FPGA Based Videogame System

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

We're really in a transition phase before 8K stuff arrives. Like if a 24" 4K feels kinda silly, imagine an 8K one.

 

Where 4K and 8K are obviously better are home-theater setups which are more common in the United States single family homes. Apartments just do not have the real estate for large panels, and newer condos/townhouses often have wall mounts for 40" panels at most.

 

However audio still plays second to picture resolution, and many people joke about how stereo 44.1khz is enough for everyone, and we've even started moving backwards to soundbars which throw 8 channels into a space that doesn't cast surround sound, and wireless speakers that are beyond terrible.

 

4k is a placebo unless you have wall-filling screens, though hdr may be of benefit. Improvements to existing display tech make a much bigger difference than resolution. 8k is definitely a placebo, and well beyond the limits of the human eye, aside from the fact you might need a magnifying glass to view actual pixels at close range.

 

True 2.0 HiFi stereo can sound phenominal compared to 5.1 surround with tinny full range satellites and an overcompensated sub. Sound bars are just Bose treatment. Big sound in a small box violates the laws of physics. Generally they get around physics hurdles with custom digital EQs. Telltale sign: Midtones and treble go up in loudness when you crank the volume, but bass just gets muddier.

 

I built a pair of Tritrix Transmission Line speakers for the living room and they are phenominal. They reproduce down to 35Hz with a subtle rolloff, plenty good for music and even movie watching, and the old Sony sub sits in a corner, disconnected, neglected, and unmissed.Ignore the birdhouses, that was a separate full range project that I just kept for looks. Back in 2001, I was indroduced to surround sound and thought it was awesome, but later on realised you need a solid Hifi stereo pair for music reproduction. The satellite cubes cutoff around 100-150Hz so you crank the sub up to overcompensate the lack of midbass, resulting in the boom-booms and a hole in the midbass area of the spectrum. A good Hifi 2-way or 3-way pair places equal emphasis on all frequencies. Want surround? Get a sonically matched pair of surrounds and a center from the same vendor. Typically MTM laid on it's side for the center, MTM or WMTM towers for the L/R, and MT for the surrounds. All with matching woofers, tweeters, and crossovers.

[jamon1567]

 

4k is a placebo unless you have wall-filling screens, though hdr may be of benefit.

 

Even at 65" in a not very large room, 4k is only slightly better looking on my OLED, but HDR....that's a whole other ballgame and the reason I purchased it. I would not have purchased (and wouldn't recommend anyone else do so either) a television simply for 4k. HDR and perfect blacks are why you would purchase one.

[bikerspade]

Hey all - anyone know if FDS audio support was fixed, or is that an outstanding issue/item? Is there a work around to get it to work on the Nt Mini?

 

Thanks,

There haven't been any NT Mini firmware updates since I discovered the broken FDS audio in Metroid (no sound opening doors). Since then I've bought an FDSStick and FDS Ram Adapter and that has been working perfectly on the NT Mini.

[funkwad]

There haven't been any NT Mini firmware updates since I discovered the broken FDS audio in Metroid (no sound opening doors). Since then I've bought an FDSStick and FDS Ram Adapter and that has been working perfectly on the NT Mini.

Oh - that's interesting...I'm running an FDS stick and Ram cart, and attempting to run Zelda, and the bonus sound isn't working.

 

But I'm running Firmware 1.6, due to having issues with Video output for Atari 7800 on the latest firmwares beyond 1.7. Maybe that's the problem. I'm also running audio/video from the NT mini via analogue. Are you using via HDMI?

 

Also I appear to be having an issue with the FDS stick switching disk sides...I thought I read FDS stick still had issues? Curious how you've gotten yours to work

 

Thanks,

[bikerspade]

Oh - that's interesting...I'm running an FDS stick and Ram cart, and attempting to run Zelda, and the bonus sound isn't working.

 

But I'm running Firmware 1.6, due to having issues with Video output for Atari 7800 on the latest firmwares beyond 1.7. Maybe that's the problem. I'm also running audio/video from the NT mini via analogue. Are you using via HDMI?

 

Also I appear to be having an issue with the FDS stick switching disk sides...I thought I read FDS stick still had issues? Curious how you've gotten yours to work

 

Thanks,

I am using the latest jailbreak firmware. Make sure cartridge audio is enabled in Settings. I use both HDMI and component (both work fine). I did not have any of the earlier reported FDSStick issues. To switch to side B, press the button on the FDSStick twice relatively quickly (but not too fast). Press just once to flip back to side A.

