Kismet

It shouldn't be. 4K OTA broadcasts are never happening. It will be all over-the-internet or nothing. The governments were in a such a quick rush to sell off the analog channels to wireless companies that they didn't consider the possibility of 4K or 8K broadcasts. Outside of the US, you can't even get OTA HD broadcasts most of the time, and coax is encrypted (no clear QAM, no cablecard.) So the Analog Tuner is useless, and a DTV tuner is barely useful, so expect it to disappear. And it really does make sense to dispose of the analog/digital tuner and let people add one if they need it when most markets will never use it. TV Manufacturers should have learned this by now that you need a minimum of 4 inputs: 1) DisplayPort 1.2 for computer use 2) HDMI 2.0 for 4K input 3) HDMI 1.4/MHL for HD input 4) USB-C 3.1 for 4K input in Displayport alternate mode or HDMI mode Either a TV can have one of each, or a TV can all the same ports, but they need at least 4 at any size. If they only have 1, then they need to have a Surround Sound system that also acts as a switch for the HDMI and that's just not very good for games.

The original NT was a also premium product in the same idea of the CMVS. The NT Mini is the same product but with a FPGA for the entire thing instead of recycled NES parts and a FPGA for the PPU. It has an aluminum chasis. The thing could probably survive being thrown from a third story window. Look at Analogue's other products (The CMVS was made of wood!) Nah, it's more likely Analogue would release Pin adapters because Kevtris isn't going to build them. He may release a schematic for people to build their own, but I don't see him building 10,000 pin adapters by hand.

Interesting. I doubt it. The AVS was for people who wanted a replacement for their NES. The NT Mini was for people who wanted a premium product. My guess is that after the Super NT is released, they will either produce a pin adapter to allow the FC/NES carts to be used on it, and discontinue the NT Mini once they run out of inventory, or they will update the NT Mini to have the A6 Cyclone V, and call it the NT Mini+ , and release a pin adapter for that. Obviously Analogue would make more money by selling pin adapters rather than essentially identical consoles with different branding. So I'd expect "pin adapters" for the common consoles, and people will just use their flash carts. Now that I think about it, this does create a specific kind of incentive to make a flashcart explicitly to work with the JB firmware where the cart has it's own save/savestate management that works across different cores by emulating the pin adapters.

I want to point out that in the Nintendo Power magazine, I will always associate that SMB screen with having a more orange color, while knowing that the blue was slightly more on the violet side. So I'd say the FCEUX palette looks like the intended color, but that Sony CXA is probably the right brightness. Those bricks in SMB are not supposed to be bright red or brown, so the other three look off.

Keep in mind that goal posts are always moving with FPGA's. We're currently on Cyclone 10 in 2017 (Previous was Cyclone V from 2011, which is in the NT and Super NT) , most other hobby FPGA's are using Cyclone V. The IV's are 40nm tech, the V's are 28nm tech, and the 10's are 14nm tech. So as an analogy, that is like going from a 40nm CPU's in the Xbox 360 S, PS3 Slim and Wii U, or a Core 2 Duo, all from 2007, to i7-3770 in 2011 in one step, and then to the Xbox One S, or Intel i7-7770. So you can fit more in each generation of FPGA just like in the CPU's and GPU's. Some chips don't really benefit as much as others. As you'll notice the i7-3000 and i7-7000 CPU's are basically the same performance, but the change in GPU performance is roughly 8x. However, take that with a grain of salt. The clock speeds don't really change with die shrinks. For the foreseeable future it's unlikely that any CPU over 100Mhz can be replicated in a single FPGA like the Cyclone parts.

The SNES Emulator SE, ICE (In Circuit Emulator) had a bunch of FPGA/CPLD's there were three of them (one on the CPU, Midi and Video boards.) Notice the Xilinx chip on the CPU board. Given the age, it's very likely these are CPLD's that use EEPROM, not flash rom.

That is a counterfeit (bootleg/repro) , open it up if you have a screwdriver for it and check what it has for a PCB.

