Keatah Posted October 16, 2017 Share Posted October 16, 2017 That's right mr. flomojofofo, you tell 'em! Make them grovel and repent! They had their chance to work with an industry pro. Instead they flafflegassed around and created nothing but embarrassment and confusion. CODE RED URGENT FOR REALS Putting it here in this snarky thread just to make sure people see it ... The "promise" of the Coleco Chameleon, an affordable FPGA system that plays old cartridges with style on new machines, is actually coming, and Kevin Horton (Kevtris) is part of it. It's very likely he'll bring his FPGA "core store" to it as well. I have ordered a black one and eagerly await this project's delivery in February 2018. https://www.analogue.co/pages/store/ More about it, including background, here: https://retronauts.com/article/622/the-ultimate-nes-gets-a-super-follow-up-mdash-and-this-ones-priced-to-sell https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7q93x/kevtris-kevin-horton-cyrogenics-retro-gaming https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/16/16459182/analogue-super-nt-snes-console-price-release https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/16/16481824/super-nt-super-nintendo-analogue There are other threads discussing this. If you want to read/say more about this, I think the best place would be here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/242970-fpga-based-videogame-system/ 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevtris Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 Power goes in and video comes out. It's that simple. (sorry, I couldn't resist) 16 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RampantOctopus Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 Once again, I nominate this thread for a Pulitzer. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pipercub Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 Much like the MCC216 and so many other FPGA implementations of retro systems this one looks like a champ and is backed by a winner. I will back it and share it on RetroGamingRoundup. Who could not support a fellow Chameleon under the bus vet! 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keepdreamin Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 Power goes in and video comes out. It's that simple. (sorry, I couldn't resist) 469 pages later, and.... mic drop. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godslabrat Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 And if you need to put it in a Jag shell... Im sure Albert could accommodate! 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaybird3rd Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 And if you need to put it in a Jag shell... Im sure Albert could accommodate! Now that's what I'd call poetic justice! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 And if you need to put it in a Jag shell... Im sure Albert could accommodate! I really wish they would. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 Now that's what I'd call poetic justice! That's what I would call a really bad idea. Let the f$cking Jaguar rest in peace. 3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+5-11under Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 Once again, I nominate this thread for a Pulitzer. Comedy? Tragedy? Science Fiction? Edit: Horror? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted October 17, 2017 Share Posted October 17, 2017 Public Service, Investigative Reporting, Commentary, and Criticism. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MagnaRyuu Posted October 19, 2017 Share Posted October 19, 2017 That's right mr. flomojofofo, you tell 'em! Make them grovel and repent! They had their chance to work with an industry pro. Instead they flafflegassed around and created nothing but embarrassment and confusion. again I would love to have a few of the shells from this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thanatos Posted October 19, 2017 Share Posted October 19, 2017 Much like the MCC216 and so many other FPGA implementations of retro systems this one looks like a champ and is backed by a winner. I will back it and share it on RetroGamingRoundup. Who could not support a fellow Chameleon under the bus vet! I saw the MCC-2016 at a convention a few years back, it looked pretty neat. Had forgotten about it until now. And after doing some searching I'm glad I didn't buy one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newsdee Posted October 20, 2017 Share Posted October 20, 2017 I saw the MCC-2016 at a convention a few years back, it looked pretty neat. Had forgotten about it until now. And after doing some searching I'm glad I didn't buy one.Look into the MiST and MiSTer boards. It's way more than the MCC ever was, with more than 40 cores out there. https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki MiSTer is a newer project with a bigger FPGA (Cyclone V at 110K LE) but is more hobby oriented (it's still early stages) . Their focus is reimplementing retro computers though. They don't use carts but for example have MIDI ports and USB connectors. So the Super NT is a very welcome addition, the price point feels just right. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Posted October 20, 2017 Share Posted October 20, 2017 So the Super NT is a very welcome addition, the price point feels just right. I agree. $189 is the sweet spot for sure. Only reason I might not buy would be to hold out for the Z3k instead. I'm assuming Kevin's baby would be the most robust of any offerings he's involved with seeing as that is his own. