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New Donkey Kong PK batch


tep392

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6 hours ago, tep392 said:

I sent you both PM's.  It's rare for me to do this, but I can if your comfortable with your soldering skills.  I'll test the boards before I ship them, but can't provide any warranty if something goes wrong with your work.

Wanna sell a third one this way?

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On 8/19/2020 at 10:23 AM, tep392 said:

I sent you both PM's.  It's rare for me to do this, but I can if your comfortable with your soldering skills.  I'll test the boards before I ship them, but can't provide any warranty if something goes wrong with your work.

 

Just put a POKEY socket on the board.  It fits, all AA titles are made this way.  Reminds me, I need to order more.

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On 2/13/2020 at 8:39 PM, DrVenkman said:

As I've posted elsewhere, the creator of PokeyONE is an acquaintance of mine. He's a local arcade guy and designed this specifically to replicate the aspects of POKEY most essential to arcade operators - e.g., DIP-40 form factor; 5V DC compatibility; absolutely perfect RNG emulation (needed for some arcade boards to function); and sound so close I can't see a difference on a scope at audible frequencies even with super-sampling the sound. More importantly, it's a device available in whatever quantity an arcade operator needs at a basically fixed price - which cannot be said for vintage POKEY chips. Yes, Brad will sell you one from Best for cheaper. But just that one. If you need to restore a dozen old Atari arcade cabs in a year, good luck with that. 

 

However, that DIP-40 form factor really drives up the cost. In an ideal world, we'd be able to get a POKEY implementation on FPGA directly integrated into the game cart PCB and machine assembled at the fab house, and some enterprising homebrew publisher would buy a few hundred of this putative new design at a time.

 

 

The DIP40 form factor means little to nothing as far as costs go. I've made 100's of DIP42 daughter boards like this and they cost me about $1 to a max of $2 each even in smaller batches of only 50 boards and then getting an awesome price break at 100 boards. Fab houses charge by the layer and the square inch. They don't care what else you are doing. 1 through hole or 100 of them.

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2 minutes ago, Shawn said:

 

The DIP40 form factor means little to nothing as far as costs go. I've made 100's of DIP42 daughter boards like this and they cost me about $1 to a max of $2 each even in smaller batches of only 50 boards and then getting an awesome price break at 100 boards.

 

I still have a few of those, that I snagged, when I ordered them. :D

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4 minutes ago, CPUWIZ said:

 

I still have a few of those, that I snagged, when I ordered them. :D

 

As long as you still have whatever for your portfolio of boards you have made, I'd grab whatever you are not using\wanting to keep. Just as keepsakes as that was the first board I ever had made. I might even make another socket cart like I showed you the other day but this time for Hirom and with the pcb exposed to show off the board, just because.

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16 hours ago, CPUWIZ said:

 

Just put a POKEY socket on the board.  It fits, all AA titles are made this way.  Reminds me, I need to order more.

I would have to order some since I don't use them for my own builds.  After de-soldering and installing about 140 POKEY's, I have yet to break one. I look at them as insurance that will never pay for itself. People will argue cost is low, but it's still waste to me, so I don't do it.

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4 hours ago, Shawn said:

 

The DIP40 form factor means little to nothing as far as costs go. I've made 100's of DIP42 daughter boards like this and they cost me about $1 to a max of $2 each even in smaller batches of only 50 boards and then getting an awesome price break at 100 boards. Fab houses charge by the layer and the square inch. They don't care what else you are doing. 1 through hole or 100 of them.

I’m talking retail price not necessarily price from the fab house. Making the entire thing fit into a very small board means either tedious, intricate and time consuming hand assembly of SMD stuff (when time most definitely means money”) or machine placement (which just puts the costs somewhere else). Conversely, the same POKEY core can be implemented on a custom-designed game cartridge PCB that integrates flash ROM and a small programming header, getting rid of separate DIP sockets for the POKEY + EPROM or whatever chip your game code is riding on. 

 

But hey, my friend who explained all this to me - who’s actually in this as a business supplying parts and chips to arcade owners, operators and parts supply places,  and has actually designed both implementations - might just be lying. ?