Start making below-retail offers, especially if they modded them, because you can say "it's been opened"

Hands down, Xbox 360. RRoD. Even on late models due to Microsoft not spending money on a few extra parts to prevent scratching up discs. So damned if you have a non-S model, and damned if you have an S-model and like playing discs. My S model, the hard drive died with no notice, so I'm stuck with only playing the games on the USB stick. When the Xbox 360 becomes 30 years old, you will not find a single working unit because people will not be willing to part with working models. In the case of early CD's, I have working 2X cd-roms proprietary drives that still work. So it's not so much the drive but, the type of drive. A slot loader or a top loader is more likely to be damaged by the user forcing the disc, so the PSX and the late model Sega CD/CDX are more likely to be the most fragile by the way they are handled, while the DC is more likely the most fragile due to proprietary features. The 3DO is more likely to be salvaged with software emulators since you could buy things like the 3DO blaster which used a stock Panasonic 2X proprietary interface drive to begin with.

The N64 is out of reach for a (single) FPGA, with current generation FPGA's at most you'd get away are 100Mhz processors of a complexity around a 486. So even if it could be done today, it would not be cheap at all. http://ece545.com/F15/reports/F14_N64_rewrite.pdf This project just barely got something working and even then, didn't emulate the RCP 3D subsystem or most of the audio. Of note they used DSP elements on the FPGA they selected. http://ece545.com/S15/reports/F13_PSX.pdf This is another team who decided to try the PSX on a DE2-115 (same thing all other SNES FPGA projects used), and noted that it was too slow for some timing things and didn't have enough block ram. They were unable to get it to boot in the end. It should be noted that in both projects, they did not write their own CPU, they borrowed a licensed CPU core. BTW take a look in the directory for a few other FPGA projects http://ece545.com/S15/reports/ Overall, a FPGA project likely has no reason to do anything that the original hardware couldn't do to begin with. The reason some features exist on the NT Mini (like 16 sprites per line) is because the clock is simply doubled on the PPU (where as the NES would only have one clock,) as the PPU has to be adjusted to work with HDMI anyway. For the SNES, it's unlikely there will be a "overclock" feature, but it might need an "underclock" feature to allow PAL region games to work on it. With a PSX or N64, simply overclocking the RCP would likely not net any performance gain because the games would have been designed to run at 12, 15 or 30fps, and you can't just flip a bit and get a 60fps frame rate. You can see this kind of thing in the FF9 PC port. The game, even running at 4K, still runs at 30fps. In mean in theory you could use a game genie feature and figure out where in the game code it's being told to wait 32ms between redraws and see if changing it to 16ms makes it explode. But typically the goal of a FPGA project is not to do stuff like this unless it's incredibly trivial. In the case of the 8/16 sprites in the NES PPU, this is possible because the games were already making use of a quirk of the PPU that the AVS and NT Mini can take advantage of. From an EE point of view (which I am not an EE) it seems like a "RAM/ROM Expansion" might be a futile thing since the games would not take advantage of it, and any hack that does, would not run on a real N64 anyway, so there is no guarantee that the hack won't be broken by changes in the firmware. Like let's say a NT64 had 8GB of RAM in it for some reason, the N64 only had 4 or 8MB. A hack can not address more RAM than the CPU could see in the first place. Since the CPU is 64-bit that means it could in theory access >4GB of RAM, but it has a 32bit systembus, (the spec sheet http://datasheets.chipdb.org/NEC/Vr-Series/Vr43xx/U10504EJ7V0UMJ1.pdf says 32-bits physical, 40 bits virtual) so the maximum is 4GB. If a hack somehow could use 4GB, what would it use it for? Improving the GPU would require more than simply increasing the speed or adding memory, and you can see what happens today with software emulators when they translate the output to D3D or OpenGL, it looks passable, but it's neither good due to low resolution textures, or better (because it's missing precision.) You can have the fastest GPU in the world, but that N64 emulator is not going to do 120 fps at HD, because the game is not designed to work that way, and probably looks worse for it. GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) Mario 64 at 4K It's likely that software emulators will be the best way to play "3D" games if you are seeking an improvement in resolution. Otherwise a project will more likely do the same kind of line doubling used for the 8-bit and 16-bit FPGA consoles in order to give the best low-latency play over trying to improve it.