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoenixdownita Posted October 23, 2017 Author Share Posted October 23, 2017 Now that "karma's a bitch" has gone full circle (the very FPGA engineer they had did deliver a SNES FPGA ... oh the irony) what do you think it would take to have this thread reach the 1M views. I think that to Mike's credit we owed it to him to recognize that at least he did contact the authority in FPGA retro recreation (aka kevtris the core store master), even if he couldn't handle him (thanks to Mike's own bs obviously). Anyway just another ~45K views and we reach the 1M .... any thoughts on how to get there? Anything that does not involve "pron" (misspelled on purpose) greatly appreciated. NOTE: If we can do it by Dec 25 2017 (2Y after the thread started even better). NOTE2: well if we count the views on the original thread (the RVGS one at http://atariage.com/forums/topic/235430-how-has-this-not-been-posted-yet-retro-vgs) with 354,126 views then the Mike "I want my Retro Empire" thing really hit the 1.3+M views. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newsdee Posted October 23, 2017 Share Posted October 23, 2017 Well for one we can see how a company could do something like this without Kickstarter or delusions of grandeur: iterative development. Hopefully Analogue will sell enough of these to keep going or make a new unit for more powerful consoles. FPGAs do have the potential to faithfully recreate the originals and add things like HDMI video, so at that point there's the question of whether this should be considered an upgrade rather than a clone. It wonder if the Super will have NES core though. That would cannibalize demand so I guess it might be excluded. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godslabrat Posted October 23, 2017 Share Posted October 23, 2017 The final product is very lacking. Theres no online storefront, proprietary cartridge format, or fisticuffs. Its like they didnt even try. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Charlie Cat Posted October 23, 2017 Share Posted October 23, 2017 (edited) $189? This is gonna be fuckin' awesome! I 2nd that Shawn. Amazing that this thread continues and almost at 1,000,000 views. Anthony.. Edited October 23, 2017 by fdurso224 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cybercylon Posted October 23, 2017 Share Posted October 23, 2017 How about reaching the length of the thrift finds thread? More likey I guess if MK comes out of the wood work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S1500 Posted October 23, 2017 Share Posted October 23, 2017 Bitches don't know about my hoodie And no, I can't rotate the dang pic. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevtris Posted October 24, 2017 Share Posted October 24, 2017 Look into the MiST and MiSTer boards. It's way more than the MCC ever was, with more than 40 cores out there. https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki MiSTer is a newer project with a bigger FPGA (Cyclone V at 110K LE) but is more hobby oriented (it's still early stages) . Their focus is reimplementing retro computers though. They don't use carts but for example have MIDI ports and USB connectors. So the Super NT is a very welcome addition, the price point feels just right. Funny story on that MCC216 device. The guy that makes/sells it emailed me 3 years ago asking if I'd put my cores on it. He got really mad when I told him I was making my own system and sarcastically told me "good luck". His reward to me for porting my cores was giving me one of the units. Now that "karma's a bitch" has gone full circle (the very FPGA engineer they had did deliver a SNES FPGA ... oh the irony) what do you think it would take to have this thread reach the 1M views. I think that to Mike's credit we owed it to him to recognize that at least he did contact the authority in FPGA retro recreation (aka kevtris the core store master), even if he couldn't handle him (thanks to Mike's own bs obviously). Anyway just another ~45K views and we reach the 1M .... any thoughts on how to get there? Anything that does not involve "pron" (misspelled on purpose) greatly appreciated. NOTE: If we can do it by Dec 25 2017 (2Y after the thread started even better). NOTE2: well if we count the views on the original thread (the RVGS one at http://atariage.com/forums/topic/235430-how-has-this-not-been-posted-yet-retro-vgs) with 354,126 views then the Mike "I want my Retro Empire" thing really hit the 1.3+M views. It wasn't Mike really, it was John that didn't want to listen to me about the design aspect of the system. He didn't really have much clue when it came to designing videogame hardware it seemed and wanted to use 2:1 multiplexers to multiplex FPGA and ARM video together, then use cycle timed code on the ARM to switch video sources to do overlays. Besides the problem of how to switch fast/parallel signals like this (with any kind of accuracy on an ARM after caching/delays/etc), he also thought that classic systems like NES and 2600 were 480i and this was all the system would support and didn't know they were 240p until I told him. It was only going to output 480i and not anything else like 720p or 1080p until later after I said I had those already working. Each time I made a suggestion on how to fix a problem, John just rebuffed it so after 3 or 4 times of this I just gave up trying. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoenixdownita Posted October 24, 2017 Author Share Posted October 24, 2017 .... It wasn't Mike really, it was John that didn't want to listen to me about the design aspect of the system. He didn't really have much clue ..... John just rebuffed it so after 3 or 4 times of this I just gave up trying. Ultimately it may have been a blessing in disguise. If it wasn't for him "pissing you off" eventually Mike would have found a way to steal your inventions, call you a minority non voting/non-right holder barely acquaintance who didn't exactly work for him, transfer whatever IP he could to a company at the Cayman (and lose the password to the account), then turn around and make sure he was the victim (after all he lost the password) and pretend that the core store was obviously his idea all along (and he needed the password back to get to it). On another note I wonder how much that debacle and clear lack of understanding of retro systems damaged John's reputation as far as his electronics design prowess goes? I mean you can't touch a turd and pretend you smell like roses, and give it was his turd he probably thought