Retroblox

[Newsdee]

then digitally processed using a line tripler and frame buffer if necessary (if done properly, only adds maximum 16ms). The conversion to analog video then being upscaled to HD would be bypassed. The new Gamerztech HD clone uses a composite NOAC chip plus an off the shelf upscaler and it's awful.

If I'm not mistaken the Gamerztech is upscaling composite video to HDMI (in fact, as far as I know all cheap Famiclone SoACs are hardwired to output composite video only from the chip). I've also seen some second-rate modders offering cheap HDMI support for NES with the same kind of trick. Ironically it's often still better than using composite directly, just because it bypasses the TV's circuits. How bad must those be for a cheap upscaler to beat them!

 

RGB is a completely different story, with several good upscalers out there that give you HDMI. You get 16ms (1 to 1.5 frames) of lag usually due to the usage of a freamebuffer in the pipeline, but the OSCC (for example) does direct line doubling/tripling and has less lag than the Framemeister:

http://retrorgb.com/upscalercompare.html

 

Obviously the catch here is that the (almost) lag-free upscalers for 240p video aren't cheap. If you are in control of the video (eg. FPGA), line doubling can be done internally and you can generate a 480p signal. This is what the MiST does, giving the option to use a VGA upscaler instead. Recently somebody made a small mod to output Component video instead (with a small adapter cable) which apparently works better with cheap upscalers or even direct TV inputs. Either way both routes are more flexible than HDMI.

 

Basically any FPGA solution that outputs RGB is (or should be) inherently lag-free at 240p or 480p. Then it's just a question of what you choose to upscale.

[Andromeda Stardust]

If I'm not mistaken the Gamerztech is upscaling composite video to HDMI (in fact, as far as I know all cheap Famiclone SoACs are hardwired to output composite video only from the chip). I've also seen some second-rate modders offering cheap HDMI support for NES with the same kind of trick. Ironically it's often still better than using composite directly, just because it bypasses the TV's circuits. How bad must those be for a cheap upscaler to beat them!

 

RGB is a completely different story, with several good upscalers out there that give you HDMI. You get 16ms (1 to 1.5 frames) of lag usually due to the usage of a freamebuffer in the pipeline, but the OSCC (for example) does direct line doubling/tripling and has less lag than the Framemeister:

http://retrorgb.com/upscalercompare.html

 

Obviously the catch here is that the (almost) lag-free upscalers for 240p video aren't cheap. If you are in control of the video (eg. FPGA), line doubling can be done internally and you can generate a 480p signal. This is what the MiST does, giving the option to use a VGA upscaler instead. Recently somebody made a small mod to output Component video instead (with a small adapter cable) which apparently works better with cheap upscalers or even direct TV inputs. Either way both routes are more flexible than HDMI.

 

Basically any FPGA solution that outputs RGB is (or should be) inherently lag-free at 240p or 480p. Then it's just a question of what you choose to upscale.

You missed the point. Create an ASIC that outputs digital signal at native pixels rather than analog, and upscale that instead of janky composite. Absolutely no analog-> digital conversions, but a coprocessor takes over part of conditioning the output signal to HDMI. With RGB, you are still going from digital logic to analog and back to digital. The idea is to remove this conversion entirely from the chain, having the FPGA output some pixel native digital signal which gets upscaled by dedicated hardware in the parent console. Hybrid emulation is still performed by an FPGA, but the LE count is not much smaller and cost effective now that a traditional CPU/GPU combo handles the upscaling. And said CPU also performs emulation duties on the CD systems or cart systems too complex (N64?) to emulate via FPGA. Done properly, there might be 16ms lag to GPU framebuffer, but it's significantly faster than traditional emulation or analog to digital upscalers.

 

By embedding much of the FPGA function into the parent console, you reduce the cost of modules. Or the module could bear the FPGA. Getting ASICs made would also work but you'd lose the ability for bug fixes. And both Analogue and RetroUSB FPGA NES shipped with minor bugs, so migrating to a hybrid FPGA+ARM+GPU system would allow for "hybrid emulation" to work in theory, in addition to traditionally emulated CD systems. I don't see him pulling it off with FPGA alone, but 240p signals in 100% digital domain sent to GPU for scaling could work. Ideally, integer multiply the in the vertical domain 3X to 720p or 480p and bilinear scale in the horizontal domain to 960h (720p mode) or 720h (480p mode) during HDMI conversion. You'll get analog-like blending in horizontal and discrete scanlines in vertical, like a real CRT does.

[Newsdee]

You missed the point. Create an ASIC that outputs digital signal at native pixels rather than analog, and upscale that instead of janky composite. Absolutely no analog-> digital conversions, but a coprocessor takes over part of conditioning the output signal to HDMI.

