Retroblox

[Andromeda Stardust]

I don't see much easy way to do this stuff without at a minimum totally rewriting your emulator core- this definitely is not going to be happening here if they are hoping to run more than a few systems in any reasonable time period. This is IF the idea will work, and honestly I think it is all a pipe dream.

Why not write an FPGA emulator? Load the FPGA emulator on the ARM, then load "cores" from your core store into the emulated FPGA!

 

Here's an example of an ARM CPU running some of Kevtris fine FPGA cores through emulation...

 

 

[Gentlegamer]

Why not write an FPGA emulator? Load the FPGA emulator on the ARM, then load "cores" from your core store into the emulated FPGA!

 

Here's an example of an ARM CPU running some of Kevtris fine FPGA cores through emulation...

 

 

 

That's amazing!

[Newsdee]

Why not write an FPGA emulator? Load the FPGA emulator on the ARM, then load "cores" from your core store into the emulated FPGA!

 

There was a guy that was trying to write Pong and similar games using a transistor-level emulator. But he didnt get much running:

https://sourceforge.net/p/dice/wiki/Home/

[Keatah]

I thought that was rather complete and expanded to include other pong-type systems as well, as of version 0.9..

[MagnaRyuu]

My biggest issue with this system's design is the module aspect. Why not just stick with a cd based system, focus on that and make it work. Why the need for the cartridge modules? The modules just add in more components that can fail quickly or just not work from the beginning.

[keepdreamin]

My biggest issue with this system's design is the module aspect. Why not just stick with a cd based system, focus on that and make it work. Why the need for the cartridge modules?

 

They have that, it's called a laptop,computer etc..

[kevtris]

Yes, I know that, the access time for those old cartridge interface is way slower than modern system RAM access time (I think I addressed it in an earlier post) but my point is that there isn't much things that can be 'rewrote from scratch' because software emulation always fundamentally work the same way and this cannot be changed so, unless I'm missing something, I don't see any other ways than naively patching cartridge access functions in emulator code.

 

Indeed, the first thing that ANY emulator does is to emulate the native CPU, which will continuously fetch instructions from cartridge ROM to decode them, then eventually do more access (read/write) to cartridge area. You cannot change that, it already syncs to cartridge every single instructions, it's just that since ROM is copied in system RAM, this is quite fast but this will however result in a huge bottleneck if you start being locked to external hardware access timings for every instructions, and a lot of potentially wasted host CPU cycles that are needed for emulating the rest of the console hardware.

 

I agree with you that this also goes even madder when it comes to on-board co-processors or DSPs since they will run at their own speed (i.e the original speed) so the whole emulated hardware will need to keep in sync with that process.

 

Well you'd have to totally change how a typical emulator is written, so it runs 1 cycle at a time, vs. a scanline at a time (which is very common since it vastly increases efficiency of the code and performance). And now you're stuck running a "realtime" application that cannot multitask at all or perform any context switching unless you want the game to stall and/or crash (if the cart reads are interrupted too long on some carts). This isn't terribly feasible if you want to run multiple emulators without a huge code investment, provided there's even enough time to do a cycle at a time emulation without interruptions or running too long on one cycle.

[+frankodragon]

For a minute there I thought this thread was about Roblox.

[Keatah]

My biggest issue with this system's design is the module aspect. Why not just stick with a cd based system, focus on that and make it work. Why the need for the cartridge modules? The modules just add in more components that can fail quickly or just not work from the beginning.

They have that, it's called a laptop,computer etc..

 

Yes. And while the words "laptop" and "PC" sound pedestrian, lame, and scream "everyday appliance" - please recognize and consider that you have a retrogaming powerhouse in a small package.

 

It comes with a screen, stereo sound , hdmi, usb, keyboard, cpu, memory, and hundreds of billions of bytes of storage. All wired up and tested. All ready to go. A reliable package that can be purchased from a thousand different retailers worldwide. Or even assembled by you if you're so inclined. No kickstarter necessary!

 

Not only that, it's fully updateable and fully customizable by you. Emulators range from the KIM-1 & SYM-1 all the way through PS1. You are definitely covered.

 

And ONE huge often overlooked advantage involving updates to a PC-based emulator box is that you can update your software on system-by system basis. One week you might update the Atari 400/800 emulator, the next might be a SNES update. All the while not having had touched the Vectrex or Bally Astrocade systems for months. It's all your choice and under your control.

