Lythium "All In One" Retro Console - Development Post

[philyso]

 

To get a bit more technical, we will only add LibRetro cores that are GPL-compatible (most are). There will also be the ability to point the software to external emulators you install yourself.

 

All SNES and Genesis Libretro cores (namely Snes9x and all its variations, Picodrive and Genesis Plus GX) are not licensed under GPL and explicitly prohibit commercial use of their code.

 

Does this mean your 'console' will not be sold with SNES and Genesis support out of the box and will require buyers installing libretro compiled DLLs?

 

I'm not really sure about legal terms but couldn't advertising of SNES and Genesis emulation to sell a product eventually be considered as commercial use of said emulators?

Edited February 14, 2017 by philyso

[habbasi]

 

All SNES and Genesis Libretro cores (namely Snes9x and all its variations, Picodrive and Genesis Plus GX) are not licensed under GPL and explicitly prohibit commercial use of their code.

 

Does this mean your 'console' will not be sold with SNES and Genesis support out of the box and will require buyers installing libretro compiled DLLs?

 

I'm not really sure about legal terms but couldn't advertising of SNES and Genesis emulation to sell a product eventually be considered as commercial use of said emulators?

The bsnes core comes under the GPL license, and so will be included with our software.

 

For SEGA Genesis, you are correct. We cannot include the core directly with our software due to licensing restrictions, but we will try to provide a tool that will compile it and link it in directly from GitHub.

 

Edit: Of course, the fallback to use an external emulator will always be there.

Edited February 14, 2017 by habbasi

[Tanooki]

Seems like a deal breaker if you can't get the stuff running internally with no more effort than stuffing a cart into the slot. Most people aren't aware how or are unwilling to do more, and most of those also can not compile their own source either (throw me in with that.) If you're going to supply support for a system, you do it right and have it work out of the box no different than the original hardware did.

[habbasi]

Seems like a deal breaker if you can't get the stuff running internally with no more effort than stuffing a cart into the slot. Most people aren't aware how or are unwilling to do more, and most of those also can not compile their own source either (throw me in with that.) If you're going to supply support for a system, you do it right and have it work out of the box no different than the original hardware did.

The intent is to provide a single click solution that will do everything for you provided you have a network connection and a USB stick. And SEGA Genesis is the only console with that problem, all the others on the list will work fine out of the box.

 

Edit: We could put the core in but that would violate licenses. For this reason, to honor licensing agreements, we unfortunately have to introduce this slight detour.

Edited February 14, 2017 by habbasi

[Newsdee]

Isn't there another open source Genesis emulator? What about MAME?

 

The GP32/GP2X (pre-Android Linux handheld consoles) had a great homebrew community, this could be the case here if tools and APIs are easily available for it. Easier said than done though.

Edited February 14, 2017 by Newsdee

[Tanooki]

I guess it's honorable you'd want to honor the license, but personally having used ROMs and emulators for so long I have no issue owning a Retron5 knowing what Hyperkin did. I know that sounds bad and some won't agree, but if people were so intent on protecting their work they should put some effort into it other than a flimsy GPL warning on a doc file or website.

 

Perhaps an attempt to get a license for it could be in order, and if not there are many Genesis cores around, perhaps one would sell into it or profit share a tiny percentage to have it.

[habbasi]

Isn't there another open source Genesis emulator? What about MAME?

 

The GP32/GP2X (pre-Android Linux handheld consoles) had a great homebrew community, this could be the case here if tools and APIs are easily available for it. Easier said than done though.

 

I guess it's honorable you'd want to honor the license, but personally having used ROMs and emulators for so long I have no issue owning a Retron5 knowing what Hyperkin did. I know that sounds bad and some won't agree, but if people were so intent on protecting their work they should put some effort into it other than a flimsy GPL warning on a doc file or website.

 

Perhaps an attempt to get a license for it could be in order, and if not there are many Genesis cores around, perhaps one would sell into it or profit share a tiny percentage to have it.

Yes, there are open-source emulators and LibRetro cores for Genesis, but the license for these isn't GPL compatible, and so we cannot use them. Getting a license for these is tougher than it really sounds. Unlike commercial licenses, which are owned by a company which you would have to make a deal with, open source licenses cannot be changed without actually tracking down every single person who contributed to the project and getting them to either waive their rights or relicense it. Some of these people may be unreachable, and if their contribution to the project is more than a few lines of code, it may be impossible to work around it.

