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Coleco Chameleon .... hardware speculations?


phoenixdownita

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They don't have the hardware locked down yet:

 

Stefan Weilhartner please tell us something about the hardware
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Retro Video Game Systems, Inc. Hi Stefan. Once the prototype is complete we will reveal what's inside. It shouldn't be too much longer.

 

 

 

 

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It's gonna be 1995 technology, what could he possibly tell us and not deliver on spec wise?

It's hardly 1995 technology. 2010 at best. The Chameleon will most likely run on a SOC ARM processor with hot-pluggable cartridges which hold up to a Gig or so of onboard write-protected flash storage, possibly with a scratch area to save data and potential DLC / bug-fixes. I imagine the cat shells will be mostly empty with an SD-like cart slot connector probably no larger than an inch or so across. In order to maintain reliable high speed data transfer, every other connector will likely be a ground to minimize noise and signal leakage on the otherwise over sized connector.

 

System shouldn't cost any higher than say $100-150. Compare to the $150 price point of the Razor Forge, which has tons more tech crammed in (bluetooth, wifi, etc...) and a highly sophistiated dual stick + touchpad controller.

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It's hardly 1995 technology. 2010 at best. The Chameleon will most likely run on a SOC ARM processor with hot-pluggable cartridges which hold up to a Gig or so of onboard write-protected flash storage, possibly with a scratch area to save data and potential DLC / bug-fixes. I imagine the cat shells will be mostly empty with an SD-like cart slot connector probably no larger than an inch or so across. In order to maintain reliable high speed data transfer, every other connector will likely be a ground to minimize noise and signal leakage on the otherwise over sized connector.

 

System shouldn't cost any higher than say $100-150. Compare to the $150 price point of the Razor Forge, which has tons more tech crammed in (bluetooth, wifi, etc...) and a highly sophistiated dual stick + touchpad controller.

 

I was unaware you could only play 100 MB games in 2010. Good thing I stuck with consoles. And the Sega Saturn... in 1995.

 

EDIT: I wanna retract this, pretend I own an Action Max and have someone else tell me what one game would be... must be over 100 MB in 480i if the game was under half hour.

 

EDIT 2: Currently on Ebay looking for an Action Max. :(

Edited by bretthorror
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I was unaware you could only play 100 MB games in 2010. Good thing I stuck with consoles. And the Sega Saturn... in 1995.

 

EDIT: I wanna retract this, pretend I own an Action Max and have someone else tell me what one game would be... must be over 100 MB in 480i if the game was under half hour.

 

EDIT 2: Currently on Ebay looking for an Action Max. :(

The 100Mb quote was probably another case of classic Mike "diarrhea" of the mouth and not knowing what he's talking about. Multiple G's of memory on flash chip cost a couple buxx these days. I'm sure the final console will support bigger games than that. Games will be on write protected flash media in over-sized shell. You heard it from here first. ;-)

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The 100Mb quote was probably another case of classic Mike "diarrhea" of the mouth and not knowing what he's talking about. Multiple G's of memory on flash chip cost a couple buxx these days. I'm sure the final console will support bigger games than that. Games will be on write protected flash media in over-sized shell. You heard it from here first. ;-)

 

100 year rule doe. I'd be fine with that. See, Mike. You can fuck me in the ass and I'm ok with it. Just keep your "carts" CIB 24.99 or less. $19.99 and you have yourself a customer. If you've read the shit I've said, I'm down with some cheating. There's nothing wrong with a, say $129.99 "system" and $19.99 "cartridges". Sure, you can get this shit on steam on sale for $2.00... but I can't say it's not absolutely worth the money for $20. Comparison wise, you might have shit to explain, but I can't argue that a lot of Steam games I've gotten for $2 are better than $20 carts I've bought.

 

My butthole is only so big. Fuck me in the ass a bit, but don't pillage me. We can all play the cart premium, but keep profits margins fair. You shouldn't make 5x more on Chameleon than you do on Steam, right? Maybe 2 or 3 and we'll be cool like play cousins.

 

P.S. I love light gun games... really shoulda bought an Action Max 10 years ago. Prices were much better. :(

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Wrt cart technology, for the love of God I can't find much info on reasonable "mask ROM" or equivalent (OTP or flash) that can hold ~128MBytes while allowing direct fast access.

