elmer

Wow! $300,000 raised in 3 days on IndieGoGo for the handheld Speccy (200% of the goal) ... https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-sinclair-zx-spectrum-vega-plus-console Mike's jealousy will drive him straight to the bottle when he hears about it!

This is my guess ... but I could easily be wrong. See Heinlein’s Razor ... Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice.

I find this board a heck-of-a-lot more interesting, since it's plug-and-play out of the box with HDMI, and has a huge memory bandwidth to the FPGA ... http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=167&No=830&PartNo=1 No ARM on-board, but why-on-earth would I want a ARM on board when I can just buy a $35 Raspberry-PI2 if I want a cheap quad-core software-emulation machine?

1) After the last year of mis-steps, changing directions, exaggerations, and what-seems-like downright fibbing, together with an overall air of ego-and-incompetence ... you have to be very generous to use the phrase "really smart" when referring to anything that these guys have done. 2) What makes you think that the owners of the Atari brand would even be interested in allowing their name to be associated with these guys? 3) OTOH, the Coleco brand's owners seem to be perfect matches for Mike's sympathies. You may have missed this info from one of the earlier threads ... http://www.paramuspost.com/article.php/20151116193122623 So the River West/Coleco guy that we actually saw on the Toy Fair video has only recently joined/bought-into the company, and has no history in video games except for being a massive toy collector and writing self-published guides on collecting GI Joe figures and NES games. A match made-in-heaven!

Jeez ... I posted this a few pages ago, but I guess that's too far back in time for people to remember. The guy's only using approx 29000LE on the DE2-115 ... approx 1/3 of the space on the chip. The DE1 only had 20000LE, and the chip was 2 generations older and less capable, that's why he had to switch to the bigger board. You can buy a 50000LE Cyclone 5 chip for $50 (but you'll still need all the other logic ... like some memory to simulate the cartridge (or just use an actual cartridge). The 512KB of block RAM inside the Cyclone 5 chip is plenty big enough for the 128KB SNES CPU RAM and the 64KB SNES PPU RAM. BTW ... the DE2-115 is $310 academic price, and can occasionally be found for around that price on eBay ... that's where mine came from. P.S. Don't think that anything that I've just said means that I think that Mike has the knowledge or capability to pull that off, or that I think that the Chameleon "design" will be anything other than a cheap Chinese ARM SoC with minimal-if-any FPGA.

This is also why I think that everyone here (including me) is probably just totally barking-up-the-wrong-tree. Just because Mike says that they're running a "custom SNES-core" in their FPGA, doesn't mean that he actually means it in the same way that Kevtris would if he were saying it. I wouldn't be even-the-slightest-bit surprised if Mike's custom-and-proprietary SNES-core was just the simple FPGA logic programming that would configure a small-and-cheap FPGA that is attached to a SNES cartridge-socket, and enable it to read the contents of a SNES cartridge into a software-emulated-SNES that's running on an ARM chip, i.e. no different to a Retron 5's FPGA.

I know that I certainly wouldn't want my Absinthe to be absent!

Even simpler ... did the hardware guy really not take any pictures of the board/assembly before he sent-it/gave-it to Mike, either for insurance, historical-record. or cover-my-ass reasons? The whole excuse is just BS. You're not going to design a cobbled-together-with-spit-and-duct-tape system that uses a salvaged SNES-Jr back-half when there's plenty of FPGA prototype boards that you can buy off-the-shelf that will let you demo your wonderful new SNES FPGA core ... if you actually have one. There's plenty of circuit-diagrams for adding an MSX cartridge adapter board to an off-the-shelf Altera DE1/DE2/DE2-115 board ... you can't tell me that IF they really wanted to prototype an FPGA core with a SNES cartridge port, that they couldn't have done the same.

Just to play "Devil's Advocate" ... none of what he's saying would be strictly untrue if they used a cheap ARM SoC board (like the C.H.I.P.), used a small-and-cheap FPGA to interface that board to a cartridge port, and then ran their own SNES Emulator on the ARM chip and called that software the "core" of their system.

