Kismet
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Posts posted by Kismet
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9) Game Preservation - Here he basically says it is meaningless to preserve the hardware games run on because they will eventually fail. Evidently no one has told him that the sd2snes is still in production, or what the odds are that the Super Nt will be able to play backups just like the Nt Mini.
10) Closing - After he in this same post claims that fpgas have better response times using less resources and complains that just because the Super Nt has less bugs doesn't mean people should ignore the effort he put into his emulator finishes by saying that the Super Nt isn't more accurate. This completely goes against the things he literally just said.
Let's not hate on byuu. He probably feels this is a failure of open-source/gpl (which yes, it is) if a closed black-box product offers a superior solution that so far OSS has not been able to offer. This is the same reason why Linux is still not the desktop OS of choice. This is the same reason why Apple's iOS makes more money than all Android devices combined. Whatever the superior solution is, needs to simply be better than all other alternatives for people to justify the cost. That's why people spent $450 on the NT Mini and not $185 on the RetroUSB AVS. So Analogue here decides to purposely come in at the $190 level for the SuperNT and thus even eat the lunch of the rubbish clones (Retron 5 is $160, the Retrofreak is $210.) And we still don't know the extent of the Super NT's future capabilities. R5 and RF are basically software emulators with a cartridge interface. They can't play chip carts.
(For the record, I don't think the Retrofreak is as rubbish, as it appears to actually have been designed with the intent of being a legal alternative to the Nintendo Virtual Console. The Retron however is so poorly engineered that it's price is not justified, despite accomplishing the same thing the Retrofreak does.)
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He sounds more than a little mad.
But the thing is, a bare metal "Gaming OS" does not exist, and "99.9% accurate" Higan is out of reach for the vast majority of x86 PC's due to the CPU requirements alone. Once you add in monitor and controller latency and the thousands of combinations possible on a PC, you can no longer make the claim of "software emulation better" It will only be at parity in a configuration that less than 24% of PC owners have access to just for the CPU requirement alone. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
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I'm not following. That seems to be an example of people highly regarding it. The Super Bowl just happened and football doesn't change much.
The point there is that Monopoly, or Football doesn't need a video game adaption to "preserve" the experience of it. More people have played monopoly than football, but you can still watch people play both, or you can play it in a video game to know what the rigid game rules were like. What you don't get from the video game experience in both is how house rules, or coaching affects gameplay. Yet people will still watch recordings of football highlights, they don't watch competitive monopoly players.
At any rate, with video games, you can not preserve the experience, you can only preserve the storyline to games that have one by recording it. One of the oddly useful things that comes out of gamefaq's/youtube walkthroughs/lp's and data mining is that it helps preserve the game rules, even if the developer doesn't want people to ruin the experience.
So an adventure game is utterly ruined by those efforts, but at the same time, players may miss half the stuff in the game and not feel compelled to sit through the first 20 hours of the game to unlock that extra 2 hours of gameplay they missed by saying no to a NPC's sidequest somewhere along the line. Pretty much if people want the game experience, they need to be able to play the game without any of this other stuff being required to play it, and some people simply can't play a game without a walkthrough because they are incapable of solving puzzles where the answer isn't standing in front of them.
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When I think of a movie I think of the video version of a play but when I think of a video game I think of the video version of sports, board games, card games, or any other game.
And yet, Monopoly is pretty much the same as it ever was, and even console/pc versions don't change much.
Preserving a video game requires more than simply emulating the hardware environment in software. Much in the same way that preserving a film on VHS is not the same as watching the film the day it was released to the theater. Many people don't care about the theatrical experience, but the theater is what determines the success of that title and if it gets any sequels or if the director/producer do any more for that studio.
Like it really kills me to see titles embrace micro-transactions. 50 years from now, people are going to find these games with the original cloud servers long gone and wonder why anyone would spend hours tapping on a screen.
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It's kind of hard to put what I am thinking into words but hopefully you guys understand.
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Yet a copy of Red Sea Crossing was found in 2007, and people at Atariage wanted to get the rom dumped (basically, we were acting as the American Film Institute or National Register Historic Places equivalent for Atari games and other retro games) to preserve it for generations to come in the event the cartridge would succumb to bit rot, so the game would not become "lost" like that Miracle Man movie from 1919 that is lost and is now highly sought after, and yet we are looked down on as a bunch of fruit cakes that are inexplicably interested in "Obsolete technology" Yet people going insane over a movie from 1919 is seen as completely normal, or wanting to put underwear that George Washington wore in a museum to preserve it aren't seen as crazy in the slightest.
And comments from people like that Steve guy that programmed that Red Sea Crossing game thinking we are crazy for "being interested in obsolete technology" Which leads to my point, why are video games looked down on and not movies, music, paintings, buildings, and numerous other things? Rogert Ebert, one of the most famous movie critics, once said video games can never be art. You don't look at the original Star Wars movies and go "EWWWWWW those are SO old! The special effects are so dated and the special effects were all created with obsolete technology! Why waste time watching some old, crusty movie made with obsolete technology when you could be watching a new movie?"
