Kismet

Well, again, VR Headsets are more likely to get that 16,000p 250fps realism by using the way the eye works against itself. Instead of having a 16K monitor that wraps your entire peripheral vision , you'd have something like a 2K or 4K monitor that physically occupies the space of about 4" but takes up the entire peripheral vision of the VR headset sweet spot. Like as it stands right now, people become sick if a VR headset isn't even 100fps. (Sony's VR kit is only 90 apparently) To say nothing of the latency. I don't even like VR stuff. But to reiterate my previous point, there will likely be no market for an 8K computer monitor or a >8K TV, because the amount of space required for it to be of any practical use requires a 48" screen to fit entirely in your peripheral vision, and right now a 4K 24" monitor sitting at about 3' away tends to fill the entire sweet spot. You can't really tell a 4K from a HD monitor at 24" short of some scaling artifacts. eg, my 4K and my HD monitor side by side with a photo I scanned at >4K resolution from a negative, then yes the 4K IPS monitor looks better, but if I'm standing 8' away from the monitor I could not tell you if that was a 4K photo or a HD photo, only that the 4K IPS monitor is more colorful. At some point, likely by 2025, computers, tv's and monitors will just be like cars, where there's very little improvement other than energy efficiency, and it's just a feature fight.

We are not going to see TV's or computer screens over 8K. UHD was created with the intent of having 8K theatrical resolution. The only thing higher than this are hemisphere screens for IMAX. The only way you get that at home is with a VR HUD. It's actually unlikely we will see anything over 4K for computer monitors. We may see 240hz 4K monitors, but we won't see 8K. TV's we will see 8K, but that's it. I know it sounds strange to basically say, "that's it", but that is it. Computer hardware is not improving in a way that will allow anything better. There is maybe one viable die shrink left and that might not bee seen for 3 more years. So take what we have right now, and multiply by 4. GPU power currently can do 4Kp60 with a single $1000 card. To get 240fps, you need 4 of them. So a die shrink may allow this being reduced to a single card. 8K is 4 4K screens just like how 4K was 4 1080p screens. Without some kind of lossy compression allowed in the monitor, it's unlikely anything higher will be possible. That's assuming anything higher than 8K could be built at anything under 40"

Note I said "out of cheapness", those SmartTV SoC's route the video through the SoC so they can do things like PiP and transparency with the apps because who cares if the video is delayed by 3-8 frames in the process. Monitor menus need to know what color the pixel is before they draw it to do transparency. That overlay is always running on a smartTV. Here's a 4K Display Driver http://www.digitalview.com/media/manuals/svx-4096-2x-manual-rev201-19aug2016.pdf

In an earlier version of this discussion, I had dug up the block diagrams for a few LCD monitors and televisions. Basically the way all LCD's work, or at least those with any kind of menu, is that they need the framebuffer to create an overlay and typically do it out of cheapness. Now let's say you put the bare minimum between the input HDMI (eg no HDCP, thus it is just TDMS) and buffer just enough lines to allow the maximum integer scale (so 9 lines for 240p to 2160p, 103,680 Bytes or so) you'd likely have only one line of latency, and would be comparable to CRT speeds. However the real challenge here is building a LCD driver board that works with any LVDS connection. A FHD doesn't integer scale 240p but a 4K and a 720p does. However as demonstrated in various videos, 720p's issue is that it doesn't have the right aspect ratio, hence 4K makes the most sense to get an integer scale correct. Most of the 4K panels I've looked up, seem to be being built as eDP. eDP connections AFAIK pass the control to the video source (eg a GPU with FreeSync) thus allowing variable frame rates under the guise of power management (CVT-RB2,) so there is a built in frame buffer, but the GPU is directing it. iDP is the same idea but for Television between the TV's SoC. So it may at some point become possible to pull the back off a TV and disconnect the SoC and use the eDP/iDP connection directly, but I've found no information if eDP/iDP simply goes to a scaler/buffer ASIC in the panel that then drives the pixels, or if there is yet another LVDS link.

People are overlooking the display driver. I'm not talking about the software side, I'm talking about that circuit that decides to take the HDMI signal, decode it, upscale/downscale it (thus buffering it), and then deciding where to draw the pixels. The pixels are never blanked like a CRT would, as that would generate flicker, which if you recall, all CRT's did, and I can distinctly recall being unable to use a CRT at 60hz after using one running at 85hz that appeared flicker-free. So the correct answer would be 'it updates the pixels and holds them as fast as it's able to', otherwise running a panel at 288, 240,144,120, 90, 60hz would all look distinctly different. It's like how RAM works, in that the physical panel is being told to hold the pixel at a value, and you're changing the value through the display driver. Here's a FPGA display driver without a framebuffer, http://hackaday.com/2011/09/09/putting-laptop-lcds-to-use-with-an-fpga/ So while we're talking about HDMI at 60hz, the LVDS is running at 500Mhz. Here's a FPGA display driver with a framebuffer http://blog.tkjelectronics.dk/2012/10/lvds-display-controller-for-microprocessors/

As a general rule, anything sold for less than MSRP, especially when other listings are in the 200's is counterfeit. If I still worked at eBay I'd remove this listing.

