Coleco Chameleon .... hardware speculations?

[cybercylon]

 

"Cornering the Market on RETRO Gaming"

 

cornerthemarket.PNG

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-kennedy-75933212?

 

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/corner+the+market

 

 

Once again, way behind on posts, but is that a recent addition to his LinkedIn profile. I don't remember seeing that the last time I looked (don't depend on my memory though).

 

If it is new, really? Cornering what exactly?

[+thanatos]

 

I know I am a bit old, but some of these acronyms that are thrown out - color me confused? POE? Piece of excellence?

My first thought was 'Power over Ethernet', which made even less sense.

[PlaysWithWolves]

 

 

Once again, way behind on posts, but is that a recent addition to his LinkedIn profile. I don't remember seeing that the last time I looked (don't depend on my memory though).

 

If it is new, really? Cornering what exactly?

 

I'd seen it there before, but I couldn't tell you if it was last week or last month. Anything beyond that I've killed with whiskey.

One could argue he wants to be a RETRO Kingpin, I guess. Or, it could just be salesman-speak?

[Carbon Tiger]

This whole thing is such a fascinating car wreck. MK is no engineer that much is true but as it relates to his exact talent sales/marketing he seems to be bad at that too. Any good marketer knows how niche markets function and he seems to be totally clueless. Unless he really thinks there's this untapped wider casual market screaming for the return of games and related tech from the early to mid 1990s.

 

I think he greatly confused the concept of a collector's market with an active market then there's all the scamming...

[triverse]

 

I never really understood just what the big deal was about the console and cartridges still working in 50 years. Do people really expect display technology to be compatible? Do you expect the same kinds of financial value placed on old consoles that we do now? Would your grand- or greatgrandkids even care about this stuff?

 

A lot can change in 50 years. You can fit the entire history of the console market in that.

 

Ikea used to make a computer desk called the 'Jerker' (and I'm sure the designer was having a bit of a larf when he named it). The second version of the desk is the Best Damn Desk Ever. Solid, useful, can be configured multiple ways for a multitude of uses unrelated to computers. Practically indestructible too. People into making music still rave about the desk to this day becuase it could easily bear the weight of heavy keyboards and mixing consles. There was a shrine website to this desk at one point.

 

And then Ikea discontinued it.

 

Why? Because it was too good. People only had to buy it once and they never returned to buy another one. Sure, add on accessories sold but the markup was just not the same as the desk. Ikea replaced the desk with a similar looking but nowhere near as sturdy desk. In fact, the replacement (Gallant, ISTR the name was) would fall apart within a year or two -- and that's exactly what Ikea was hoping... there was a 50% chance you might come back in and buy a replacement versus a 5% chance you might come back if your Jerker broke.

 

The problem for the Chameleon (or any new retro console) is market saturation. Once the OCD completists, cartridge hoarders and speculators buy your system where do you go from there?

 

Maybe Piko or Collectorvision can give us a rough idea how much of a market there is for retro catridges. If someone is making a full time living by producing retro catridges I have yet to hear it -- almost without exception these people have day jobs in addition to their side business. I haven't even mentioned things like the Flashbacks eating into your pie. If these things (and all things retro) are selling like gangbusters you'd think you'd see more big fish in the industry throwing their hats into the ring in a big way.

 

Pixelated 2D graphics are not a trend. They are a fad. Fads come and go and get revived approximately once per generation, give or take. Flared jeans, high-top sneakers, capri pants, clogs. These things keep coming and going like clockwork. The fashion world (at least the marketing end of it) will keep shoving these down our throats till the end of time.

 

Mike made the #1 classic marketing mistake: He assumed his needs were universal. "I want a new retro system with cartridges" became "Everyone's going to want this" quite quickly.

This is what I have said for years. If the "retrogaming" scene was as big as we are lead to believe it is, then why are we not seeing Capcom and Konami (when they did release console games) continuing to support the SNES and Genesis? Even if it was a pre-order only, and only if we get this many, type of thing (such as using Kickstarter). We haven't. They won't. There is not enough money in the scene for them to do it.

