Newsdee

Definitely focus on the main features first. This has the potential to be the reference in console FPGAs covering the Retron5/Retro Freak niche. Computers are covered by other boxes; and anyway are more fiddly to setup/debug, so you'd have much more support questions on them. These can be added later by porting cores.

FPGAs are good at parallelizing; but the challenge would be sharing the same RAM and video between the two cores.

You know what would rock with a high res screen? The ability to run two (or more) gameboys at once and implement the link cable betweem them. Basically two player mode :-)

They're just building the shell, not promising a prophet console to save us in Retroland from our sins of using DLC.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is undistinguishable from magic...

The story is higher up on this thread

Nothing stops Kevtris from compiling and releasing cores for it without giving out the source. I'm sure several people would pitch in to get him a board if he was willing to take that route. But I guess its more fun to design one own's box, and in any case its good to have diversity.

More relevant for us in Retroland, the XRGB-Mini Framemeister is an FPGA inside, the Retron5 has a tiny one to handle the multiple cart connections, and the Everdrive/SD2SNES are FPGAs inside. There's quite a bunch around

How many here own a MiST or have used one? The setup is extremely easy; and the system turns on instantly so it feels like the real thing. I have several SD cards so I can change systems like switching carts, but I also havd cards with multiple systems for convenience when I only use a few games. The cores on it are not perfect but thats down to it not being a commercial product. Kevtris or the Everdrive guys have wider support of the NES (for example) but their code isn't open source and free for all to use (and expand). I've recently tried a Retropie setup, and while its more compatible I still feel like I'm running a PC/Linux box. but it is cheaper. I guess everybody has their own tastes. If anybody has any questions on it or would like me to try some game I'd be happy to check and give feedback.

Just wondering, what would be Atari's view of hacking ET to change sprites and call it "Alien" or something like that? That way they remove the movie tie-in?

Speaking of cases there's a Kickstarter right now for molds to make an Amiga 1200 case, which can also fit an RPi or a MiST. Maybe the RVGS can pursue something similar for consoles: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/a1200housing/new-amiga-1200-cases-made-from-new-molds

Ah what I was suggesting is just having the connection points on the motherboard. Leave it to us crazies to mod the connectors/cables in :-) Shouldn't impact final sale price, unless they are reusing the same moterboard fro previous manufacturing.

That's very interesting... I guess it makes sense Atari is worried. How about having a way to mod it for higher video quality? S-Video is probably not difficult, HDMI probably too expensive (extra components) but maybe expose RGB+Sync for people to mod?

Would it be too expensive to add an SD card slot to it? Or just have the connectors for one inside. That way the hard-core minority can mod it, but the general population will still buy a new version with more games.

How about the fixed E.T.? http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ Although probably hard to license...

I can see the ads: "IGG does what KickStopped"

That's kind of what the Retro Freak guys are doing; they have one emulator box that receives the SD card and the main hardware, and that tiny box can be installed into a bigger one with cartridge ports. We need to wait until it comes out to check if its any good (it seems like a Retron 5 done right), but the idea of decoupling brains and cart connectivity makes a lot of sense.

I couldn't agree more with a few points made here on retro gaming. A lot of what we find interesting just won't transfer to future generations unless we somehow create a link or make things accessible. Nintendo is kind of doing that by shamelessly recycling their inventory. Their latest gimmick is to have figurines which unlock some emulated games with save states that you can play for a couple of minutes after loading. Like or hate it, it is an interesting way to make people directly experience parts of games they might never see (and conveniently point them to the full version). Carts/Discs have some charm as a way to select games to play... relying on the luck of what you'll find in a store, or choosing one on the shelf because you like a label. But for that to happen they have to be accessible to play; having them framed because its a super rare cart won't help. I guess there might be a niche to sell popular recent games on a cart, which could be done after the game is mature (think "game of the year" editions).

Shhh don't let marketers get involved or they're going to start releasing one machine per core with the same innards

The thing about FPGA code is that it's very modular if you design it to reimplement existing chips. You can also separate your "board integration" layer with the rest, so porting the core to a new board/bigger FPGA only requires changing that part. The part that is more difficult is if you port a core from a bigger board to a smaller one which might have less features to reduce cost (less logic gates, less internal RAM, etc). But this work is only a concern for developers. The end user just gets a core file to install on his box; usually by loading from SD or uploaded by USB.

That's unlikely to happen (if anything because chips will get more.powerful and cheaper), but why is it a problem?

I'd say FPGAs are where emulators used to be in the late 90s... lots of shareware/propietary implementations, with a (very) slow move towards open source. Some cores are open-source since the beginning (like MAME), others became so when the original devs got tired of actively working and opened them up to somebody else to pick up (like Final Burn Alpha). I do think the future is in OSS rather than closed solutions, but you can't blame devs not to want to work on something that, technically, allows anybody to use their work later without compensation. It's slowly changing because there are now FPGA platforms where people can develop for accepting some HW design limitations (e.g. MiST and Replay), and the fact that a few projects opened their code (minimg, 1chipMSX). There is also some (less obvious) collaboration going on, such as the people working on the MiST and Replay both fixing the same code for 68000 CPUs. These boards might be considered "homebrew" still, but they've come a long way and they're definitely worth digging into them, even just as a user.

There's excellent open source cores out there. Unfortunately HDL is hard for most people (there seem to be much less developers than emulators) so we only get projects people are interested working on their own time (basically nobody's making money here except the FPGA manufacturers). Check out foft's Atari800 / Atari 5200 for a nice mature core that runs on many boards already.

According to forums posts (so take it with a grain of salt) the MCC-216 took open source cores, did some adaptations without releasing the sources back, then never updated them once they became obsolete. I don't know about the open source part, but I can tell you there are much better Amiga (AGA) and C64 cores out there; both the MiST and Arcade Replay have Amiga AGA cores, and the TC64 has a much newer Amiga 500 core (plus an excellent C64 core with SID reimplementation). I love my MiST, but I'll still get a Zimba 3000 if it improves upon its design (say cartridge connectors, mature cores, HDMI out...). As long as the systems are open for development, I see them as complementary rather than competing products...

The chip Kevtris mentioned is at least twice as big as the one in the MCC-216 (i.e. you can put more stuff inside). Should be fine.