(I just recently read that entire original Red Sea Crossing thread from 2007 when Nagn2 found it for 50 cents at a yard sale a few days ago and that is what inspired me to start this.)
Edit:Can a mod please change the thread title to "Why are video games looked down on, while other things like movies are not?" Or something similar. Made a mistake typing the title and don't know how to get in touch with a mod. Thanks
The thing is, there's always two angles to the problem being solved:
a) Is this worth preserving
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b) What happens to the value if it's preserved?
For the most part, there are few games that are worth preserving unless it was either "the first game to do X" or "the best game to implement X", as a lot of games (look at steam right now and all the asset flip fake games) value is hinged on what it was known for. If it was simply known for being a cheap knockoff/bootleg/counterfeit of something else, then it's value is that of curiosity, not of historical significance.
Nobody really cares about curiosity other than to know it exists, and if we forget about it, often it didn't add any value.
For example, the "ET" game for the 2600 has a notoriety around it, that it's often referenced in pop culture, and in other video games, and thus people who are aware of what exactly Atari did (there is an entire 3rd act of Hyperdimension Neptunia re;birth 3 that talks about 'Tari, and a miniquest to find trash games from the lost 'Tari civilization.) The Neptunia games are all pretty cheeky ways of representing the console wars without outright anyone saying anyone actually won.
Likewise Donkey Kong set precedents about copyright law.
Yet, there are also undumped games like Marble Madness 2 which exist, but should the owner of the machine die, or the machine be destroyed in a fire, that game is lost to us for good. When StarFox 2's beta was found, someone dumped it, but later Nintendo included it on the Super Nintendo Classic, and it too probably got dumped to the internet.
Like the problem with game preservation in general is that up until Bleem! there was no game preservation going on. It was seen as piracy. There are people out there that simply believe they are doing what is right and holding onto copies of software (regardless if they bought it or not) because X years from now people will want to know what those games were like. But there is also an entire section of pirates who will buy nothing, with impunity. So there is friction between the preservation pirates and the anti-capitalist pirates. The consequences for both is we end up with rubbish DRM, online-only games, and rubbish like gachapon/lootboxes replacing gameplay. BSX games (Sattellaview for the SNES) is an example of where entire games are lost because they were broadcast to the Satellaview, and unless someone recorded it with a VCR, we have no idea what was in the game, or how it was supposed to work.
There are also BBS "door" games that have been lost because dial-up BBS systems are essentially extinct. "who cares about text adventure games" you might say, but those games actually were interesting and predecessors to social media games. It's unlikely anyone will want to play one of these games now because you can just storm through it with unlimited time and no more long distance charges.
In my personal experience, what is worth preserving starts with Arcades. You can not replicate the Arcade experience, nor can you replicate the game hardware at present. So the idea of getting a high score on a emulation environment is just not exciting since you will be the only person playing it.
Next are PC (including PCjr/Tandy1000)/Mac/Amiga games, particularly those games that predate Windows 95/MacOS X. Although we have sufficient software emulation environments to run them, the experience is just not the same without the original hardware, and many people had different experiences depending if they had appropriate color monitors, sound cards and joysticks. So their nostalgia for a game may not reflect the experience they had. The first two games I ever played with a sound card were Ultima 7 and Sierra's EcoQuest, and in both cases the first time you hear speech out of the PC it was like "WOW, I didn't expect that!" , even though speech is now a standard thing of games, nothing will replicate the experience of suddenly hearing speech where previously there was none.
Game consoles, particularly 8-bit and 16-bit systems, would come after those computer games, cartridges for these systems are the only way to play these games authentically, and while software emulation exists, there is latency and emulation accuracy issues that render playing most of these games for these systems not accurate enough to know why something with tight input was amazing to play. Like if you played the Mario games on original hardware on a CRT, it was absolutely amazing back in 1986. Today people just won't get it.
When we entered the 32-bit era on the PC and game consoles, preservation started to take a nose dive, DRM measures practically ensure that games will be forever lost, and indeed many indie people's shareware and demo's have been lost (and not all of it people would care about.) It wasn't until relatively recently with Steam Greenlight, and later the current monstrosity that anyone with a compiler or game toolkit could produce some shovelware and get it on steam.
A lot of shovelware people really don't care if it stops existing. The app stores, many of those apps are going to just simply stop being updated, and when people trade up their devices, those apps disappear. Social media games (eg games that require you to empty your wallet to play) will be the first to be lost the game often require an account on some server to keep track of what you bought, and update your game from the cloud when you switch devices. They are effectively incomplete games at all time. MMORPG will pretty much be unpreservable as part of the experience requires other people to play them in a party. Good luck replicating that experience.