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20 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

I’m talking retail price not necessarily price from the fab house. Making the entire thing fit into a very small board means either tedious, intricate and time consuming hand assembly of SMD stuff (when time most definitely means money”) or machine placement (which just puts the costs somewhere else). Conversely, the same POKEY core can be implemented on a custom-designed game cartridge PCB that integrates flash ROM and a small programming header, getting rid of separate DIP sockets for the POKEY + EPROM or whatever chip your game code is riding on. 

 

But hey, my friend who explained all this to me - who’s actually in this as a business supplying parts and chips to arcade owners, operators and parts supply places,  and has actually designed both implementations - might just be lying. ?

 

Well I will ask this, How is it that the Hokey is gonna do the exact same as this and one of the main motivating factors to finishing it is that it can be made and sold for so much cheaper to the masses than this $40 version that is already completed and for sale? Machine placement isn't that expensive either if soldering it manually is putting this large premium to the cost of this. I'm not trying to be rude at all here but the $40 price tag on this and all the stated reasoning for it is straight up silly talk. 

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2 hours ago, Shawn said:

 

Well I will ask this, How is it that the Hokey is gonna do the exact same as this and one of the main motivating factors to finishing it is that it can be made and sold for so much cheaper to the masses than this $40 version that is already completed and for sale? Machine placement isn't that expensive either if soldering it manually is putting this large premium to the cost of this. I'm not trying to be rude at all here but the $40 price tag on this and all the stated reasoning for it is straight up silly talk. 

Where is HOKEY? 

 

Again, $40 retail isn’t the same as $40 in parts and boards. I don’t know what you think, but when people do things for a living (not just a hobby), they have to make a profit and cover the risk of buying parts for dozens or hundreds of units at a time in case the stuff doesn’t sell for months or years.

 

Feel free to do a cheaper implementation yourself. If Fred’s efforts every bear fruit and the cost is cheaper and quality is acceptable, great! The more the merrier.

 

On a related note, I have a breadbin C64 that got fried by a dead PSU a few years ago. Last year I dug it out and spent a few weeks learning how to diagnose and repair it. In the end, among the chips I had to replace was the SID. The SID is sadly fragile but the C64 ecosystem, being so much larger than the Atari scene, actually has several different modern SID replacements - the cheaper one is called Nano SwinSID. About $15 - $20 on eBay. Does it work? Mostly, for most basic purposes. But if you listen to comparisons between it and a real chip, it’s pretty clear that this is a “just good enough to get buy” solution based on a cheap ARM core. By contrast, the incredibly accurate, powerful and flexible FPGASID implementation is currently about 78 Euro, plus shipping. 

 

So in the grand scheme of things, the current FPGA implementations for POKEY are priced pretty fairly, especially for arcade guys who need to be able to buy 5 - 10 at a time to stock repair parts for their machines and those they repair for others. That’s this guy’s business, after all. 

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For arcade machines these make sense for sure, especially if he's making them himself at cost. The replacement part being more expensive versus NOS original parts to the consumer for console games is nutty though. For pure profit or as a hobby. While Best Electronics limits are now one per order, a brand new pokey is $29.99 at retail and serious profit. I'm sure you could ask nicely and get more than 1 at a time. All due respect to Brad at BE but I think even NOS that is a crazy price which I would NEVER pay. If your buddy is selling these for $40 and getting decent sales, all the power to him. Makes zero sense to me. There is no way to justify that price no matter how you present it.

 

EDIT: Back to where this started when you said it was because of the dip40 form factor of the PCB being the reason that guy has to charge the $40 price tag, that is simply not true. That board is worth no more than a dollar and that is a fact. All the other stuff you added afterward about being a business and whatever else are after thoughts. I'm not shitting on your friend or you but I am calling what you said for what it is because it was such an obtuse claim. Only those who don't know any better would believe that and for those who are ignorant to such things, I don't want them thinking such things are valid just cause it was posted here and went unchecked. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ok — total latecomer and just discovering the amazing world of the 7800... Apologies for what might be a dumb ask, but is it possible to still purchase / or get on the waiting list for a DKPK? Would happily send a Ballblazer for Pokey extraction.

 

Thank you in advance!

 

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9 hours ago, offbase said:

Ok — total latecomer and just discovering the amazing world of the 7800... Apologies for what might be a dumb ask, but is it possible to still purchase / or get on the waiting list for a DKPK? Would happily send a Ballblazer for Pokey extraction.

 

Thank you in advance!

 

I’m still making them. ? I’ll send you a PM with instructions. 

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