[BassGuitari]

Seems like a deal breaker if you can't get the stuff running internally with no more effort than stuffing a cart into the slot. Most people aren't aware how or are unwilling to do more, and most of those also can not compile their own source either (throw me in with that.) If you're going to supply support for a system, you do it right and have it work out of the box no different than the original hardware did.

 

 

I guess it's honorable you'd want to honor the license, but personally having used ROMs and emulators for so long I have no issue owning a Retron5 knowing what Hyperkin did. I know that sounds bad and some won't agree, but if people were so intent on protecting their work they should put some effort into it other than a flimsy GPL warning on a doc file or website.

 

Perhaps an attempt to get a license for it could be in order, and if not there are many Genesis cores around, perhaps one would sell into it or profit share a tiny percentage to have it.

 

C'mon man, quit being a hater.

[Tanooki]

I wouldn't say I'm a hater. I'm being a realist. Can you with all honesty say if you put a system out right now on the shelf that tried to sell as one point of it being a Sega Genesis, they'd not return that to the store once they found it it didn't work out of the box?

 

You buy a system, then get an instruction sheet of some sort that says, you go here, get these tools, compile yourself an emulator, then transfer that to the console so you can play 25-30 year old Sega games? Other than a few die hards, I don't think so. That's why I was going there with it as it's just a really stupid idea. Get your stuff lined up first so whatever you want to support works right out of the box or don't bother at all. Making people jump through hoops will make them jump right to a Retron 5, older clones, the AT Games turd box (or handheld), the RetroFreak, (if it happens) Retroblox, a Pi box, some other emulator on some format, or the original hardware. Any of that would be less annoying if it was ready to go as you turned it on.

[philyso]

I guess it's honorable you'd want to honor the license, but personally having used ROMs and emulators for so long I have no issue owning a Retron5 knowing what Hyperkin did.

 

AFAIK, Retron5 / Retrofreak software is based on an older version of Genesis Plus GX, when it was still under GPL. I think it was only missing Sega CD support compared to latest non-commercial version so it would not make much difference if you only support cartridges. They however used Snes9x-next which has always been non-commercial.

 

I know that sounds bad and some won't agree, but if people were so intent on protecting their work they should put some effort into it other than a flimsy GPL warning on a doc file or website.

You realize those software developers do not have the financial means to protect their license against those companies or any commercial entities, right? Or they are simply not aware their code is being used because it's often simpler not to tell anyone you are using open source stuff (until someone disassemble and analyze your software to find similarities with existing code).

 

Emulator authors are mostly expecting people to simply respect their work (which is often thousand of dev hours in case of emulators) and either respect the license of their software or contact them to get a commercial license agreement but sadly, those emulators are nowadays only seen by retrogaming entrepreneurs as convenient development cost savings so they generally have no plans to either spend money for retributing original devs work or time for contributing back to the original project.

 

I get it that many end-users are like you and do not care about emulator licensing 'crap' as long as they are not affected and their retrogaming needs are fulfilled but saying it's original devs fault is quite dishonest and hypocritical in my opinion.

 

The bsnes core comes under the GPL license, and so will be included with our software.

 

That would make it the first 'emulation box' (outside PC) that uses Bsnes for SNES emulation, which could indeed be quite interesting. It would however needs something stronger than a Celeron . Edited February 14, 2017 by philyso

[BassGuitari]

I wouldn't say I'm a hater. I'm being a realist. .

(It was a joke. You don't remember the Hater Brigaders over in the Chameleon thread? )

[Keatah]

I wouldn't say I'm a hater. I'm being a realist. Can you with all honesty say if you put a system out right now on the shelf that tried to sell as one point of it being a Sega Genesis, they'd not return that to the store once they found it it didn't work out of the box?

 

You buy a system, then get an instruction sheet of some sort that says, you go here, get these tools, compile yourself an emulator, then transfer that to the console so you can play 25-30 year old Sega games? Other than a few die hards, I don't think so. That's why I was going there with it as it's just a really stupid idea. Get your stuff lined up first so whatever you want to support works right out of the box or don't bother at all. Making people jump through hoops will make them jump right to a Retron 5, older clones, the AT Games turd box (or handheld), the RetroFreak, (if it happens) Retroblox, a Pi box, some other emulator on some format, or the original hardware. Any of that would be less annoying if it was ready to go as you turned it on.

 

 

Yes all that.