So as more games move towards social media/online-only interactions, more games will be lost, and many of them will be lost and forgotten about except through video recordings. To give an example Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0 is already lost. People captured packets during the end and have made inroads towards producing a private server to preserve the original game play, but it will never be complete, nor will it ever be able to replicate the original experience. People who play V2.0 often mention how something in FFXIV 1.0 was a little better, but would not want a return to V1.0 except to play the storyline. Fortunately people did capture at least the cutscenes from it, and what you can do with the existing private server work is play them back, but you largely can't do anything but wander an aimless empty map otherwise. Similar things have happened with Ultima Online and World of Warcraft.
To answer the subject directly, video games are complicated.
A video game is not a house, preserving historical houses is often done to preserve the architecture or history of a building, but not all buildings are worth saving, and typically heritage buildings eventually are destroyed by environmental factors (eg fire/wind/flood) and taking pictures of it doesn't replicate the experience at all. Some early VR tech tried to do this but it's just not the same.
Compared to artwork, there are counterfeits/replicas of modern art, but the original's value, entire value, is in the original work, and such works are kept in museums for others to enjoy, but they are still owned by someone. When works are stolen or destroyed, they are gone for good, and often paintings have to be "fixed" every few decades due to atmospheric conditions making the paint dirty or discolored. This is how some paintings were discovered to have "earlier drafts" or "last minute changes" when they were scanned to preserve the look before cleanup.
A video game however is equal parts software and hardware. Preserving the hardware is not an indefinite thing, while preserving the software can be. But only if someone decides to make that decision to not honor the developer's copyright. Until Microsoft "licence agreements" software was often considered covered by the same copyright law as music and art. The binary code itself was not covered by those copyrights, because there is no way to run that binary code on anything but the original hardware. Hence Nintendo's lockout chip on US market NES systems.
If software was treated the same as modern film productions, all new games would be released to arcades first. Arcades would be everywhere. But no instead the only reason film theaters still exist at all is because there is an entire "box office" system that determines things like awards, royalties and such for the performers in the films.
The equivalent with video games would be for software to be in arcades for 6 months before home versions become available, but there are no awards based on this. Until digital sales became a thing, there was no way to even determine what game was #1 in any market except by counting sales made by dedicated game stores like Gamestop. So I don't know about you, but I'd rather be able to play a game now, rather than have to find an arcade to play it.
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I wonder if they decided to put a usb slot also would it be to difficult. But then they have to deal with programing drivers I guess. But would a generic usb driver be enough? It would of been extra work that would take away from the main project I guess. But would open the controllers options without dealing with latency problems
USB has what is known as "HID" (Human Interface Device), which is driverless, that's why you can plugin in a keyboard, mouse or joystick and it just works without drivers.
BUT, of course some manufacturers don't do this the way you want it to. NKRO with keyboards and XInput with USB Joypads are non-standard configurations. So that means the host driver has to support multiple configurations. Bluetooth also has profiles that go with it, as Bluetooth is simply "wireless USB". Then there are non-standard 2.4ghz radios.
If the goal is just to support input devices without supporting output devices, then yes you can generally get away with supporting just the HID driver, and remapping the button layout depending on what "known" controller id's are. You could plug in a number pad/keyboard and a Xbox 360 controller and be able to play Colecovision/Atari games that used the number buttons in a non-standard configuration. Analogue could come out with an 8-bit/16-bit microcomputer model that could use these things that way. But you'd be hard pressed to support any original hardware without the original ports having pins mapped directly onto the FPGA.
At any rate right now let's see what happens with the SuperNT.
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re: LED brightness. I have added it as an option now, so you can set it from off to full on in 32 steps. This allows one to select any LED brightness they like.
Nice. Does the LED change color or strobe or anything when the SuperNT encounters a problem, or does it just stay on once turned on?
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This is just wrong. As usual TBH. But seriously. It's just plain wrong. PEople tested lag back in the day for the xbox 360 wireless controller and found none.
PS3 and xbox 360 controllers were tested back in the day and people found about 1ms of lag. That means none. People have tested the 8bit do controllers too, and found no lag on their origial wireless bluetooth SNES controllers with the SNES receivers.
People found lag on the newer models with snes style and analog sticks, and also on the ones that come bundle with receivers for the SNES and NES mini.
Tons of wired controllers have lag too. So this wired vs wireless is complete bullshit. You have to look at for each single controller. on PS4 people found out using the controller over USB was lagging MORE than the wireless. I think they fixed that now though. Still, it's same lag now.
There is a logical reason for this. With digital-only pads (eg NES/SNES w/o analog sticks) you don't need to sample the analog signal with a microcontroller. With the original NES/SNES and other simple pads, there is literately nothing in the controller but a shift register.
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Everything 8bitdo makes is garbage. Original SNES controller is the best 2D controller of all time. Why fix what ain't broken? But to each their own...