I got your point but I don't think a (decent) DAC is too much of an issue or source of lag. What exactly is the native pixel signal? As far as I know many systems use RGB internally anyway.

 

To my knowledge the issue is normally the pixel clock frequency which is more lenient on VGA than HDMI (but still pretty limited compared to what a CRT can handle). You can manage to get close to 60hz by adjusting internal CPU clock but it can have compatibility side effects.

[Newsdee]

To get back on the thread topic, I'm not sure Hybrid Emulation refers to FPGAs. They seem to claim a fast enough processor can interact with the cart. Let's see a prototype to support such claims...

Edited February 23, 2017 by Newsdee

[Tusecsy]

To get back on the thread topic, I'm not sure Hybrid Emulation refers to FPGAs. They seem to claim a fast enough processor can interact with the cart. Let's see a prototype to support such claims...

We will see no such thing its a buncha BS. They said in the gameshill81 video that they were developing a PC Engine FPGA and finished it but along the way discovered "Hybrid Emulation". If they actually had a working PC Engine CD FPGA wtf didn't they put it to market? Oh ya that's right....another lie. So basically there is zero chance the thing is any sort of FPGA, even by their accounts.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Tusecsy

[Newsdee]

They were developing a PC Engine FPGA and finished it but along the way discovered "Hybrid Emulation". If they actually had a working PC Engine CD FPGA wtf didn't they put it to market?

FPGA PC Engine (no CD) exists as an open-source core. Maybe they planned to expand that but realized its very hard unless you are an experienced hardware developer. Anyway, no FPGA and vague details with marketing buzzwords doesn't bode well...

Edited February 23, 2017 by Newsdee

[Andromeda Stardust]

To get back on the thread topic, I'm not sure Hybrid Emulation refers to FPGAs. They seem to claim a fast enough processor can interact with the cart. Let's see a prototype to support such claims...

Either they've got some FPGA guy on their team, or the "hybrid emulation" BS is snake oil. They will announce this for the Kickstarter, then backpedal sometime prior to release and do a YAEB (yet another emulation box), possibly with an Ouya-like storefront that gets dick support. Even if this is the case, their YEAB will still be worth it to some for it's inclusion of a CDROM drive.

 

Oh, and Lythium is a YEAB too, as far as I'm concerned.

[Tusecsy]

FPGA PC Engine (no CD) exists as an open-source core. Maybe they planned to expand that but realized its very hard unless you are an experienced hardware developer. Anyway, no FPGA and vague details with marketing buzzwords doesn't bode well...

 

Ya nobody cares about plain old PC Engine FPGA, PC Engines are cheap. It's the PCE-CD we all want, and they said they were developing their own FPGA.

 

Either they've got some FPGA guy on their team, or the "hybrid emulation" BS is snake oil. They will announce this for the Kickstarter, then backpedal sometime prior to release and do a YAEB (yet another emulation box), possibly with an Ouya-like storefront that gets dick support. Even if this is the case, their YEAB will still be worth it to some for it's inclusion of a CDROM drive.

 

Oh, and Lythium is a YEAB too, as far as I'm concerned.

 

They literally said "it is not an FPGA". So ya, it's snake oil.

[godslabrat]

Either they've got some FPGA guy on their team, or the "hybrid emulation" BS is snake oil. They will announce this for the Kickstarter, then backpedal sometime prior to release and do a YAEB (yet another emulation box), possibly with an Ouya-like storefront that gets dick support. Even if this is the case, their YEAB will still be worth it to some for it's inclusion of a CDROM drive.

 

Oh, and Lythium is a YEAB too, as far as I'm concerned.

Lythium at least isn't setting the expectation that it is anything else.

[Tusecsy]

Lythium at least isn't setting the expectation that it is anything else.

 

There's definitely a market for a proper Retron 5 style box with a CD-Drive, I have no faults with anybody producing one. The Pi isn't great and a full PC can be unwieldy. I have no problem at all with these devices for the average person. It's stolen software and bullshit claims I have a problem with.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Tusecsy

[TPA5]

Boy, I missed this thread somehow. And I didn't feel like reading 23 pages of stuff.

 

I'll just say that if it does everything they say it will do, I'd buy it. If it doesn't do it, I wouldn't buy it.

[keepdreamin]

Boy, I missed this thread somehow. And I didn't feel like reading 23 pages of stuff.

 

I'll just say that if it does everything they say it will do, I'd buy it. If it doesn't do it, I wouldn't buy it.

 

Why do you need it? Does a PC not cover the consoles listed? Do you plan to stop using the actual hardware? Is it simply an impulse buy?

[Newsdee]

Why do you need it? Does a PC not cover the consoles listed? Do you plan to stop using the actual hardware? Is it simply an impulse buy?

