New Cartridge-Based System! Jag Shell

[Keatah]

Apparently, you haven't listened to the interview yet. Big developers are on board with it NOW.

 

Who are these big developers?

 

 

Not just 'someone's' mouth..the MAN who is in CHARGE of the whole thing! It's not speculation when the designer is telling you what is going to happen on the system.

 

Truth be told, no one knows what is going to happen. If and when the console makes it out there it will fall into whatever niche the developers program it for. Many people in charge of many projects can say anything. Let's see it out in the field, appealing to classic games so much they have to open a 2nd factory!

 

 

This is a designer that sees half the booths at CES covering retro games and is offering something new with the capability to play a broad spectrum of old-school style games. He said that it would be able to play games anywhere from VCS 8-bit all the way up to PS1 32-bit on cartridges.

 

Listen to the interview before you act like you know anything about the system. People here have erroneously claimed that it would be playing old system carts (WRONG), or that it would only be indie games (also, WRONG!), or that it would be expensive. It won't compare in cost to the next batch of cloud-only download based systems full of fans and huge wattage power supplies.

 

So they're going to re-issue classic software on modern-day cartridges? The old-school VCS, Intellivision, Colecovision, Vectrex, and others on new-school carts?

 

There is also a HUGE difference in having the ability and actually doing it. It could work somewhat if they made it like a Harmony. Where you get the roms on your own and put them into the cart.

 

Now I'm more confused than ever. This makes my emulator set-up simple!

[Papa]

The style of games will be comparable to VCS 8-bit all the way up to PS1 32-bit. He mentions the possibility for emulation to occur, so old ROMS aren't out of the question. He also mentions new games being made and more recent, popular titles that the developers have expressed an interest in putting on cartridges.

 

Truth be told, the man made tens of thousands of dollars off selling Jag shells to modders, saved upwards of hundreds of thousands by using the shells from pre-existing systems and controllers, and knows that the system will be made, as developers are already making software for it!

 

My feathers haven't been ruffled, nor am I becoming anything other than fervent about the possibility of a solid-state system with new proprietary cartridges being released in our day and age!

 

I believe in the system and the possibility for great games to be available for it! Employing Americans for a game system hasn't happened in a loooong time! I was exited about the AT-Games Genesis, the Flashback systems, RetroGen, RetroPort, and the Retron5! I wasn't disappointed by any of these efforts and I doubt that I will be by this one! He said that if it's sales compare to the Ouya and it's launch than we're in business!

 

Nothing could be simpler than buying a cart and putting it in a system with no subscription, internet connection, or upgrades/updates/downloads required!

[darthkur]

I'm looking forward to it and hope it's both of good quality and affordable. I don't understand the need to argue about anything. Let's all just wait and see what happens.

[Keatah]

Why not make the FPGAs on the mobo socketable to accept future upgrades?

 

How powerful is this compared to the mini-mig? Or other benchmark systems?

Edited April 15, 2015 by Keatah

[+remowilliams]

So it's going to have FPGA cores recreating old hardware to run new software that could be run on the old hardware to begin with... ?

 

 

 

[...] all the way up to PS1 32-bit

 

Not if they're using an FPGA based system...

[Cerebrate64]

 

 

 

Also, could you please define "success"?

 

 

From the standpoint of most indie developers, it wouldn't make much sense to create content for the VGS when Playstation and Xbox are far more mainstream. I'm sure most developers would like to see a profit from their games, and as niche as the VGS is, I don't think we'll see many games for it.. I like cARTridges too, and I would like to have one of these, but i'll wait until a list of confirmed releases is shown.

 

 

I'm looking forward to it and hope it's both of good quality and affordable.

 

They're shooting for $150- $180 at launch with $20-$50 per game.

Edited April 15, 2015 by Cerebrate64

[Video]

Sounds all good and stuff, but it's just crap flowing fro the horses mouth for the moment.

 

Proprietary memory is NOT that expensive (gameboy and DS have always had NEW games launch at $20 price range, so not impossible) It's when you try to put as much proprietary memory as possible on it that it starts to go up, several gigs, yeah, it's going to be expensive. 2 megs (if you can find someone that will stamp one that small still) not going to be a lot.

 

Personally, I hope it does good. They can take up the slot Nintendo used to have (kid friendly system, no moving parts, cheapest console on the market)

 

But to be 100% honest, I don't see it coming. Even if it does, it'll be a niche thing like so many before it...but then, ones before it were usually NOAC crap, but I have seen a few retro style consoles come and go without even so much as a ripple.