I somehow doubt that to be true. The original SNES/SFC controller's have the right size/weight balance. Bluetooth controllers tend to feel light, cheap and flimsy if they are like the junk Hyperkin sells. The Xbox360/PS4 controllers feel too heavy when they have batteries in them. So I use a wired xbox 360 controller on the Xbox 360 and Windows machines. The wireless controllers are in the drawer for when someone else comes over. However I haven't tried the 8bitdo controllers, but have seen them at BestBuy. I've been tempted to buy at least one, but I can not get over my hate for needlessly wireless stuff.
I mean it makes sense why companies are making them, people are playing on 40"+ screens in their living room where the SNES would have never had long enough cables to reach (we often had the SNES sitting in the middle of the living room as kids, otherwise the cables wouldn't reach the couch, and this was back with smaller CRT's) A gumstick sized battery is cheaper than an 8'+ cable.
What I would like to get modular controllers where the transmitter is turned off when connected by USB-c, but whatever.
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To say original hardware is always better because it is under 22ms more responsive (in most cases) when most people aren't even playing on a crt or using an ossc to even be able to experience the difference is just stupid when you could experience things like 60fps 4k graphics with a deblur filter on a system that used to run in 480i at 30fps.
I paid money for Componet cables. I have a CRT reference. People playing with framemeister/ossc on a HDTV are obviously going to have at least one frame of latency. But this argument was about software-emulator fans not knowing how to A/B test a software emulator against hardware, which is misleading or lying at worst.
When I get my SuperNT I'll compare it to the real hardware and we'll find out just how much a difference exists.
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But the newer versions would obviously have even better accuracy as bsnes has been updated multiple times since then... if anything that makes your point about minor graphical glitches even less relevant because of how accurate that emulator is now.
Byuu's SNES emulator's system requirements are also not something any desktop computer can hit (especially after Meltdown and Spectre patches shaved 10% to 50% of the CPU performance off just about everything.) Let alone rubbish arm boards. A few people with OC'd systems at 4Ghz might be able to run Yoshi's Island, but in general the point about needing a very expensive desktop hasn't changed. The FPGA console is still the better, and cheaper option. Higan is only an option for people who already made that very-expensive-gaming desktop rig to play games like FFXIV and Neir:Automata which cause CPU and GPU's to die.
Even if you can play Higan, you will still run into the latency issues on Windows, nobody installs linux just to play with emulators. The closest thing anyone can get to an off-the-shelf emulator box is an nVidia Shield (which has the same power as the Nintendo Switch) , and even that costs more than the Super NT, and requires a bunch of fiddling around, hence scammers selling fully-loaded kodi boxes configured that way on eBay.
All paths towards reasonably accurate software emulation inevitably cost more money than buying the actual equipment to play it accurately in the first place. If the SuperNT has a JB firmware at a later point that can replace every 8-bit and 16-bit console in someone's living room, that would probably be a net benefit. I no doubt believe that some people bought it with the intent of selling their collection of actual consoles/carts, but everyone else likely would rather stick that stuff in storage.
Disc based systems, I don't think there is any love lost over converting discs to images stored on a hard drive. Disc media was always cheap, and unlike rom carts, all well-used discs rot pretty quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if people's collections become mostly unplayable on the real hardware, as discs are unlikely to last 25 years unless they were never opened. Especially those in top-loaded consoles like the PS1, where you often had to bend the disc a little to remove it from the machine.
Inevitably we will see a repeat of this argument if and when Analogue pursues their next project. If Analogue wants to create something with broader mass-market appeal, they would need to seek a way to licence the firmware for old computer systems as well, because there is an entire market of "old DOS", "old C64", "old Amiga" and "old Apple II" that could be served by one device, and at present many of those DOS games can be purchased from GOG, thus negating the need for people to pirate anything.
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The world of n64 hacking is in a similar state of affairs right now. The tools used to deflate N64 ROMs so that the assets can be manipulated, break the ROM when played back on an Everdrive. So much of the fabulous Mario64 ROM hacks can not run at all on real hardware, and probably won't work on future more accurate emulators either.
And despite all the developments regarding N64 hardware development, software emulators and the hacking scene at large are just as broken now as they were some decade ago when Toad's Tool debuted. It's sad that I can't play these wonderful creations on real equipment and must rely on janky pc emulators.
I'm less concerned about gee-wow hacks and more concerned with translations and asset patch fixes. The game I referenced had to be decompressed and recompressed to patch the Japanese artwork and maps (this is a game I fumbled through once in Japanese) and thus the translation was only ever available for like 15 years in this broken state because nobody cared enough to try it on real hardware. Or so I figure.
While I don't really give a care one way or the other about most romhacks, the matter still stands that there will be broken stuff out there, entirely caused the piracy websites distributing stuff pre-patched and they have no means of testing on real hardware, and the downloader has no means of knowing what version it is.
You do realize the article you linked to which shows the correct behavior shows that correct behavior on an emulator... that is included with retroarch... right?
Yes, and that is a very old version, thus proving my point again about accuracy.
If people want the authentic game experience, they need to play with the original controllers on a device that is hardware accurate. They don't necessarily need to be playing off the original cartridge, but that is still an option.