Portability, aesthetics, convenience. The Retro Freak without the cart connector (i.e. internal module) is smaller than a Raspberry Pi box. And there is something to be said for devices you can just use without much setup.

 

You may rightly ask why not get an Ouya, but I think those aren't produced any more.

Edited February 23, 2017 by Newsdee

[keepdreamin]

Ok, but this won't be the last of these consoles. There will probably be another one a few months down the road with a slightly different form factor. How many do you folks plan on buying?

[Newsdee]

Ok, but this won't be the last of these consoles. There will probably be another one a few months down the road with a slightly different form factor. How many do you folks plan on buying?

They will need to have something different to get my dollar, for sure. More power, support for more systems, CD, etc. A nice UI goes a long way too, the NES mini did a great job on making save states intuitive to use.

 

Personally I'm more interested in FPGA devices now, which do things PCs cannot do out of the box (interface with older hardware, lower power requirements, etc.). But these still have a long way to go.

 

The market is quickly becoming saturated though.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Newsdee

[Keatah]

Which FPGA computers run emulators that let you access vintage printers or vintage external modems?

[Flojomojo]

Which FPGA computers run emulators that let you access vintage printers or vintage external modems?

Is there a market for such things? Besides yourself, of course.

 

I don't even like modern printers, and am filled with nothing but disgust and loathing for "vintage" printers.

 

To say nothing about modems, bleargh.

[keepdreamin]

someone should start a kickstarter for a rubbermaid style bin custom molded for housing unused clone consoles. Imagine your Ouya, various hyperkins, retrofreak, retroblox, etc.. all nestled together cozy like in the back of a closet. maybe make it a modular storage system to hold all the console modules.

[Tusecsy]

I don't know how you can call the marketplace crowded. There isn't a single all-in-one device that emulates PCE-CD and Sega CD to 1080p, nor one that doesn't look like it was designed by a 5 year old. A sort of bloombox looking thing but with all the slots built in, an SD slot, and very solid emulators would be a pretty big deal even at this point.

 

Of course most of us in the hardcore retro realm are into FPGA, but lets not forget there are other people out there who just want a plug 'n play all-in-one device that actually works.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Tusecsy

[Andromeda Stardust]

someone should start a kickstarter for a rubbermaid style bin custom molded for housing unused clone consoles. Imagine your Ouya, various hyperkins, retrofreak, retroblox, etc.. all nestled together cozy like in the back of a closet. maybe make it a modular storage system to hold all the console modules.

put em in a cigar box!

[Kismet]

 

There's definitely a market for a proper Retron 5 style box with a CD-Drive, I have no faults with anybody producing one. The Pi isn't great and a full PC can be unwieldy. I have no problem at all with these devices for the average person. It's stolen software and bullshit claims I have a problem with.

 

Eh, no.

 

Consider the following:

 

1. A student with little money is going to university, packing three of their childhood consoles to school and the games probably fills an entire suitcase, that suitcase costs $50 to take on an airplane. Plus there is the risk of it being lost, stolen or damaged in the process.

 

The solution here is to replace all of that with one device. My sister did this with her music collection, she ripped all the CD's and then took only the computer to university. She left the Playstation and SNES at home. For the "travelling light" person, being able to store everything in one small box (even if the emulation is poor) is better than trying to take all the original equipment.

 

2. A collector of classic games, the convenience if being able to play games (usually from an expensive flash cart/FPGA cart) is worth being able to preserve the original cartridges and reduce wear on taking them out. Only when you're doing preservation efforts do you take the physical carts out (eg dumping or recording, taking apart to photograph.) Likewise a FPGA console that can play the games exactly like the original hardware is preferable to a software emulation that is hobbled by the processor power, or lazy one-size-fits-most solutions like libretro. So the collector will likely buy most of these emulation devices just to have and compare, but they will ultimately only use the ones that work the best, and "hybrid emulation" seems like snake oil to them. If someone comes out with a new libretro system every year, the collectors will get rightfully mad over seeing the exact same thing in a different shell over and over again.

 

3. The pirate. The pirate owns little to no games, doesn't care how they acquire them, and has no way of verifying the accuracy of such games, because they've never played on real hardware. These are the kinds of people these software emulation devices are targeted at, because they know the pirate will just side-load their own games. The physical cartridge slots or cd-rom drives are just there to give it a look of legitimacy. The Pirate is most likely going to invest in their PC, or invest in a stand-alone emulator device regardless of the accuracy just so that they can use their computer for other things.