All anyone had to say was "PAL is 50hz, and PAL regions got 17% intentionally slower devices" Basically the difference between 60 and 60.09 only matters to the display device, not to the player. It's likely that you could tweak the clock on a real NES/SNES to be exactly 60 or 59.94 and get it to work better on frame doublers/LCD's as well.

The people who are doing the dumping, and the people selling "RPi's fully loaded with RetroPie" or "NES Classic Mini's with 1000 roms" are two different people. The latter people don't even care if the games work, they are just selling rubbish to people who don't know better. Show me someone who dumped all their own carts and arcade boards with a properly setup Retropie and I'll show you a flying pig. The RPi route is for people who like to tinker, but the people are selling them on eBay are overpromising what a $45 experimenter's board can do, and are doing it illegally in the first place. https://retropie.org.uk/about/legal/ Yet... http://www.ebay.ca/itm/NES-Mini-Old-Skool-Entertainment-System-RetroPie-Console-with-2-Controllers-8GB/262944635747

Let me restate what I was talking about because I'm not sure you understand the implications. People selling the NES Mini Classic loaded 1000 roms, did not dump the roms themselves, the stole them off the internet, and are trying to dupe people into buying these broken consoles off eBay that they themselves did not have the means of verifying. They are simply a bunch of opportunistic pirates looking to make a quick buck off people who don't know better, like parents buying a toy for their kids and not knowing the difference between similar looking products. Counterfeiters rely on this brand confusion. The Raspberry Pi is even worse, because people just download roms off the internet, package them up in plastic chasis that look like the NES Classic and then try to sell them on eBay as something legitimate, when none of these games have been tested, and the emulation quality is somewhere between rubbish and broken. People who legitimately acquired the games, and actually have the games, have the means of verifying that the games work as intended. Pirates do not. Nintendo has the means of verifying that the games work as intended on their 30-games NES Classic Mini because they have access to the game roms without needing to find them on the internet. As byuu could tell you, in his project to verify every SNES cartridge out there, there are many bad dumps out there, and the bad dumps can be as little as bit-flip errors. These are not things a pirate selling a loaded console is going to catch, nor things that someone playing the pirated game is going to notice until it is too late. But pirates are just inflating the number of games they are loading on pirate systems so they can command high values for the systems that are not authorized to sell. Nobody that knows how software emulators actually work is going to buy these lawsuit traps.

There is no proof that Nintendo did, or needed to download a ROM of a game they own. The existence of the ines header is just as easily explained by Nintendo or some third party licencing an emulator that already worked with ines roms, and thus the ROM provided by Nintendo would be a bit for bit match. To flip the story on this, the SNES roms of FF4/5/6 and Chrono Trigger appeared on the PSX versions of the games, and the GBA versions appeared on the Mobile/PC ports of the FF6 game. Those aren't emulators. Those are using the rom as a database. There are things you can do from a legal standpoint to reverse engineer hardware, such as the NES. There are also things you can not do, such as look at stolen developer manuals and websites derived from stolen content. The only safe way to reverse engineer something is having one person take it apart, and describe how it works, and have someone else take that description and build something that works to that description. You do not get away with it by simply copying everything. Even if it were true that Nintendo for some reason used a ROM dump that produced an ines header, that does not prove it was obtained from the internet, or by any unauthorized means since Nintendo clearly authorized someone to produce an emulator that can play the game. People advocating for, or selling the RPi, know that the person has to commit gross copyright infringement to even use the thing. Be that hardware BIOS's or acquiring the games themselves. The Sony vs Connectix case pretty much established that there is no infringement in producing an emulator, but that did not open the door to redistributing the roms. So everyone playing with the jailbroken Analog Mini knows what they are getting into, and that's just fine. That is not a mass produced toy that opportunistic pirates are going to load with 1000 roms and sell on eBay. The RPi is. So is the NES Classic Mini.

This is misdirection. If a third party is developing a NES emulator, they're not doing what Kevtris is doing and probing all the chips with a oscilloscope, they are reading what developer information they were provided with and not going to the internet for it. For all we know the NES emulator in the Virtual console is Marat Fayzullin 's work, yes the guy who wrote ines, as he's also one of the few people who license their emulators for commercial use.