From my perspective, I'd rather buy the SuperNT , test everything and then hand it to my sister so her kid can play it with the real carts when he's old enough to not chew on the controllers. There should be more SuperNT's in stock in a few years I hope. My sister on the other hand would be content with just a SNES-mini if they would ever be restocked anywhere out here, but so far I have not seen one.
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Also once again, you clearly detest speed hacks but you never answered my question, if speed hacks don't cause any glitches in the game you are playing and optimize your performance to be at the same amount of input lag most people have trying to play retro games anyways then what is wrong with them? "Oh no I'm getting more performance but not in the same way as the original hardware and it isn't causing any problems ahhhhh"
And I never mentioned anything about pis, just that emulation is in many cases far superior to original hardware.
Speedhacks always cause glitches, if you perceive them to be a detriment to your play is another story.
https://floating.muncher.se/byuu/accuracy/
Once again, I need to point out the problem of how speedhacks make speedrunning and other kinds of 1:1 tournaments difficult. If you setup a speedrun (as GDQ has been doing) they have to use the original hardware currently, thus making streaming also something of a pain in the butt. People who learned on software emulators are going to be screwed by the kind of absurd claims made by the RetroArch people. I don't know why they are trying so hard to go "my emulator is better than real hardware" when that is never true, and can never be true. If you put one person on real hardware and one person on software emulation to do the same speed run, and then have them switch, the person who trained on the software emulator will botch their speed run pretty quick from the input timing alone, while the person who trained on real hardware may botch their speed run as soon as some known "glitch/bug/unintended gameplay feature" doesn't work on the software emulator because of the speedhacks. Some of these hacks end up never being fixed. Thus with "new" accurate SNES hardware people will again start complaining about random crap they pirated off the internet only working on some inaccurate SNES software emulator. I actually encountered this on day one with the SD2SNES when I pulled my original 1999 translated patch for a game I have and put the game on the SD2SNES, and lo and behold intro to the game is all busted, but yet worked in SNES9x and even ZSNES before it. Someone out there re-patched the game to fix it in 2014.
If you are just playing the game, and do not care about anything (eg game experience, lp'ing, streaming, speed runs, tournaments, multiplayer), then the Super NT is not for you anyway.
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None of which is possible on original hardware.
So I ask you: Would you rather have 15ms, milliseconds, as in 15 thousandths of second, faster response time (or less depending on your setup) and half the resolution, fps, and anti-aliasing, or do you want that the other way around?
Don't get me wrong emulation isn't functional for every game or even every system but to say original hardware is best because in most cases the only difference is that it may run almost imperceptibly faster is honestly bullshit. Not to mention the cost of obtaining and modding a system as well as all the cables and hardware you need is insane compared to the cost of, at worst, maybe needing to upgrade the computer you already own for better results with your emulator.
Fpgas are the best of both worlds though, offering the same native resolution increases, digital outputs, and anti-aliasing/filters at native clock speeds and that is almost entirely because of Kevtris.
I don't know why you insist on talking about completely different things, missing the point of my posts and others posts and insist on arguing about things that have no bearing on the topic.
1) A FPGA console solves the largest problem with trying to replicate the original experience, it actually replicates the original experience, but lets you use new computer/tv screens, and even new controllers. It's not going to be for everyone, especially those who rage about not being able to play their illegal game collection on whatever flavor-of-the-day piece-of-crap software emulator-on-an-arm-device that people sell hoping to profit off idiots. If you are buying a FPGA console, you're literately asking "I want the exact same experience as the original hardware", which is what you want if you're doing an LP, or speed-running.
2) Software emulators solve a different problem, that being solving the transformative media hole. If I have a video game for my Wii, I can't play it on my Desktop PC by sticking the disc in the drive, no I have to go though a whole bunch of hell to acquire the right drive, or jailbroken firmware for the wii to rip the disc. Or I can just locate the game on the internet and save myself the trouble. That is what people do. Whatever is the easiest, is probably what people will do. So playing a Wii game on a PC is not easier than playing it on the Wii itself, but if the Wii is no longer available for sale, and you don't have a Wii U, then you're probably going to play it on the PC with whatever inaccurate emulator exists. All the game companies want to move to exclusive digital-downloads only because they can unlock parts of the game with digital downloads, and everyone has to buy them, because when the game or console is no longer published, those downloads can't be retrieved.
It doesn't matter if you can play a 240p game at 4K, most games do not look any better if they were not designed for that resolution, and that becomes readily apparent when you see 2D elements that end up with linear filtering on them, being blurred out of existence. If you are playing games on your 4K just because you can, that's all fine, I've even done that with a Wii emulator. But that's more of a "because I can", and if you stream/lp that, it's a redflag you're playing a pirated copy, and Nintendo will just copyright-strike it.
