katanaswordfish

That's a pretty good idea. I know that Kevtris isn't interested in open sourcing his cores, nor should he have to be, but it'd certainly be a great thing to have some kind of very basic and stripped down "open bootloader" or something for the SuperNT that would allow people to run their own firmware/cores.

I don't really mean to counter-flame you here, but if you ask me this sounds incredibly entitled. This is the exact type of ungrateful and needlessly negative bullshit that could possibly convince people like Kevtris not to even bother doing things for this community. Being a dick to people who have put in multiple years of their live to the retro gaming community is a pretty damn good way of screwing everyone else over. Kevtris is just one of many people who have spent years doing research and development on retro gaming hardware, writing documentation, creating formats, providing knowledge to others, and now creating great products. You want people like him to step away from this community because of toxic attitudes like this? No? Good, then grow up. If nobody else will say it, then I will be happy to. Grow up, buddy. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. The "gameplan" was to make an accurate, low-latency HDMI Super Nintendo for roughly $200. That's what they marketed the SuperNT and that is exactly what we got, and if you don't understand the difference between the SD2SNES (a flash cart) and the SuperNT (a clone console) then you sound pretty ignorant of what each devices actually does. We got exactly what we paid for, and then some. Listen, I'm with you as someone who has wanted and continues to want more cores for this puppy - I'd love to play NES, and gameboy games on this sucker using the great cores that Kevtris released on the NT Mini. I still have some hope that it will happen eventually! But those are nothing but our own personal hopes/dreams/desires. Nobody owes us shit, other than exactly what we got; a great little HDMI SNES. Is someone else able to make cores? I'd imagine anything is possible for someone with enough knowledge to hack this thing in order to get it to run arbitrary code and load up some other core. But I don't have the skills to do that, do you? Outside of Kevtris there are really only a handful of good FPGA clone console developers out there. If you ask me, it's very, very unlikely that anyone other than Kevtris would be able to deliver high-quality cores on the Super NT. But, again, if you ask me, the only person giving a "giant middle finger" is you, and that doesn't seem like the best strategy for getting people to go out of there way to give you something for free, does it? Go ahead and sell your Super NT, because there are many people who clearly would value it more than you do right now. But regardless of what you do, I do think you owe Kevtris an apology after you take some time to cool down. Maybe you should think less about what you don't have, and think more about what you already do have, and you'll be a little bit less angry and irrational. Of course, nothing personal, and I hope you come around. If people don't want a $200 vanilla Genesis, then it won't sell. It's as simple as that. Personally, I'm not sure. On one hand, if I spend $200 on a system I'd like to think that it can play all the games in the library. On the other hand, most of my favorite Genesis games are vanilla system games. As for RGB, I currently have no way of plugging that into any of my TVs with buying an expensive upscaler and cables and the potential for an FPGA console to do other cool things is much higher. I'll have to wait and see how I feel if/when they announce one.

Hey all. Came across this small graphical glitch in Donkey Kong Country in an early stage called Barrel Cannon Canyon in the first area. While I've played this game a few times on real hardware and emulators over the years, I don't really remember if this is something that existed on the original hardware. Here's an, admittedly pretty low-quality off-screen screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/KxV7yi9.jpg It looks like there is some kind of transparency issue on a few tiles in the entrance cave at the very start of the level. When you move around you can see it's the background layer because it parallax scrolls. It's not a big deal really, but it was something that I noticed in this play-through that I've never noticed before. Is this a glitch that exists on regular hardware? US Donkey Kong Country, played off cartridge. Area 1, "Barrel Cannon Canyon", Start. Super NT firmware JB6.

Personally I think that pixel art just looks better with subtle scanlines. I don't really care that much recreating a CRT look or anything, It's just a personal preference that I feel is part of aesthetic of pixel art.

I love everything about my older model 8bitdo controller except for the dpad. It's a little bit disappointing to hear that they still haven't improved it. It's definitely not terrible or anything, and I was able to get mitigate it a bit with a small square of scotch tape, but it's really a black mark on what would be otherwise a great controller. To anybody interested in the tape method, it's pretty amazing how much of a difference a small piece of tape can make - while the factory controller makes it too easy to hit diagonals, I found electrical tape to be slightly too think for my taste, making diagonals a bit too hard to do for games like Street Fighter. I found the scotch tape to provide a happy medium although still not 'perfect'. I also kind of wonder how it will hold up over time. I do wish that 8bitdo would save us all some time and just try to improve their dpad slightly.

Oh yeah. I guess that makes sense. Well that's cool, because I imagine that type of thing would give him a nice little head start on implementing the YM2612 for the genesis.

