Retroblox

[Flojomojo]

Can't be 300$ plus the modules. Gamester81 said this potential game changer would be very reasonably priced. When has he ever led people astray?

That sounds perfectly reasonable ...at least from the seller's perspective.

 

Needs a defunct game brand license stuck on it. I hear COLECO is available for partnership.

[+GoldenWheels]

He also once shilled for RetroVGS, and later had to make a public apology video to save face. Also $300 may reasonably priced for one collector, absurd for another

Stardust--I am just being a knob. Dat stuff up dere was supposed to be like, satire, or something. Ya know? Wink wink?

 

And if 300$ for this thing, plus privilege of the module fees for more extra crap you have to plug in, seems reasonable to someone, well that person can put this thing next to their two copies of Magical Chase.

[+GoldenWheels]

That sounds perfectly reasonable ...at least from the seller's perspective.

 

Needs a defunct game brand license stuck on it. I hear COLECO is available for partnership.

Time for White Westinghouse to get in the game!

[Keatah]

Agreed. I'm not being critical of Retroblox for its own sake. On the contrary... this is a concept that holds a lot of appeal to me. There are lots of systems out there I'd like to try, for the sake of two or three games, but don't want to invest in the hardware for practical reasons. I've longed for a "one-off" console for a long time now, and Retroblox is conceptually EXACTLY what I want. BUT, that doesn't change the fact that this is the latest in a long, long line of failed concepts and broken promises, not to mention outright scams. If Retroblox wants to fill that niche (which is very real and likely very lucrative) then they do need to show that they can deliver where others failed. And they need to show it in positive terms, not just a lack of outright lies. As I said before, benefit of the doubt died at the New York Toy Fair.

 

For the those who have seen and followed that debacle. There's a boatload of noobs ready to fund.

[Gentlegamer]

WELCO

METOT

HENEX

TLEVEL

 

Ouya!

 

[Flojomojo]

I've come up with a hypothesis.

 

I think the guy writing all the PR and the Kickstarter pitch have employed someone much like elmer working behind the scenes. I'll refer to this unknown man as 'Evilmer' from now on.

 

Fig. 1, Evilmer

 

 

heh

 

There are *huge* concerns ... but I'd like to remain a "skeptic", rather then a member of the "AtariAge Hater Brigade" for a little while longer.

 

 

Speaking as a founding member of the AtariAge Hater Brigade (the ridiculously frequent posters in the Chameleon "speculations" thread) we have ample motive and opportunity to bring another vaguely-described, world-promising, retro-style project onto the scene, especially one with the potential for dramatic meltdowns. It gives us purpose. Without an antagonist, there's no story!

[Andromeda Stardust]

Ouya!

 

LOL! I remember that projectile vomit ad. Viral marketing gone wrong...

[PikoInteractive]

I got a leak of pricing at $200 and $50 per module. The online store would be cool, but I doubt there would be tens of thousands of users to get a decent amount of sales.

[BillLoguidice]

I got a leak of pricing at $200 and $50 per module. The online store would be cool, but I doubt there would be tens of thousands of users to get a decent amount of sales.

 

That seems like fair pricing. I also agree about the online store thing. If the OUYA store couldn't make anyone decent money, I doubt something like this would, particularly since I don't think it will get anywhere near the same exposure/retail reach.

[Flojomojo]

Agreed. Also, digital sales only make sense if you either:

 

a) treat the media as disposable/service; or

b) have some assurance they'll be around for support.

 

OUYA's store is pretty fragile, if it even exists anymore. It was full of indie games of varying quality at one time.

 

I buy a ton of digital stuff, but I try to keep it on services I trust. Compared to a lot of the artifact collectors here, I'm pretty trusting, and I wouldn't touch a digital store from Retroblox at this point in time.

[Flojomojo]

It only does everything.

Remember when. Play again.

[dj_convoy]

Remember when. Play again.

It just works.

[+thanatos]

Blast processing and fisticuffs.

 

Will it blow your balls off?