Which goes back to the point, and the comment I had pointed to, RetroArch is not a solution to "I want the same experience as the original hardware", it can not be, because it's software full of speed hacks, and the more complicated the console, the higher the processing requirements. It's absolutely stupid to invest $2000 in a desktop PC just to play games for a game console that cost $200. And no, armboard-flavor-of-the-day is not a solution. None of these RPi solutions are solutions to anything but "hey I can do something cool cheap". Nintendo may have unintentionally created a standardized armboard for these pirate solutions to use, but those chips aren't going to be around for years.
If you do not see the value in the Super NT, then don't buy it. But please don't pretend that people flogging $15 RPi's with RetroArch aren't scammers.
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Since you said that Kevtris, I think you may find this piece of news interesting. It requires quite a lot of hassle, but still pretty impressive:
I'm gonna call BS just because retroarch is not "one" emulator, but dozens of pieces of random emulators with different performance profiles. That might only be true of really specific boards/chips as well that has it's own controller bus like the NES/SNES mini and not of anything using USB or Bluetooth." Whoever told you input lag was a given with emulators and that you needed FPGA in order to avoid this latency, was talking about pre-RetroArch. Post-RetroArch, latency indistinguishable from real hardware is perfectly possible! "It is physically impossible to get "like hardware" latency in software, especially when we're talking about 8-bit and 16-bit systems which don't tolerate latency. Take note that the person who actually did the work used an i5-5xxx series CPU on Linux, which is not a configuration many people have, and thus can't replicate the findings of. Plus the author is only talking about the NES. That's all you need is someone who reads that and then tries this on a RPi with 1/16th the capability. Plus that claim of being "indistinguishable from real hardware" is a bold faced lie. When they do some double-blind tests, they can try again.While I think the retroarch people might believe they have a low-latency emulator, that will never be better than the original hardware, only "good enough" for people who tolerate inaccurate timing in the first place. There are plenty of speed hacks in current generations of emulators, that if you were to remove them, you'd never be able to emulate a SNES either except on the highest end hardware, which an i5 is not..-
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The wait for this thing is going to be so real now.
I actually wonder if the SNES cart market will be adversely affected by the Super NT. Probably not if there's a Core Store, lol.
Probably only for the chip carts (eg Mario RPG and Yoshi's Island.) Most people are not competent enough to change the battery on a SNES cart. I have to wonder how many snes carts wound up in landfills because people thought they were broken, when they were simply dirty or needed a new battery.
At any rate all the SNES games are available in some shape since emulation has been a thing since the late 90's. So if it didn't affect them then, it's not going to affect them now.
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Here it is:
I dunno, my first impression is that it is too black. Maybe Im just too used to Apples space grey color.
That is what is called "matte black", eg not piano black like the Xbox 360's or PS3, even the Wii U. Matte black doesn't reflect light, which is typically better for gear located near the TV, as it results in no glare from lights in the room.
That said, geez, white LED's. Those tend to light up small rooms.
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Ugg... You guys don't get it. Analogue sells Super NT, a future cost reduced "NT Micro" NES, a Mega NT, etc, billed as physical hardware designed to run a single cartridge based system. Kevtris releases jailbreak software for free to boost sales, but if you want to play with physical carts, you buy the console with the form factor that supports it. The cart adapters were a great idea, but now you need separate series of cart adapters for the NT Mini, Super NT, or Mega, and endless add-ons to convert one console to another one. So the Zimba3000 becomes more of a pipe dream with time as the Analogue hardware evolves with physical FPGA clones released for each system.
On second thought, perhaps a Retron style FPGA solution would be a better idea?
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And I just read what I wrote and comared it to the replies written by everyone else. Geeze, have we gotten petty with the speculation? Everyone has their own idea of what Analgue's business plan will be, everyone else is wrong. Everone is a self-proclaimed pundit who knows more than the people working at Analogue, or Kevtris whose brilliance made it all possible.
"Past Performance Is Not Indicative Of Future Results"
That's what's happening with the speculation here.
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System upgrades including new cores could be fitted to work on individual systems only, so there would be no risk of online distribution. They could establish a store system where you registered with your system number and pay for your systems upgrade with the cores of your choice.
There's a bad idea that has never worked.
They can do whatever they want. Sure they can charge to unlock cores - but you are also right about people sharing and piracy as well due to no internet connection. It's really all speculation. I'm interested to see what they do.
Again, bad idea.
The best option currently available would be for the Super NT to generate it's own "store key" and analog personalize firmware to the device using that key. That would prevent pirating of the cores without going through additional cloning efforts. The other thing that could be done just to reduce support costs from people pirating is to stegographicaly encode the serial, store key, and game hash into to the output and ask for a screenshot before providing support. If the screenshot reveals that the game is not using a purchased core, or is playing a game that they don't have a hash match for, then they can assume the problem is the game.
However either of those means comes with the cost of making it more expensive. So it makes more sense to just not bother with that foolishness in the first place, know the users will pirate the cores just as quickly as the games they will run on it, and instead opt for the more practical consideration of putting the JB firmware behind a paywall, and those who want it "now" will pay for it.
