kevtris

I did a little investigating and cornhole was first mentioned on page 40 (well it was on 26 but only in passing and not as an amico title) and tommy was very quick to follow up with a probable lie: then some lame "poll" designed to drive tons of posts from the hopefuls... still almost nothing about it yet. guessing he was talking about it some on "interviews", however. (page 114) when I re-read some of this stuff I just have to shake my head. uttered again by tommy on page 149. card games are the most played genre on earth! woowwww things really take off on page 151 about it when the hopefuls finally notice it and tommy has to go on about it. so maybe it wasn't a cheesy suggestion after all and I was wrong on that. I just remember there being a big explosion in interest that seemed odd. looks like tommy laying on the bullshit thick was the reason. Note the search hashes on the right in the scroll bar. Fastest growing sport in the world, don'tch'a'know! weirdly it doesn't get mentioned again until page 203 or so with just a mention in passing and no followup. On 207 drops this one: Never minding the fact tommy is only 50% italian at best (mom is canadian, dad italian, born in the USA), apparently tommy only thinks people celebrate holidays during winter months and that is perfect time for amico! No one celebrates easter, 4th of july, labor day, or memorial day and plays outside games then. No one ever gets together on weekends in the summer either. nope! We never did hear more about bocce ball, shuffleboard (lol) or horseshoes again. People overlooked these since there's very little interest compared to other games. You're not going to see esports contests for bocce ball or horseshoes.

I member how someone mentioned cornhole being a "killer app" (lol) for amico, and everyone glommed onto it and that's how it came to be. "NO ONE makes a good cornhole game!" which isn't true, there's several decent ones and they are better and cheaper than the turd that amico got. They talked about horse shoes and bocci ball too (it's italian, don'tcha'know!) but cornhole won out for some reason.

I checked out the video and paused it and single stepped it to get a good look at the FPGA. it seems to actually be the same FPGA that's on the DE10 after all. my DE10 here has a -7 speed grade rated part, and the clone board does too. One interesting thing about the DE10 board's FPGA is it is specially marked. the part number ends with 7NDK while the one on the clone is just 7N. the "DK" stands for "development kit" and you should only find these on dev kit boards like the DE10. I wonder if intel does this to detect grey market chip sales? Since it is using the same speed grade FPGA after all, theoretically it should be compatible with all the cores, at least the FPGA should be. Jury's out on the rest of the board but that shouldn't be difficult to get right. It's a mystery to me where they are getting the chips. The problem with pulled/reballed parts is they have been used once, and it's a big hassle to pull and reball them, and also the supply is uncertain. you might get a bunch of them when i.e. telecom equipment is retired and never get more. also, reliability might not be great since they will have 10-20K hours on them, and were heated up three more times to pull, reball, and install them on the new board. the RAM module seems in line with what I'd expect. the RAM chips are a few bucks each and the PCB is pretty cheap, so $15 seems reasonable.

I suspect these are pulls from ewaste and have been cleaned up and reballed. Not that there's anything wrong with that- they probably got them for practically free on something like cell phone equipment when it was upgraded. The problem with this, though is they might not be the same speed grade. The de10 has a -6 part which is the fastest; the picture I saw strategically covered up the chip's markings so I cannot tell what speed grade it is using, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was the -8. This means that certain cores might not work or will be flaky if the speed grade is slower. I noticed the on-board jtagger is gone too and has been replaced with a plain old jtag port. this would save some cash and unless you're a developer this doesn't matter too much. I don't know what RAM it is using, it looks similar to the official board so the DDR3 is most likely fine. There could be other minor things changed too to save a bit of cash. So I suspect it will work fine for a lot of things but might fail on the more demanding applications. there might be other things like lower spec power supplies too. If people know what they are buying I don't see a problem with it, just hope it doesn't cause a support issue. IF they can obtain -6 parts it would be possible to have essentially a 1:1 clone though. so it will all hinge mainly on which chip is on there.

but at least he can play boogie woogie on the piano! that takes what, 3 fingers max?