AFAIK that's the only core that's known to exist, so far. According to the guy's website it's using around 30,000LE on the DE2-115. The cheapest Cyclone V chip that I can find with > 30,000LE is the Cyclone V E 5CEBA4F17C8N at $50. So, either he's contracted the only guy on the planet with a working SNES-in-an-FPGA, and is willing to pay $50-per-chip for just the FPGA itself in his $150 package, or ... He can use a $9 C.H.I.P., run an emulator, and pocket the change. What are the odds that he'd really choose to go with the FPGA?

Just wanted to get in one last "hardware-speculation" before the show starts, in the unlikely event that they actually announce any real details. I'm still betting that what will be on show today will be a BeagleBone Black or a Raspberry Pi 2 maybe-attached to a custom motherboard to provide a cartridge port ... although that's not certain given the lead-times for large prototype boards, particularly if ordered from China. The "console" would then just run uBoot on startup and display the "Chameleon" logo almost-instantly while it is booting linux from eMMC or SD card (or cartridge ... hahaha!). But that will only be the "prototype", because they'll plan to replace the "expensive" BeagleBone/Pi with a $9 C.H.I.P. (http://getchip.com/) for actual production. So ... my end prediction is that the final plan for the "Coleco Chameleon" is that it will be a $9 C.H.I.P on a custom motherboard, thrown inside the Jaguar shell, bundled with that cheap Wii-U controller, and a couple of pack-in carts (1 Coleco collection + 1 16-bit game), and then sold on to their adoring fans for a 200%-300% markup. Or I could be wrong. It's going to be an interesting day.

So is slotting in an existing ARM SoC board (like a BeagleBone) on to their Jagwire-sized motherboard (if they go that route) ... and also so is taking a chip-manufacturer's ARM SoC reference design and just adding a cartridge port to it and then building the whole thing onto a new board (if they go that route). I'm still curious about how they plan to differentiate this from just being a "Coleco Ouya" with a cartridge port.

For whatever reason, the FaceBook page isn't sorting their updates by date. You've missed two updates, on Dec. 30th and Jan 15th, that show that they're still focusing on the most critically important factor for their future success ... getting the "Coleco Chameleon" logo on to the Jagwire case mold.

The component cost should come down considerably when buying a couple of thousand, particularly from a cheaper distributor (such as when contract-manufactured in China). But I guess that that would still be within the $25-$45 game cost that I think that Mike was originally talking about so many months ago, IIRC. It would be easy to have u-boot in a small eprom/flash inside the console that displays the "Coleco Chameleon" logo while it boots the game kernel from a USB-style cartridge, or a PATA/SATA-style cartridge ... or while it configures a small FPGA to provide a DMA system to an N64-style parallel cartridge. There are lots of possibilities ... but anything "interesting" and "different" is going to take time to design, and to put together into a bulletproof system for commercialization. This stuff isn't Mike Kennedy's area of experience, nor is it Steve Woita's. So the question is ... who is doing the design now, and what is their background? With the original mention of the BeagleBone Black, and the incredible speed of the turnaround between failed IGG and the "new" Coleco Chameleon, it seems likely that they've just gone back to that style of simple ARM SoC. But, IMHO, that kind of low-power (by modern standards) system just isn't going to handle the kind of modern programming that goes into the current Unity-made "Retro-style" games without looking like total crap ... or without requiring months of Chameleon-specific optimization, that just isn't going to make economic sense to any game developers. I really look forward to hearing more details about the system (hopefully in February), but I can't help feeling that whatever they come up with to fit into the new "low" price, it just isn't going to be a viable target for modern developers and their high-profile "Retro Style" games, and it isn't going to be an "interesting" enough system to attract smaller homebrew/old-school developers.

A quick search on Newark shows a few flash chips of 1Gbit-2Gbit size. For example ... Spansion S29GL-P MirrorBit ® Flash Family S29GL01GP 1Gbit parallel NOR flash (100,000 write cycles per page, 20 year retention). This kind of stuff exists ... if you want to pay for it. But in reality ... I'd expect them to use serial flash. Does everyone here complain that the Nintendo 64 somehow wasn't a "real" cartridge machine just because it's cartridges were serial-access (via an 8-bit or 16-bit port IIRC) ?