 

in the old days it was acceptable to have to go through a 100-page manual to get things going. That's how I did it on my Apple II. Had to read and learn what an RF modulator was. Then learning the concepts of CPU and RAM and I/O and all that. Had to learn to type machine language commands into the monitor to get a cassette loader to load, which then loaded the game.. Back then this was THE meat and potatoes of the hobby. Today it is much different.

 

Outside of a small circle of people that are into this stuff, no one is going to put up with anything more than a 1 minute 1-2-3 quickstart guide. The days of reading manuals for consumer products is long gone. Let alone anything technical.

[Keatah]

I wish to emphasize a few points in bold.

 

AFAIK, Retron5 / Retrofreak software is based on an older version of Genesis Plus GX, when it was still under GPL. I think it was only missing Sega CD support compared to latest non-commercial version so it would not make much difference if you only support cartridges. They however used Snes9x-next which has always been non-commercial.

You realize those software developers do not have the financial means to protect their license against those companies or any commercial entities, right? Or they are simply not aware their code is being used because it's often simpler not to tell anyone you are using open source stuff (until someone disassemble and analyze your software to find similarities with existing code).

Emulator authors are mostly expecting people to simply respect their work (which is often thousand of dev hours in case of emulators) and either respect the license of their software or contact them to get a commercial license agreement but sadly, those emulators are nowadays only seen by retrogaming entrepreneurs as convenient development cost savings so they generally have no plans to either spend money for retributing original devs work or time for contributing back to the original project.

I get it that many end-users are like you and do not care about emulator licensing 'crap' as long as they are not affected and their retrogaming needs are fulfilled but saying it's original devs fault is quite dishonest and hypocritical in my opinion.

That would make it the first 'emulation box' (outside PC) that uses Bsnes for SNES emulation, which could indeed be quite interesting. It would however needs something stronger than a Celeron .

 

Some authors (I would guess) are simply disappointed, some are angry, few would want to get drawn into a legal battle.

 

Not only does it take thousands of hours of development, but you have to include testing and feedback from users. Users will oftentimes bitch and moan when their favorite game glitches or doesn't work. Then they write up a bug report. They'll go back forth a few times with the developer to pinpoint and clarify the bug is real. The developer corrects the situation and more testing follows - hopefully nothing else got broken.

 

Thousands of hours is an understatement, I'd say the low tens of thousands is more like it. Consider that some emulators have had several captains at the helm over the years. And that some are a team effort - which only compounds the amount of time.

 

On my standard i7 I get a good experience from Higan/Bsnes. What will it be like on a low-end Celeron SoC? I can't even guess. Has this been tested yet?

[Tanooki]

Phil: Funny how most the trolling you see online complains about the Genesis first like it was the worst and SNES9X second. I never dug much into it as I didn't care to get involved in the drama as the system just worked and suited many peoples needs well. I don't want to get into some huge moral debate, but yes i realize they can't afford lawyers, and knowing that I really still didn't care as I stayed out of that whole fight. It's just an unfortunate situation that happens when you put something like that out there public with no lock and key on it, people will use it as they see fit knowing they can get away with it. I used to work with a few emulator authors back in the 90s on some projects to help iron out bugs, one was the old SNES96 that was the first to add audio, FWNES which first did FDS as I knew Fanwen fairly well, same can be said with zsnes (zsknight) as I knew them all from efnet irc. I know to a decent length the level of dedication that went into such things and the hours of work and testing that work, it's not small task. I'm just at a point now I'm just over internet drama over stuff is where I was going with that 'sounds bad' bit you quoted.

 

 

Bass: No actually I don't. I never kept up much with it except off and on as I kind of smelled bs early on and maybe every week or two I'd pop in *lurking then* to watch that nitwit try and defend his layers of stupidity and that failed project. I read here to fill in some of the lines around the slant stories of the gaming media trying to either buddy up to defend MK or set him on fire over it.

 

 

Keatah: You got it. I originally got my first computer for Christmas 1990. I never learned to code, tried and failed as math and logical math problems are my undoing. I did learn a heap about general software and hardware IT, how to get into and around stuff. I didn't mind going through a book of stuff back when I was a kid or even in my 20s when I had more time for it, but now not so much. It just kind of depends. But that's me, and I'm posting that on a mass consumer level and most people are into that whole instant gratification garbage and being hipster cool and smart and that doesn't equal having to go through that old book and slap together band-aids to get a piece of hardware to work which is what I was pointing out.

