phoenixdownita

This one does a decent job at introducing FPGAs in general:

From those pictures it looks like you use real golf balls? When you hit it where does it ends? I mean beside lodging itself on US chalkboard walls, or ricochet into the groin if it happens you have EU brick walls, or maybe just smash a window? EDIT: nvm just saw it comes with a net so that's where the balls are supposed to end.

I really hope that whatever happens to this venture we're going to see the improved Steve Snake ( https://segaretro.org/Steve_Snake ) emulation as well a exclusive mednafen Sega Saturn CD support etc.... basically the actual original work that went into this thing separate from whatever this unit is going to-be/not-to-be. (no a skin, a menu selector and an online store do not qualify in my book as something worth of any accolade)

I bow to you, it's always nice to try things first hand vs hearsay maybe!!! Wrt 32X I recently looked at: if nothing else it made me wanted to go and check the manual for Kolibri ( https://www.digitpress.com/library/manuals/32x/kolibri.pdf ) and a guide for Darxide ( http://segabits.com/blog/2014/08/28/a-users-guide-to-darxide/) and the guy talking about Zaxxon Motherbase 2000 also made me want to give it another try. I don't expect any of those to radically change my judgment but neither of them particularly appealed to me for one reason or the other and I rarely ventured past the first level thinking (like they mention in the video) that that was all there was to them.

-- Deleted , joke was not funny. --

We get it you like the Jaguar more, but if you put anyone that went to the Arcade during that timeframe playing a Jag vs a 32X the presence of the Sega properties on the 32X is a big boost no matter how you slice it and dice it. If instead you propose the challenge to a PC gamer then Jag it is via Wolf3D and Doom. The Jag has a few interesting and unique games but same for 32X, the "quantity" argument is meh at best, no amount of garbage (on either system) compensates for the lack of a solid lineup that is not single-digit. Also many of the exclusives while not being garbage by any stretch are just not as fun most of the time, take Tempo on 32X I found it boring (Bubsy on the Jag too but both looks well packaged at least so not garbage for sure). But the Jag has such lows like Fight For Life, Club Drive and more that left me speechless .... didn't feel like that on the 32X but I have not played yet Motocross Championship or Brutal Unleashed: Above the Claw ... not sure I care to try even after I actually played Supercross 3D and Kasumi Ninja on the Jag (I actually finished Kasumi Ninja ... did not like it, Supercross 3D I gave up at the third corner that I happened to slightly cut maybe 3px and the bike keeled over [which part of corner did I not understand !?!], may as well shoot the racers at the start as they already line up pretty neatly, one shot suffices).

I was expecting by now someone would have said it ... in the taunting section, but I call BS on this one. And yes, it comes in Gold too. (I should stop attempting jokes, but hey, I was done with all the BS) Plus it says it right there on the first page:

Does it mean in the 6 btn ctrl we have to "sand it down" aka permanent mod ?

Also I am not sure what you mean here. If you intend to say that because the authors (that can be many hundreds or even thousands) while working under paid time on a project should be entitled to have a choice about it, then we'll agree to disagree. Anything performed while paid by an employer (I really mean while at work) belongs to the employer period, I even agree that usage of any facilities made available by the employer (be it buildings, computers, HVAC etc....) and used for non work related purpose (a personal side project for example) needs explicit language (I am pretty sure anyone that works for cloud computing corps cannot simply start bitcoin mining on "test" hardware). Even more, if the company decides to release SW as open-source there should be no employee opinion involved.

It's his first FPGA project he could have chosen anything, like Krikzz that moved from Altera Cyclone II to IV when the II got discontinued he could have chosen the newer Cyclone V (like kevtris products or MiSTer) or Cyclone 10 ... note that the Cyclone line is already the cheaper line of FPGA from Altera (aka Intel as they bough them a few years back) well MAX10 is also there. Anyway no point in arguing, as long as it gets the job done and it's not obsoleted in 1Y or so we're fine.

Man those things must have been flying out like hotcakes, I think I checked about 1H:30M after the 9AM PST announced availability time and it was sold-out, sniping galore. Good for Mike, wish he had used a more modern FPGA part, Cyclone IVs are so old (they were announced in 2009), at a point they disappeared from the Altera catalogue just to reappear couple months later (maybe they found a warehouse worth of) .... Anyhow I can't blame him for using cheaper parts whenever possible. If I get to acquire one I'll have to sell my 2X-Pro-M + Scart-to-YPbPbr setup, I ended up not using it that much due to requiring a compatible TV set for more console than I expected (and the more modern aka more compatible TV is in another room at the moment), at which point the Framemeister just worked out better for me, but I do need one that can do fast 240p/480i switch as same Saturn games are borderline unplayable, only saving grace is that the TV set currently hooked up seems fine with direct SVideo connection so ... somehow it works.