They're not directly comparable. It was possible to emulate the SNES on a 1998 PC if you had at least a 120Mhz Pentium, and if you didn't you simply couldn't emulate the color math. That says nothing about the accuracy, which instead requires a 4Ghz PC, and even that falls short if there is an expansion chip. http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench3/2756993 That puts it roughly between a Intel Pentium D 945/950 3400 MHz and a Intel Pentium M 1.70GHz from 2008. What has changed since the Pentium 4 (Pentium D) is that most CPU's are multi-core, while the single core performance of a current CPU is barely more than one from 5 years ago. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html Like just looking at the top of the list, you see chips from 4-5 generations ago right beside current ones. Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz right beside Intel Core i5-8600K @ 3.60GHz The Intel Core i7-8550U @ 1.80GHz is right beside Intel Core i7-3770K @ 3.50GHz And multi core chips run slower to enable additional cores to run at the same time. That part in the NES/SNES mini is also the slowest version of that A33 chip. It's about the same performance as Samsung Galaxy S 2/3/4/5 (The S3 is from 2012) So I have a feeling Nintendo simply just found a cheap vendor (those A33 chips are 40nm parts) who had a surplus, and use that. So these things are probably very profitable, as I doubt the BOM is more than 10$

That's not how copyright law interprets it. You must make your own backups from your own software. You can not simply buy a game cart off eBay, legit or not, empty box, or whatever and go "See I have a legal copy, now gimme da romz" Technically the Retrode is not a "copier" it's more like a way to use your carts as a USB disk, it just so happens you can copy the rom off the cart instead of directly playing it in the emulator like it's intended (otherwise why bother with the controller ports.) It's also a way to work around dead batteries in the carts if you don't have the tools or skill to fix them. They even say so Either way, the point is moot, if you're copying your own carts, or simply using it to play the carts as-is. Those are presumably your games and not your buddies or whatever. Likewise copyright law requires you to destroy the backup should you no longer possess the original. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html If someone wants to risk $30,000 to $150,000 fine for each title you pirate off the internet instead of doing your own backup, by all means, just don't claim ignorance, or try to interpret it in a way otherwise. Legal precedents have pretty much suggested it legal to reverse engineer hardware to produce an emulator, but you still can't produce a device that has a single purpose of engaging in or promoting piracy. Remember the R4 and half dozen other DS flash carts? http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r4-cart-ban-more-details-emerge I took most of those things down in 2008 on eBay before the European and Australian lawsuits from NOA requests that weren't for counterfeit pokemon GBA games. And believe me, there were hundreds every few days, all out of Asia. Which is why I've mentioned a dozen times, probably on the last two pages about how important it is to not promote a device as being capable of playing pirated software. That's how it becomes a lawsuit bait. If you notice the NT Mini marketing makes no mention of being able to copy games, or saving them to the SD card. Yet they did mention it's compatible with two known flashcarts which is tactic admission that it does nothing to prevent unauthorized software from running, but neither does a real NES. Replicating the function of the orignal NES pretty much requires allowing it to run anything, legal, foreign region, NTSC or PAL, unlicensed, homebrew, hacks, etc, since there's no way it could ever know if the cart plugged in is legit. If anything, a portable game system is improved by being able to store all the games on one cart, because if you lose the system, because people lose those stupid tiny carts all the time on transit. So yes it's very possible to see a device get seized at import because it's deemed a piracy device, even if you could justify it with homebrew. This is from this year (Their site is still up too): https://www.myce.com/news/nintendo-wins-lawsuit-seller-flashcarts-modchips-game-copiers-81581/ More detail here: http://canliiconnects.org/en/summaries/45589 So keep that in mind that the NT Mini and Super NT will only survive a legal challenge if the device can't play "unauthorized copies" in the stock firmware, thereby only playing games from the cartridge slot. It doesn't matter if the user JB's it after-the-fact, because a user JB'ing a device is no different from JB'ing a phone or smart tv to add functionality (that may or may not induce piracy.) One could argue that even if the firmware only allowed using pin adapters to access the cores, there is still no way to tell if the cartridge is authorized, repro, hacked, homebrew, etc. We probably won't see a lawsuit from Nintendo over the sale of the hardware, if they can't play backups when shipped from China, then there is no way they can be claimed to be pirate devices.