The chip isn't doesn't self-destruct in 20 years ... it just suffers bit-rot on the last-programmed data. Simple solution ... have the console itself reflash the game image when a game is run. That extends your date another 20 years. 100,000 write cycles on a NOR flash. Silly solution ... it's Mike's plan to pass a business down to his kids and grand-kids ... charging $10-a-time to reflash the 100's of millions of Coleco Chameleon cartridges that will be sold.

Mike even mentioning the new "100MB" game size gives us some room for intelligent guesses about the hardware. A quick trip to any electronics site (like Newark) on the web shows ... 1GBit NAND flash (10 year data retention) approx $1.90 in qty 1000. 1GBit NOR flash (20 year data retention) approx $6.30 in qty 1000. The NOR flash seems the likely candidate for a cartridge given Mike's desire for reasonable longevity, and the potential cartridge costs. I'm guessing 100MB for the game, and 28MB for the OS & libraries. What I'm curious about is the software side ... how careful are they going to be about avoiding any GPL'd bootcode/OS/libs if they're throwing this thing together so fast, seemingly without anyone that's actually had a history of doing the kind of system-software level programming that they'll need (unless they just throw uboot/linux/sdl/android/etc on there without any consideration of the legalities).

How about "The new Coleco Chameleon will have the same level of high-quality hardware design as the famous Coleco Adam"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam This thing just took another lurch towards being what I've suspected for a while ... a $99 Christmas novelty product with pack-in games just like a cartridge version of those Jakks Pacific Atari Joystick or Atari Paddle games (or the current successors). It's just going to be an under-powered BeagleBone-Black ARM system running an emulator, with the "experience" of changing cartridges being it's sole selling-point.

Transparency like "The Emperor's New Clothes"?

It's not hard to imagine that IndieGogo would have a clause in the campaign terms-and-conditions that prevents people from advertising rival crowdfunding sites in one of their campaigns. So when Mike did that by posting "We're leaving this dump and going to KickStarter", I rather imagine that he got a polite email from them pointing this out. Not understanding "brand protection" is kind of a basic sort of a mistake for a marketing guy like Mike to make. But then not reading those "terms-and-conditions" and posting "We're shutting down this campaign" before realizing that he technically couldn't, shows that as a businessman he really doesn't understand the importance of reading the fine print on contracts.

There's "courage" and there's "reckless" ... I'm not convinced, yet, that we're seeing an example of the 1st one here. If there had been much sign that Mike and friends were learning their lessons, then great, but ... Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein

I don't know how I can be expected to treat this "Kevtris" guy seriously when all that he has to show is years of experience, working boards, working cores, a protoype, and a plan to keep costs manageable ... but yet, there's not a single picture of what laboratory POWER SUPPLY he's using! Frankly, that's just totally amateur! This whole thing is doomed. DOOMED, I SAY!!!

Wow, that was quick! So that probably means that they've gone back to the previous BeagleBone Black design. It'll be interesting to see if they've ditched the expensive FPGA and just decided to focus on the Unity steam-games-on-a-cart collector crowd, or if they're still trying to be all-things-to-all-people. It's hard to believe that they'll go with Woita's desired FPGA system and just concentrate on targeting people like me ... at this point I suspect that most of us old-folks would rather just wait to see what Kevtris comes up with.

I'm sure that he's pissed at his ex-partners' inability to see his true genius in being able to cost-reduce the hardware spec down into only being 3 times the end-user-cost of an Ouya for the same performance. They were blind fools! But on the positive side, it's a new "designer" credit for his resume, and now that he knows how to install-and-run linux on a manufacturer's development board, he's going to be unstoppable!

Classic business-backer strategy. People learn one heck of a lot more from a failure than from having everyone around them tell them how great they are. That was my first observation of the whole RETRO VGS plan ... these 3 guys just don't have the right experience to pull this off as a successful business. Having said which, I'd have quite happily bought one if it was the FPGA powerhouse that they were initially talking about (just the machine, no games) ... but a cartridge-based under-powered Unity machine, no way.