kevtris
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Posts posted by kevtris
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.... that's an easy one, you didn't release your cores for free (source and all) and ported them onto MiSTer as you were at it.
My wife hates you for that too (the free part, not the MiSTer part) as she really wanted me to spend 200US$ in something else .... when she got what she wanted though she stopped bugging me about the SuperNT ... she doesn't know yet the MegaSG is also coming ... oh well it will cost me an extra 200US$ to shut her up .... I kind of hate you too right now
<I-was-being-sarcastic />
hah. I try my best!
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I guess I fall into the group of thinking mister is just over hyped. It comes off like the next douchey catch word of something to use that comes along like all the pedantic trolls who drone on and on about how having a Pi is the answer to everything, acting like a 5 year old could set it up blind folded and that it just works the best when in all cases it's not. Mister seems to have a few flaws, input lag being the big one that'll break it on a lot of TVs. For me using displaylag.com labeling I find you need to be under 30ms on a shelf bought TV or you have problems with the pickier stuff and down from there. If mister is adding some bad level of input lag because of some internal flaws to it that could be corrected, I have to wonder what worth they have to bragging rights when attack claws go out when such issues are brought up.
And on that, I didn't know if kevtris or analogue popped up in conversation they got nasty about it, that's a new one on me, but if it's true that reeks of an inferiority complex.
They sure do, I've witnessed it on the discord chat so far. I still am trying to figure out what I ever did to them to result in such negativity and hate from them.
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I saw you down in the browsing list a bunch, and was kind of hoping you'd chime in around page 10 or so.
I stayed well clear of being trolly. Still, no way I'm sticking my neck out in the coleco forum anymore.
koolaid-drinking posts only, just like with jaguar. Life's too short to swim against that kind of current.
I didn't post anything because I just assumed it would've been deleted with extreme prejudice. I had plenty I wanted to say, but I would've just been labelled a troll and a hater, and didn't want "competition" <cough>. Obviously none of that is true. I ended up talking to bmack on dischord and he was nice about it.
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It's all gone very quiet. No activity on their web site or social media.
Can we assume Poymega is dead?
Does anyone know if refunds are happening ?
They got peoples' money, no need to talk about it any more. It will remain to be seen if they produce anything in the next 5-6 months.
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He deleted your post almost instantly but now acts like it was his decision to do just what you advised him to do . And having a custom chip built .
Interestingly The Opcode guy thanked me in a private message for the info and I'm glad he got something out of it and saw it before it got nuked. Without constructive criticism, projects get stuck in a hug-box echo chamber and then people can lose sight of the big picture. Sure, trolling is not a good thing and isn't constructive, but calling actual criticism "trolls" when it is not helps absolutely no one. Once your project gets a wider audience than 1 sub forum, the narrative cannot be controlled. I saw lots of complaints about youtube comments/videos in that thread. If those people only got to see the hate that I receive all the time from youtube and other sources, they'd blanch. I just take it in stride and don't worry about it.
I am always happy to receive well thought out constructive criticism, and I do not need to be protected from wrongthink. There was a lot of mister talk in this thread awhile back but I didn't say anything or complain about it because people want to talk about it. It's like going to a Coke convention and then talking about how Pepsi is so much better, and you shouldn't drink Coke. I bet if I was talking about the virtues of my 1080p HDMI Coleco core in the Phoenix thread, it would've been nuked from orbit in literally seconds.
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And people should to listen to you of all people with your experience . And not make your post disappear like when you warned opcode about using old chips for his possible upcoming system . And yes , a mod and a few other people like to blast people for their opinions and questions / concerns .
Did my post on that get deleted? I didn't notice. If so, that was a douchey thing to do, because I was just being honest and trying to save them a huge headache down the line when they were getting hundreds of parts only to find out half of them don't even work, because they were pulls sold as new, and/or factory rejects that were remarked, or simply not available. It's pretty difficult to buy 100-1000+ parts that were last made in the 90's and are otherwise very uncommon and get known good product.
Unless it's something common like a sound chip or RAM chip or whatever, a single sourced Yamaha VDP is going to be nearly impossible to source in any kind of production quantity. Heck, I have problems getting things that went end of life 6 months ago, let alone 20-25+ years ago!
