kevtris

I purposely didn't mention what I do because I didn't want to be seen as advertising, but since you asked... Unfortunately I can't talk about numbers but they are quite good. We got our stuff on all the big videogame journalist sites, all the big youtubers, and seen by millions. My thread over in classic gaming general on here has over 1.3 million views. Here's some videos. I did all of the electronics, programming, PCB design, firmware and HDL code. These systems have a pretty decent amount of relatively modern hardware in them, and are not some simple clone boxes. They are a ground-up recreation that I have done by reverse engineering the original hardware using custom fixtures and such. So far, I have done the Analogue NT Mini, Super nt, Mega SG, and currently the Pocket. These are NES (and 17 other things), SNES, Genesis/SMS/game gear, and Gameboy/GBC/GBA respectively. What sets them apart is modern HDMI with zero lag scaling, various enhancements, and no compromises on quality. These are ground-up and do not use clone chips or anything like that. It's a 100% new recreation by me. The pocket is the world's first handheld FPGA system with an extremely insane LCD, which can be docked to output HDMI. Super nt: Mega SG: Pocket: Some of these videos have over half a million views, and there's tons and tons more of them on youtube. I just picked some of the ones at the top of the list. If you search, these products have been featured on dozens and dozens of the top news sites, and the Mega SG made it into Time magazine's top inventions of 2019. These products have appeared in several print publications also.

yes, the game gear tuner works. such as it is

It isn't an "easy response". It's just the facts. If your project hangs on the balance of having absolutely no negative press anywhere on the internet, maybe it isn't as solid as you think it is. A truly great product doesn't need to have everything slightly to the right of 100% blowout fawning praise scrubbed from the internet. There will be many more "Pats" to deal with that won't play ball when it comes to correcting the record. I understand fully what goes into making a modern videogame product, and how much money it costs. I am on the fourth one in 5 years. It is very expensive, and it takes a long time. I estimate you're going to need to go into production by mid-July at the latest if you want to get it in stores by 10/10. It is gonna be a tough row to hoe. Fortunately the games don't need to be done in a few months, but the hardware will need to be finalized by then for sure if there's a hope of getting is done in time. Sony/MS probably get some consideration for their logistics and manufacturing that you won't get, allowing them more time for production and less time wending its way through the system to final retail endpoints. I totally understand what you are trying to build and all the hassles that go with it- I have been there multiple times! You just need to concentrate on building stuff and writing games, and less time spent constantly looking for the glitches in the youtube Matrix. IMO. Feel free to disagree, but I am probably the other most qualified person here that knows all the trials and tribble-ations that go into it.

As a CEO of a corporation you should just ignore these things. This is like the most obvious lame attempt at trolling. I would give it a 0/10 for effort. When I saw it, the video had like 50 views. I doubt the CEO of Mcdonalds searches youtube every 10 minutes for videos bashing mickeyd's. If I posted in my thread about every single little affront to my stuff I'd be posting non stop every day about it. You just need to let it go and not bring it up in multiple threads every time it happens. They posted a video in an attempt to get a rise out of you, and judging by the posts they sure as heck got it. The Amico is pretty small time right now (compared to what you want it to be) and while you can control the narrative right now, once it gets bigger that will become impossible. So far it seems that when a small youtuber posts something deemed "negative" or wrongthink, the current solution is to post a comment, then send them t-shirts and hats, and then they make a more positive video afterwards. I have seen this several times now. Whether this is what really happens or not, it sure looks like it. While this is good viral marketing, it makes me wonder what will happen when larger outlets start reporting on it that can't be so easily swayed with swag. I have been at ground zero of three console launches of my hardware/software/HDL design so far, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. There's plenty of "haters" and true haters out there to go around, but the difference is I. Just. Don't. Care. At the end of the day, my stuff has to stand on its own merits, and no amount of hand wringing or wishful thinking will change that. Like the Amico, my stuff was a huge gamble too, and the livelihoods of many people hinged on how well it did in the market. There's no real way to know how well something will do until it's released and for sale. I can say that the projects I worked on have vastly exceeded my wildest dreams. Instead of worrying about what some random person thinks about my stuff, I am here every day working on code for 6-8 hours a day (in addition to my day job!) and more like 10-12-14 hours on the weekends. I haven't even really done a search on youtube for my own stuff! Maybe 2 or 3 times since it launched. I certainly don't troll youtube multiple times a day looking for any glitches in the Matrix. Just relax and let things flow. If not, you'll end up dying of a heart attack or something when the coverage really gets rolling. Since this is the bacon thread (right?) I will provide some!

