Newsdee

Pffft no cartridges. I'd like to see one in person, the quality of the LCD screen makes or breaks handheld systems, in my personal tastes...

I can confirm the credits is at 100 carts. I don't remember which one unlocked the small NES game but it was much less, like maybe 25-30. Maybe they need to be Famicom games...

Attack the claims and maybe ideas, not the people I think many of us see some value in what's going on but strongly disagree in the way it's being carried forward. This won't be the first nor last project of this sort regardless of whether the KS succeeds or not, so just bring out the popcorn and wait...

On second thought I think you're right, because if you add the licensing of 3rd party cores (assuming you couldn't package open source ones republishing modified code) and stuff like advertising etc. you end up with a higher total cost. Unless you have enough volume to save significantly in manufacturing.

I think they're faking the prototype, but looking at the price of the MiST on dragonbox.de, its around 188 USD. It does not run SNES yet but (in theory) it has the FPGA for it. Somebody (chaos) pulled off Amiga AGA, so a SNES seems possible at that price point, barring greed adding a huge margin to it. Granted it doesn't have cartridge ports so maybe we should add the price of a Retrode (60 bucks). That'sa bit over 200 but I'm sure you could save on the case and component costs if they're wired together.

Torlus (Greg Estrade) has also written a fantastic PC Engine FPGA core which is open-source and has been ported to the TC64 and the MiST (with improvements) by AMR (Alistair Robertson). Runs most games with sound except the larger ones and the tiny supergrafx library. I like this way of doing things; if that core was made/funded by a corporation it surely wouldn't be open and any extensions would be unlikely.

Uhm going through steam comments it looks like they agreed/decided to release earlier exclusively for tournament fighters, who are after all a big portion of their clientele. As long as they don't charge extra for the next update...

They might bring those features by free update but it's a bit shocking. I mean mapping buttons isn't rocket science, you'd think they could recycle some old menu code for that...

The Freak is great for kids. I brought mine to the xmas family gathering with a USB hub and 4 generic USB controllers (identical so their setup is trivial) and it worked great for Bomberman (SNES, PCR) and Gauntlet II (NES).

It's a damn shame but I'm glad I didn't pre-order. I really like SFIV, and had fun with SFxTekken but the net code on the latter for online play sucked (last I tried).

Err....

Not nuch to add to what others already said; but what baffles me is that with so many people on the "team" being sales/creative people then why do they need to go on KS at all? Can't these guys with years of experience in the industry at least cobble together enough funding? I guess it's the new "gig economy"; just beg online to get money and then find some guy who hopefully isn't too bad to do it for you under a six month contract. No thanks.

In the old firmware performance was better without filters (they tended to cause overheating). They seem to have fixed that with the latest firmware. I also have a Retron5 but broke the SNES pins. I keep it to play NES games but the Freak is a step above because its more open.

If it turns out to be a SNES Jr or a Super-Famiclone in there, I'm sure they'll claim the FPGA part is inside the cart... like in the SD2SNES If (and that's a big if) there are super nintendo equivalent of famiclone chips, they might be good enough to be paired with an FPGA cart to run several SNES games good enough. I have a super cheap Famiclone that amazingly runs with an Everdrive, so this kind of setup is possible in principle (Subor D99 if you want to know, has the cheapest plastic I've ever seen on a console).

It's one of the few Easter eggs inside the Freak. Mine was a sound file to change the selection chime which was rather annoying by default. I've found these oher unlockables as well: - Famicom mini game (unlocked by number of carts dumped) - Famicom music clip (also based on carts) - Credits roll (unlocked after 100 carts dumped) - A picture of some mascot in front of a building (I think this was specific to one Famicom game but I can't remember which)

There's other videos where they demonstrate playstation and N64. It seems like the real thing, but until we get an unofficial firmware in the wild it's all hypothetical.

That thing is a proof-of-concept at best. Perhaps they felt the need to prove that cartridges can be done in a modern system... I can see that being an easy rebuttal/objection from a business-type guy to make.

We just need to wait until instruction for this become available...

That's only because a lot of emu authors agreed to open source their code and they're written in popular languages that many people like having as a hobby/practice. With FPGAs both are a problem - first there's less people to go around and among the few pros, apparently few agree to open source for various reasons. And it's hard for people to pick up unless you're really into EE. Now apparently with the MCC-216 (based on what I've read in forums so Google and make your own opinion) they've modified open source code from Minimig without releasing the changes, so unless you start from scratch expanding the cores is not an option. I certainly can't find any info about source code from their website. Contrast with the FPGA Arcade or the MiST where everything is open source. MikeJ (Arcade) is working on a cycle-exact amiga AGA core (from scratch) which is supposed to become open source once done. Priori to that Chaos (Rok Krajnc) beat him by updating the Minimg port of the MiST to work with AGA (which nobody thought possible). So assuming the Arcade releases the code (and there's no reason to think they won't given past track record), there will be two open-source AGA cores available. Nobody's is making crazy money out of these (other than maybe bragging rights and something to put on a resume), but that's the kind of firendly competition you want to see, instead of lone developers who make or break the system. There are other cool projects / updates in the past year. One quite interesting in general is that Till Harbaum (designer of the MiST) has put up a few tutorials on VHDL from scratch which hopefully will get more people involved with FPGAs. There's a lot of potential but it's quite a different paradigm from CPU programming, so it's not like you can ease into it from previous knowledge unless you are already familiar with designing your own electronics. Edit: I should add there's a Coleco core (play in HD 60 fps for best results)

Using IPS patches on carts is one of the features I really like about these two emulation boxes.

In both the Freak and the Retron5, changing cheats invalidates save files. Perhaps the new firmware corrupted it? If you want to just delete the save to get the game to run, then activating a cheat could work. You can do so by adding a new entry to the cheat XML file, using the CRC of the game as reported by the game DB XML dump (menu option). Recovering the save is another story... maybe you can back it up to a PC and see if FCEUX can read it.

In FCEU it's part of the UI. Maybe there is an option in the OSD, but if not they might have hid it...

I forgot which emulator the Freak is running, but for FCEUX the bios must be named disksys.rom .

I knew they had a virtual theater, but a virtual arcade is interesting. Too bad they dropped support for the Note4 in the latesy version

The Kairosoft games are a lot of fun. I started with Game Dev Story (manage a game studio to make your own games and consoles), then they have a series of similar games with slightly different gameplay twists each.