 

Don't let the fact that these "kickstarter systems" use open hardware and are based off R-Pi and similar fool you. As soon as anything custom comes into play, like adapters and modules, you're locked in. With these proprietary kickstarter systems you typically have only one source of updates, and that's the original developer.

 

That lame-o lame-o boring pc thing? Yeh that hot-n-heavy beast, its just so versatile and customizable! Don't ever forget that!

Edited February 14, 2017 by Keatah

[Keatah]

For a minute there I thought this thread was about Roblox.

 

It's a goddamned free-for-all. We're talking about everything here!

[Keatah]

My biggest issue with this system's design is the module aspect. Why not just stick with a cd based system, focus on that and make it work. Why the need for the cartridge modules? The modules just add in more components that can fail quickly or just not work from the beginning.

 

To answer this directly, I believe it has to do with an undefined future, keeping the system open and allowing new things to be plugged into it. It would take too long to do it right and all at once. Piecemeal, ya'know?

[zeromus]

I'm more interested in supposing they're not flat-out lying about "hybrid emulation" and figuring out how they might can pull this off, instead of figuring out why they can't. "Synchronization is hard" doesn't cut the mustard, and "systems timing is unreliable" doesn't make sense. Are you telling me you can't setup a realtime kernel and configure an ARM system to run code out of a non-cached region, or alternatively, reconfigure the cache to be TCM instead and run out of there? Nintendo's made a lot of games that run at 60fps steady on ARM systems, including emulators!

First of all, "Full hardware compatibility" is obviously a lie. So reckoning backwards from that to the impossibility of doing what it would take to achieve full hardware compatibility isn't useful.

So let's stipulate that they're not beholden to USB timing shenanigans for reading their pads, because why not GPIOs? That's how it works on the game consoles, approximately. And it doesn't matter anyway: simply have one thread continually reading the pad input and parking it in buffers for the main emulation thread to pick up at the moment it needs it. That doesn't introduce any latency beyond the GPIOs (nobody can detect it) or beyond USB (only wizards can detect it). They could do all this without compromising their claims of low latency, because marketers have that power.

Wait states on GPIOs for reading the cart -- I'm not an expert about this, but a few minutes of googling show ARM advertising GPIO "operating speed in excess of 150mhz" so this is almost sounding negligible.

How about having to turn the emulator inside out in order to be able to mix the rendering with the main thread cpu emulation? My answer is: don't. Read/evaluate the PPU and ship the bytes off to another buffer, to be rendered all at once or even pixel by pixel truly in parallel. Now, the latter isn't the easiest synchronization in the world, but it's still a relatively simple pattern since it's simply a reader and a writer.

We do have problems with situations where the cpu can read data back from the PPU or APU. Consider that the bulk of the novelty in this emulator. In both cases only a subset of the emulation needs to be done on the CPU thread (on the NES, only sprite 0 at a limited level; and the APU.. well.. maybe about 80% of it needs to be done there. That's starting to feel like enough logic that it may need to be broken into a several-stage state machine with only one stage ticked per clock out to the cart.

Now's a good point to mention that this isn't such mad science that you couldn't prototype it on a workstation and IDE of your choice, thus accelerating development. You would only need to make sure you weren't busting your CPU time budgets once the code compiles and runs for ARM. What's more, they could have developed it before even having the hardware ready, given certain assumptions. Any of us could make this emulator right now as a proof of concept before dedicating our careers to getting it put in HW.

Business considerations making all of these emulators in time -- ahh, but they can slip on shipping a few modules and as long as the product is real and proven, they can take some heat and survive. That's the real power of the modular design.

What concerns me more is why a system built this way would have any provision for dumping and storing ROMs. Or even how it would do that -- it can't be reliably, and it adds an unneeded piece to their mountain of tasks. Maybe it's a value-add for convenience, but their userbase likes plugging carts, so I don't get it. Maybe it's so they can support patches, translations, etc.

Edited February 14, 2017 by zeromus

[Tusecsy]

If they reinvented the wheel then why is their Chameleon 2.0 demo box simply just running obviously emulated games with a fancy interface? Why not show off the harder to emulate games like Starfox or Sega CD?

 

The fact that Tekken 3 is just a fake CD spin so they can pretend its playing off the CD should be proof enough. This project REEKS of bullshit. Not to mention Sony crushing them if they ever actually try to release it with PS1 support.

 

If you put money towards the kickstarter of this thing you're nothing but a fool, and a fool and his money are easily parted.