I was thinking the same thing. The constantly shifting perspective and zoom on Night Stalker is going to make some people motion sick I think. I was having a really hard time following it because of this. The walls "growing" when you get near them seems to serve no purpose other than looks, and it seems to be an impediment to players who are behind one, because it grows and obscures your view of your player. I didn't even see the bats the first time I watched it, because they blend in with the shadows most of the time. They could use a white/grey outline to make them stand out I think. Multiplayer mode on it seems to just be the same as single player with regards to everyone just doing their own thing all at once instead of i.e. taking turns. I know this is early and extra modes might be added to make multiplayer be more than that. The play area seems pretty cramped for the three players shown and maybe the play area could be increased in size as player count goes up? Maybe dial back the explosions or have an "explode-o-meter" slider that lets you control how big they are. The second level really dialed it up though and added that flashing/sweeping effect that doesn't add anything to the gameplay and just acts as more visual noise/distraction. There's a lot of flashing and throbbing going on which draws your attention, but has no gameplay significance. This could be a problem for epileptics who are sensitive to flashing things. I liked the music and audio though, this was well done IMO. What is the "end condition" for winning a level? Is it lasting long enough, or do you have to shoot enough stuff? I couldn't quite figure it out. As for Astrosmash, it suffers from a similar issue but fortunately it's only the background now that is randomly shifting around. I was looking to see if it followed the players but doesn't seem to, it just is constantly zooming and shifting for some reason. The tanks should be colour coded or look unique somehow so players can tell each other apart; I assume this will be added at some point as this is just an early demo. As with Night Stalker, it is just multiple players doing their own independent thing with no real competition or common goal in mind but as before I know it's an early demo. Some of the explosions are way over the top and this game could also use the "explode-o-meter"(tm) slider I think. Looking forward to seeing more demos!

This is correct. I never meant or implied that AA was censoring negative posts. I was only talking about youtube.