 

4. The LP/Youtuber/Streamer. From a legal perspective, you should only be recording games that you own the physical media for. In practice most people play them on a software emulator because hardware FPGA emulators have not been available until last year. Even then the recorder is more likely to play a game from a flash cart if they are just casually playing the game so that they can save-state the SRAM to avoid having to backtrack through the game if they make a mistake.

 

One of the things you do to prep a LP or a stream is pre-play the game and make copies of the save game at various points so that if you screw up, you don't have to redo the entire recording. If you're reviewing a game, you make need to make multiple takes and thus it's easier to pre-record the video rather than live.

 

In theory a software emulator that supports save-states is preferred to do video recording, but unless the emulator is high accuracy (eg Higan) in the first place, it will be immediately obvious when a video is recorded from an emulator, and hence these libretro devices.

 

The real risk that is going to happen sooner than later is that people will record video of games, and not cite how it's played (to avoid DMCA takedowns), thus it will be up to people with the real hardware to upload their own videos of how the game is supposed to look and sound. Preservation is going to become more important than ever. It's too bad there are too few people who know how the games are supposed to look AND how to record video properly.

 

5. Electricity is expensive.

The final, and least justified use of these devices are to save energy. The FPGA IIRC uses less energy than the Retropie, but the Retropie uses less power than the desktop, in which a desktop PC might consume 70 to 300 watts just to emulate one device. The Retropie might be between 1 and 10 watts, and the FPGA would depend on what size the FPGA is. The original device's power bricks might be around 20 watts.

 

These are estimates as I have yet to see a controlled test.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Kismet

[Newsdee]

Which FPGA computers run emulators that let you access vintage printers or vintage external modems?

If this is a serious question, it doesn't need emulators.

 

There are upper scale FPGA recreations of some computers that have a full suite of original ports. Like the Suska for the ST: http://experiment-s.de/en/

 

The MiST can't connect to printers but can do Ethernet on the Atari and Amiga cores:

http://youtu.be/iXxGhNXtb54

 

It can also be setup to use serial NULL-modem communication (by disconnecting the MIDI extension). Somebody hooked it up a Raspberry Pi:

http://www.minimig.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=655

 

These are just some examples, but basically FPGA can be wired to old and new peripherals if they provide the connections on the PCB.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Newsdee

[Keatah]

Is there a market for such things? Besides yourself, of course.

 

I don't even like modern printers, and am filled with nothing but disgust and loathing for "vintage" printers.

 

To say nothing about modems, bleargh.

 

I've been asked several times how to get PrintShop to print through emulators. And while the modems may be more niche, there was this guy that wanted to control a real serial modem through emulation for testing his BBS.

 

Virtual ][ for the MAC does the printing part nicely by making a PDF you can dump to a modern printer. It essentially emulates an Epson MX-80 F/T w/GrafTrax III dot matrix printer and a Grapper+ parallel interface card. The high-end home standard of the day.

 

Don't quite understand your hate of vintage printers. I'm rather the opposite and cherish my MX-80. Had a lot of good times with that printer! And I equally like vintage modems, all the way from 45.5 Baudot through Bell 103 110/300 and only stopping at the latest 56.6 Corporate analog modems from U.S. Robotics/3COM.

 

I generally have no interest in DSL modems, that's a half-assed converted-to-consumer product popular during the dot-com era.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Keatah

[Tusecsy]

I'm new here but pretty sure I can speak for everyone when I say please take irrelevant worthless printer posts to a different thread.

 

@kismet

 

You have to be kidding me with that overwrought explanation of why you personally are poor and why you personally don't want one (neither do I btw). 200-300$ is not a lot of money, college or otherwise. FPGA's do not exist for anything past 8-bit atm, and for the forseeable future, so your second point is mute. Everyone in 2017 is "the pirate", so that point is stupid also. "The Pirate" SCAAAARRRSGAAARRRDDD!!! would love to have a nice retron-style system with an SD slot. Maybe .1% of users actually care about streaming to youtube so another pointless point. And if you're arguing electricity cost is a factor for using FPGA, you really need to get a job and probably shouldn't be involved in retro gaming anyway.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Tusecsy

[Keatah]

5. Electricity is expensive.

The final, and least justified use of these devices are to save energy. The FPGA IIRC uses less energy than the Retropie, but the Retropie uses less power than the desktop, in which a desktop PC might consume 70 to 300 watts just to emulate one device. The Retropie might be between 1 and 10 watts, and the FPGA would depend on what size the FPGA is. The original device's power bricks might be around 20 watts.

 

These are estimates as I have yet to see a controlled test.

 

Those are good estimates. Each configuration will be different.

 

One of my scrap i7 6700T rigs rings in at about 61W (depending how you round it) when running Tac/Scan through MAME, monitor included. CPU TDP is like 35W, in-game it's around 20W. So the paper specifications correlate nicely with practice.