[Papa]

Well, he said the system would be pretty revolutionary. As FPGA stuff goes, (uh...they're in everything up to super computers) a revolutionary one for gaming probably could run something comparable to a PS1 (or..*gasp..maybe even better!)! I mean, you can run Spider-Man on an Android tablet and it looks better than any PS1 game. My son had it for his JXD and it looked and played extremely well. Those are mini-tablets built into PSP shells that get WiFi and can network to each other for two player gaming. He's had his for a couple of years now and it still runs most old school emulation (even N64) quite well and plays modern touch screen games perfectly. Those are between sixty and a hundred bucks each and has HDMI output. Something proprietary would be slightly more, but that doesn't mean it won't be as capable. Whether it's coming to fruition or not I don't think is even in question any more. It's coming!

 

I think the only real risk here is in establishing a consistent reputation after the system launches. If a user buys a game thinking it will be like, say, 16-bit quality and ends up looking like an 8-bit Atari game, or someone buys a game thinking it will be like an 8-bit game and finds it to be quite advanced or modern, like Assaulter, they may shake some people off. Clear depiction art on packaging, some terms to help define the quality set for each game (8-bit retro, 16-bit Arcade, or 3D high resolution), prices that don't deflect ($150 certainly sounds better than $180), and some clearly defined capabilities including technical details, should perk up interests and secure repeat customers. ARM processors in modern tablets and tablet-like handhelds prove that cheap tech has no problem exceeding the capabilities of a PlayStation.

 

The Ouya seems like the gamebox for Android fans, whereas this may end up being the replace-the-android-for-old-school slotted do-it-all system. It may be biting off more than anyone can chew opening the gate so wide as to consider proprietary carts sweeping all qualities between the early eighties up unto the late nineties. From what the producers have said, I would think that developers are chomping at the bit for solid state reps of their software. Assaulter would attract Neo-Geo Metal Slug fans. I wouldn't think that Neo-Geo games would be impossible for this system (the actual games, I mean) as there are some let down fans twiddling thumbs around the X system and I would love to be able to buy a cartridge with a Neo Geo game on it for less than a hundred dollars that doesn't emulate like crap (like the PS2 or X system presentations)!

 

Fans on the Facebook page (I can read it, but I'm done with Facebook personally) are expressing the desire to see older titles, including Neo-Geo, and are helping to bring form to the finalization process. It looks like it will be able to use Sega pads or the pack in analog joysticks (this would immediately put it in at least two arcade cabinets I've already made ) and has a few developers stacked up the left side with little graphics from their own projects sprucing up the page. I think it will be a big success!

 

I LOVE IT!!

[+remowilliams]

You do know that FPGAs are several orders of magnitude more expensive by capability than ASICs or ARM CPUs, etc. right ?

[Keatah]

Well, he said the system would be pretty revolutionary.

 

I hear this all the time with new product releases. Revolutionary. Game-changer. Groundbreaking. Surpassing everything that's come before. Reaching new heights.. All corporate & marketing speak.

 

 

From what the producers have said, I would think that developers are chomping at the bit for solid state reps of their software.

 

Producers think one thing, developers think another. How are updates going to be handled here? And updates ARE going to be needed. At the very least the firmware that manages the fpgas. The bootstrapper.

 

Today's tech industry cannot produce a consumer product (other than single-function microcontroller thingies) without having some form of update needed. Fer'Chrissakes! I have a DSLR lens that comes with a USB port. For what??!?! To update it of course. And update the software that updates the lens. And not forgetting updating the operating system that hosts the updated updater that updates the lens.

[Torr]

I have a DSLR lens that comes with a USB port. For what??!?! To update it of course. And update the software that updates the lens. And not forgetting updating the operating system that hosts the updated updater that updates the lens.

 

Wait, wait, wait... you have a camera lens... that needs to get updates from the internet... just the lens... this blows my mind...

 

No wonder game companies can't make a Video Game or Gaming System that works properly the day you take it home... apparently they can't even make a curved piece of glass properly before selling it... I know, it's obviously MORE than that... you can't update a piece of glass... but still... it's the principle...

 

*starts checking peanut can for a microchip* Nope... nothing here... so far we don't need electronics to keep a tin can sealed... yet...