 

Let's fast forward a bit, at least on the hardware side of things. Since cost per game is probably a huge factor for many game companies not supporting classic hardware, let's ask why- if the scene really is HUGE, then why aren't these companies continuing to program NEW games for the Virtual Console or for release on other modern platforms but using the devkits from the old consoles? Surely, removing the cost of the cartridges would be a major push for companies to support classic consoles through emulation. Again, nope. Because there are not enough people buying the games there either.

 

The only place we see major retro game sales, from my experience, is in the "gifting" price range and all inclusive. Things like the Flashbacks, the handhelds the plug and plays. Those things sell because they are cheap, everything needed is in the box, they have familiar designs and they are easy to understand for most people.

 

Let's address those qualities:

 

Price. Flashbacks and the like are usually no more than $50 brand new. They quickly drop in price, especially around Black Friday. They also include more than one game and are not readily able to accept more games.

 

Convenience. It is all in one box. Odds are someone looking at the back of the box and seeing 20+ games they are going to think that whomever they are buying this for is going to find at least one game they like. They also know the person they are buying this for is not going to get stuck with "present shock" of having to buy something else to make this work (batteries, more games, extra controllers, adapters for the TV, etc).

 

Familiarity. Why do you think the Atari Flashback is shaped quite a bit like the 2600 instead of the 5200 or the 7800? Sure, it contains games for the 2600 but "Atari" is most iconic with that design. Same for the ColecoVision Flashback. This could simply be the licensing company and the hardware partner understanding their audience far better than Mike understood his (8, 16 and 32-Bit? Pick one Mike and focus on that first, the others later).

 

Understanding. See convenience above. Basically the Flashbacks are made simple on purpose. They removed the carts and have everything in one box for a reason (I am sure cost savings came into play at some point too).

 

These are all things that Mike is missing the point on with the Chameleon. Outside of gamers the only recognizable thing about the Chameleon is the Coleco name (which could be due to past toys, past license, current licenses, etc). This console was designed backwards from the start and it resulted in what was expected by most in the end- nothing.

 

Also, on Mike's LinkedIn profile, has anyone noticed that he lists RETRO Media Network as 8 years old (he is listed as the "Founder, president and publisher". I remember when that was "Game Gavel Network" and surely something else in between. I wonder what the new name will be? Intellivision Media Network listed at 8 years old? Or will it be "Ocean Front Property Enterprises"?

[Andromeda Stardust]

Well they did, ahem, manage to show the "actual output of our printed circuit board design" as part of the Indiegogo campaign:

 

RVGS_indiegogo_pcb.png

 

I'm not sure about the exact timing of when you were talking to John, but you (and perhaps future RVGS/CC archaeologists) may be interested by this short talk he gave about the RVGS at Commodore Vegas Expo v11 2015 - July 18-19 (RVGS info starts at 5:50) :

Some key points:

5:53 "I feel like I've really lucked out on this one earlier this year"

6:30 "[Mike] managed to buy the tooling and mechanical design for this old system"

7:50 "Kickstarter within the next few weeks"

8:15 Acts confused and flustered: "[how much RAM] on the FPGA? Goodness, let me try and remember that, it's about 3/4 of a GB attached to the FPGA. I say about, it's actually a little bit more, because there are actually 3 banks of RAM attached to the FPGA allowing us to do various different functions, there's 1MB of SRAM that we use, mostly it's just a DMA buffer, so we can use the FPGA to automatically get a lot of the information off the cartridge, and we're looking at some fairly substantial cartridge sizes on there as well"

9:00 "One of the mandates on our design is that we have to make this for this really hard use case where we basically play with the system and shove it in a closet for 50 years and it still has to work when you pull it out of the closet. And so we can't use a lot of the cheap commodity flash memories because those are good for maybe 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. We're using premium flash memory that's got a thick oxide tunnel window and that's rated for 100 year data retention."

9:40 [question: internal expansion bus?] "Yes and no, there's of course the exposed cartridge bus, I'm trying to make that as open and freely accessible as possible. Right now I'm pushing to have the FPGA on a separate board that will attach with a couple of connectors so if you wanted to stick something on the bus you just pop it between the FPGA and the main board"

 

 

 

As Mike said before about the decision to use the Cyclone V (5 minutes into the SegaNerds Toy Fair interview), they probably decided on a 6-layer board because Kevtris had mentioned it.