If you want to see how bad the counterfeit/re-mark chip industry is, just check out ebay. Search for AY-3-8910. Any chip that is laser marked is a fake. Let's see. I see dozens of auctions for faked chips. The first results are some chips that have been painted black and a new marking stamped on. Yeah, I think GI is still making chips in 2013! (they have a 2013 date code). Seeing how GI was bought by Microchip in the early 90's, this is hilarious. And another that has been painted black and laser etched with a Microchip logo, and a 2016 date code. I think these chips were last produced some time in the early 90's, and did carry a Microchip logo, but it was always stamped and never laser etched. This is just 1 chip, now multiply that by all the sound/video/etc chips on the market.
Then again, I only have had 25 years experience with the whole "making electronic hardware and selling it" racket, so maybe I don't know a lot about it. I've made and sold thousands of hi def NES adapters and all of our products at work as well and several FPGA videogame systems that have hit the market. Clearly I don't know what I am talking about!
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To me, the fact that it only outputs 480p isn't that much of a big deal. Scalers inside a TV are not the greatest, but upscaling a digital signal isn't as messy as up scaling noisy, older analog signals (e.g., RF, composite, S-video). I have a VGA modded ColecoVision, and I am running the VGA signal through a VGA to HDMI converter, and the picture looks pretty darn good.
I'd buy a CollectorVision system if I could, but thanks to unexpected medical expenses over the last 6-8 months.... probably not. Who knows... Santa might be nice to me this year..
I wasn't going to say anything about the system, but since people are talking about it here, I might as well.
I think 480p only was a mistake- TVs and monitors have poor scaling and when I am testing video, there's a really obvious difference between 720p, 1080p and 480p. The latter looks blurry, like your glasses are dirty. When you do a direct A/B compare, going from 480p to even 720p seems like you've cleared the fog off a window. All the hostility against people who brought up the inconvenient truth that it was 480p only was bad for the cause. Calling such people "trolls" was disingenuous at best.
It was fully reasonable to ask questions and raise concerns about it, and beating those people down for no reason other than their opinion was unprofessional and poor form.
Also, showing Atari 2600 running on it, but only in VGA form and not HDMI was sort of deceptive, because there's a whole frame buffer system that has to be created before 2600 can be displayed over HDMI (unless you stick to games that output a single scanline count, and/or try to get your monitor to accept different frame rates, and don't mind it blacking out every time it changes). The system has no VGA port (though technically one could be added via the expansion port) so showing it running on a video output the board doesn't have was as Dave Jones of eevblog says.. "a little how ya doin'".
Speaking of frame rate, I don't think the system outputs an exact 60.0Hz frame rate either since it's basically raw digital VGA f18a video being transcoded into HDMI, and I don't think this outputs an exact 60.0Hz frame. If you do not output 60.0 exactly, there are plenty of monitors and TVs that will choke on it and give a black screen or similar. When making a product that will be used on potentially thousands of different TV and monitor models, it must conform to the HDMI standard as closely as possible. You MUST borrow or buy an HDMI analyzer to ensure compatibility.
I am not knocking their system or the creators of it at all, and I would not have said anything but it was brought up here. This is all my opinion and everyone is free to disagree with it :-)
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Well, that's all folks, the pre-orders are over!
It looks like they pulled in $17,500 in the last day, despite giving out no new information all month, and with no sign at all of the see-the-hardware-working video that was promised weeks ago.
In fact, the only posts that I can find from Playmaji themselves in this last month were on Twitter last night ...
amusingly the countdown was based on your browser's local time, so when it hit 0 for me, others still had 1 or 2 hours left!
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What does the CPLD do? if you are combining the chip enables, you can simply AND all four together and then use A13/A14 on the cart edge. A 74LS08/74HC08 ought to do it.
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Just stumbled on this, not sure when they were put up:
FPGA Console of DOOOOOM!
http://kevtris.org/Projects/console/video/page1.html
it almost looks like geocities.
From here:
http://kevtris.org/Projects/console/
it looks like they have been there for 13 years .... wow!
yeah I never had the skillz or time to improve my web page. Those pics are so old they are pics of a CRT. The first pics date from 2004 when the project started, to around 2006.
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If we're still tracking analogue sale/order numbers, mine's
20038 Mega Sg
9344 super nt
3640 nt mini
Looks like orders are doubling each year. I wanted to wait a little longer for the preorder, but there was this fear of missing out on 'the good one'
Kevtris, Is this your full time gig, now?
You're putting out a system a year, which is a heck of a pace.
I still got my day job but yeah Analogue's pretty much my full time thing at the moment. And yeah, it is a hell of a pace. haha.
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Hey Kev!
Since the Mega is coming out any new updates coming to the NT mini or Super Nt coming?