You've been picking a fight because you seem to think my posting on this forum is somehow going to convince kevtris to stop releasing JB firmware or something. Yet.. I seriously doubt you have legal backups. Now please give it a rest.

The NES ROM Dump feature is not in the stock firmware. That's in the JB firmware. It is not marketed with this ability. https://support.analogue.co/hc/en-us/articles/115002083128-Nt-mini-Technical-Specifications I don't personally care how you get the games, which seems to be what you are refusing to understand. There are less copiers in existence than there are copies of roms floating on the internet. Everyone has the same unauthorized copies unless they made the backup themselves, and pretty much nobody has a copier to begin with, let alone the technical know how to acquire the bios dumps from chips that had to be decapped.

You still have to make the backups yourself. Please, do show me photos of your personal copier devices, or kindly put a sock in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. "substantial noninfringing uses" The cartridge slot fulfills this requirement. Nothing more.

Again, you are still trying to suggest something that was not said. The NT Mini and Super NT have a cartridge slot, therefor it can play legal games, with the original controllers. That is the entire point. If they wanted to sell a piracy device they wouldn't even bother with the cartridge slot they'd just repackage the Cyclone FPGA into something the size of a candy bar and have to use bluetooth controllers.

You seem to be fishing for an argument that wasn't even being suggested. Go back and read this thread from the beginning. There are more people in this thread blatantly admitting to using pirated rom files, and zero people saying how they legally acquired one. Nintendo goes after a lot of things, and a lot of that has to do with trademark infringement. They are required to go after people who infringe trademarks, regardless if there is any copyright fair use merit. Type in "SNES compatible" into Google, and you will see the Hyperkin, and various Rasperry Pi projects. No mention of the Super NT till the third page, and that is by third party sites, not Analogue.

Why is ad hominem the attack of choice when you don't have an argument? I have worked for companies dealing with copyright infringement. What makes Nintendo decide to file a lawsuit has more to do with the perception of unauthorized copyrighted content being made. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc. The NT Mini does not make a copy of the game when it plays it from the cartridge port. The Game Genie does not make a copy of the game, it simply patches variables in memory. When you JB the device, and load it with roms you acquire off the internet, you're the one doing the copyright infringement, not Analogue.