I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but I feel I am in a fairly unique position to reply to this. For those that don't know, I have been part of the design and release of three recreations of videogame consoles in the last 4 years, and currently working on #4. Those systems have been more successful than my wildest imagination could've ever hoped for. The reason I am posting about this is not to plug my work (in fact I will not post links to anything; you can google my name if you're curious) but to shine a light on what I have to deal with because of it. You just need to ignore those that are negative, and not try to control the narrative about your products. The amount of actual seething hate I have received has been relatively low, but there's been a LARGE amount of negative comments, especially at first, over my work. Just watch some of the earlier videos/interviews about it. You'll find dozens and dozens of "why should I buy this? just use a Raspberry pi!" "this thing is a ripoff!" and other similar things. Of course they totally missed the point of why these products exist. It took a few years but finally the hate level has been dialed back some once the stuff was released and people got to experience it for themselves and understand what our mission was. Tommy, I love your work, but you just need to relax a little and let things take their natural course sometimes. I have never censored or tried to correct the record when people post hateful or possibly wrong comments to videos or whatever- mine or otherwise. I would be wasting many hours a day doing this if I did. The negative stuff is usually forgotten pretty fast, other people tend to reply and set them straight, they're seen as petty/jealousy/etc and life moves on. You just put a large target on your back when you try to fix every single possible little sleight on the internet. On your Breakout and Night Stalker videos, I noticed there is not one single comment that is negative- not in the hundreds I looked at. This is a very obvious case of comment culling and I don't care one way or another if anyone does this, but it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the cesspool the youtube comments usually are. I just concentrate on making the best possible stuff I can for those that appreciate what I do, and let the haters run their course. You have to have a thick skin to want to try and sell a videogame console today no matter what stripe it is- new powerbox, recreation of an original, or a new envisioning of something. I have NEVER ONCE complained to the moderators of Atariage about people posting in my thread on here about my stuff; It has over a million views and thousands of posts. There's been a lot saltier things posted in there than I have ever seen in this thread or the main Amico one. People will take issue with anything and you need to let them talk about possible negatives along with positives, but honestly I have not seen that going on in the Amico thread- any tiny tiny negative, no matter how small, gets dogpiled and shut down with labels like "hater" and "troll". I recently saw someone simply state that he wouldn't drive 2 hours to play an Amico if it came to a mall nearish him. No less than THREE people dogpiled him and questioned his love of the system, just because of that. I was honestly dumbfounded and flabbergasted. Here's a guy that can't wait to see/play it and has been a huge supporter all along, and that one tiny sleight caused everyone to turn on him. I had some honest feedback but I have not posted any of it because I don't want to be falsely labeled as a hater, troll, negative nelly, etc. so I keep it to myself. The Amico thread is simply a place to ejaculate about how awesome and great everything is, and it's all puppies and rainbows. While this feels REALLY good to see all the positives and no downsides, it is not reality and when the Amico is opened up to the wider world after E3 (or whenever marketing starts) you might be getting a rude awakening. I could very well be wrong- NO ONE knows what will happen when it launches. You can have all the focus groups, studies, and the best people but at the end of the day, focus groups brought us New Coke. There's unfortunately no magic bullet and the market will have to decide. By blocking out any negativity, it just hurts your ability to get an honest overview of what the market might think about stuff. I have seen that my stuff has been talked about on places like 4chan- they are very harsh but IMO can be very honest, and I felt kind of honored that they actually made a few kevtris memes. So I hope this wasn't too long, and I am being as honest as I can, after living through the launch of THREE videogame consoles, and soon a fourth. I am a true industry veteran. I try to pay back Atariage by buying a subscription since the first system launched, as a thanks for having a place to host my thread and put up with me for the past 4 years. This comic succinctly sums up my thoughts on it:

I posted a whole series on my youtube channel about the making/development of the hi def NES, which is what that "6502A" board is. The playlist for it is here:

Great teardown! I love the high rez pictures of everything. One minor note on the main board, is that the FR4 (fiberglass) is actually black, and the soldermask is clear.

I wasn't going to say anything, but I feel I should. I am on the edge on resubscribing too next time it comes due. I brought up some valid concerns in the thread in question, and supported my position with images from the original video, and he threatened to leave the forum because he didn't like what I brought up. He goes on about Pat and Ian not taking him up on his offer, but they couldn't take the offer- they would've had to sign NDAs which would've tied their hands and effectively prevented them doing any kind of videos after that point which wasn't a glowing review. Instead he plied another youtuber with a similar offer, who posted a really weak attack video after that. The whole thread over there seems to be bordering on cult status, and when someone simply said they didn't want to drive 2 hours to play a demo unit (if and when one showed up at a mall 2 hours away) he got dogpiled and accused of being a hater by three others. It's easy to call people haters and trolls that don't toe the party line, even if they have perfectly valid criticisms. You literally are not allowed to have any counter-opinion or concern. I understand the enthusiasm and desire for it, but it seems to be clouding peoples' judgement, and causing a total rejection of reality. That's the last I will say about it on here probably. Let's get back to tacos! 🌮

