogue subforum or at least an FPGA subforum (since there's also a MISTer topic). Right now there may not be a lot of dedicated threads, but precisely because of the lack of subforum. For instance, most Mega Sg discussion happens in the Mega Drive/Genesis thread. The logical thing would be to create new topics in the Emulation subforum since FPGA is hardware emulation, but evidently nobody seems to do that. So maybe a "Hardware Emulation" subforum next to the "Emulation" one (that could be renamed "Software Emulation") would be the solution.

[SegaSnatcher]

1 hour ago, spoonman said:

Oh, yeah, that makes a big difference. I guess I wasn't clear on their wording. It sounded as I f they were only allowing OFPGA developers to develop on the 15K LE Cyclone 10...  Analogue:"We added a second dedicated FPGA just for developers to develop & port their own cores.". 

 

It would be neat to see perfect Neo•Geo AES games running on a portable. The RAM might be tight for larger Neo roms, but if Kawaks could pull it off on an original Xbox with 64MB of SDRAM @200MHz, or NJ's Neo•Geo emulator, running on a PSP, with 32MB of RAM, there's hope for larger roms. 

I mean the Pocket has 96MBs of ram available, so that is definitely not much of a limitation. 

[+Razzie.P]

Running the roms off the SD card, using GBC_Bios as instructed -- there doesn't seem to be a way to play GB games non-colorized, that I can see.  Anyone else having this issue and/or perhaps found a fix?

 

[cacophony]

3 hours ago, Razzie.P said:

Running the roms off the SD card, using GBC_Bios as instructed -- there doesn't seem to be a way to play GB games non-colorized, that I can see.  Anyone else having this issue and/or perhaps found a fix?

 

While GBC bios screen is displayed press LEFT and B simultaneously

[Reaperman]

Well that didn't take long.

Alpha neo geo core with compatibility with some games (Analogue Pocket NeoGeo Github)

 

Keeping all these different cores up to date is going to become a real PITA if/when this takes off.

I'm half expecting an updated collection of them to pop up at archive.org, or maybe some piece of pc software shows up that keeps our SDs updated.  Those MiSTer update scripts have spoiled me.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Reaperman

[Punisher5.0]

Already got AES going......very nice. It'll be interesting to see what the Pocket can handle.

[+Razzie.P]

https://www.androidpolice.com/waterfield-analogue-pocket-cases-game-boy/

 

 

Those seem pretty cool!

[Kaide]

I have a couple Waterfield bags that I've been using for many years, with the oldest getting close to 10 years, and the newest is about 3 (needed a bigger laptop bag). In terms of quality, no complaints at all.

 

Price is another thing though. I would lean towards the sleeves for gear specific cases.