Excuse me? I know exactly what I'm talking about. My job at one point in time was taking down copyright infringement materials on eBay. I've had many the argument with staff about why something is legal and something is not, and it comes back to "whatever the copyright holder believes is their right, it's between the seller and the rights owner". Much infringing materials persist on eBay because Nintendo have less lawyers than there are copyright infringers in the world. Nintendo is more concerned by counterfeit Pokemon carts then they are anything else. From a legal perspective, you can not create a product that can only play copyright-infringing materials, because there is no way to legitimately acquire the ROM's or BIOS's. Period. Nintendo does not sell the ROM's, and nobody that has produced a NES or SNES game has ever sold bare roms. You can rip these ROM's from some third parties PC "collection packs", but that is the exception, not the rule. There is no fair use argument to be had. Every single person who has a ROM file or BIOS file, is in possession of an unauthorized copy produced by someone who made their own backup and shared it. The number of people who have this ability is probably less than 20 in the world (and the people who possess this ability are the same people who write emulators.) People in this thread alone keep mentioning where to find pirate ROM's that are pre-setup to use on the NT Mini. That is BAD. That is why the firmware's of the NT Mini can only play what is plugged into the cartridge slot, because in theory it can only play legal cartridges, even though 100% of the people who buy a NT Mini are going to use a flashcart or JB it anyway. It's not Analogue's fault if people JB the device, their due diligence ends with selling a device that works with legal carts. They are not under license from Nintendo to make it only play authorized carts, because nobody is producing new NES carts. There are no patents at stake. There are no trademarks at stake. Nintendo didn't make the lockout chip work in both directions. With the Super NT, the lockout system does work in both directions if there is an expansion chip involved. So it's more important that it works with all legal cartridges than making it able to play those same games off the SD card once JB'd. If kevtris really wants to, he can just never make core play expansion chip games, and thus it's up to people to get the real carts, or help the SD2SNES developer create those cores if they really want to play those expansion chip games. It's the argument we've had since the 80's when people copied floppy disks, copyright law only permits YOU to make your own backup. You can not legally have backups produced by someone else. Everyone knows this. Everyone ignores the law, because the law tends to not care until someone is making money off infringement. Kodi boxes are what the entertainment industry is concerned with right now, and it's the same situation there. You can buy an nVidia Shield, put stock Kodi on it, and you can play your own backups. But there are plugins that let you find unauthorized copies of anything to play, and the only way the entertainment industry can stop it is by going after the files indexed by the plugins. The NT Mini or Super NT is not a TiVo. The only way these are legal is by being sold and marketed only able to play the legit cartridges. If they are JB, that is not an endorsement of piracy by Analogue. But historically that is what happens, anytime a piece of hardware become available with a "secret" mode that lets it defeat copy protection, it becomes a hot seller before the seller vanishes.

Probably an unpopular opinion, but all early 3D games, particularly those on the PC, were horrid. Compare FF7 and FF8 on the PC to the PSX version. The PC version was better except that FF7 needed an AWE32 and a FF8 needed a Yamaha XG synth to sound at least as good as the PSX. FF9 (remaster) for the PC simply has the OST sound track built into it at a loss of some dynamic musical cues, but is a far better experience than the PSX version. The reasons for being horrible had a lot more to do with the reliance on having a software renderer as a compromise in case the player didn't have a 3D accelerator board. Thus you have special versions of games made for 3DFX and S3 Virge boards that didn't have the software fallback which looked nicer, but the extra depth was defeated by how everything looks flat (eg textures painted onto flat surfaces instead of having depth.)

That's not true. It's not "It looks better on a CRT" but, "It has less latency on a CRT" The problem is that CRT's color phosphors fade with time, and believe me there are "shader plugins" for emulators to replicate the look of a crappy CRT. So a lot of the whimsy actions of the fringe emulation scene makes people believe that playing on a CRT is somehow a superior experience, when in fact nearly ZERO people played on a good CRT, let alone with RGB/SCART cables. Nostalgia tinted glasses so to speak. To give you an idea, you can buy IPS monitors that aren't as good for gaming, but they make photos look fantastic, or you can buy TN monitors which have the lowest grey-to-grey time, which are better for gaming since they allow for >60fps, but they're all 6-bit panels, so you only have 262144 colors, not 16.7 million colors. Then there are awful glossy screens, and great matte screens, but matte screens require higher brightness. Compare this with playing a NES on a 1980 Sony Trinitron over RF. That was the only option. By all accounts, RF looks like a dogs breakfast compared to anything in HD. Yet we put up with RF analog broadcasts all the way into 2009. So if you're one of the lucky people who found a late model 480i CRT with Component video, you've lucked out, and have the best possible CRT you can play PS2 and earlier games on without modifying the console. But for most people this is not an option, and the amount of space taken up by a large CRT is unjustified. Even goodwill places won't take CRT's anymore. In many ways, chasing the best CRT down to play a classic game console on is a lot like trying to find a vintage record player. There is simply no point, but people will insist that the analog noise creates a better experience. Ultimately what will replace CRT's in things like arcade cabinets will be OLED-types of screens that can just be thrown away every few years.