 

Gamester81 needs to apologize for pushing this pile of shit, he's obviously just a gullible person (cough Coleco), so I guess I shouldn't hate on him too much? But for those who are actually dumber than he is, I feel bad for them getting ripped off on this pile of pipe dream garbage.

 

And if you're reading this post a year from now, told ya so.

Edited February 15, 2017 by Tusecsy

[+frankodragon]

To me, it just smells Coleco Chameleon all over again. And I've seen some videos about it but I don't see no cartridges inserted into the unit- only CD-ROMs- if they're actually un-pirated versions of them.

[Tusecsy]

The one thing that really stuck out to me is how they're going to emulate it if it's loaded on the system, but somehow use the actual cartridge when its plugged in to "hybrid" it. Who actually buys this verbal diarrhea, seriously.

[zeromus]

 

The only problem with that is you can clearly see that Tekken was already installed on the system before they inserted the disc when he scrolls down in the menus. They even acknowledge that the games listed there are ones they've already backed up. lol

No, you can clearly see that Tekken was listed as a "continue playing" which I guess means it was savestated. When you launch that 'tile' it'd have to tell you to insert the matching disc (which it couldn't efficiently positively confirm, thus permitting the possibility of later dysfunction). This isn't how I would have done the UI.. I'd prompt you to load the state (if there was one) when you launch the game, and the "now playing" (not yet playing) "tab" that they launch tekken from definitely doesn't offer that option. So I can fault them for poor choices in UI design, but this evidence isn't automatically damning.

 

It's worth pointing out though that the "hybrid emulation" would preclude some games from running from savestates. For instance, NES mappers almost universally have a bunch of volatile state which can't be known to the "hybrid emulator". So if we see this thing savestating NES games, we'll know it's just vanilla emulation. Notably, I did not see any NES games savestated, or in pictures, etc. in their UI.

 

If these guys arent making a more clear distinction between "hybrid emulation" and vanilla emulation from backups, then they're either over-hyping hybrid emulation or confusing their users with bad UI. If it's bad UI, I'd suggest they have a separate "hybrid mode" which whisks away the other UI and just shows what's inserted, and only what you can do with it. Which would include dumping.

 

It is notable that tekken doesn't show the PSX bios splash stuff. Seems like that would have been an awful lot of work for some busy guys who should actually be thrilled to show an actual boot splash there to have hacked an LLE bios (necessary for anything like good compatibility) to skip the splash. So I guess it's only running with someone else's HLE'd bios now, which should in turn tell you something about which emulators it's using and what their compatibility level is.

Edited February 15, 2017 by zeromus

[cybercylon]

Even if the ideas are legit and they have something working, I think all of these promises are a bit much for a project manager and one software engineer.

 

I asked about what a project manager does, and my hunch is right. One could be a PM for major game franchise X, but doesn't necessarily equate to being able to pull this off.

 

Could be wrong, but my guess at best, this is just going to be some Retron 5 type system with a few more whistles and happens to have module to play CD games

[Andromeda Stardust]

There was a guy that was trying to write Pong and similar games using a transistor-level emulator. But he didnt get much running:

https://sourceforge.net/p/dice/wiki/Home/

Man, PONG emulation, holy crap, dude, stop the presses! In all seriousness, it be nice as a historical curiosity, but gameplay wise, Video Olympics / PONG Sports for the VCS trumps the original. I mean look at all those variations!

[godslabrat]

 

Could be wrong, but my guess at best, this is just going to be some Retron 5 type system with a few more whistles and happens to have module to play CD games

 

If that were the case, it would actually be pretty cool. A CD-oriented Retron-ish product has a lot of appeal and there is a demand for such a box. If RB brought it to market, it would sell. The problem I have is that their overly-ambitious promises in other areas call into question their integrity project-wide. If they're willing to misrepresent their efforts in one area, I can't have faith in them to deliver anywhere else, not even for the basics-- because if they had the product we wanted and talent to deliver, Retroblox wouldn't need to dance and shuffle.

 

Merely delivering yet another Retron would be a best-case scenario, IMO. It's still very likely someone will open that black case up and find a DVR card inside.

[Flojomojo]

If that were the case, it would actually be pretty cool. A CD-oriented Retron-ish product has a lot of appeal and there is a demand for such a box. If RB brought it to market, it would sell.

 

I don't get what you're saying AT ALL here.

 

How do you know there is demand for such a box? How do you know what people would be willing to pay?

 

Help me understand the appeal of a fragile, spinning CD instead of an ISO file, in an age when storage is cheap and plentiful.