Most the rubbish people load onto the RPi doesn't even work, because the pirates didn't dump the roms themselves, they don't know how to dump a rom. This is the problem with software emulators. Sure most of the stuff may work, but we're no farther ahead than we were with a NOAC clone and a flash cart. If all you want to do is play some nostalgic game from 25-30 years ago, fine, knock yourself out. But I wish people would stop hawking game pirated games on eBay. They are fooling none.

I've been reporting the modded consoles over the last week, and the US version has grey plastic while the UK version has "white" plastic. Nobody actually opens the things except to load pirated games on them, and buying/selling an opened one is basically saying "Nintendo sue me". Some Pirate models have Tecmo 17 as a cue its modded. The Japanese model is a completely different game set, and the controllers are smaller.

If you are capturing from a REAL device, the SA7160 based capture cards (They actually have a small FPGA on them) are the lowest-latency, highest-quality thing you can use. https://solarisjapan.com/products/sc-512n1-l-dvi-component-hd-and-dvi-capture-board https://www.startech.com/AV/Converters/Video/HD-PCIe-capture-card-HDMI-VGA-DVI-CPNT-1080p-60FPS~PEXHDCAP60L They also aren't cheap. You can capture HDMI, DVI, VGA, S-Video, Component, Composite all with the same card. It can even capture the weird SNES 240p60 mode, if you somehow manage to get a SNES to Component cable. That said, the only reason I know it can do that is because the Luma on the S-video is connected to the Luma/Green on Component, and when you switch inputs with the SNES running S-Video, you get a greyscale image in 60fps instead of interlaced. If you are capturing emulators on the PC, use the native capturing if it has it (eg DOSBOX, SNES9X) as that will ensure there's no frame dropouts. If you don't have that option, use OBS, but you're not going to be able to capture a raw output. It's also possible to use GeForce Experience or MSI Afterburner's video capture to capture a less noisy output than using straight OBS, but there are compression consequences either way. My personal preference is to try and get the original hardware, but in most cases, especially with DOS-era hardware, it's way too difficult to get working hardware and since PC software all over the place in performance, it's just less frustrating to use dosbox. Dosbox's internal capture correctly captures the correct VGA frame rate and palette cycling where as capturing with OBS or anything else will only be able to capture at 60, thus it will look like it's tearing even when it's not.

I only ever had a Tandy 1000. I wish I still had it, and occasionally look on eBay to try and find a complete system, but I know in my heart that finding one in good condition is a crapshoot. I'd also love to have an Amiga 500 or 2000, but just like the Tandy, crapshoot. The main stumbling block with buying any vintage hardware is that the power supplies and monitors are extinct. AFAIK I think it may still be possible to build an Apple II from scratch, provided you could find the parts. The original Apple I was only ever a kit, and originals go for half a million dollars, but you can still build a software-compatible version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replica_1, though I don't know how popular that project was either. At any rate the NES Classic Mini is at best just a software emulator, and I think Nintendo was rather naive about it, since their Wii, and Microsoft's Xbox are also used as software emulator machines.

DTV transition was 2009 so unless the TV was marketed as "DTV ready" it's not likely to be digital. Analog channels are 3 or 4 for US NTSC consoles, 1 or 2 for Japanese consoles. If you are using the auto switch that came with the NES, then it will switch automatically. If you're using a third party switch, then usually there was a mechanical switch on it somewhere. You can also just use a coax cable with an RCA connector on the NES end and plug that directly into the TV's coax/CATV/CABLE connector. If that still doesn't work, either your TV can't tune the RF, or you've somehow damaged the RF module inside the NES. The only way to find out if the TV has a digital or analog tuner is to connect your regular CABLE directly to the TV and see if it can tune the radio. If you have digital cable, there should be at least a dozen radio stations somewhere, in the clear. If you have analog, there will be absolutely nothing but noise on any channel except the one the NES is connected to. You may also need to fiddle with the TV settings. Sometimes there is a "Antenna/Cable" mode. Only channels 2-6 are the same for cable/antenna mode. Also... this is exceptionally silly, if you have any device between the TV and the NES, there is a "antenna" mode as well which switches between the box's internal video, and the incoming cable connector (if that makes any sense at all, you usually see it on VCR's to switch between recording on channel, and watching on another.)

The Apple II emu's also emulate the Mockingboard. I wouldn't put it past Apple producing something like the Analog NT Mini, except perhaps with a hypervisor SOC that manages a virtual floppy drive. I'd imagine the same would be true of the C64 and the Amiga 500 had Commodore still been around today and the source code to Amiga OS 3.1 hadn't been leaked. But this is a super-niche market. Apple could use a FPGA system to build a 68K emulator, or just use their own fab partners to produce new 68K SoC's with all the mac hardware on a single chip and do it. I'm sure they have access to everything they need to do such a thing. It's just not a very "Apple" thing to ever revive an old product. Apple pushes forward often at the expense of still-working hardware.