Sorry but I personally feel this render was all smoke and mirrors. Look at the placement of all those tiny chips on the PCB.

You've got the two square FPGA packages, or what could be an ARM SOAC and an FPGA. Then you've got four rectangular memory chips below it (to the left in the image). Further on to the left, you've got a metric ton of what looks like discrete logic chips. They are too big to be surface mount resistors or caps, but could possibly be 74xx logic or what have you. IMO, those huge glut of logic chips on the bottom end of the board near the controller ports could be easily eliminated and incorporated into the FPGA logic if your team is in fact going that route. I almost had a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology, but I have little experience designing PCBs beyond a few simple through hole circuits on a milling machine.

 

That board is entirely too complex to be a SOAC + FPGA based system with a cartridge port and a few other digital I/Os. The purpose of the FPGA, besides being infinitely re-configurable, is to eliminate that tiny logic crap. They aren't designing a PC motherboard with tons of slots for all sorts of peripherals operating at different speeds and voltages, so the sea of chips isn't necessary. Methinks somebody just drew a bunch of rectangles of common SMT form factors, and arranged them on a trapezoid shaped PCB from largest to smallest, to look like an technically impressive layout, and far too symmetrical looking if you ask me. I'd bet they didn't lay out a single trace in the Gerber files or whatever the hell software they used. And if in fact the design was in fact real, no wonder it cost $350+.

 

My two cents. I'm sure Kevtris could back me up but he's a helluva lot more knowledgeable of circuit design than I am. I've never touched an FPGA dev board (although one of my professors did have one collecting dust in his office) but it seems like a great "core" concept, if only someone with the right aptitude and passion were behind the design.

[Zyppy]

I'm sure someone else will have noticed this but just in case not... I was reading the SegaNerds article from late December on Dreamcast 2 and this made me smile;

 

"The likelihood of them ever doing is so unfathomably low that there'd probably be a new Coleco system being released before the Dreamcast 2"

[InnovaX5]

Sorry but I personally feel this render was all smoke and mirrors. Look at the placement of all those tiny chips on the PCB.

also, the distinct lack of super nintendo video out ~

[galax]

Well they did, ahem, manage to show the "actual output of our printed circuit board design" as part of the Indiegogo campaign:

On inspection of that PCB, I am not sure how good/complete that board is.

Sorry but I personally feel this render was all smoke and mirrors. Look at the placement of all those tiny chips on the PCB.

 

I agree completely- that's what I meant by the little cough 'ahem', sorry I should have indicated that more clearly.

[kevtris]

Sorry but I personally feel this render was all smoke and mirrors. Look at the placement of all those tiny chips on the PCB.

You've got the two square FPGA packages, or what could be an ARM SOAC and an FPGA. Then you've got four rectangular memory chips below it (to the left in the image). Further on to the left, you've got a metric ton of what looks like discrete logic chips. They are too big to be surface mount resistors or caps, but could possibly be 74xx logic or what have you. IMO, those huge glut of logic chips on the bottom end of the board near the controller ports could be easily eliminated and incorporated into the FPGA logic if your team is in fact going that route. I almost had a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology, but I have little experience designing PCBs beyond a few simple through hole circuits on a milling machine.

 

That board is entirely too complex to be a SOAC + FPGA based system with a cartridge port and a few other digital I/Os. The purpose of the FPGA, besides being infinitely re-configurable, is to eliminate that tiny logic crap. They aren't designing a PC motherboard with tons of slots for all sorts of peripherals operating at different speeds and voltages, so the sea of chips isn't necessary. Methinks somebody just drew a bunch of rectangles of common SMT form factors, and arranged them on a trapezoid shaped PCB from largest to smallest, to look like an technically impressive layout, and far too symmetrical looking if you ask me. I'd bet they didn't lay out a single trace in the Gerber files or whatever the hell software they used. And if in fact the design was in fact real, no wonder it cost $350+.