If in the end it is a serial technology on disguise (or even a block device of some sort) it means data cannot be accessed directly and needs to be moved on the Chameleon RAM (and that is loading however you want to call it). Agreed that if the Chameleon itself say has only 256/512MB of RAM to start with even an half decent ATA 133 implementation (UDMA CF card) could "load" all of it in 4 secs so not such a big deal ... still loading is loading!!!!

 

In this regard I expect memory mapped direct access chips, no transformations no tricks, like the maskROM of old just bigger (much bigger).

If memory serves the biggest NeoGeo ROMs were around 768Mbits -> 96MBytes, and they used tons of chips .... I really can't find "parallel" chips that are very big (4MBytes as in 29LV320 would required 32 of them to get 128MBytes).

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Wrt cart technology, for the love of God I can't find much info on reasonable "mask ROM" or equivalent (OTP or flash) that can hold ~128MBytes while allowing direct fast access.

If in the end it is a serial technology on disguise (or even a block device of some sort) it means data cannot be accessed directly and needs to be moved on the Chameleon RAM (and that is loading however you want to call it). Agreed that if the Chameleon itself say has only 256/512MB of RAM to start with even an half decent ATA 133 implementation (UDMA CF card) could "load" all of it in 4 secs so not such a big deal ... still loading is loading!!!!

 

In this regard I expect memory mapped direct access chips, no transformations no tricks, like the maskROM of old just bigger (much bigger).

If memory serves the biggest NeoGeo ROMs were around 768Mbits -> 96MBytes, and they used tons of chips .... I really can't find "parallel" chips that are very big (4MBytes as in 29LV320 would required 32 of them to get 128MBytes).

Which is all the more reason why they won't go old school style mask ROMs or even a parallel bus connector. By the time mask ROMs got near to 128Mbyte size, flash storage had taken over. Let us not forget that in 2004-2005ish, USB flash drives were going for about a dollar per megabyte. Now it's ten years later and a dollar per gigabyte. Moore's law at work. If a dollar per megabyte in 2004 became a dollar per gigabyte in 2014, then each year the capacity per dollar doubled. EPROMs were replaced by EEPROM and later flash. The older tech is more expensive anyway and terribly outdated. Modern serial interfaces use less pins and are still 10x, 100x faster than dinosaur parallel interfaces. Remember we have gone from Megahertz processors to multicore Gigahertz processors.

 

It's going to be serial write-protected flash. Seriously how much does a Gigabyte or two of RAM cost these days? Several Gigabytes of flash ROM? That 4 seconds loading time is nothing if the game boots with a flash screen or pre-loads an animation. And suppose the game is one Gigabyte but it only needs to pre-load about 256 megabytes for the first stage, then deflate the data in RAM. Your four seconds of loading is nothing. Yes, it was annoying as hell back in the days of consoles with 2x CDROM drives like the Playstation where you would often wait a minute-and-a-half for a level to load.

 

So what if modern tool chains need an OS like Android? Maybe the Chameleon only come with no OS and a simple boot ROM. No problem. The Cameleon can preload whatever redistributable libraries are necessary for game operation from the cartridge at boot. And the vast majority of OS files for GUI interface, housekeeping, storage, wireless and connectivity and any other junk are not needed. A few megabytes worth of audio, video drivers and compression libraries thrown into the game cart and preloaded on boot. Especially if it's handled like an "image" or state machine so that the OS does not need to "boot". A second or two for the Chameleon OS to preload off the media and a second or two to load the game and you're playing. Cartridge in. Power on. Chameleon logo. 4 seconds. Game developer logo. 4 seconds. Title screen.

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Will there be some sort of GUI if you power on without a cart? The retrousb AVS NES will have this, so curious.

 

I wonder if ethernet is still off the table? I still think it's a bad idea to not have some sort of patching available. Despite the reassurance from the original vision, there is NO WAY all games released will be bug free.

The QC team (which will be 1 or 2 guys?) can't verify everything. Take a game like Terraria, which could be put on a cart I assume, still gets patched today. Their bug topic alone has 6,500 posts.

 

If the idea is for the customer to send in their copy for a "fix", who will pay for returns? Mike and team? The game progammer/company? Surely not the consumer. It's lose/lose.