 

I can ALMOST see the appeal of certain kinds of cartridges, especially those with custom hardware or battery saved games. It's not for me, but I can see how some people might swing that way.

 

I see ZERO appeal in preserving physical CD playback, when they're easily duplicated or ripped using everyday consumer tech.

 

Is it about easy plug-n-play preservation for childhood memories? A way to replace busted old hardware that won't spin discs anymore? A way to hook up the same to HDMI displays?

[HardZero]

 

I see ZERO appeal in preserving physical CD playback, when they're easily duplicated or ripped using everyday consumer tech.

 

Yeah. I kinda like having the original discs but I would rather have a burned disc or an ISO in an emulator if I have the option. It seems nice, but pretty stupid.

[zeromus]

It's about the tactile feel of a cherished possession. It's about showing your reverence in a ritual way (try to set aside any scoffing at reverence undergird by emulation. That's a theological subject.) Rituals are supposed to be inconvenient. It's the out-of-the-wayness that makes it special. It's about following the same steps youve stepped every day since you were a child, inserting the disc and reading the manual while the game spins up. All your talk of convenience amounts to "wouldn't it be more more convenient to look at pictures of mecca for a couple of hours"? or "hey punk rockers, you could sweat a lot less if you just put a tape in a boombox and let that play". Museums and TBs of isos preserve. These guys re-enact.

 

All that is a separate question from how he knows what the market is, which is a good question. That there's a demand is indisputable. The rest is questionable.

Edited February 15, 2017 by zeromus

[roland p]

 

I don't get what you're saying AT ALL here.

 

How do you know there is demand for such a box? How do you know what people would be willing to pay?

 

Help me understand the appeal of a fragile, spinning CD instead of an ISO file, in an age when storage is cheap and plentiful.

 

I can ALMOST see the appeal of certain kinds of cartridges, especially those with custom hardware or battery saved games. It's not for me, but I can see how some people might swing that way.

 

I see ZERO appeal in preserving physical CD playback, when they're easily duplicated or ripped using everyday consumer tech.

 

Is it about easy plug-n-play preservation for childhood memories? A way to replace busted old hardware that won't spin discs anymore? A way to hook up the same to HDMI displays?

 

 

Just guessing, but for people who are less tech-savvy, it would be easier to buy a 2nd hand game, pop in the cd instead of downloading / copying an iso.

 

But those people would probably not be aware of the existence of such device.

[Flojomojo]

It's about the tactile feel of a cherished possession. It's about showing your reverence in a ritual way (try to set aside any scoffing at reverence undergird by emulation. That's a theological subject.) Rituals are supposed to be inconvenient. It's the out-of-the-wayness that makes it special. It's about following the same steps youve stepped every day since you were a child, inserting the disc and reading the manual while the game spins up. All your talk of convenience amounts to "wouldn't it be more more convenient to look at pictures of mecca for a couple of hours"? or "hey punk rockers, you could sweat a lot less if you just put a tape in a boombox and let that play". Museums and TBs of isos preserve. These guys re-enact.

This makes me smile. I suppose regression is to be expected when we're talking about retro stuff.

 

"These guys re-enact."

 

I used to think that games were the electric trains of our generation. Maybe that's still true, but there's quite a bit of the Civil War re-enactor in the "true retro gamer."

 

Clearly, I'm just a farb.

[keepdreamin]

It's about the tactile feel of a cherished possession. It's about showing your reverence in a ritual way (try to set aside any scoffing at reverence undergird by emulation. That's a theological subject.) Rituals are supposed to be inconvenient. It's the out-of-the-wayness that makes it special. It's about following the same steps youve stepped every day since you were a child, inserting the disc and reading the manual while the game spins up. All your talk of convenience amounts to "wouldn't it be more more convenient to look at pictures of mecca for a couple of hours"? or "hey punk rockers, you could sweat a lot less if you just put a tape in a boombox and let that play". Museums and TBs of isos preserve. These guys re-enact.

 

All that is a separate question from how he knows what the market is, which is a good question. That there's a demand is indisputable. The rest is questionable.

Quite the ramble there. Too bad a "ritual" of running PS one games from the day of old didn't involve using some aftermarket emulation console.

 

You don't see folks with massive CD collections still carrying around discman, do you? Nope, cause MP3s are easy to deal with.

 

ISOs are a bit more complicated, obviously, but if folks put in the time to figure it out you can be sure they'd be switching over as fast as the MP3 transition.

 

Anyone who's got a retro console fitted with an optical drive emulator sure ain't missing the grabbing a CD ritual