 

My two cents. I'm sure Kevtris could back me up but he's a helluva lot more knowledgeable of circuit design than I am. I've never touched an FPGA dev board (although one of my professors did have one collecting dust in his office) but it seems like a great "core" concept, if only someone with the right aptitude and passion were behind the design.

 

The lol is they basically reproduced my Zimba 3000 design based on the discussions I had with them, and added the SoC later on to it. I think all those little parts were to handle all the crap the DB9 controller ports were going to add; like reading the pots for paddles and stuff. IMO all that crap should've been done using some kind of microcontroller vs. the huge fleet of chips they chose. During discussions, I told them to drop DB9 support since it was going to add a lot to the cost and just make them optional USB plug in devices and mike poopooed the idea. Citing that he didn't want people to have to "pay extra" for that feature, and I told him that you're just going to subsidize the 1 person that will use it for the other 20 that won't. Still it didn't sway him.

 

As for the trapezoid shape, it's a stupid shape for routing a PCB. PCBs generally use traces at 45 degree angles, so if you're going to make it that shape it has to be 45 degree angles on the sides of the trapezoid. Otherwise, routing near the edges will be a HUGE pain in the ass. Routing round PCBs is a similar pain in the ass too because the routes won't neatly pack near the edges without a lot of work. I am guessing he never routed anything because I suspect he would've dumped that board shape ASAP and made it rectangular. There certainly was room in the case for it.

 

They used altium by the looks of it btw. (same software I use)

[enoofu]

 

Apparently Altium Designer is free for 15 days so I'm guessing they randomly picked stuff after they did the i/o ports and called it aday

[Great Hierophant]

 

Steve Woita was involved in making NES and Genesis games as well as Atari VCS, PS1 and PS2 games, so you really can't nail down his "retro era" to any one console life-cycle.

Here is his bio. https://stevewoita.wordpress.com/games/

 

That game list is a bit padded. Asterix and Quadrun are essentially the same game for different markets. Garfield was never released and Quadrun is extremely rare (because it was only available through the Atari Club.) I do not even believe there is a prototype available for Police Academy. Woita is more of a programmer than a game designer, and most of the post-Genesis games he worked on are either obscure or undistinguished at best.

[CPUWIZ]

 

That game list is a bit padded. Asterix and Quadrun are essentially the same game for different markets. Garfield was never released and Quadrun is extremely rare (because it was only available through the Atari Club.) I do not even believe there is a prototype available for Police Academy. Woita is more of a programmer than a game designer, and most of the post-Genesis games he worked on are either obscure or undistinguished at best.

 

Just to be accurate, Taz and Asterix are essentially the same game, with different graphics. Quadrun is totally different.

[phoenixdownita]

Are we calling BS on the whole Carlsen interview tech content?

And I mean we believe little to nothing of what he said he had produced for the Retro VGS by the time he got a bus ticket.

 

Wait .... he wants to make sure we understand he left of his own volition ... so ....

 

Are we calling BS on the whole Carlsen interview tech content?

And I mean we believe little to nothing of what he said he had produced for the Retro VGS by the time he got earned a bus ticket.

[Great Hierophant]

Sorry, typographical error there.

 

I'd like to try the Garfield game sometime. I like Krazy Kreatures and Sonic Spinball, two of the games in which he had substantial input. (I'm not counting Sonic 2 in that category.)

[Osgeld]

 

PCBs generally use traces at 45 degree angles, so if you're going to make it that shape it has to be 45 degree angles on the sides of the trapezoid.

 

nah you can make them any way you want in altium, I did a flex board at work that required a S bend maybe just a cm wide with 4 traces and 2 power planes, for the traces I just copy pasted the edge of the board (from solidworks) and assigned nets, the planes auto filled using polygon manager, the whole exercise took 10 seconds

 

not saying that's what they did, but odd shapes is no issue at all, fact I dont ever recall making a rectangular board for work (cause everything we do is nested in predefined plastics and its gotta look stylish and kewl on the ass end of your shiny new car)

 

circuit paths can be any shape you wish, remember the old school hand taped boards, they look like someone photo copied their 1960's paisley shirt, you dont want 90 degree turns due to eddy currents and you do have to watch what your doing in high speed applications (talking gigahertz type stuff)

Edited March 7, 2016 by Osgeld

[enoofu]

Steve Woita is a electrical engineer that know programming, a lot of the work he did wasn't programming or design but on the hardware side, such as joysticks and motherboards.