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Why do so many people here believe, that the only alternative to Kevtris releasing every finished and possible future core for free, would be something so unlikey as for Analogue to create a fully fledged system with a different case but identical hardware for each of those? Possibly because having everything for free would be in their favour?
It really doesn't take too much imagination, to think of alternative ways, how they could distribute additional system cores. I wouldn't mind paying for those, I wished to add to my Super NT if I ordered one. Perhaps Analogue could come up with a portal on their site, where you would buy necessary files to do the upgrade, which would only work with your unit, so nobody could share them online. You could buy the Super NT as a SNES only and it would only do that, or you would have to register your unit on their site, with your unit number and they would have a process ready to create update files for your system specifically.
What many people in this thread really seem to underestimate, is the value that Kevtris gave each of us basically for nothing: a decade's worth of work of a highly trained and skilled engineer. Do your own research to see what that amounts to. Not only should he benefit financially from every unit Analogue sells, but also from every core someone adds to their Super NT. And just because we were granted all that stuff for our NT Mini for free before doesn't make it a cash grab, if the creator or the company he partners with decides to get paid for his hard work. Nobody is entitled to have all that stuff for free, even if they got it before. Instead, we should be thankful and not feel entitled to have it ported to the next system as well, which is clearly not marketed as the visionary gaming platform this thread got started with, but a SNES only.
People have made suggestions to this, including myself:
A) Analogue could "lock out" additional cores in the official firmware, requiring pin-converters to unlock so you need the real game (or everdrive or sd2snes pretending to be the pin converter). If a JB firmware comes along that lets you play the games off the SD card, that would not affect the official firmware function.
B) Analogue could release different versions of the SuperNT, one being for Sega carts, another for PCE, another for computer systems that have a keyboard. Like there's an entire untapped market for Apple II/C64/Atari/Amiga that Analogue market to, except for the fact they'd need to license the firmware/bios.
C) Kevtris could just straight up license the cores to other parties to build things that Analogue is not interested in. I'll place emphasis on license here because, part of the reason why FPGA dev's don't open source things is because if they did, the next thing that happens is you suddenly see "HD Retron 6's" with identical compatibility but the same trash build quality.
Well said, I agree 100%. This will be my first FPGA console (although I have been following for quite some time). I truly agree that Kevtris and Analogue should be compensated for their work. Many think we are entitled to these jailbroken firmware, but I disagree. If it cost me ~150-$200 for each physical FPGA console, i'm on board. If Analogue rather find alternatives such as a software core update w/ corresponding cartridge adaptor - count me in (although I would not be willing to pay as much for software without a new console).
Not many people balked at Nintendo for using the same internals for their NES/SNES Classics and the sales prove it - albiet much is because "Nintendo" and a lot is because "Nostalgia" - but I don't see why the same can't be true for Analpogue and their FPGA consoles. I would love to have a physical collection of FPGA alternatives to get pixel-perfect hardware emulation on my HDTV and to ensure these games and the systems to play them on last many many years.
As some have mentioned before as well, it takes a lot of time, money and effort to get a retro console working with a modern HDTV, and these Analogue consoles really come at a steal compared to mods, upscalers and cables - not to mention the console itself!
Anyways, just wanted to throw in my $0.02 and state that i'm super excited to get my shipping confirmation next week!
That's because the NES Mini and SNES Mini was an off-the-shelf product that Nintendo only had to produce a shell for. Had they gone through the bother of locking it down, it would have required producing their own CPU, and thus the development costs make it unviable. People quickly forget this. The purpose of the Mini's was more of an "anniversary" thing, and the fact that it took no time at all for them to be hacked and loaded up with pirated roms, just tells you how little engineering Nintendo put into it. I wouldn't put it past saying that Canoe (the emulator on the mini's) probably came straight off the new3DS, and is nothing specially designed for the NES/SNES mini either. Nintendo probably made $50 on every unit that they in turn had to pay out licencing to SquareEnix, Konami and Capcom from.
If it becomes possible to patch games with expansion chips, then it will become possible to simply load a donor cart and play another Rom that uses the chip. I know this is possible for DSP-1, not sure about sa-1 or fx. Then there is the severe performance penalty for using a fx1 donor like Starfox to play an fx-2 rom like yoshi's island. Yoshi may not like running at half the clock speed, of visa versa for starfox running at 2x.
In theory it would be possible just because of how the chips sit on the bus. In practice though, I think "donor" cart is probably impossible since that requires communicating on a bus that has two game carts and would create collisions if there isn't a way to turn off the cartridge rom. So it would require JB-mode to intercept all calls to the game's rom and route them, which probably makes it more effort than needed, Either all the chips need to emulated in a JB firmware, or it has to be emulated by something like the SD2SNES which could in theory emulate just the expansion chip when attached to the SuperNT, and save people the trouble of buying Japanese Yoshi's Island and Mario RPG games just because they don't want to pay some eBay scammer for a repro.
