Newsdee

One has to give credit to Analogue for risking and taking the (previously) empty niche of high-quality clones and hardware emulation. No product is perfect, but the Analogue devices (and the AVS) make many other commercial emulation products seem like half-baked toys. It's good to have a high bar to compare.

You just need to find somebody motivated to work on it, though. I expect this may take a while since there are many other multi-arcade systems that are sexier for everybody (e.g. CPS1, CPS2, System16, System8). Is Daphne not running well enough to put in a cab?

I guess they have great margins so retailers love them.

How much DIY are you willing to do? You can build one with arcade parts wired to a NES controller. The 4-way joystick is designed so that only one direction can be hit at the same time. So yes, it should fix your problem. Just FYI, most sticks are a regular 8 way with a different piece installed (the restrictor plate at the bottom). So if there is any NES controller using arcade parts they should do the trick. This guy seems to have made one: https://hackaday.com/2017/05/19/a-diy-nes-advantage-controller-for-the-nes-classic/

In the arcades the joystick has a restrictor gate i.e. you can't physically hit a diagonal. Those are still easily found today with e.g. Sanwa brane joystick components. For a true arcade experience you would need to build your owm stick or find somebody that sells them. There used to be a sweet little 2 button atick made by ArcadeForge (for Atari/Amiga) but they stopped offering them.

This is why I am a big fan of FPGA devices. Many people involved are using the real hardware as benchmark and major cores have become really good in terms of accuracy, both in commercial and open source offerings. Software emulation did a great job preserving the software (games etc) and now FPGAs are preserving the hardware more and more accurately.

I never understood the appeal of this. It pretends to have amazing stuff every time but we all know its impossible to please everybody. Now hopefully this fad will die out.

You could use an 8bitdo dongle to.use bluetooth

Extremely powerful, since the key market for FPGAs literally is realtime video (and audio) processing. The board has 1GB of DDR memory that can be used to buffer a compressed binary stream from the SD card, and the FPGA can decompress it and feed it to the HDMI output. I'm not sure what open source codecs exist, but I'm sure there is at least an MPEG2 one. Also somebody who does it for a living is likely have a codec license to build a closed source core. So the only real criteria is finding a developer who wants to work on that. For SegaCD and PCE CD its a different story because they just need to implement the same hardware as back in the day. The CD can fit in the DDR RAM if it can't be read from the SD fast enough. Again, the constraint is developer time / availability than the hardware.

There's an entire thread from back in the day My first opinions about it are a few posts down the first one. I seem to remember the lag got better after firmware updates but you should not use any filters. Years later, the use I had for it was superceded by a few devices. But I'm still glad to have it. And the retro controller adapter works on PC and MiSTer, so that still gets active use. That said if you dont care about carts and save states, I would suggest a MiSTer instead.

Speculation means there will be a crash sooner ot later. Thats good for those of us who wants to own stuff just to play it or display on the shelf.

What was your setup? Did you use the serial IO or was USB enough? And is it using VGA or the HDMI out? In any case this is a nice achievement, well done!

I got super lucky and picked up one at a Target sale where they were $20 each(!) Obviously I could not resist at that price. They were clearly trying to get rid of them, though.

You can do like me, and have a folder for things you own :) I understand there is some kind of satisfying feeling to physically select a game by inserting a cart, though. I find that better when playing wirh others (to let them choose easily by picking a cart).

Sometimes the lag is not obvious until you play it right after the original system. It's often not game breaking so we just assume we got worse with age That happened to me with Megaman 2... was doing a playthrough on my AV Famicom and when I switched to the RetroFreak to try it... the game felt immediately wrong (fortunately, the lag improves considerably if you disable filters).

It may be optimized only for whatever frequencies the SNT and MSG are using. Or worse, it could not be using an HDMI signal at all (basically bypassing the internal upscaler). Whatever the case, its going to be obvious soon as I expect at least some reviewers/beta testers will be curious to.try

Not necessarily, the XRGB mini used an FPGA for video processing. Realtime signal processing is one of the strenghts of the tech. So it could be the final design.

I wonder if it would work with other (non Analogue) systems. They would have a broader market if so.

More expensive, but you can use a MiSTer for low to zero lag (depending on your setup).

I prefer the Retro Freak because you can detach the "brain" of the console from the cart connector, and bring it around to play your games. It basically auto-dumps the carts you play into the SD card, albeit with some kind of security so those files will only work on your console. The box is slimmer than an RPi case, and has two USB and one HDMI port.

Mine broke after the SNES pins got ripped. I managed to recover the other parts but it can't read SNES carts anymore. As an alternative for an emu box that runs carts, I would suggest looking at the Retro Freak. It has more solid construction and will automaticslly store your games on the machine for quicker restarts. It also takes roms from.SD card if you want. I believe the underlying software is the same, it's just that the RF exposes more features than the R5.

Which part do you find complex? I'd say MiSTer setup is close to the one of an Everdrive or other flashcart. To me it does seem easier than an RPi, but that may be subjective. Keatah, if you are concerned about hardware supply, the DE10 Nano is sold in quantities to university students (unrelated to MiSTer and probably in bigger volumes) and the other components are open hardware ie. anybody can download the schematics+BOM then solder their own (or ask a friend): https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Hardware_MiSTer

Right, however for our current usage (adding USB ports for peripherals to MiSTer) the device stays being the host. So a regular hub will work with the caveat that it can't power everything you plug into it. A powered hub solves that. The reason why I highlight this is that MicroUSB OTG hubs are becoming harder to find now that USB-C adoption is rising.

Yes, a lot of people have joined and are now working on various cores and central features. It does make it a bit hard to keep up but there is clear progress. The overclock on Super FX (for smoother 3D) was a great surprise, for example.

Nah. That just means they had an early start... 😅