 

Believe it was his father in/law that hired him into Sega also a lot of the projects didn't happen until the end (Sonic 2 he was put on the team 1-2 weeks before they shipped)

 

From his skillset he would of knew that the PCI Capture card wasn't a console right away, that John's renders was BS, so something very amiss with him in this project.

Edited March 7, 2016 by enoofu

[InnovaX5]

Steve Woita is a electrical engineer that know programming, a lot of the work he did wasn't programming or design but on the hardware side, such as joysticks and motherboards.

 

Believe it was his father in/law that hired him into Sega also a lot of the projects didn't happen until the end (Sonic 2 he was put on the team 1-2 weeks before they shipped)

 

From his skillset he would of knew that the PCI Capture card wasn't a console right away, that John's renders was BS, so something very amiss with him in this project.

 

Steve is one of the few who hasn't been ejected or replaced from this project. Piperclub and UKMike would have to elaborate on exactly how long Steve has been part of it. Maybe they have and I just don't recall it. I strongly feel that there is a reason for this. If Carlsen is truth telling, it was Steve and Mike who gave him orders. Steve being an electrical engineer and this being his baby would make sense. No one has really heard from him during this entire saga aside from the Triverse interview with Mike and John. Mike Kennedy is a parrot. He loves to repeat tech stuff that he's told. I feel that Steve is feeding him a lot of this. My theory is that Steve is the mastermind to all of this.

 

Are we calling BS on the whole Carlsen interview tech content?

And I mean we believe little to nothing of what he said he had produced for the Retro VGS by the time he got a bus ticket.

 

Wait .... he wants to make sure we understand he left of his own volition ... so ....

 

Are we calling BS on the whole Carlsen interview tech content?

And I mean we believe little to nothing of what he said he had produced for the Retro VGS by the time he got earned a bus ticket.

 

No, I think he truly reverse engineered or helped to reverse engineer a playstation and made a small playstation. Maybe his time lines are a bit off. Why would anyone make up something like that? He doesn't really have any gain from saying he made a playstation clone in 2010. It isn't like he's telling us he designed the playstation 3. He says crazy stuff, like his odd obsession with lawyers and patents. I feel like he would fit right into Lee's Google-like company campus complete with showers and Goldeneye Room. Hell, maybe he *IS* Lee / Li. Right now, Carlsen is the only one speaking about anything. As we all know, DC power goes in and high quality digital and analogue video comes out. Also, the processor runs nice and cool without a fan.

[phoenixdownita]

 

Steve is one of the few who hasn't been ejected or replaced from this project. Piperclub and UKMike would have to elaborate on exactly how long Steve has been part of it. Maybe they have and I just don't recall it. I strongly feel that there is a reason for this. If Carlsen is truth telling, it was Steve and Mike who gave him orders. Steve being an electrical engineer and this being his baby would make sense. No one has really heard from during this entire saga aside from the Triverse interview with Mike and John.

 

 

No, I think he truly reverse engineered or helped to reverse engineer a playstation and made a small playstation. Maybe his time lines are a bit off. He says crazy stuff, like his odd obsession with lawyers and patents. I feel like he would fit right into Lee's Google-like company campus complete with showers and Goldeneye Room. Hell, maybe he *IS* Lee / Li. Right now, Carlsen is the only one speaking about anything. As we all know, DC power goes in and high quality digital and analogue video comes out. Also, the processor runs nice and cool without a fan.

I only referred as BS what he said he did produce for the RetroVGS, as kevtris mentioned he never saw one piece of anything (specs or boards) aside the paper PCB and the Altium render.

[InnovaX5]

I only referred as BS what he said he did produce for the RetroVGS, as kevtris mentioned he never saw one piece of anything (specs or boards) aside the paper PCB and the Altium render.

Ahh, my bad. Yeah, I don't think he had much of anything ready. Maybe he had a lot going on about it in his head. I doubt he had anything really tangible and that's how I took the recent Triverse interview. I took it as he didn't have a lot worked out but he had off the shelf stuff powering his idea which was super solid in his mind?