[LewisD]

This thread has jumped the shark. A lot of this 4K TV talk belongs at a site like AVS Forum.

[funkwad]

I am using the latest jailbreak firmware. Make sure cartridge audio is enabled in Settings. I use both HDMI and component (both work fine). I did not have any of the earlier reported FDSStick issues. To switch to side B, press the button on the FDSStick twice relatively quickly (but not too fast). Press just once to flip back to side A.

 

Thanks man!! I'm 'back in the game", haha...so I noticed the volume control for cartridge sound and the FDS/DISK (which is also enabled) seem to not be controlled by the volume adjustment. Do you have a recommended 'balanced' volume setting for the FDS sound?

[cfillak]

 

Ya I'm definitely jealous you spent 3000$ on a tv that will be 600$ in 2 years. No surprise you're a wrestling fan.

I think you're overestimating how quickly OLED panels will get that cheap. OLED has been the next-gen display tech promise for about a decade now. OLED has some manufacturing, quality control, and longevity issues that don't really apply to LCD. I'll eat my shoe if there are 65 inch 4K HDR OLED TV for 600$ in 2 years.

 

 

This thread has jumped the shark. A lot of this 4K TV talk belongs at a site like AVS Forum.

Agreed. We're so close to the Super NT, I wonder when we'll get some more concrete information? The only relevance 4KTVs really have to retro gaming is that 240*9=2160. It'll be cool for there to be a 4K OSSC or updated Analogue consoles in the future when the necessary FPGAs are cheap/fast enough.

[Guspaz]

MassDrop periodically has the LG OLEDs (as they do right now), typically for $500 USD less than the retail price of the 65"

Edited January 17, 2018 by Guspaz

[bikerspade]

Thanks man!! I'm 'back in the game", haha...so I noticed the volume control for cartridge sound and the FDS/DISK (which is also enabled) seem to not be controlled by the volume adjustment. Do you have a recommended 'balanced' volume setting for the FDS sound?

I don't have any recommendations on volume levels; perhaps Great Hierophant can offer his opinion as he has done extensive research on volume levels for the NT Mini.

[keepdreamin]

This thread has jumped the shark. A lot of this 4K TV talk belongs at a site like AVS Forum.

 

So is talk of CRTs and analog video. They have a CRT section as well. Y'all gonna stop talking 'bout CRTs? Hmmmm?

[Andromeda Stardust]

I think you're overestimating how quickly OLED panels will get that cheap. OLED has been the next-gen display tech promise for about a decade now. OLED has some manufacturing, quality control, and longevity issues that don't really apply to LCD. I'll eat my shoe if there are 65 inch 4K HDR OLED TV for 600$ in 2 years.

 

 

 

Don't be too sure. Full color LCD screens had terrible contrast in the early years. Think active/passive matrix laptop screens from the 90s era. You cock your head and people turn green and bright areas appear where blacks are. Now modern LCD tech has excellent black level compared to earlier models and much much wider viewing range.

 

OLED have an elephant in the room and that is burn in, especially with blue pixels. These new expensive sets will look like trash after a couple years of light use. Sure CRTs could burn in but it took years to almost decades of continuous operation. I've still yet to see evidence of burn in on consumer CRTs, even my tube PC monitor did not after years of windows task bar on it.

 

Either OLED will improve and get much cheaper, or it will be phased out in favor of new LED backlit LCD displays with hdr and superior black levels, similar to how plasma got phased out for LCD because it couldn't compete with LCD.

[Keatah]

I think OLED is still a one-trick-wonder. Or like cars with turbos. They burst on the scene with a WOW! picture. Make a fantastic showing, and then fizzle out due to real-world constraints and requirements.

 

Whereas LCD's principle of operation has been experimented with since the 1880's. That's about 140 years of evolution and refinement.

 

I also believe we'll have found and developed several other technologies before OLED matures to even a 1/4th that of contemporary LCD tech.

[Albert]

Please stay on topic, I just kicked two people from this thread. Thank you.