This should be avoided if taken seriously or if the board is already set, then go the Wii/WiiU route and have add-on USB ethernet available or something like that.

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Why have an ethernet port in it? Slap a 56k modem in the Coleco Chameleon and we can game like its 1999. Think about it, we can have a cartridge dedicated to the RETRO Coleco Network. Chat rooms, email, instant messenger, maybe even some limited web browsing to the retro magazine store.

 

The Chameleon is basically going to be printing money with features that awesome. The future of retro gaming and the cartridge is coming!

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Why have an ethernet port in it? Slap a 56k modem in the Coleco Chameleon and we can game like its 1999. Think about it, we can have a cartridge dedicated to the RETRO Coleco Network. Chat rooms, email, instant messenger, maybe even some limited web browsing to the retro magazine store.

 

The Chameleon is basically going to be printing money with features that awesome. The future of retro gaming and the cartridge is coming!

56k modem sounds great. They can have a 1-800 number to dial in to patch the system. Even better if your one of those people who ditched their landline for a cellphone contract.

 

Seriously though, they could always do like the Retro5/RetroFreak and write an update request to the SD card. Upload to the Internet to download the update. Install the update to the system and you're done.

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56k modem sounds great. They can have a 1-800 number to dial in to patch the system. Even better if your one of those people who ditched their landline for a cellphone contract.

 

Seriously though, they could always do like the Retro5/RetroFreak and write an update request to the SD card. Upload to the Internet to download the update. Install the update to the system and you're done.

I would think that it could work like that and as well for the games. Download a patch for a game and the system could patch the game when you have the cart installed. Really doesn't seem like a bad idea, just a bit more effort on the end user.

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....

It's going to be serial write-protected flash. Seriously how much does a Gigabyte or two of RAM cost these days? Several Gigabytes of flash ROM? That 4 seconds loading time is nothing if the game boots with a flash screen or pre-loads an animation. And suppose the game is one Gigabyte but it only needs to pre-load about 256 megabytes for the first stage, then deflate the data in RAM. Your four seconds of loading is nothing.

....

If it's a serial device in disguise then the cart is just a gimmick with no inherent value (like the NeoGeo-X cart proved to be) and the whole thing will come crumbling down very early on. The very first unit shipped would be opened, analyzed, rev-eng'ed and off we go.

 

If the cart needs to be "loaded" in RAM then the thing needs lots of it, it used to be that ROM was cheaper than RAM and having direct access to it would at least make devs and console maker save on the RAM cost while maintaining direct access (I mean thru the CPU bus) to the relevant data. Once you throw in serial read, decompress etc... etc.... it's all moot, might as well come clean have 1 or 2GB of RAM and use a simple USB thumb drive ... maybe the Chameleon could innovate in the thumb drive space as a replacement to other form of distribution.

 

I don't have a good feeling about it at all .... wait and see is the only thing I can think off ... given there's no title announced yet I have no rush feeling towards any of it .... I can wait and buy second hand .... if I miss the boat (artificial scarcity or whatnot) I'll use the money for something else ;)

Edited by phoenixdownita
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1 or 2 GB of ram costs practically nothing today. And you need some of that ram for video processing and other housekeeping functions. So I suspect the console will have onboard memory.

 

Making a masked rom is going to be a lot more expensive than standard SD. I understand the general dislike toward a serial load setup, it doesn't feel like the cartridge is part of the circuit like it did in the early 8-bit systems. It doesn't provide instant 0ms "load" times - not that the old school stuff loaded anything though - you were just changing out part of the hardware in a fixed-function computer.

 

I do believe that with good programming they can use disguised SD and achieve real load times under 5 seconds. Load the title, load the first level, and load things in the background as the game progresses.

 

I also forsee a problem +10 years down the road. The modern storage industry has a habit of dropping older lower capacity chips from inventory, and frequently upgrading the protocol - if not the interface. Compatible SD cards may not be manufactured in 10 years from now. Much like how you can't use modern-day SDHC SDXC in older readers of the 2000-2005 era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Compatibility

 

It is also notable that the masked-roms or the one-time blow-the-fuses proms of the first cart based systems have such a long lifespan not because it spec'd that way but simply used the tech of the day. Much like the AGC. Its program is still readable and will be for the next 500 years. Easy! Longevity was a product of the larger and beefier manufacturing techniques.