The Intellivison core for the Nt mini for one
The additional cores could use some work. With the Nt Mini in limbo I dont think they will ever be revisted. With the master system core being used we may see some updates there. Fm audio will likely remain a close approximation rather than a 100% reproduction.
I'm kinda sad we didn't see cartridge adapters or additional controller options on the Nt Mini.
Sorry 'bout that. I have been working non-stop on the mega sg since earlier this year. I am doing 12 hour days, 7 days a week. There's only one of me so unfortunately so I haven't had a chance to go back and do anything on the those yet. I still want to port the intv core to the nt mini and do some other fixes as well but it will be awhile yet.
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Well I wonder if kevtris really needs to do a TG-16/PCE core if they did release an analogue TG as the one used in MiST/MiSTer is pretty good and open source. Would it really be cost effective to reimplement his own from scratch or for analogue to just reuse the open source core that exists.
That's not the way I operate. If I were to do TG-16, I would reimplement it from scratch.
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I love the NES for its arcade port library. Some great titles in there that to me, make it worth owning today. My only gripe were games with no battery saves or password features like SMB. It frustrated me when I first got it. Dying in World 4 only to have to start all over again. I found that infuriating and something that would have been alleviated by a simple password after every level. That's why I enjoy the game more now that I can use save states in emulation. I came from a world of mostly single screen games so this was a massive new world at the time. I get that I'm in the minority and kids at the time were probably beating the game handily after a few tries but I never got far and just quit in frustration and played Duck Hunt instead. Then I'd put down the game pad and turned on my Atari 2600 and reveled in the simple fun of it.
You can press A+start to restart at the last world where you died. So if you croak in world 4, you can restart there by holding A and pressing start. This will always start you out on world N-1, though, but it is a pretty decent way to "save your progress" so to speak, vs. going back to 1-1.
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Damn, people had to wait three years to get the game?
That, and when the SNES port was finally released, it had a lot of bugs and glitches. Like what looks like the palette reloading during rendering which causes bright flashes for a frame between most screens. This really detracts from the immersion level and would've been an easy fix to make. There's other glitches like the screen randomly scrolling into place when you enter some screens, and the lack of smooth scrolling on the lava. (Granted that last one isn't a glitch, but it would've been trivial to add it and make things look soo much nicer.) Not to pee on anyones' parade or anything, but I kind of expect a debugged game for the asking price.
There's several videos up about it on Youtube, but most of them are of the "OMG new SNES game!" variety, and seem to focus on things like the box art and manual, and other things that aren't related to the actual game itself. Once that wears off, what's the actual gameplay like? So far, no one has mentioned any of the obvious glitching or questionable play mechanics such as having to keep a button down to use the torch in the reviews at all, which is somewhat suspicious. Again, I am not trying to be negative but for the money and all the extra time it took, I was expecting a bit more.
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Well, it's just nice to hear from you every once in a while, Kev, NDAs notwithstanding.
Yeah glad people still care :-)
I've been hard at work on stuff for quite a while now.
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C'MON KEVTRIS ... TELL US ... WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON?
The worse would be if it's not even FPGA-console related, anything that is instead Genny, PCE, NeoGeo would be a winner in my book.
haha I wished I could tell ya but I can't. not yet, anyways.
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A lot of companies made chips for Atari. They seemed to like AMI though, which is American Microsystems, not to be confused with the BIOS maker AMI. They also used IMP, Synertek, and later OKI, UMC, and others fab their chips as well.
VTI was used by plenty of 3rd part game makers such as Activision for their bankswitched ROMs, the Pitfall 2 chip, and the RAM+ carts made by CBS. Several companies were making the custom bankswitched ROMs contemporary at that time, such as the F8 and F6 bankswitching schemes.
Atari used VTI for the 7800 Maria. If you count Tengen, Motorola seems to be the main supplier for the ROMs and mappers and "Rabbit" lockout chip clone on their NES titles.
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The issue with portability has more to do with how the hardware varies vs. the actual "core" part. You have to map the pins of your FPGA to your core's inputs and outputs. If the exact same hardware isn't present, such as RAM chips or DACs or whatever, you have to adapt the core to the new hardware so those things will play nice. It is much lower level than a software emulator running on some hardware; it's more akin to writing an emulator in assembly that directly interfaces with hardware vs. having some kind of interposing layer such as a video driver or sound driver. It's more like porting a game between the SNES, genesis, and playstation.