 

I do have an i7 DIY custom laptop with that nvidia gtx 980M 8GB backed video card in it with 16GB of ram so I'm in the same boat as you where I can run stuff like higan/bsnes, Dolphin, and other heavy hitters in silky smooth style. So I too have to wonder exactly how higan is going to plod along on a celeron/atom level chip. Sure you won't have a huge bloated mess of Windows and a hellish about of APIs, drivers, and various off the rack myriad of parts and their baggage to deal with but I can't imagine something so measily cutting it. The laptop I had before this is an i5 chip with a HD3000 intel chip in it and 6GB of RAM on that and I could get BSNES to run 60fps using the median or fast core, but not the dead pan accurate one except on stock games (chipped stuff would drop.)

 

I would like to think an i5 with that video on a chip and level of RAM would top some piddly celeron even without all the roadblocks in the way. The i5 could run PS3 level stuff just at low/med level settings (because of the HD 3000 alone) and it couldn't cut it. This thing I have here now could do/outdo the PS4/One and their updates and it is a happy camper. I'd love to have that explanation how their core can run such things.

[Newsdee]

On my standard i7 I get a good experience from Higan/Bsnes. What will it be like on a low-end Celeron SoC? I can't even guess. Has this been tested yet?

I think that's one of the points of this modular approach. If you get the dumper unit only, it has a frontend that would make launching your emu easy. I don't know if they could launch on cart insertion but that would be neat and a little better than what the Retrode does out of the box. So you would run with the full power of your i7.

 

The Retrode presents itself as a drive that is empty except when you put a cart it dumps it and adds the file to the drive. It does have 2600 support via an unofficial adapter, but I haven't tried it myself so can't comment how well it works.

 

So these guys aren't making anything new but the point is they are packaging it in a convenient format. I think it's quite a realistic and clear approach; but whether it will attract a large nunber of people remains to be seen.

 

Definitely a step above than the "look ma, I got the molds" and "patent pending heavenly pastry technology we can't show you yet, but look at this render" seen in other projects

Edited February 15, 2017 by Newsdee

[cybercylon]

I give this more of a chance than that other project we have been talking about.

[Tanooki]

That I do agree with as well. Of the three of these style of catch all devices yet to (or never will) hit the market stuff, this one here is the most believable. Also as you can see their support network at least has been pretty consistent and a bit more open about stuff as well.

[Kismet]

I'm looking at this and can't really see the point.

 

On one hand, being able to dump carts you own, dump the sram, fix the battery on the cart and then reload the sram has some value. However I have SNES games that the battery from 1990 still works, and I probably could salvage the save game, so while I think this isn't novel, it may provide 1/2 of a solution for something like the Z3K in the other thread, where the cart can be dumped legitimately to an SD card and then played on the physical FPGA system.

 

That said, as soon as I saw "libretro" my interest vanished. If you see "libretro" that means software emulators, and more to the point, libretro is a just a collection of out-of-date emulator cores much the same way FFMPEG is a collection of out-of-date video codecs. It may mean well, but because there is no way to actually guarantee performance out of the target device, you get really foolish things like N64 emulators running at 2fps on original Raspberry Pi hardware. Unless you can gaurantee 60fps from every emulator in the backend, for all games, remove backends that clearly will never work.

 

My interest in this lies entirely on the ability to use original cartridges/joysticks, but connecting those by USB doesn't add any value and adds latency that otherwise wouldn't exist on a FPGA hardware emulator.

 

In some ways I feel too many "I wanna be a clone too" systems are being made without any understanding of the nature of the hardware they are supposed to be emulating and are instead blindly using libretro and don't care if it really doesn't feel like those original consoles. This is why people often inquire about flash/sdcard support, because they don't actually own many or any original carts.

 

[Andromeda Stardust]

The intent is to provide a single click solution that will do everything for you provided you have a network connection and a USB stick. And SEGA Genesis is the only console with that problem, all the others on the list will work fine out of the box.

 

Edit: We could put the core in but that would violate licenses. For this reason, to honor licensing agreements, we unfortunately have to introduce this slight detour.

Expect a lot of customer support issues from people who don't even know how to set up an internet router much less download a file from the internet and copy it to an SD card. As is, someone buys your device, unboxes it, plugs it into the TV and a power strip, inserts a game cart, and cannot play it because it needs a "download" from somewhere online in order to work. They have a name for that: Dead on Arrival. That is going to be a logistics nightmare for customer support.