[solidunit]

My hot take is: its a Retron 5....with a modular interface for the cartridge slot and controller inputs. And what looks to be a slicker user interface.

 

This "hybrid emulation" stuff is just marketing bullcrap; its *software emulation*. They're probably using libretro cores for all the systems they're tackling.

 

I don't have a huge issue with what the product looks to be; for a lot of people, a well-done, cheap emulation box that accepts real cartridges and controllers is the perfect solution. What I take issue with is this disingenuous language that gets people super hyped up over nothing they haven't already seen.

Edited February 9, 2017 by solidunit

[godslabrat]

My hot take is: its a Retron 5....with a modular interface for the cartridge slot and controller inputs. And what looks to be a slicker user interface.

 

This "hybrid emulation" stuff is just marketing bullcrap; its *software emulation*. They're probably using libretro cores for all the systems they're tackling.

 

I don't have a huge issue with what the product looks to be; for a lot of people, a well-done, cheap emulation box that accepts real cartridges and controllers is the perfect solution. What I take issue with is this disingenous language that gets people super hyped up over what is just that; an emulation box.

Exactly. If it plays the systems it claims, reasonably well, then I don't especially care how they do it*. I'm not impressed at all by the marketing razzle-dazzle, I'm impressed by the fact that it's a clever design and can fill niches that have been previously unfilled. If they could just speak to that, being honest about the product's real strengths and weaknesses, I might be more inclined to take them seriously.

 

Or, I could be wrong, and we're looking at 24th-century technology that was accidentally left behind by the Ferengi. We'll see.

 

*Okay, I really don't like the idea of using stolen emulator code. However, that particular horse got out of the barn a long time ago.

[Guspaz]

On the subject of "emulation can do all the mappers/chips/etc", that's more or less true in a full software environment, but not quite true when dealing with real cartridges. Some problems occur:

1) Cartridges don't have headers. There is no way to know what mapper or chips the cartridge uses unless you build an exhaustive list in advance, and even that doesn't help with homebrew (how do you know that random Yoshi's Island romhack needs a SuperFX? It won't necessarily identify itself as Yoshi's Island). One need only look at Kevtris' work to see this limitation in effect: the NT Mini running carts works with mappers/expansion audio because it lets the real cart handle it like this thing plans to, the NT Mini running ROMs relies on ROM headers to tell it which mapper/chip is needed, and the Hi Def NES... requires the user to manually select which expansion audio chip to use, because it has no way of figuring it out for itself and an unmodified NES can't use expansion audio.

Basically, if you want to be able to work with any mapper/chip/etc without requiring a hardcoded list and/or manual selection, you need to rely on the cartridge to do it for you.

 

2) How do you dump the ROM on an Everdrive to run it in an emulator? If you interface with the cartridge in real-time, flash carts working is at least a possibility for each system (depending on emulation accuracy).

 

This thing is basically like the NT Mini (simulated/emulated console talking to a real cartidge) but using software emulation instead of an FPGA simulation.

[Keatah]

Nothing wrong in manually telling the emulator I need a SuperFX chip or DSP-1 or whatever, for carts/roms not in a database.

[Guspaz]

Sure, although that doesn't solve flashcarts or multicarts. But isn't it better if you don't have to tell the emulator what chips to use, possibly every time you change the game (as you do on the Hi Def NES)?

 

It also depends, I think, on how much of the software development they're doing themselves. If they're really implementing the emulation from scratch, then the effort to implement cartridge I/O would certainly seem to be less work to me than writing emulators for every enhancement chip and mapper under the sun. Some of the enhancement chips are full blown CPUs that are more complex than the console's own CPU. If they're doing an in-between approach where they're writing the emulator themselves, but licensing the CPU emulation, well, you can license CPU emulators for a lot of the common retro CPUs (the 6502 series chips in the 2600/NES/SNES, the Z80 series in the GameBoy/Master System/Genesis/Neo Geo, the 68000 in the Genesis/Neo Geo, etc) and modify them as required, or use opensource CPU emulation (open source wasn't the problem with the RetroN, violating the non-commercial-use license was)... but not for many of those enhancement chips. I doubt you could license a SuperFX emulator, unless there are emulators available for the modern ARC chips, and unless the modern ARC chips bear any resemblance to their granddaddy the SuperFX.