I know of no commercial entity (aka in on it to make money) that does open source without very obvious self-serving reasons. Sony ... really ... the company that removed "OtherOS" from the PS3. SUN made it a point to commoditize the SW as they banked on selling you the HW (those workstations were expensive) look at where they are now ...right, your claims on MS office are just out there (as some of your speculative ties would expose MS to the lawsuit from hell with billions at stakes) although anything under more liberal GPLv2, MIT, 3clause BSD is par for the course in any commercial software stack. Which company would not want to cut dev costs using a permissive piece of existing code, especially if said piece is not its bread and butter. Every commercial company contributing to open source does it so so it has some return. Business is business is business, there's no free launch, if your boss shoves money down an open source project he better have a plan to make it back at market return rate one way or another. Check out what happened to Docker, once they agreed to splinter the layers (runc/contaierd/dockerd) their business model of trying to make money on the swarm (their multi-box manager) got peed on by Google K8, which now is ditching and replacing the top layer and everyone is happy ... well for sure everyone else. Facebook for example releases quite interesting open source projects and given SW is not their business they do it so they can attract talent into the company, this assuming the load of money they pile on programmers covers for the kind of business they actually do (newsflash, if you do not pay for the product, you are the product) ... yeah money and morals are at odds, not blaming the developers that work for Facebook here, I have not any higher moral ground. <rant> It's been quite the recurring theme, company X invents tech Y but shares it assuming it can make money charging for advanced feature Z, big company K gives away for free their version of advanced feature Z, called Z-prime, as they're gonna charge you some other way, they also release Z-prime free because, which big company J packages neatly with tech Y and sells some other way, and on and on the wheel goes making everyone believe that the SW itself (the one at the bottom of all of this) is worthless shit 'cause everyone is attempting to charge for something else. </rant> In specific wrt games imho it is suicidal to think of releasing all the sources/assets of a new game (say one week after release) that has costed tens if not hundreds of millions to produce. Now if we were to live in a different society based on sharing from the get go with no intent to "make money" per se but based on satisfying needs (primaries like food, shelter, health, but also secondaries like entertainment), then of course the mere ideas of private property (physical or intellectual) and copyright would be simply silly and everything open the natural way things would be, but where we stand now I really do not see a company with commercial ambitions being able to make a business by open sourcing 100% of all that they do. I hope one day that is the case as it would mean we would be in a very different society. PS: for the specific title in the OP even the instructions cannot be reproduced and freely shared btw. Right or wrong I believe according to laws in some countries it's in their rights to limit its circulation. maybe they would relent on that in say another decade or so.

I am sure if a major video game company would release its current gen games on current gen consoles in source format and let anyone build it we would see people pitching in to fill the gap about tool-chains, and builds and everything in between just because they can, and I wouldn't blame them (look at the instant hacks of the mini-consoles, granted the companies were making money out of the HW they sold so ...). As to single authors making games for dead-and-buried consoles it is their choice wrt open source it or not, as it is their time and investment, well obviously if they want to give away the source of a current gen game they made (assets and all) it's their choice too. My point is about the choice to open-source the code or not and that it stays with the author/owner, we already know that the binaries will be dumped and cracked and adapted to run on flash carts eventually [that's the trend we have seen so far at least and aside Nintendo shutting down the various rom-site or occasional fan-made game there's not much IP enforcement for better or for worse].

On the RetroTink-5X I'm on the fence mostly because I expect there will be revisions (like the 2X -> 2X-Pro -> 2X-Pro-M) AND somewhat that Mike will find a way to wedge in an auto-attenuator circuit on the Scart signal path for people that have TTL CSYNC cables/mods. I have manually added LM1881 to my setups and it is still unattenuated (hadn't had time to add a series resistor yet) and I did use it with the Framemeister to stabilize my NeoGeo AES via Scart, somehow I could never dial in the settings well enough to avoid desync but with the sync stripper it was perfect, so obviously a problem with a noisy composite line on my AES. PS: wrt TTL CSYNC I am planning to eventually add a series resistor, I guess I was "lucky" that nothing bad happened to my Framemeister but I didn't play a lot via it 'cause that NeoGeo AES via SVideo mod worked wonders on the TV set I had available and only one game would desync constantly and require the use of the Framemeister which though was disappointing until I added the LM1881 (I have it inside the Scart adapter cable and I can toggle it to sync stripped or source csync via a switch so it's not constantly in TTL mode either). Wrt TTL attenuation on the LM1881 output I know everyone says 300ohm, because 75/(300+75)=1/5=0.2 so 5V -> 1V at the same time just a 100ohm should already attenuate below risk 75/(100+75)=0.42 so 5V->2.1 (and 5V is the max output but I suspect it's typically already lower, at 4.5V output 300ohm gives 0.9V and 100ohm gives 1.9) https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm1881.pdf most of the time the risks mentioned are wrt upscalers that are 3.3V and not 5V tolerant, ESR diodes etc...etc...

I know what open source is, I am asking why one would expect game source code to be open source. Authors/companies can for sure decide to release it as it's been done in the past, I am trying to understand the expectation that it MUST happen on some moral ground. In the end that very source code is what made the game what it was (tricks and all) and if the game was developed for economic reasons (and not as a teaching device for example), expecting the code to one day become open-source just because is not something I understand aside from us wanting to see it. I don't hear the same passionate standpoint wrt to the source code of the microcontroller of those digital anal thermometers (I know I'm pushing it but there really is something of a double standard ... and I am sure you can make them play Doom if you are really dedicated and whoop some ass).