I would not put it past Analogue to release a "Blast Processing NT" or something to that level that plays SMS/MD/GG/Sega-CD/32X games, with essentially the same inside, just different cartridge connectors and controller ports. The problem with trying to play CD-ROM game is that most CD games are not in good condition, and you get a better experience by ripping the disc. So from a legal perspective, a Sega-CD wouldn't be doable in official firmware, but the physical unit could connect to a "real" SegaCD, by which then someone could simply produce a SegaCD emulator FPGA board and solve that. Likewise with the 32X. Like, realistically, either system could play the same games with an unofficial JB firmware. It's just the official firmware needs to play the legal carts and expansion devices without ripping anything. It's also just as easy to make pin adapters for just about anything for use with a JB firmware. The Sega MD has 64 pins, the SNES has 62, plus some ground paths. The NES has 72, the FC has 60, SMS has 50, GG has 45, GB has 32. There just needs to be official documentation for it. Analogue could also simply make these themselves and have the official firmware do a core switch when the pin adapter is plugged in.

Well early 3DFX boards used an analog switch. It would be identical to using a mechanical VGA switch to switch between the 2D card and 3D card, though the quality of the switch and cables left a lot to be desired. Like I'd reasonably expect a ARM+FPGA solution to have the FPGA do everything, and the ARM side only handles a "mechanical" i/o switch to switch the video graphics and controller/keyboard input back to the ARM side when the FPGA is "rebooted" , when the FPGA is running, the input is on the FPGA side and a watchdog process on the Linux side monitors for the FPGA to send a "suspend" state before switching back i/o to the ARM side. What would induce latency is actually running the video as a frame buffer full time, (typically to have overlay menus) by which you then have to buffer the audio and input. There are things like LD Arcades (which use an Amiga+Genlock+LD Player) and MPEG cards in PC's that essentially require overlay support of some sort, and that is more easier achieved using a frame buffer if it's just playing video.

The unwritten rule is: 1. Frame your subject appropriately, this is going to be landscape mode for all Video, and portrait mode for still photos where there is a single subject. 2. Post-process video and photos so that it doesn't end up sideways, or upsidedown, or mirrored. The problem with both digital still cameras and cameraphones is that you habitually want to get the entire subject and might rotate the camera during filming, which doesn't change the orientation flags. Likewise, many people with smaller phones hold the cameraphone with one hand, and thus can't hit the record button if they hold it in landscape mode (which requires two hands then.) So in a sense, if you are NOT going to do any post-processing, always record in landscape mode. That saves the most amount of time. A similar problem is frequently encountered when people record video game or older camcorder footage from analog sources, Analog is always 4:3, but the recording mode might not be, as many camcorders had the option to enable aspect ratio correction by cropping or compressing. So the output from those cameras is a widescreen output either compressed into non-square pixels, or is the actual NTSC/PAL output with black bars applied to it, in the same way watching a widescreen DVD on a 4:3 television is. For example, my Canon HV20 is a HD camcorder, but it really stores video in the DV format as 1440x1080 non-square pixels but it's wide-screen, however connect a HDMI cable to it and you get the full 1920x1080 square pixels. Which goes back to the original argument about framing the video. If you know how the video was intended to be framed, then there is nothing to complain about. But realistically, if you habitually record video in portrait mode, you're losing two thirds of the resolution when it has to be rotated 90 degrees (1080x1920 becomes a 608x1080 image) and played back on a HDTV without any post-processing (eg in recording the rocket launch, you might move the frame as the rocket moves, instead of having the static shot.)

Depends if you have a widescreen CRT. I do. You can tell it to pillar-box or stretch it. That said, It is unplugged 99% of the time because the flyback transformer makes a high pitch noise. To me that high pitch whine is as bad as nails on a chalkboard.