 

As things get smaller, they become more delicate. And in modern Flash memory, you have circuit paths so small they "erode" and wear out due to migration and saturation from the moving electrons. There's more to it, but that's the general idea.

Edited by Keatah
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1 or 2 GB of ram costs practically nothing today. And you need some of that ram for video processing and other housekeeping functions. So I suspect the console will have onboard memory.

 

Making a masked rom is going to be a lot more expensive than standard SD. I understand the general dislike toward a serial load setup, it doesn't feel like the cartridge is part of the circuit like it did in the early 8-bit systems. It doesn't provide instant 0ms "load" times - not that the old school stuff loaded anything though - you were just changing out part of the hardware in a fixed-function computer.

 

I do believe that with good programming they can use disguised SD and achieve real load times under 5 seconds. Load the title, load the first level, and load things in the background as the game progresses.

 

I also forsee a problem +10 years down the road. The modern storage industry has a habit of dropping older lower capacity chips from inventory, and frequently upgrading the protocol - if not the interface. Compatible SD cards may not be manufactured in 10 years from now. Much like how you can't use modern-day SDHC SDXC in older readers of the 2000-2005 era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Compatibility

 

It is also notable that the masked-roms or the one-time blow-the-fuses proms of the first cart based systems have such a long lifespan not because it spec'd that way but simply used the tech of the day. Much like the AGC. Its program is still readable and will be for the next 500 years. Easy! Longevity was a product of the larger and beefier manufacturing techniques.

 

As things get smaller, they become more delicate. And in modern Flash memory, you have circuit paths so small they "erode" and wear out due to migration and saturation from the moving electrons. There's more to it, but that's the general idea.

I also imagine old school EPROMs have much larger cells than modern high density flash. Suppose an EPROM cell leaks electrons at a fixed rate, and a modern flash cell leaked electrons at the same rate. But the modern flash chip may have a thousand cells occupying the space of a single EPROM cell.

 

One strike against flash.

 

On the other hand, I picked up some extremely high speed 32-Gb MicroSD flash chips at Best Buy the other day. 80mb/s read, 20mb/s write. And get this. The packaging claims to be "X-Ray Proof." As many well know, EPROMs often have those little windows that allow UV light to enter, zapping and erasing the chip. Normal light only have 2-3 electron volts, not enough to zap them. But UV light, or sources including sunlight or improperly shielded fluorescent light fixtures, can and will erode the EPROMs if exposed. And if you cover those windows, Xrays or Gamma rays will also erase them, including stray background radiation. And write once EPROMs are just EPROMs without windows.

 

So if the flash chip is truly Xray proof, then it must be radiation hardended somehow. Maybe one should send a few flash chips into outer space and expose them to the elements. Will they retain data when shielded?

 

One strike against EPROMs for not being at least partially resistant to ionizing radiation.

 

Who will win in the end? What rewriteable storage medium has the longest shelf life? Will magnetic RAM last longer than flash, even if susceptible to stray fields? A single-pole-double-throw toggle switch could retain one bit of data forever.

 

Maybe data could be stored as nano-switches. A negative ion within a carbon nanotube gets pushed to one end or the other and is held there by the presence of a positive ion in an adjacent reservoir. This reservoir acts as part of a nanoscopic MOSFET transistor that conducts or doesn't based on the presence of the charge. A negative electric charge can be applied somehow to the juntion that exceeds the charge potential of the positive ion, repelling the negative ion and kicking it to the opposite side of the nanotube. A bit has been flipped. Yes, the position of a single atom determines whether a stored bit retains a one or a zero. Petabytes of information can be stored on a single die.

 

Yet a stray photon strikes a cell, with an ionizing potential of millions of electron volts, releasing sufficient energy to scramble not only the cell it collides with, but those of many of it's neighbors. So redundancy and exhaustive error checking will be required for mission critical usage.

 

Suppose potassium is the ion of choice for the positive charge. A small minority of potassium atoms are known to be radioactive (see also radioactive bananas in the banana thread). These have a half life of 1 billion years, but on a Petabyte or even Exabyte sized storage, it is probable that a potassium ion somewhere will decay at some point during the useful life of the device, rendering the bit inoperable and stuck in a permanent state. Not only that, but the ~1 million eV gamma burst will surely scramble many of the existing bits surrounding it. Existing potassium ore will need to be depleted of radioactive isotope before it is fit for use in mission critical nanotube data storage...