 

..Al

[Kismet]

 

True 2.0 HiFi stereo can sound phenominal compared to 5.1 surround with tinny full range satellites and an overcompensated sub. Sound bars are just Bose treatment. Big sound in a small box violates the laws of physics. Generally they get around physics hurdles with custom digital EQs. Telltale sign: Midtones and treble go up in loudness when you crank the volume, but bass just gets muddier.

 

 

 

Back around 1996 or so, I used to play the SNES with a 5.1 system that had hand-built speakers for the front stereo pair. To this day, when I hear sound come out of "built in speakers" and soundbars, I'm like "yuck".

 

That's the problem also currently presented with the FPGA snes projects as well. Because when you have a HDMI output the TV sends the audio to either it's internal audio DSP/DAC's or it may be configured in software to output through HDMI or S/PDIF. Since the SNES is 32Khz, that gives us a similar problem with the 4.5 scale at 1080p, where the target audio device might support 32khz, or might only accept 44.1khz, 48khz or 96khz. I would love to see the option of changing the output rate just like resolution, but that might screw up things that assume 32khz like white noise generation, and the few games that actually have matrix Dolby Prologic surround getting thrown out of phase.

[cacophony]

If you haven't seen it, there's a kickstarter for NESmaker, which is a application that allows somebody to create a NES game with no coding:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1316851183/nesmaker-make-nes-games-no-coding-required/description

 

It will only support the creation of games with mapper 30, which I assume the JB Nt Mini supports?

 

It sounds like this application was primarily developed to aid in the creation of Mystic Searches, which is documented in The New 8-bit Heroes:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4568312/

And FYI, kevtris actually appears briefly in the above film ^^^

Edited January 18, 2018 by cacophony

[F34R]

If you haven't seen it, there's a kickstarter for NESmaker, which is a application that allows somebody to create a NES game with no coding:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1316851183/nesmaker-make-nes-games-no-coding-required/description

 

It will only support the creation of games with mapper 30, which I assume the JB Nt Mini supports?

 

It sounds like this application was primarily developed to aid in the creation of Mystic Searches, which is documented in The New 8-bit Heroes:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4568312/

And FYI, kevtris actually appears briefly in the above film ^^^

Ohhh!! That sounds pretty cool!!

[thetick1]

Ohhh!! That sounds pretty cool!!

 

Sorry to be the party pooper here .. but it's just like lego and basic .. just too simple to be cool. Learn C or an assembler as all other software languages are toys! VHDL and Verilog for FPGAs are cool though.

Edited January 18, 2018 by thetick1

[narshe]

 

Sorry to be the party pooper here .. but it's just like lego and basic .. just too simple to be cool. Learn C or an assembler as all other software languages are toys! VHDL or Verilog for FPGAs is cool though.

 

There is a big difference between essentially Mario Maker, and learning C/assembly, plus the hardware, plus all the tricks it takes to get a NES game working, plus game programming, plus.... This isn't meant for a hardcore programmer.

[scott64]

If you haven't seen it, there's a kickstarter for NESmaker, which is a application that allows somebody to create a NES game with no coding:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1316851183/nesmaker-make-nes-games-no-coding-required/description

 

It will only support the creation of games with mapper 30, which I assume the JB Nt Mini supports?

 

It sounds like this application was primarily developed to aid in the creation of Mystic Searches, which is documented in The New 8-bit Heroes:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4568312/

And FYI, kevtris actually appears briefly in the above film ^^^

time for a flood of second rate cookie-cutter homebrews

[Riptide]

4k is a placebo unless you have wall-filling screens, though hdr may be of benefit. Improvements to existing display tech make a much bigger difference than resolution. 8k is definitely a placebo, and well beyond the limits of the human eye, aside from the fact you might need a magnifying glass to view actual pixels at close range.

True 2.0 HiFi stereo can sound phenominal compared to 5.1 surround with tinny full range satellites and an overcompensated sub. Sound bars are just Bose treatment. Big sound in a small box violates the laws of physics. Generally they get around physics hurdles with custom digital EQs. Telltale sign: Midtones and treble go up in loudness when you crank the volume, but bass just gets muddier.