That sounds like the classic "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit". Who would put "redundant" capacitors and resistors on the board? If they didn't pay their hardware engineer for 6 months and he left at the start of board bringup, they're screwed. What does "optimized routing of circuit pathways" mean? The routing of a modern CPU is extremely constrained and optimized. It has to be, or it simply will not work. Modern high speed logic design and layout isn't your dad's Z80 dev board from 1980. With Chinese new year approaching fast (end of jan) there's no way they are going to have anything for sale on march 31st if it isn't already "in the can". Why don't they just admit defeat and give up at this point and do the "hardest letter I have had to write"? The backers are well past the point of being able to get refunds from their credit card companies at this point, and the stock price is in the toilet. There's no place they can go but down. From what I gather, they still haven't really shown any software off, other than ancient stuff that you can get a dozen ways for peanuts already. Where's that Tempest they promised? Is antstream all they got? Nothing like paying for this overpriced box and then having to pay nearly $100 a year to play games on an emulator in a server farm somewhere, wasting gigabytes of internet bandwidth to play a 30K byte game. I haven't really been keeping up after they showed off their PCB which to their credit did look legit, as in containing all the parts and things it needed, and it seemed to have routing. But it sounds like it is just a paperweight without their dev. Maybe he quit because the board had some major showstopper that prevented it from ever working? There's literally hundreds of possible showstoppers on a board design like that. It's not just a PCB- it's hundreds to thousands of impedance and length matched traces and transmission lines. There's so much design wrapped up in a PCB like this that isn't shown on a schematic and is absolutely critical for operation. A few millimeters can be the difference between your SSD working, being flaky, or not working at all.

that's an adjustable inductor/transformer. Looking at the schematic, that's for the audio carrier- you will probably want to disable that. It generates a 4.5MHz FM carrier that's injected into the video that's sent to the modulator. This is an issue on 2600 video mods too, and for a similar reason. Looks like you can disable it by lifting one side of C9. This will disconnect it from the modulator chip. That might make the waviness in the video go away, too. Going by the schematic, C9 should feed into pin 10 of the MC1372. Looks to be 15pf? the schematic is really hard to read.

do you have a capacitor in series with the video out? try throwing a 220uf cap in series if you have one. It could be the TV doesn't like a DC bias on the video signal.

I don't understand it either. I've been called all sorts of nasty things by the Mister community. They seem to have a vendetta against me and use every opportunity to bash me and/or Analogue. At first, the Mister devs on there were real nice to me, but when I told them I couldn't release my code in an open source manner, their attitude towards me changed pretty fast. One of their devs accused me twice of using/stealing his code, and another of the devs there keeps pushing this lie on there as if it were the truth. Of course I have not looked at a single line of Mister source, except when someone posted it in this thread. As for that blending, I already have something similar, and the idea was to only make it blend when it needed to, instead of all the time. This way the whole screen doesn't look like someone slathered Vaseline on it. I can make it blend all the time instead of selectively maybe by setting a slider to min or max and might add that when I do some other changes/fixes. It was pretty amusing; the Mister people on the discord server were making fun of me for the Super nt core being TOO accurate! I support video modes that the original hardware can do, but aren't terribly useful, simply because it's there and something might use it in the future and got harassed for it. They carried on for an hour or so with their barrage of hate towards me, and scattered like cockroaches when I started talking. When the Pocket got announced a few months ago, they'd go on a 2-3 hour hatefest every day. It was frankly amusing how petty and ironic a lot of their so-called arguments were. They sure are not endearing anyone to the Mister cause with all their hate and abuse towards me. I just am curious to know what I did to them to make them detest me so. Awhile back I tried to give them some NES information and was accused of "talking down" to them, so I have stopped trying to help at all. It seems that if you're not giving away stuff you worked on for years for free, you're not welcome and become a target of ridicule. When I pointed out that I give out stuff more valuable than code, such as my hardware documentation, they scoff at it. I am giving away the golden goose (docs) and all they want are a few eggs (source code). Knowing how the actual hardware works at a register and cycle level lets you reproduce it in any form, be it PC emulator or FPGA core, write games and make compatible hardware. Trying to extract this kind of information from an emulator can be pretty difficult due to how emulators are written. They tend to use runahead, catchup, or other hacks to get decent performance which muddies the waters when it comes to figuring out the timing. Due to the single SDRAM nature of the Mister development environment, it makes cycle accuracy impossible or very difficult on many of their later cores, like SA-1 and Superfx for the SNES, the GBA core, and possibly others. When I have said in the past that something couldn't easily be done, I meant in a cycle accurate way. Sure, you can make it work if you don't care so much about cycle accuracy, but that is an affront to my whole FPGA mantra of accuracy. "yeah but it runs the games!" Sure. But at that point, you might as well be running a Raspberry pi and an emulator if all you care about is running games. This is pretty much all I will say about the Mister project; they sure have not made me want to help or support them in any way and I have seen them actively drive away several other people with their attitude.