*checks scissors* yup... no microchip and STILL sharp and I didn't cut myself... make a note of that so in 20 years when we have microchipped scissors, there will be proof that it's NOT needed.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Torr

[Bill Loguidice]

I just want to note that I always find the "back in my day" and "get off my lawn!" type comments about how today's technology works today versus how it used to work amusing. You simply can't separate the good from the bad of how things are, just like it's very easy to remember the old way(s) being better than they really were. In a generation or two, there will be similar nostalgia for how things were today. Regardless, the idea that "everything" getting regular updates is somehow all bad is of course ridiculous. Is it often used as a crutch to release half-baked stuff? Sure. Is it also often used as a way to patch unforseen bugs, security holes, balance issues, or add additional content, etc.? You bet.

 

As for the way things used to be, if there was a bug, even a game breaking one, you usually had to live with it. Sometimes it would be patched out in future revisions, sometimes it wouldn't. In any case, there are plenty of examples where an ability to patch something would have been welcome. The Retro VGS would do well, particularly considering the modest team sizes, to have an ability to patch their products if the need arose. It's no longer OK to leave something with a significant flaw.

[Keatah]

That something needs to be updated out of the box or frequently on a weekly basis says the product is incomplete or still malfunctioning. Says there is a flaw straight away. Why else would they need to do such activity?

[Bill Loguidice]

That something needs to be updated out of the box or frequently on a weekly basis says the product is incomplete or still malfunctioning. Says there is a flaw straight away. Why else would they need to do such activity?

 

Sure, that's the worst case example, but we can give that for anything. The point is, it's a good thing to be able to fix or patch or enhance a product post launch.

[Torr]

The point is, it's a good thing to be able to fix or patch or enhance a product post launch.

 

I'd consider that an opinion, not a "fact". And one I don't agree with. There needs to be deadlines, and they should be met.

 

All it does is encourage laziness and rushed work. Imagine having a due date for a school paper, but really the due date is moot because the prof will just keep giving it back to you telling you what to change until you finally get an A+, they don't deserve that A+ as much as the guy who passed it in on time and right the first time. That may sound ridiculous but that's what a lot of companies do to consumers all the time, and ironically they make more money stringing customers along with promises, promises... meanwhile the the guy who got it right the first time only makes one-time sales and therefor receives less media coverage and "repeat" business, IE people buying the same thing over and over with minor tweaks Ala the Street Fighter II franchise.

 

Being able to "enhance" a product with innovations that were impossible or at least unfeasible when it first launched would be acceptable. But that's unfortunately NOT how it's utilized. By the time that technology has advanced enough that a proper update is actually necessary, they generally just completely re-release the hardware rather than just update the few things that need changing.

 

*I don't want to derail this thread, long story short, they claim this new system wont need updates, that it will work out of box, like EVERY other system prior to the last 10 years, and I applaud them for that.

Edited April 17, 2015 by Torr

[Papa]

In the interview and on the Facebook page it is explained that the FPGA will get an instruction set for each programming style and this will control how the game is interpreted by the processor. Some ARM processors ARE FPGA and I don't think they are talking about some dye-drop FOAC, low bit chip solely for emulation. He wasn't expressing that it would be 'revolutionary' by being better than modern systems, but by offering something not yet offered as a cartridge-based console.

 

I will always favor certain technologies over others. I firmly believe that a point is met in the life of an idea where it is expressed in a near-perfect way and then it gets chopped down. In our time the legal responsibility for companies to increase profits has made everything break down to the barest, cheapest expression and most convoluted form. Cars are the baby of industry today, requiring bits from all the powerful media companies and tech fields to get everyone's money hooked to a loan. Even chocolate sucks here now because of how everything needs to be cheap to secure consistently higher profits. TV's die out faster than ever. I wouldn't say that Philo's TV was the best one to get, but one from the late eighties that has a tube-life of twenty to forty years. I think CD/DVD/BR are too fragile and require too many things working together perfectly to be better than offerings from the past. I wouldn't say that reel movies are the best you could get, but I would say it became nearly perfected around the time of betamax and then with vhs and went down pretty fast from there. The motor goes out, then the disk or the battery or a cap..whatever. Cartridge systems were available for the consumer for up to twenty years. Just a few years ago we had the PS3, then a few years before that, the PS2. The disks get bad, the motors go bad, the fans cooling the processors go out and the thermal paste crusts up and fails!