The rumor is based on the SFC controller trademark being registered like the NES controller was before the Mini was released. As for why the NES Mini was discontinued so quickly, blame the pirates. I reported 240 "loaded" consoles on ebay last night, an and additional 40 this morning. There was only 100 non-loaded. People are also asking between $400 and $1000's for these loaded pirate modified consoles. And people are bidding them. If Nintendo is in fact producing a SNES-mini, which I'm pretty sure they will (25th anniversary maybe) they likely will not leave such an easy backdoor in it this time. Nintendo will likely only use it's first party games this time around.

Because there are people in China working full time to second-guess what people want for the clone consoles. My personal opinion... just clone the "dogbone" SNES pad and be done with it. Apply some of that engineering to an Xbox 360 controller style grip (I hate the trigger buttons on all controllers, even the original SNES ones.) Use the SFC color scheme or the Xbox 360 color scheme. Or better yet put tri-color LED's behind the buttons and make them user programmable. That's the trend with motherboards and GPU's nowadays, why not gamepads? While we are talking about this... why hasn't someone cloned a darn Powerglove. Yes I know it actually is useless for all but like two NES games, but with all the VR stuff out there, you'd think someone could have created a better one by now.

Well considering that they registered trademarks for the SNES controller layout, I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to come out with one. But this time they will make it less hackable, thanks to those people who couldn't wait to reverse engineer it. That said, I don't see Nintendo putting anything other than it's own properties on a SNES version.

The Sega 3D glasses just used a stereo mini-jack IIRC, but there was a thing that plugged into the card slot. What would be cool, but probably not viable to do, is to figure out how to use the HDMI output and a VR HUD to make the 3D effect work.

I'd say 50% of it is just to accomplish the same thing a FPGA console would do (eg HDMI, accurate chip implementation.) The other 50% is that many arcade machines the complexity is the security elements, and the number of people who physically own an arcade cabinet of a certain game is probably in the low 100's. So basically piracy. So if you want to take the high road, a FPGA console at least says "insert original cartridge here", the jailbroken firmware is just a bonus and may even be a selling point (which is why it should remain $500 and not $200) should pin adapters exist for various vintage hardware (carts, controllers, etc.) A FPGA arcade machine on the other hand is never going to have an "insert arcade mask rom here" pin adapter. If some copyright owners would "bless" a ROM store of some sort that works on some variation of the NT Mini, or later Z3K, that would be a win all around without the drama and look-the-other-way of the MAME piracy.

DRM should be about protecting the integrity of the software, not about making it a pain in the ass to media shift. eg, preventing cheats/trainers/hacks being used during online multiplayer. Single player games with no leaderboards and no internet connectivity, who cares what some pathetic player does during single player mode, they're only cheating themselves (seriously why would you pay money for a game, and then just cheat your way to the end?)

"The vast majority..." Uh first no. Most people love their jobs or they would not stick around, some people only stick around because of benefits (eg healthcare), or immigration (green card) requirements that they would otherwise be unable to keep if they voluntarily leave the job. When it comes to freelance contract work, the freelancer can refuse any work that is either too terrible or doesn't pay enough, they are not require to accept poor working conditions. The disadvantage to freelancing is that you're responsible for your own benefits, so don't balk at $100+/hr rates. That's why voice actors for games, and artists for comics and such are so expensive. Someone who actually knows their stuff for electrical engineering, should be paid a small fortune to do the kind of stuff that kevtris has done so far with the NT mini, and he's doing this because he wants to do it. I'm sure if he setup a patreon and had a steering questing (eg "I want to work on, X, Y and Z cores, which one do you want to see first) there would be a fair amount of interest. Even from people who do not have the NT mini currently, because maybe that is just the point at which they would buy in.

That is just a SVGA (1280x1024) screen with a VGA input. The CGA/EGA input probably has a way to pass 15Khz video to it, but that's not analog, and VGA's not 15Khz so it would be interesting to find out what the driver actually supports. However to me this looks like just an Analog VGA LED backlit LCD, not an OLED screen. So at best it's probably passable for a pixel-quadrupled 320x240 resolution game with some letter-boxing. See the problem is that it's still not a CRT, so you can't actually get the right pixel aspect ratio intended. At any rate, most consumer monitors and TV's have phased out the analog VGA connector already, and you won't see it on a 4K screen. So a custom driver might allow buying something like an AMOLED screen that you plug the SCART/RGB/Componet/S-Video/Composite/VGA/EGA/CGA input into and a chip on it does a line scaler instead of a framebuffer scaler directly. No other "smart" nonsense.