I was unaware that some cartridges might take awhile to become ready, so I just test once. it's been changed to test for 2 seconds, and show the error screen, but it will keep rescanning continuously and will boot if the cartridge ever becomes ready eventually. the fix will go out with the next update.

ask and ye shall receive. here's my exchange with tommy. (tommy's reply, cut off my post he quoted) (video links removed) (removed where tommy quoted my entire post) since that, several more products have been released, while amico languishes.

they would need to probably start ordering parts today if they hope to have it all. then figure start assembling in august at the very very latest. so they got some time to debug it, but they'd have to hire another engineer probably to redo the design; guessing lots of parts are EOL/not available/long lead times so they will need to do some major redorkulating. also, the extremely poor battery life and constant disconnections need to be addressed. the former probably is not fixable without hardware changes (bigger battery, etc) and the latter SHOULD be fixable with software, but that'd require debugging and someone to do that work. I'd be surprised if the controller gets made at this point. yes, those will need separate tests. they will need a total of four tests I think: safety test (battery, charger), emission test for bluetooth (intentional radiator), emission test for wifi (intentional radiator), and general EMI/RFI emissions (unintentional radiator).

pretty sure it'd need safety testing since it has a lithium ion cell in it.

yeah the only real way to ID games would be to CRC the upper 8K or so but even that isn't bulletproof- many mappers can start up in any bank so that means you'd have to store a CRC for every possible bank. though, for this application it isn't quite that bad- it only has to identify a fixed set of games and not the entire library. still it doesn't help the flash cart situation. it would be possible to have some kind of register that can be written to enable the required expansions, but that'd require flash cart devs to add that to their code. I actually do have that feature in there- the NSF player hack I did for the powerpak uses it, and automagically turns the correct expansion chips on for you.

that wasn't a bug, it was conscious design decision. the reason is someone will turn one of those on, forget about it then wonder why there's weird noises coming out of their tv. so the solution is to make them reset when the power is cycled. there isn't a super good solution to the problem, and that was the one I came up with. (playing non-expansion sound games with one or more expansions turned on can cause the expansions to still make sound anyways, when the games write to their mapper chips which tend to mapped into similar areas. the best solution would be to somehow ID/fingerprint the game first and automatically turn the correct ones on, but that won't work for flash carts since their menus run first and would defeat any kind of identification. also I was totally out of space in the FPGA. it's a bit over 95% full right now)

I know one thing. I would've liked to have been a fly on the wall when mike saw the super nt come out. The first real live FPGA SNES that didn't need a SNES jr. stuffed into a jaguar shell.

The Analogue products would've happened anyways; I had FPGA cores done long before the chameleon was a thing. I find it hilarious still that mike wasn't really thinking much about FPGA until I mentioned it on a skype call, then everything I talked about all of a sudden became features of the retroVGS (which is what it was called at the time). I was showing off my Zimba 3000 idea and he glommed onto it. After the first call (I believe there were only two total, maybe three?) I knew that it was dead in the water and I never wasted any time working on anything for them, especially since there was going to be no money in it. He tried real hard to get my hyped up about it but I wasn't biting. It sure was a lot of fun though trying to identify everything they posted though. my favorite was the cardboard PCB with the parts glued down to it I think.

not to mention a lot of it was semi-custom, teal seats and stuff on the chairs (OMG gotta colour-coordinate everything so the chairs match the walls!) selling used office equipment in a down market where everyone is working at home is one thing; selling teal office furniture is quite another; black/grey/white would sell much easier since it would go with a lot of things. teal just goes with teal and maybe orange but no one's going to have that kind of thing except tommy. Also when selling at an auction, you take what you can get if you truly want to unload it. it was definitely a buyer's market there.

unfortunately since it's been so long, they would have to retool the design quite a bit now I think. it's been 5 years since the initial design, and so a lot of parts are most likely no longer available. There are most likely replacements available, but it means redoing some of the PCB work and that means engineering costs. Let's say they can get every part, and there's zero changes. It's going to be pretty expensive to manufacture just a few units. the cost to make 1000 vs. 100 is probably marginally more, since economies of scale start to kick in pretty good at the 1000-10K piece level (electronic parts). After that, there isn't much between 10K and 100K and even less between 100K and 1M. Be that as it may, the system itself is pretty expensive to manufacture, since they basically need to make three things. (two controllers, 1 base unit). I am guessing their total cost is in somewhere in the $150-200 range without including profit or shipping. This is manufacturing in china, and not in the US (where the total cost would probably be 3-5x this). Going by how popular (or unpopular as the case may be) for the games they have already released, there's no way they can sell more than a hundred or two systems at the rate they wanted, north of $300. Only 1 or 2 of the games have 100+ downloads, the others are stuck at 50+ or less. No one's going to bankroll a loser like this when the games are basically unsellable. So if they want to make 1000 units at $150 each, they will need $150000 to do it, which they more than that. They definitely had PLENTY of money to manufacture a run of 10K units (say, $2M) but tommy and friends just pissed it away on a non-stop office party and schmoozing around.