I know this is all very hypothetical, but when you say it wouldn't support the 32x, do you mean supporting an actual 32x plugged into a cartridge slot? Would it not be possible to have a virtual 32x core on the same FPGA as the main system? Too much FPGA space? At any rate, I can imagine it'd probably be a hell of a lot of work to emulate both, assuming that could fit on a reasonably priced FPGA. And as an aside, what type of FM stuff have you made before? It'd be cool to see if you want to show it off sometime on youtube or something like that! :] Edit: As for epic bitching, it's the internet so it seems like there will always be a few loudmouths to bitch about something no matter what happens. Tune them out!

From what I understand it's not possible to power the Super NT on or off remotely because of the way the power switch works, but would it be possible to create a sleep or low-power state? This way you could just leave your Super NT on all the same and just tell it to sleep at the end of each session. This could also help people who are running the JB firmware to remember to push their saves to their SD card when returning to the menu to put their console to sleep at the end of the session. I'm thinking that while sleeping the chips might slow down, the display would stop updating, and the LED might dimly throb until the user presses start or something like that. Possible?

Many thanks to Kevtris _____ and SmokeMonster for creating and sharing jailbreak firmware that takes a great SNES clone and begins to unlock it's true potential as an FPGA console! Despite my humble collection of games I'm already totally in love with my Super NT, and now with the unofficial jailbreak firmware we can take full advantage of the great hardware and play games that are so rare or expensive that they're really not very accessible to the casual user without spending another $200 on a (somewhat similar) device like a flashcart. There is so much potential packed away in the Super NT's hardware, and while I think it's fair to say that we've already got our money's worth with the stock firmware, I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we've very grateful for all of the time and effort that goes into providing these kinds of extra features and, maybe someday, expansion chips and cores. So thanks again to Kevtris for creating the system, to _____ for jailbreaking it, and to SmokeMonster for helping to share the jb firmware! I can't wait to try it out!

So, what is it about chips like the SuperFX and SA1 that makes them seemingly so hard to emulate? Is it a much higher level of complexity or have they just not been documented as thoroughly as other chips? I'm assuming that's why they haven't been done in any of the major flash carts as of now, so correct me if I'm wrong.

It's not massive but there's definitely a difference there. In Higan the colors seem to be slightly warmer and more saturated than the NT, although the range of value seems about the same. The "limited" Nt output seems to be similarly saturated (colorful), but still not as warm as the colors in Higan, it also looks like it's crushing or compressing the darks which is why you can't see as many levels of the glowing gradient in Super Metroid. So without a doubt, there's a minor difference in colors between Higan to the Super NT, but is one really more 'correct' than the other?

Hey Kevtris, My Super NT just arrived a few hours ago and, while I haven't had time to really dig into it yet, I just wanted to congratulate you on another successful project and thank you for all of the other stuff that you've done for the community. I don't post here often, in fact I think my last post here was made simply to express my interest in the "zimba 3000" and to throw my opinions into the initial poll, and frankly it's amazing to think of how far things have come in what seems like a relatively short time. Even though the Super NT doesn't quite realize the full concept of the Z3k as a truly shape shifting FPGA mega-console as of now, I just want to say that I'm really glad to have been able to support your work in some form and to buy what seems to be arguably the best option around to play Super Nintendo games to date. The SNES is among my favorite consoles, with such a massive and awesome library of games that I know that I'll easily get hundreds and hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of this device. Also, as someone who also loves listening to emulated chiptunes and stuff like that, thanks for all of your work on that front for many years with things like NSF. As for everyone else, relax a little, all right? Try to take a break from constantly thinking about what you want and instead focus a little bit on what you have. As someone who doesn't own physical copies of some of his favorite games, I'm just as hopeful and excited about the prospect of a "jailbreak" patch as the next person here. But I think there is a line where "hope and excitement" starts to become "greed and entitlement", which some people here are beginning to straddle. Don't instantly argue with that, just think about it for a second. Those of us who have a Super NT got exactly what has been advertised so far - not a Z3k, not an Nt mini, but a kick ass little Super NT that plays some of the greatest games of all time with (I've heard) is stunningly accurate, responsive, and compatible. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want a jailbreak to play ROMs, or to load up other cores, etc., but it's also important to realize desire for more will always exist and you can't just let that desire dominate you. Kevtris created a great device, and people want more. He may at some point unlock the potential of the Super NT, and some people will still want more - more bells, more whistles, more games, more cores, etc... That's natural to some extent as we're all fans of these consoles and games, but it's also an urge that we have to fight against because it ultimately leads to taking things for granted. I'd love to have a device that takes full advantage of the size and flexibility of the hardware that Kevtris put on it, with fun things like the Nt Mini has, but I know (just like we all know deep down) that neither Kevtris nor Analogue owe us anything beyond what we paid for; a great little HDMI SNES! I think this is a great time to be into retro games, because of the hard work of people like Kevtris (and I'm sure many others who make emulators, hacks, formats, modkits, etc.). But let's all take some time to step back from wanting "the next shiny thing", to appreciate what we have, and to give credit where credit is due. If you're hopeful and excited about the idea of a Nt Mini-esque jailbreak firmware (as I am, and as most of us probably are) then please continue to be, but please also take care not to step across that line where we become greedy and entitled, don't be rude and don't take things for granted - just play the games that you have on cartridge so far, enjoy them, and wait patiently for Kevtris to do whatever it is that he wants to do.