 

Getting back to the Chameleon, I demand it use my patent pending nano-tube tech that I or more likely somebody else hasn't invented yet as storage device. Anything less and it won't be future proof! :twisted:

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Why have an ethernet port in it? Slap a 56k modem in the Coleco Chameleon and we can game like its 1999. Think about it, we can have a cartridge dedicated to the RETRO Coleco Network. Chat rooms, email, instant messenger, maybe even some limited web browsing to the retro magazine store.

 

The Chameleon is basically going to be printing money with features that awesome. The future of retro gaming and the cartridge is coming!

 

We can game like it is 1982-1983. 150-300 baud modem... the kind where the the head set fits in.

 

We still keep a rotary dial phone for the heck of it. Can only accept calls on it though.

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In this regard I expect memory mapped direct access chips, no transformations no tricks, like the maskROM of old just bigger (much bigger).

If memory serves the biggest NeoGeo ROMs were around 768Mbits -> 96MBytes, and they used tons of chips .... I really can't find "parallel" chips that are very big (4MBytes as in 29LV320 would required 32 of them to get 128MBytes).

 

A quick search on Newark shows a few flash chips of 1Gbit-2Gbit size.

 

For example ... Spansion S29GL-P MirrorBit ® Flash Family S29GL01GP 1Gbit parallel NOR flash (100,000 write cycles per page, 20 year retention).

 

This kind of stuff exists ... if you want to pay for it.

 

But in reality ... I'd expect them to use serial flash.

 

Does everyone here complain that the Nintendo 64 somehow wasn't a "real" cartridge machine just because it's cartridges were serial-access (via an 8-bit or 16-bit port IIRC) ?

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A quick search on Newark shows a few flash chips of 1Gbit-2Gbit size.

 

For example ... Spansion S29GL-P MirrorBit ® Flash Family S29GL01GP 1Gbit parallel NOR flash (100,000 write cycles per page, 20 year retention).

 

This kind of stuff exists ... if you want to pay for it.

...

Nice find (didn't know), at ~10US$ a pop for the 1Gbit=128MByte at 130ns they make the whole cart based game still within reason but not as cheap (I'm pretty sure the gang would claim that manuals, plastic shells, and supplemental materials cost more than that so minimum a cart game would need to be sold north of 40US$).

 

...

Does everyone here complain that the Nintendo 64 somehow wasn't a "real" cartridge machine just because it's cartridges were serial-access (via an 8-bit or 16-bit port IIRC) ?

I hear you, maybe we're making a mountain out of a mole-hill after all. Let's see what they come up with. Edited by phoenixdownita
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Does everyone here complain that the Nintendo 64 somehow wasn't a "real" cartridge machine just because it's cartridges were serial-access (via an 8-bit or 16-bit port IIRC) ?

Not at all. And games that really pushed the ststem like DK64 and Conker's do have small loading times although it's masked well by the game so you might miss it. Four seconds tops versus a minute-and-a-half for PS1.

 

I kinda like the hybrid nature of N64 ROMs. It's got a 16-bit bus yes but the console requests memory in chunks rather than single address. The console fetches a value range from ROM then the data is streamed automatically with each clock cycle bus sending like 16 bits per clock. With the 60-something megahertz bus and the 90-something megahertz CPU (N64 shipped with a +50% O.C. CPU) with direct DMA access from ROM to RAM, gamers were getting it on N64 style while the PS1 dudebros were jacking around with a loading screen.

 

Still, if the Chameleon gets DMA with a Gigahertz multicore ARM, cheap RAM, a good DMA controller, and a serial bus that operates similar to SATA or SD Card formats, with smart programming the load times will be minimal. Unless the team places an artificial limit on storage, there shouldn't be any size restriction on serial data. Memory mapped storage is no longer a necessity with multi-gigabyte RAM modules.

 

Still that tiny cartridge connector in the oversize cart will look funny, like a Saber-tooth Jag cart. I just hope they are keyed to prevent insertion to a real Jag.

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