 

Anyhow, point is, there are advantages to that approach, it improves compatibility/accuracy, and depending on their development approach it could save them a lot of time. It's still not a trivial exercise, but if they can pull it off, it could work out well for them.

Edited February 9, 2017 by Guspaz

[kevtris]

Someone asked me in another thread to weigh in on "hybrid emulation", so here it is.

 

I don't think this will work out very well for a couple reasons.

 

First, the cart timing is pretty rigid, and you cannot "speed up" accesses to the cartridge past what a real system accesses it. i.e. for an Atari 2600 cart this is around 1MHz. While some carts might work, others probably won't. There will be a mandatory "waiting period" after setting an address before the byte can be read. Let's say it's 350ns. At 1MHz this means you only have 650ns left to process that CPU cycle. Let's say your ARM core is running at 1GHz to be fair. You've got 1000 cycles to use to emulate each system cycle.

 

This sounds like a lot, but if you're running ANY kind of OS at all, it will instantly be a failure. You flat out cannot have an OS of any kind running. In these 1000 cycles, you have to handle reading controllers (I hope they aren't USB!), output video (I hope you aren't using some kind of video library) and emulate your hardware. It must render the game/video/audio like a real system does, cycle by cycle. This means that in the 1000 cycles you have to run the audio once, the video once, and read the cart bus once. Then read controllers too. There cannot be drivers used in the usual sense, since they tend to operate in bursts (i.e. read the USB controller takes say 100uS which means you lost 10 cycles on your cart bus). Because you can't read the cart faster, you lost 10 cycles and can't get them back by reading the cart faster to compensate.

 

Then there's the fun of caching. the CPU is caching code/data and when you get a cache miss, it's going to stall things while it flushes/loads. This is going to steal a bunch of cycles at hard to predict times, and possibly cause more cart bus read fails. Trying to bang the cart via GPIO is going to be slow relative to the CPU- when it access GPIO it probably has a pretty large number of wait states which will also eat into your cycle count bottom line.

 

For systems with sprites like the NES, you're going to have to spend a lot of cycles processing the sprites each output pixel. In the case of the NES, pixels are generated at a rate of around 5.3 million a second. You must handle all 8 sprites (rendering with priority) that many times. For the 8 sprites+ backgrounds, this means 9*5.3 million pixels must be calculated and checked per second. That's nearly 50 million pixels. All of a sudden 1000 cycles doesn't sound like much. The NES has the double problem of running the CPU *and* PPU at the same time, and handling their interactions too. In short, there's just no way this can ever work except in the most trivial cases.

 

So those are the things I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's lots more.

 

I rate success about as probable as the RGVS/Coleco Chameleon, except they did more work on the software end at least. I can guarantee they are not going to be writing their own emulators. It's just way too involved, especially for systems like SNES. Even NES emulation of any decent quality is a pretty big job that would take 3-6 months of 8 hour a day work to have it be anywhere close to accurate enough to run most titles/mappers. This is why I knew the Retron 5 was using purloined emulators. There was just no way to write that many good emulators in that short amount of time.

[Keatah]

Common sense is telling me they're not going to go and re-duplicate the efforts when there are many existing efforts to pick from. Development time is too long, and then there is the debugging.. Many of today's emulators have gone through many revisions and have changes inspired by bug reports and suggestions from users. A long process indeed.

 

And all the above, all that stuff going on in the emulator.. All of it has to be perfectly synchronized - and that takes more cycles & time..

Edited February 9, 2017 by Keatah

[Flojomojo]

I love this guy! Thanks Kevtris.

 

I can guarantee they are not going to be writing their own emulators. It's just way too involved, especially for systems like SNES. Even NES emulation of any decent quality is a pretty big job that would take 3-6 months of 8 hour a day work to have it be anywhere close to accurate enough to run most titles/mappers. This is why I knew the Retron 5 was using purloined emulators. There was just no way to write that many good emulators in that short amount of time.