[enoofu]

Also apparently Steve Woita and John worked together for a few years in the 90's

Edited March 7, 2016 by enoofu

[Newsdee]

In that way, it'd be kind of like a supergun for plug-and-play tv games. Naturally a cart adapter wouldn't be the hardest thing to add later, if they must.

 

I proposed this idea in the other thread as the only way that I see for carts having a comeback. with the RPi Zero at $5 it seems viable to have these somewhere between $30 or $50, but a decent FPGA / ASIC would probably be cheaper.

 

Of course the downside is that anybody would end up able to manufacture carts, which could flood the market with shovelware (blamed for the crash but also common in the PC shareware market of the 90s for instance).

 

So for this to work you'd have to make good money on the base unit. I'd pay ~$150 for an open, well documented platform if it comes with some carts (or can run them from SD card), but without games out of the box it's a bit pricey considering you could put that money towards a decent upscaler or an HDMI emulation box.

Edited March 7, 2016 by Newsdee

[Pipercub]

 

Steve is one of the few who hasn't been ejected or replaced from this project. Piperclub and UKMike would have to elaborate on exactly how long Steve has been part of it. Maybe they have and I just don't recall it. I strongly feel that there is a reason for this. If Carlsen is truth telling, it was Steve and Mike who gave him orders. Steve being an electrical engineer and this being his baby would make sense. No one has really heard from him during this entire saga aside from the Triverse interview with Mike and John. Mike Kennedy is a parrot. He loves to repeat tech stuff that he's told. I feel that Steve is feeding him a lot of this. My theory is that Steve is the mastermind to all of this.

 

Well you won't hear an unkind word about Steve from us, we know and like him thus far he has not been involved with any shennnanigans that we know of. If you listen to the indigogo era episode of RetroGaming Roundup you will hear Steve discussing some of how he came to be involved with the project; http://www.retrogamingroundup.com/shownotes/2015/roundup091_2015.09.php

 

In short Socal Mike and I had been talking about this console idea, the very early days of fleshing out how to turn the idea into a product, and Steve and I had also been discussing his interest in getting back into the type of game development that he treasured and doing things the way they were done when it was in his view, better. And I can't say I disagree. As I have said here several times when Socal Mike asked me if I thought it was a viable product, and how such a thing could or would be made I told him I would buy one but that I was not convinced the mass market was there. I mean if I could buy a new console that just played games, wasn't infested with Call of Duty kids, and pick from new games on carts designed by the guys from the golden era of gaming you bet I would. And yes I do like carts, they are durable survivors that you can pull out of an attic or closet decades later and no matter what companies have come and gone, servers taken off line, licenses expired, re-issued etc. etc. etc. the things will just work and nothing can reach into your collection and interfere with your games. But how many of "me" are there out there, I don't know as someone recently said here, if I am making the mistake of assuming everyone's desires are the same as mine so I lean toward there not being a big enough market. As I am talking with Steve about the notion of standing up a studio I said he should really talk with Socal Mike about this because Mike was looking to fire up a console. Steve was brought into that discussion and all of that and what came next is pretty well detailed on the episode I posted just now. So for Mike to say stuff like "Why would Scott think he was a part of this etc." is so damn insulting because I literally brought the initial team together and was a contributor, anyway listen and your questions should be touched on.

Edited March 7, 2016 by Pipercub

[galax]

Also apparently Steve Woita and John worked together for a few years in the 90's

Not quite; that was more exaggeration by the RVGS spin machine. John Carlsen was a "Game Tester" at Mediagenic/Activision (where Steve worked at the time) for 8 months in 1990-91, he seemed to imply in the interview that Steve didn't remember him.

[InnovaX5]

Well you won't hear an unkind word about Steve from us, we know and like him thus far he has not been involved with any shennnanigans that we know of. If you listen to the indigogo era episode of RetroGaming Roundup you will hear Steve discussing some of how he came to be involved with the project; http://www.retrogamingroundup.com/shownotes/2015/roundup091_2015.09.php...

Thank you Scott. I'll go give it a listen now.