 

I built a pair of Tritrix Transmission Line speakers for the living room and they are phenominal. They reproduce down to 35Hz with a subtle rolloff, plenty good for music and even movie watching, and the old Sony sub sits in a corner, disconnected, neglected, and unmissed. Ignore the birdhouses, that was a separate full range project that I just kept for looks. Back in 2001, I was indroduced to surround sound and thought it was awesome, but later on realised you need a solid Hifi stereo pair for music reproduction. The satellite cubes cutoff around 100-150Hz so you crank the sub up to overcompensate the lack of midbass, resulting in the boom-booms and a hole in the midbass area of the spectrum. A good Hifi 2-way or 3-way pair places equal emphasis on all frequencies. Want surround? Get a sonically matched pair of surrounds and a center from the same vendor. Typically MTM laid on it's side for the center, MTM or WMTM towers for the L/R, and MT for the surrounds. All with matching woofers, tweeters, and crossovers.

 

Note to self, the next time I need to buy speakers PM this guy first.

 

 

Sorry to be the party pooper here .. but it's just like lego and basic .. just too simple to be cool. Learn C or an assembler as all other software languages are toys! VHDL and Verilog for FPGAs are cool though.

Lets say you need to parse a giant text file... are you really going to write code to do that in C/assembly when perl/python/awk would be way easier? Everything has its purpose, and maybe this toolkit is for getting people interested enough to take the next step.

[F34R]

 

Sorry to be the party pooper here .. but it's just like lego and basic .. just too simple to be cool. Learn C or an assembler as all other software languages are toys! VHDL and Verilog for FPGAs are cool though.

Well, the poop in my party is that I can't "learn" an entire language with all that goes with it. My coding days are extremely limited due to a brain injury I had, and I don't have short term memory any more. Basically I can't convert short term to long term memory. So, what I learned earlier today, I won't remember it later in the evening.

 

I used to be proficient in BASIC, PASCAL, LUA, JavaScript, and.... C; as much as I've lost due to the injury, it's really hard to even use things I was well versed in before. The Playgrounds app in iOS has been hard to even do the basics. So there's that. That's why I was interested in seeing what I quoted.

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

Back around 1996 or so, I used to play the SNES with a 5.1 system that had hand-built speakers for the front stereo pair. To this day, when I hear sound come out of "built in speakers" and soundbars, I'm like "yuck".

 

That's the problem also currently presented with the FPGA snes projects as well. Because when you have a HDMI output the TV sends the audio to either it's internal audio DSP/DAC's or it may be configured in software to output through HDMI or S/PDIF. Since the SNES is 32Khz, that gives us a similar problem with the 4.5 scale at 1080p, where the target audio device might support 32khz, or might only accept 44.1khz, 48khz or 96khz. I would love to see the option of changing the output rate just like resolution, but that might screw up things that assume 32khz like white noise generation, and the few games that actually have matrix Dolby Prologic surround getting thrown out of phase.

 

32kHz should scale quite nicely to 48kHz with minimal loss of quality using a simple 2:3 bilinear algorthm. Latency of such a custom algorithm could be as small as 3 48khz samples or 1/16000 sec. A menu option to "force" native 32kHz for receivers that support it, or resample to 48kHz by default.

[thetick1]

Well, the poop in my party is that I can't "learn" an entire language with all that goes with it. My coding days are extremely limited due to a brain injury I had, and I don't have short term memory any more. Basically I can't convert short term to long term memory. So, what I learned earlier today, I won't remember it later in the evening.

 

I used to be proficient in BASIC, PASCAL, LUA, JavaScript, and.... C; as much as I've lost due to the injury, it's really hard to even use things I was well versed in before. The Playgrounds app in iOS has been hard to even do the basics. So there's that. That's why I was interested in seeing what I quoted.

 

Oh man very sorry to hear that. Please don't take this the wrong way but programming is probably not your best choice of time spent. As with any type of rebuilding mentally or physically slow progressive steps would be best. Simple puzzles and mazes are what you likely should be doing.

[thetick1]

Note to self, the next time I need to buy speakers PM this guy first.

 

Lets say you need to parse a giant text file... are you really going to write code to do that in C/assembly when perl/python/awk would be way easier? Everything has its purpose, and maybe this toolkit is for getting people interested enough to take the next step.

 

That would be a scripting language NOT a programming language. Personally I use ksh more recently bash for simple scripting and perl if it's a more complex data structure. I'm old school: shell, perl , C, C++ in order of preference depending on the complexity of the task. Depending on the embedded system I would use in-line assembler if the C compiler sucked or I needed to improve performance... but C compilers now days mostly are pretty well polished and hardware unless it's retro is damn fast.

Edited January 19, 2018 by thetick1