Looks like that is what it is, but it seems to use a CPLD or FPGA of some sort to translate the data. This isn't a problem but if you run your DMG on batteries it will probably drain them faster. How much faster is anyone's guess. Also, I am not sure if this LCD will exactly fit in place of the old one, or if there will be some kind of border. There's no picture of the installation running from the front so I am a bit skeptical that it fits perfectly. It very well might, but there's no picture of the final install. Poking around google images, I found one or two pictures that might be this install or a similar one, and there's a very thin border around the edge.

I tested the 3D glasses with the DAC and it does work fine using a power base converter and the SMS x7 cartridge. It doesn't work too hot on HDMI though

The Cyclone V is the FPGA that will be usable by developers. Any article stating otherwise is wrong.

Then you're in the wrong thread 🙂

I didn't do capture on it, but I did use the schematics to implement it in verilog awhile back for an FPGA 7800 core.

Their video of "production" didn't mean much, IMO. You can send a lot of different places your PCB files and bill of materials and they will assemble it for you. There's dozens of them in China and even many in the US and around the world for that matter. What counts isn't video of production, but video of real hardware working, with footage of them showing the guts working, with a cable running to a TV and controllers.

Well that board probably never ever did anything useful. It might've gotten powered on at one point, but it seems it was just for show. I still am fairly sure they were hoping they could slot that into a DIMM socket of a motherboard and emulate the system RAM, but substitute cartridge data for RAM data. There being absolutely no IO except the DIMM-like header and some ribbon cables sort of re-enforces this thought to me. There was no RAM, no flash, no audio, and no video. Kinda hard to play games without that stuff. I guess it could've been some piece of FPGA hardware for their dev to play on without any actual application to the task at hand, no way to know. But as it sits, the board is quite useless without any IO at all. It's literally an FPGA and the power supplies to run it, with the FPGA IOs broken out to headers and sockets and nothing else. They would've gotten more mileage out of a commercial FPGA dev board. Those .1" headers all around the FPGA really choked off the board routing, and no PCB person worth their salt would've ever designed a PCB that way on purpose. That must've been why it needed 14 layers to route, when it could've been done on 6 without those headers choking the routing paths. If you needed .1" stuff around the chip for... some reason (hint: you don't) you can get surface mount connectors that don't need holes through the board.

thanks!

Is the mapper for this game documented anywhere? I looked but didn't find much. Oh yeah, and why is the ROM size off? it's 8195 bytes vs. 8192.

Yeah, and those investors are going to want some return on that investment. If it's like most of these projects, they have some say in what happens if they don't turn a profit in X time.

The problem is they vastly underestimate how difficult it really is, and figure they can just pay someone to do the work for them and they'll sit back and count the money as it rolls in. Polymega only got what, 600 grand or something? That sounds like a lot, but when you need to make all those plastic molds, and have a large monthly burn rate (salaries, building rent, etc) it goes fast. Then they have to have some money left to actually make the product.