 

 

From where I sit, their claims about their custom emulator engines are the only value-add they bring to the game.

 

I do not see any appeal or practicality to modules. They remind me of the similarly-named Phonebloks project, a concept that was explored and dropped by Google.

[godslabrat]

I love this guy! Thanks Kevtris.

 

 

 

From where I sit, their claims about their custom emulator engines are the only value-add they bring to the game.

 

I do not see any appeal or practicality to modules. They remind me of the similarly-named Phonebloks project, a concept that was explored and dropped by Google.

 

 

Ah, Phonebloks. Thank you for reminding me, I was starting to think that was a fever dream I had a few years back.

 

The difference is, today's smartphones all have basically the same parts... WiFi, Bluetooth, a touch screen, and so on. The actual need to customize it is very low. Yes, maybe someone wants a headphone jack on their iPhone 7, or misses the keyboard from their old Blackberry, but in the grand scheme of things, these are problems that can be addressed without resorting to Lego phones. There's a shocking number of people who don't even care if their phone runs iOS or Android.

 

But class consoles, as evidenced by the wide variety of knockoff hardware, seem to defy the "one size fits all" mentality. Some want original hardware. Some want PCs. Some want Retrons. This hobby is very nitpicky. I think it's a holdover from the days when a console was what it was, and you didn't dare ask for something different because it just wasn't going to be made. Now that new options exist, we want something that can cater to our every whim.

 

Take me, for example. I have no need for another NES or Genesis. I'm perfectly happy with my original hardware. I find it slightly annoying that most clones focus on those two systems, when they're the systems I'm least likely to buy in clone form. However, I do have an Atari 2600 that I don't hook up because it's a pain in the butt. My SegaCD is broken. I have some CD-i games that I've wanted to try, but don't think I'll enjoy enough to warrant buying and storing a console. I've been warming to the TurboGrafx-16 lately. So it stands to reason that I'd be interested in a system that played 2600, CD-i, SegaCD, and TG16 games. Of course, it's unreasonable to ever expect a system like that to come to market, but if it's modular, suddenly this absurd concept has merit. Heck, just look at the announcement of any clone system.... the comments always read like a wishlist for systems too obscure to warrant inclusion. "Why can't you support NGPC? Or Atari 5200?" And so on.

 

That isn't to say that I think Retroblox is going to deliver this. We're a long way away from that kind of confidence. I'm just saying the attention they're getting (which honestly isn't much... yet) is there because of people like me.

[cybercylon]

As someone said... if this is nothing more than a Retron 5 that now supports some CD based games and has some other features that the Retron 5 and Retro Freak do not have, then I'd rather they be up front about what they are doing. I don't understand the more technical posts completely, but I get enough that I highly doubt they are writing everything from the ground up. I am skeptical because that is a big effort even if the people involved are doing it full time.

 

So if they are using code from other people's efforts, get permission, be honest about what you are making, and be done with it. I would have no problems with that approach; I am sure there are people that would benefit from having some means to play some of the older CD based systems on more modern hardware with HDMI out. Maybe it will be over priced, but buyers can decide that.

 

As it stands though, there is a lot of vagueness and what looks like some smoke and mirrors. Unnecessary if the goal is to make a "better" Retron 5, Retro Freak, whatever. So some suspicion is added to my skepticism. Maybe I will be proven wrong and will get the egg on my face, but magic beans indeed. The last time those magic beans were used by someone, there was nothing but a lot of hot air produced....

[Andromeda Stardust]

I got a leak of pricing at $200 and $50 per module. The online store would be cool, but I doubt there would be tens of thousands of users to get a decent amount of sales.

That's definitely better. Does it come with one module out of the gate?

[keepdreamin]

here's a mildly entertaining challenge. Try to think of really good, high quality products, that replace a series of consonants at the end of a word in the name (or alternate in a different one) with a x, or z etc.. and don't scream "Seen on TV" trash.

Edited February 10, 2017 by keepdreamin