 

The 360 is a great example of how screwed the world is when tech is set up for sale to the consumer. I think the name may just be a big joke in itself. They plan on having an aluminum case that would let the scaler chip breath and keep the system cool AAAND at the last minute the case is turned to plastic (an insulator) so the system melts down and is RROD in no time. "What should we name this piece of S#!T?" "How about the 360? Cause your gonna buy one and then pull a big 360 taking it back to the store and then coming home empty handed! HA HAAAAAAAA!!" *farts

 

Then this fits right in with your downloads. You spend a thousand bucks downloading all the games from the past you want to remember and beat for the first time and low and behold, the system burns out. Maybe it's perfect in that you were playing Legend of Zelda on a 360W, four-fan-having, money-sucker of a download-everything system! You send it back, they fix it, AAAAND you get your fixed system back EMPTY! Sure you can re-download stuff if you have the same IP and they remember you, but it SUCKS and proves my point.

Edited April 17, 2015 by Papa

[Keatah]

Companies can create the illusion of washing away the old and ushering in the new with an update. How many times do you hear people complain about a tech gadget not working and then start mumbling about maybe an update will fix it?

 

There was a company that would update their software to do none other than change the version number.

[Keatah]

Sure, that's the worst case example, but we can give that for anything. The point is, it's a good thing to be able to fix or patch or enhance a product post launch.

 

Back to the camera thing. I got an 18-300mm zoom - an all-in-one convenience lens. Straight out of the box I had to update the camera's distortion control table, and the main firmware to accept that new 2.0 distortion control table. Fair enough. The lens was designed and manufactured some time after the camera was.

 

Without the update the camera would produce an image that looked like a CRT. Bad pincushion and barrel distortion, and chromatic aberration at the outer edges. With the update everything looks ok. Never seen a lens require so much correction to produce an acceptable image.

 

So, another trend I see is sub-par hardware relying on software to gloss over inherent design flaws. Years ago, the lens designers had to get it right. There was no such thing as in-camera post processing to remove lens defects.

 

One could argue it's a tightly integrated system, both hardware and software.. IDK..

[Bill Loguidice]

It's very difficult to get something perfect or to account for all usage scenarios before launching a product. Having an ability to update and/or fix that product after it's released makes perfect sense. To say otherwise is ridiculous. Just because that option is there, doesn't also mean that releasing buggy or half-finished products should then be a thing. Of course it shouldn't. One doesn't have to follow the other. Obviously the goal is to always release a perfect product, but that's not always possible no matter what precautions are taken. Without the ability to update and/or fix post launch, we have situations like - to use one famous example relevant to AtariAge - Impossible Mission on the Atari 7800, where you can't actually finish the game. Back then there was no way to fix it. Today, we have the technology. There's no reason to ignore modern technology just because it has a chance of encouraging sloppiness.

[Cynicaster]

I don't know anything about launching a console but I would think the best chance of getting a good selection of titles would be to somehow make it very simple for indie devs to release games on the VGS that they have already made (or are already planning to make). At that point the business case for releasing a title on the system goes from being one of "why?" to "why not?"

[godslabrat]

I wonder if there would be some kind of cart adaptor that would allow it to play retro carts? If it's capable of ps1-era games, it could almost certainly emulate a 2600 or vertex.

[+remowilliams]

I wonder if there would be some kind of cart adaptor that would allow it to play retro carts? If it's capable of ps1-era games, it could almost certainly emulate a 2600 or vertex.

 

If it's an FPGA it's nowhere near capable of PS1 era core performance. And why would they sell you something so you could just play all the games you wanted, for free? Their business model is to sell you games on cart, not be a RetroN 5.

[Torr]

WTF???

 

If everyone just expects this system to "play" already existing hardware's games why don't they just buy the existing hardware or some shit system like the Retron 5???

 

This a NEW system, that is capable of playing games from 1977 era standards to 1995 era standards to anywhere in between.

Whether it be an "NES" styled game with 256 colors or a version the "VCS" Adventure with Polygonal dragons...

Why don't people understand this?

I was saying that getting people to program games for this system would be the biggest hurdle... but no... getting people to UNDERSTAND what this system IS will be the biggest hurdle apparently.

Edited April 18, 2015 by Torr

[Keatah]

Since this is a cartridge based system it will be more difficult to get stuff made for it.

 

It is also clear there are many wants and expectations of this system. Can it live up to all of them?

Edited April 18, 2015 by Keatah

[+remowilliams]

[...] to 1995 era standards to anywhere in between

 

Where did you miss this part? 'If it's an FPGA it's nowhere near capable of PS1 era core performance'

 

People aren't understanding alright - and it's people who don't know what an FPGA is, what it does, how it functions and the performance per price it represents, among all the other giant flaws of the proposed business / software model.