[Andromeda Stardust]

(It was a joke. You don't remember the Hater Brigaders over in the Chameleon thread? )

He wasn't here at the time, though I am sure he would have jumped on the bandwagon. Tanooki, clear your schedule for the next 24 hours (or longer), and prepare lots of coffee. It is one of the most entertaining debacles in the history of AtariAge:

 

Part 1: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/235430-how-has-this-not-been-posted-yet-retro-vgs/

Part 2: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/247145-coleco-chameleon-hardware-speculations/

[Keatah]

I'm looking at this and can't really see the point.

[..]

In some ways I feel too many "I wanna be a clone too" systems are being made without any understanding of the nature of the hardware they are supposed to be emulating and are instead blindly using libretro and don't care if it really doesn't feel like those original consoles. This is why people often inquire about flash/sdcard support, because they don't actually own many or any original carts.

 

I still feel there is a misunderstanding between the folks making these devices and the gamers. I can see how that happens, and I myself spent countless hours of reading and documenting the behaviors on both sides. Sometimes I'm not sure I'm getting it right either.

 

There's certainly no shortage of entrepreneurs trying to repackage existing bits and pieces into what looks like the next big thing for retrogamers. Nothing wrong in that, it's what they do.

 

For me to really really desire this product, it will need to support more of the classic systems (pre-NES) and not just the retro systems from NES onwards. It will need to work out of the box. The only thing I should need to do is provide the games.

 

I've said this before in many posts - it is only recently that software emulation has pushed for accuracy. And that happening on only a few emulators. Getting final few percentage points takes enormous efforts and even core rewrites. Are these projects prepared to deliver that? Because that's what it'll take.

[godslabrat]

I still feel there is a misunderstanding between the folks making these devices and the gamers. I can see how that happens, and I myself spent countless hours of reading and documenting the behaviors on both sides. Sometimes I'm not sure I'm getting it right either.

 

There's certainly no shortage of entrepreneurs trying to repackage existing bits and pieces into what looks like the next big thing for retrogamers. Nothing wrong in that, it's what they do.

 

For me to really really desire this product, it will need to support more of the classic systems (pre-NES) and not just the retro systems from NES onwards. It will need to work out of the box. The only thing I should need to do is provide the games.

 

I've said this before in many posts - it is only recently that software emulation has pushed for accuracy. And that happening on only a few emulators. Getting final few percentage points takes enormous efforts and even core rewrites. Are these projects prepared to deliver that? Because that's what it'll take.

If you're providing a cart slot I need in a form factor I can connect to a PC and/or emubox, you have my attention. I'm willing to do a little work to get it up and going, but I'm really wanting someone else to take care of all the big-picture stuff.

 

An Atari/Vectrex/TG-16 slot I could mount into a PC tower is kind of what I had in mind, and this seems to be in the ballpark of that.

[Tanooki]

I wasn't registered, doesn't mean I wasn't passively reading that dramatic nightmare of a turd dance from Mike. The media was all over his hypocrisy, and a few suck ups also in denial trying to defend as well, both sides linking threads on this forum, as well as other forums picking up on the stupid behavior. I just didn't recall ever seeing that piece about the hater brigaders.

[Flojomojo]

I wasn't registered, doesn't mean I wasn't passively reading that dramatic nightmare of a turd dance from Mike. The media was all over his hypocrisy, and a few suck ups also in denial trying to defend as well, both sides linking threads on this forum, as well as other forums picking up on the stupid behavior. I just didn't recall ever seeing that piece about the hater brigaders.

 

"The media" was blindly copying his stupid press releases about "Coleco is Back!" without asking hard questions. A few amateurs like YouTuber Gamester81 fell over themselves to be in on the ground floor and ended up looking pretty foolish. The AtariAger "galax" was one of the big winners in identifying the PC video capture card stuck into the clear case of the "second prototype," and that person also ran some statistics on the most frequent posters in the thread. We started a private shitposting chat for the top 30 or so people, thinking we could continue the discussion when the thread died out or locked up again (the "RetroVGS" thread got a little heated). The thread did NOT die out, it's still going. AtariAger "toiletunes" printed up some awesome little badges like you see in a few people's avatars.

 

[Keatah]

That "press and media" stuff was a joke. They either didn't know how to ask real questions or they were just pansy asses sucking up to keep their bonus points going. Likely a little bit of both. It was cringeworthy yet amusing watching those MK supporters try to squirm and distance themselves.

 

Hopefully that RVGS circus enlightened a lot of folks to all the potential risks and downfalls of these cashgrabs.