I have written my own "framework" for all of my FPGA cores, which makes porting them to new hardware a very simple procedure in the future if it needs to be done. It has a standard set of inputs and outputs, and these connect up to some stuff that sits between the actual outside world hardware and the internal "core" part which makes it simple. This allows me to change parts and still retain the easy to build aspect of it.
As for re-synthesizing the core, this is a red herring, because to port an emulator to a new system you end up having to recompile it anyways. An FPGA design is no different in this respect. The hardest part of porting is probably changing between FPGA vendors (i.e. altera/intel to xilinx). Because there tends to be vendor-specific things for PLLs and blockrams. Though I tend to use verilog only blockram instantiation vs. their "mega gizzard" (mega wizard) version, unless it's required, such as when you need true dual porting. For simple dual port or single port RAM/ROM, you can instantiate it in verilog just fine without using vendor-specific stuff.
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Somehow, I don't think $500K is enough money to pay people and pay for prototyping of a full custom modern spec Intel based motherboard. Along with all the plastic molds they have to make for all the various modules (at least the tops), controller ports, the base unit itself, and all those controllers. That's probably 50-60 grand or more in mold making right there. I guess it's possible molds are already done for that stuff but I don't think they will be able to use them as-is-- at least for the base unit, so that will include money to get it retooled or redone as dictated.
Then there is the whole thermal design issue, getting 35W of heat out is going to be tricky, so they will need some custom cooling solution most likely to go with it. They probably extended the deadline because they realized 500K is definitely not enough money to get all the NRE costs paid for (non-recurring engineering) and make the product too. Even if so they are still in the hole to their investors on top of it all, who will be first in line to get any money they hope to make as a profit. To recover 500K in investment money will require them selling several million dollars of product at least, before they will actually recover a penny of profit themselves.
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Looks like they were auctioning it off back in March. And a bonus, it came with the bowling ball. https://propstoreauction.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/124/lot/24149/
Where the broken circuit board came from is anyone's guess.
That's a 4 phase SMPS buck regulator, commonly found on PC motherboards and video cards. That one seems to date around the athlon 64 era if I had to guess. If you check out athlon 64 mobos on google, you will see a lot of similar setups. They tend to have 3 phases but I saw a few 4 phases. It could be a year or three newer but it's from that era. That has toroidal inductors, which went out of favor for the box style ones, as inductance went down and switching frequency went up. It could also be a VRM module from a server. I did a quickie google search and found plenty of similar things but nothing exact.
The other piece of PCB has a single phase buck regulator on it. I suspect if it was a mobo or video card they were careful to only take the most generic power supply components and not have anything too identifying like a CPU socket or GPU. In fact there's not really anything other than power supply in that "videogame system". All four pieces of PCB are just power supply parts. There's no chips of any kind other than power by the looks of things.
I like how they used a band saw or similar to cut the PCB up to make it look broken, and the switches and stuff don't have any wires or anything attached to them.
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After talking about it some more, it seems that the size of the box has grown significantly too. Their product pages claim the unit is 31*31*21cm now which is about 12.2*12.2*8.2 inches. Going by the renders, I measured the pixels across the front of it, and it was 500 pixels wide. the CDROM slot was 278 pixels wide, giving a ratio fairly close to 1.8:1. Assuming that a CDROM is 12cm, and giving 2mm of "slop" on the disc to make it easier to insert, we can calculate just how big this thing has to be.
So if we assume the slot is 12.2cm, multiplying this by 1.8 gives 22cm (8.66 inches) almost exactly for the width. This means each pixel of the image is approximately .44mm. The height of the thing in the render is approximately 130 pixels, so this means it's 5.75cm high, or about 2.25 inches.
From all that, I am going to say the size of the box is 22*22*5.75cm (8.7*8.7*2.25 inches) in the renders. This is a volumetric increase of 7.25 times between the render and the dimensions listed on the website (2783 cc's to 20181 cc's).
edited to add: checking out the size and weight of a PS4, the Polymega seems to be awfully close to it.
The 'mega is 31*31*21cm and 6 pounds
The PS4 is 27.5*30.5*5.3cm and 6.1 pounds
The PS4 pro is 29.5*32.7*5.5cm and 7.2 pounds
The PS4 slim is 26.5*28.8*3.9cm and 4.62 pounds.
I hope my math is all right. I sourced the render I used here:
https://raginggazebo.com/is-the-polymega-dead/
and the 31*31*21 number is right off their product page here:
https://www.polymega.com/product/polymega-base-unit/
It's under "additional information" Also listed is the weight - 6 pounds!