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huh? The Framemeister uses a dedicated Marvell Qdeo video processor that is no longer made, that's why it's discontinued. It isn't a FPGA device.
The XRGB-mini framemeister is a FPGA ( http://www.micomsoft.co.jp/xrgb-mini.htm), so is the OSSC. You can see the spartan chip http://www.micomsoft.co.jp/img/xrgb-mini_z03.jpg and here http://i.imgur.com/TXceISY.jpg , how much of the processing is done via the FPGA could be up for debate, but that's not something we should really get into , the Marvell Qdeo chip is the upscaler itself. the OSSC just uses a larger FPGA's to do the same thing. I don't own either device.
If it's anything like the SC512-N, the FPGA in the framemeister is really just an overengineered analog to digital step to allow running composite/s-video/componet with one chip.
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You're moving the goalposts from "a working snes" to "a full blown scart framemeister rig". A working snes can easily be found for $50 and played on a free CRT. The issue here is clearly the shipping cost, which makes zero sense (unless Analogue is drastically overcharging on shipping).
For a HDMI SNES? no it's not moving the goal posts at all unless you already posses the equipment. Quite literately for $190 you are getting what would cost you to a minimum of about $275 assuming you already had the cables and working 240p capable TV.
Yes the shipping looks a bit out of line, but if you're outside the US, that's actually reasonable, because even buying stupid 1lb books costs $20 to ship.
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The odds of gettting a GPM model that works is not that high, but I've already had that argument elsewhere in this thread and in another thread about SNES reliability, so I'm not going to rehash it. Suffice it to say the reliability of the 1991 (SHVC-CPU-01) models is in question and lucking out and getting the later models took me 5 tries to get a working model (SNS-GPM-02) at about 75$ each.
Getting top quality HDMI from a SNES today requires:
1) A 1chip SNES (typically a Jr if you don't want to play the serial number game)
2) An RGB bypass mod board with a THS7374
3) Somebody to mod it for you
4) A good RGB SCART cable
5) An OSSC or Framemeister
All of those things together add up to far more than $222. Some of it can be skipped: if you're handy with a soldering iron you don't need to pay for step 2, and if your HDTV can handle 240p over component you can save money using HDRV YPbPr cables instead of an OSSC or Framemeister, but even then you're going to end up at more than the cost of a Super Nt.
Yep, the OSSC/Framemeister alone is $200, and a framemeister (discontinued apparently $400.) Both are FPGA devices.
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They look nice but is there any point in purchasing them. Some people are like why pay so much for old cardboard so they go for reproduction boxes.
Not much point unless you have a OCD penchant for wanting everything to look a certain way.
As long as they are marked as such it is fine. I personally would think a shelf full of crisp new boxes would be nicer looking than beat up boxes. I as well will not pay hundreds for a piece of paper.
The thing is, reproduction-anything is still copyright infringement, but this is one of those cases where creating the reproduction box/manual/label is a purely aesthetic consideration rather than trying to acquire a "NIB" (New in Box) that you can never play for hundreds of dollars and just gathers dust.
Where it's a serious problem is when someone buys that repro box, and uses it to create a fake NIB game to sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. This is why from a certain perspective it should be discouraged unless the box is personalized to the buyer.
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Is it possible to consolize the 3DS?
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
The 2DS is simply one screen with part of it masked off. So yes it can be done. You will never be able to get the parallax barrier effect to work on anything but the original 3DS screen, and it only works because it's that small, and the bottom screen has a touch screen.
The DS/DSi likewise are simply two screens, of which the bottom one has a touch screen.
The touch screen in both is not a capacitive touch screen, so it doesn't have a multitouch ability, and neither does the Wii U tablet screen.
From a technical perspective, there is nothing stopping Nintendo from making the Nintendo Switch be able to play 3DS or DS/DSi titles or even GBA titles, it just needs a translation layer. It would be less trivial than trying to emulate the SNES on it.
However if you wanted to turn a 3DS into a "TV console" machine, you would need at the very minimum an output device with touch support. So that would mean something like a Cintiq Pro 13, or a Cintiq 22HD since both of those support touch and have their own stylus. That's dramatically overkill.
Which leads to the next viable option, something like the "Ubi Touch" being put on a regular monitor/tv. That is still a $900 product. Also most 3DS games don't actually use the touch screen for anything but some gimmick that is used once in a while, so you might go from using an 8+ button controller (eg a Xbox 360 controller) for most of the game and then when it comes to that thing where you have to "scratch bowsers belly" or something have to go up to the screen.
For all practical consideration the kind of thing you would need already exists, it's called the 2DS. When people install capture boards into their 3DS handhelds, they are tapping into the display driver, at great risk of damaging the electronics.
The 3DS does NOT have the ability to output a native signal to a TV, what you see at trade shows during presentations is actually the development kit which costs thousands of dollars and isn't available to purchase.