it didn't really stink (as if) ... so even worse. ["Power goes in, video comes out" would likely follow him for the rest of his professional life] I gather Mike is not exactly having the time of his life either but I do not have much details, not sure what happened to "Mr Lee" or to the gang of VPs/SVPs/Directors he assembled for the Coleco Chameleon .... wait we know what Cardillo has been doing and that is not good, even if the "rest" may have been good guys I'm pretty sure they are still cleaning the mess ... take the Woita guy for example, everyone swears by him being a great guy but as far as management skills and things like attention to details or just plain attention goes I'm sure we can all agree he was severely lacking for a good couple of years, not something you want on a resume for sure, two years .... I give up on a poop in 20 minutes. Regarding your projects I just wish there was a way to speed up the Z3K but I believe there's a reason you chose the path you chose and in due time we will get the "ultimate retro machine". 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevtris Posted October 24, 2017 Share Posted October 24, 2017 Ultimately it may have been a blessing in disguise. If it wasn't for him "pissing you off" eventually Mike would have found a way to steal your inventions, call you a minority non voting/non-right holder barely acquaintance who didn't exactly work for him, transfer whatever IP he could to a company at the Cayman (and lose the password to the account), then turn around and make sure he was the victim (after all he lost the password) and pretend that the core store was obviously his idea all along (and he needed the password back to get to it). On another note I wonder how much that debacle and clear lack of understanding of retro systems damaged John's reputation as far as his electronics design prowess goes? I mean you can't touch a turd and pretend you smell like roses, and give it was his turd he probably thought it didn't really stink (as if) ... so even worse. ["Power goes in, video comes out" would likely follow him for the rest of his professional life] I gather Mike is not exactly having the time of his life either but I do not have much details, not sure what happened to "Mr Lee" or to the gang of VPs/SVPs/Directors he assembled for the Coleco Chameleon .... wait we know what Cardillo has been doing and that is not good, even if the "rest" may have been good guys I'm pretty sure they are still cleaning the mess ... take the Woita guy for example, everyone swears by him being a great guy but as far as management skills and things like attention to details or just plain attention goes I'm sure we can all agree he was severely lacking for a good couple of years, not something you want on a resume for sure, two years .... I give up on a poop in 20 minutes. Regarding your projects I just wish there was a way to speed up the Z3K but I believe there's a reason you chose the path you chose and in due time we will get the "ultimate retro machine". Well, I wasn't going to do any work without getting some kind of payment. I wasn't going to jump in and design them a PCB or anything. The entire project struck me as impossible from the very start, but I just hung around on the edges on the off chance it did work. There's no way I would ever give them my code or any source files (i.e. altium PCB files, verilog, C code) without payment at the time of transfer. I think it was a case of John getting into something he knew relatively little about and was in over his head. That, and none of the team really knew how to design something for manufacture. Costs were all over the place (and going up all the time), there were no design documents that I saw... I honestly don't think anything existed. Zero hardware design set in stone by the launch date of the indiegogo campaign. I was trying to get information on what hardware it would have a month out, and every time I got a completely new laundry list of features and parts. At the last talk I had with them, the thing was going to have an A4 cyclone V, some kind of new not released TI SoC (they didn't even have a datasheet), and then that cardboard PCB dropped. I am guessing the two large chips are the SoC and FPGA. The heat pipe was a nice touch as were those heatsinks. I guess this means they dropped some schematic symbols onto a sheet and then pulled them into a PCB (they used altium by the looks of it) but never routed anything, and there wasn't a visible rats nest on the cardboard PCB. I could've made a PCB design like that in a few hours. It's easy if you just plunk parts down and pull them into a schematic and don't hook them up. I agree with what others said, that Mike seemed to think this thing could really be made, if only they had the money to do it. After the IGG failure though, I am not sure what was going on with the stream of obviously fake prototypes though. It was almost like a "dog at my homework" level. The SNES in the jag shell WAS a brilliant move though; I had no clue that would've ever fit in there so well. I have to wonder if they tried Genesis before SNES Jr. trying to find something 16 bit that fit in there. Bonus points for the plexiglas cube around it. As for Steve, I liked him but he honestly didn't really seem to have much of any input in the design. He was on board I think to do software, but since no hardware got even close to built he didn't have anything to do. He hardly said anything on the skype calls I had with them. The Z3K is still out there on the back burner, but since I have to eat and live, I gotta do the paid jobs first. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schizophretard Posted October 24, 2017 Share Posted October 24, 2017 The Z3K is still out there on the back burner, but since I have to eat and live, I gotta do the paid jobs first. If you held up a sign that said,"Will work on Z3K for food." then we would all bury you under a massive pile of food... under the bus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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