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Hmmmm, extremely interesting. Thanks!
That matches with their announced plan to map the cartridge memory directly into CPU address space ... however well that would work well in practice (or not).
As you point out, modern PC CPUs don't use DDR2 memory anymore, especially something really, really modern like the Intel Pentium Gold G5500T processor that is their current spec, which uses DDR4 memory.
Does anyone want to guess what can/does still use DDR2??? ... ... ... The Rockchip RK3288 ARM processor that was Polymega's original CPU.
That ARM SoC chip can directly use 1.2V LPDDR2 memory, which nicely matches the 1.2V power supply for that Spartan6 FPGA on the board.
That fact, and the time when the photo was released (around E3), gives me even more reason to think that the FPGA dev board is part of Polymega's original hardware design, and nothing to do with the recent change to an Intel system, or the change to drop the FPGA from their main system board, and put the cartridge interface circuitry in each module instead.
Yeah that's probably a reasonable guess- making something that lines up with the SOC memory that would typically be used. They've strayed pretty far from the original gameplan and are trying a hail mary pass to see if they can make a final go of it. I just think it's too little, to late. The current design is just a wishful thinking exercise IMO. I would like to see how they are going to remove 40W of heat from that little enclosure. Their previous version at E3 was overheating and was probably running on their original specs (SOC). A desktop CPU in that small box with no cooling will make a dandy coffee cup warmer I guess if nothing else.
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See kevtris's thoughts on that board, and a picture of it, here ...
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/261689-retroblox/page-56?do=findComment&comment=4056440
... and my comment on his comment, here ...
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/261689-retroblox/page-56?do=findComment&comment=4056682
That dev board couldn't have been their main console board, because it had no ARM/Intel CPU, no RAM and no HDMI.
It was likely built for prototyping the FPGA code that would be used in each of their modules to interface/dump the cartridge, and read the original controller ports.
As kevtris pointed out, the components on that board are too expensive for it to be anything close to a shipable test board for the actual modules. That Spartan6 FPGA is over $60 just by itself!
The card-edge connector at the bottom of the board looks like it *might* be a standard connector that you could plug into a desktop PC somewhere, and so be consistent with their change in design specs, but someone else would be in a better position to say if that's likely.
Personally, I don't think so, because it looks more like a PC RAM SIMM/DIMM card edge than a PCI/PCI-E card edge.
I kinda suspect that it is left over from their original ARM-based-system plans.
We have no concrete confirmation of when that board was actually manufactured, or which of their many defunct hardware guys actually designed it.
After a bunch of WAG's and speculation, the current theory is that their hybrid emulation is as follows:
That FPGA board edge footprint matches up with a standard DIMM form factor, and this board was meant to plug into a desktop motherboard's DIMM socket. The board has two ribbon cable connectors which would've connected to the element modules. It appears there's an SPD EEPROM (serial presence detect) near the right lower corner of the board, or something else similar in an 8-SO outline. The chip is a standard EEPROM, so including one wouldn't be difficult.
The ultimate goal of doing this, I think, was so that they could access cartridge memory, as if it were the computer's own memory by making what amounts to a cart to PC "bridge". The FPGA would translate the CPU's memory reads and writes into cartridge reads and writes.
This sounds like a good idea in theory, but I can think of a few reasons why this still wouldn't work very well. The main reason is still speed- the carts are incredibly slow in relation to the DIMM it replaced, and I think the form factor looked like DDR2 or so (I'm too lazy to check). A modern mobo wouldn't have this, but they could be using an older mobo for this, for testing and development and possibly expect to make a DDR3/4 version at some point in the future.
Even if they get it to work the speed issues and more important caching would be a non-starter. If the CPU caches the cart data, that means anything with bankswitching probably wouldn't work because the underlying memory would be changing and the cache wouldn't know.
If all those problems could be solved, the chipset/CPU's memory controller would need custom programming, which means hacking the BIOS and a bunch of other scary and hairy things would need to be done to make it work.
Again all speculation but it's the best thing I can come up with on re-examination of the evidence presented.
eta: thanks to those on discord including Drag The Waters for his theory on having to change the BIOS to make it work.
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FPGA Based Videogame System
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
He is right, I never had a genesis. I had a SNES though. Friend and I swapped systems for a month or two; I got his genesis+sonic and he got my SNES+super mario world. Up until this year, about the only things I played on it were sonic games.