Hey Kevtris, will you be doing any development posts or videos? It would be really cool to be able to follow the process of the project from design to implementation to manufacture and debugging. It'd be interesting to see the development over the months. Also, in general, where's the best place to stay up to date on the status of the z3k? Obviously there's this thread, and I know you have a youtube channel, is there anything else?

Hey all, just signed up here to show my interest and support for an 8bit and 16bit retro console FPGA workalike! Just recently I randomly stumbled upon kevtris' FPGA console work through this oldish blog post, although I've also heard a lot of good things about the HDMI NES project and the Analogue NT. As a total electronics newbie, that post was my first ever exposure to the wild world of FPGA and my mind was pretty blown - it sounded like the holy grail of retro console hardware emulation/cloning! I spent hours looking up youtube videos of people running 8 and 16 bit games on their FPGA dev boards and I was seriously impressed with the effectiveness of what I was seeing. FPGA hardware emulation seems like a far better route than something like the Retron5, which is basically just unlisenced RetroArch cores running on android in a cheap shell that looks like a console. Jumping ahead a bit, I remember seeing the announcement of the RetroVGS and, frankly, I wasn't interested in it at all; some strange 'retro-modern' console that wanted to use carts and had Atari Jaguar shells? Not me for... Luckily for me however, all this ridiculous RetroVGS drama brought my attention back over to kevtris' FPGA console and this forum thread! A new console that accurately plays retro games through hardware emulation of multiple platforms spanning multiple generations with digital video and audio output? What retro gaming enthusiast wouldn't like that? Anyway, just to throw my two cents into the conversation, here's what's important to me personally or on my wishlist: - NES / Famicom core - Gameboy core - SNES core - Genesis core - NeoGeo core - TG-16 core - Gameboy Advance core (Wishlist. Not sure if it's possible within your spec, but not a deal breaker at all.) - MSX core (Wishlist also. Cool but not a deal breaker.) - Any other cores are icing on the cake for me! - HDMI output: It would be really awesome if it had similar features to the Hi Def NES (scaling modes, manual stretch/crop, scan lines, audio channel panning where applicable, palette modifiers where applicable, etc.). I do understand that the complexity of including all of those features may be higher now that you're dealing with multiple system cores, but I'd certainly love those features if possible. The idea of breaking off the AV output into a separate module/PCB to save costs and allow for customization sounds awesome if you think you can pull it off. Low latency HDMI is my preferred output though, and that's probably what I'll end up buying. - SD Cards + Cart Adapters would be ideal for me: I have a decent collection of retro games on carts but I have a collection of 8/16bit ROMs for some of the games that are harder to find, translations, etc. I have a mix of English and Japanese carts and roms, and having both types of media would be very nice. Carts are great for that classic plug-and-play, retro gaming feel, and it's great to own hard copies of games that you like - but it's also very nice to have roms for obvious reasons. In some cases I have Japanese hard copies of games but English roms, and some carts are just impossible to come by on a reasonable budget. I don't mind buying extra cart adapters separately, of course. - Input: USB sounds like a smart way to go if drivers and button binding aren't issues. I'm not sure how that whole thing will work, but I'm guessing you have it mostly figured out at this point. As long as I can plug in various usb controllers and bind my buttons for each player I'll be totally happy. Obviously the price is up to you, it's clear how much time you've put into this project and your skills are unquestionable. While it depends on the features of the final version, I'd be very happy to pay ~$200-250 for this system (main board + hdmi av board +/- 1-2 cart adapter(s) +/- simple case). I'd be really happy with that! Regardless, this is a great project and I'm really looking forward to seeing it come to fruition.