Kismet
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Posts posted by Kismet
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8k, really? How long will they continue to boost the resolution? Of course it's great for prints and stuff, but they continue to double the resolution every ten years or so, eventually you will need a 30x microscope held to the screen to see the pixels. I prefer mine big, like a CRT mask.
So... SD -> "2k" ie 1920x1080, then "4k" ie 3840x2160, now "8k" is apparently a thing at 7680x4320. What next? "32k", technically 30720x17280, would be a half-gigapixel resolution, or more precisely 536 Mega pixels. Yeah I skipped 16. Now we have the "Moore's" law applied to HD displays when the human eye really can't discern much above 4k, or 1080p with a non-gigantic screen at normal viewing distances. Hopefully they just stop somewhere and decide upon some arbitrary value once the pixels are infinitesimally small as to be invisible.
Definitely frame rate will be a huge boost to the film industry. Live sports and news events are captured at 60Hz and have been since the advent of broadcast telivision, yet we still shoot movies at 24fps. If people during the early days of cinema had access to faster projectors and high speed ISO film, I am sure they would have done full 60Hz or faster frame rate, yet legacy dictates that even most modern films be shot at 24Hz. And with the push for higher detail and bandwidth, lower resolutions at higher frame rates are simply not in the cards at this time. I consider the jump from 24Hz to 48 or 60 or 120Hz a quantum leap, not so much the jump from 4k to 8k.
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"
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Poppycock. The setup menu for most CRTs manufactured after 1990 or so can overlay menu icons, volume settings, and channel descriptors over live TV in realtime, not to mention closed captions. Funny because when I tune into a snowy picture on the RF, the system menu seems to get wavy as the rest of the picture is distorted for lack of Vsync and colorburst / hsync signals. This is easy to do, just send bright color info to the opaque pixels as they appear.
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
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Kimset, would it not be possible, with the right display driver, to perform the scaling and update each line in realtime? This would create just a handful of scanlines worth of lag.
For instance, the display analyzes the input signal to determine the input and output resolution. From there a matrix is applied to each row using a fast bilinear scale algorythm to determine exactly what percentage of each input scanline gets blended into each output scanline. A similar algorythm is applied at the pixel level for all pixels scaled into each scanline. There is no frame buffer but a half dozen or so lines must be buffered to handle the bilinear scale algorythm. As a result, and with minimal delay, the main display gets updated one line at a time, at a rate wholly dependant upon the vertical rate of the input signal multiplied by the scale ratio of input lines to output lines.
Such a hypothetical display would be able to push pixels to the screen almost in realtime, with an overall display lag of well under one millisecond. It would also tolerate signals with out of sync timings, provided each frame has consistent number of scanlines. A similar processor could take analog signal such as 240p, convert it line-by-line to 720h (horizontal pixel width), repeated 240 times per frame. The one downfall is such processing wpuld be treated as progressive since interlaced signals are incompatible with realtime processing on progressive display tech, so 480i content would be processed as 240p60, with some small offset of the lines during odd frames. Likewise, 1080i gets treated as 540p60.
I don't see why a display with sub-millisecond lag could not be achievable by refreshing the LCD one line at a time, even with bilinear scaling applied to the image. Even with an "update once per frame" display driver, realtime bilinear scaling should be possible without buffering the entire input frame before pushing to the display. My ASUS monitor I use for gaming has 9ms rating on displaylag.com for instance, so it must be possible on some existing displays, since buffering a single frame cost 16ms.
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.
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And the question remains. Let me put it this way. Once the HDMI signal comes into the television and goes through the circuits. Does the image get held and then all of a sudden snap to the screen, all pixels changing at once. Or is it scanned from top to bottom.
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/
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Another cheapee popped up on ebay. But he has zero feedback. Probably a fake or scam.
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.
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no, just because the entire thing is slightly slower, it's still cycle accurate. The game has no way of knowing that it's running slower or faster than real time without some kind of time reference from the outside world, so to speak. Kind of the same argument that we're all living in what amounts to a giant simulation vs. a "real" universe. The FPGA (or other emulator) is the same type of idea. You're recreating the "universe" that the game runs in, and the accuracy of said universe isn't dependent on speed.
Now, if you were to feed button presses "open loop" into a system that's running slightly slower/faster than it should, of course it will desynch, but this is just because of the fact that you're feeding it signals open loop. In fact, the crystal in your typical videogame system is not perfect, and feeding a long i.e. speed run "open loop" into a videogame system could easily cause it to desynch over time because it's running slightly faster or slower.
This is why if you wish to "play back" a speed run on i.e. an NES, you have to synchronize it to the vblank or controller read pulses if you want the playback to work reliably. This style of playback should work fine on the nt mini running at 60.0 fps too. I don't think it's possible for a human player to "detect" the 60.0fps vs. 60.09fps, either without some kind of outside help. They will definitely notice it's running on a flat screen vs. CRT though.
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.
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That reads like most emulators on a Raspberry Pi(or software emulators in general) don't even work, the reason they don't work is from bad ROM dumps, the reason they are bad ROM dumps is because "pirates" don't dump their own ROM's, and this whole bad ROM dumps issue is the primary problem with the accuracy of software emulators. In other words, it reads like what GoldLeader was suggesting couldn't be done because Flojomojo and Keatah could do an excellent job but none of that would matter because they would be using only ROM's they downloaded with most of them being bad dumps that would break most of the emulators they would set up. I belief this to be false. Therefore, I posted that video to point out that some "pirates" do know how and do dump ROM's because that is how they get online in the first place, these same "pirates" are able to provide good ROM dumps, and these good ROM dumps could run on emulators on the Raspberry Pi or on any other hardware of choice. I wasn't even responding to the eBay part of your second paragraph which was obvious based on the content of the video I provided. It had nothing to do with eBay. It had to do with the possibility of Nintendo downloading a good ROM dump of Super Mario Bros.
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/
LicensesRetroPie is a system to install/configure emulators on an existing OS – The RetroPie Setup Script is released under the GPL.
The image we provide is Raspbian Lite with RetroPie pre-installed. Much of the software included in the RetroPie image have non-commercial licences. Because of this selling a pre-installed RetroPie image is not legal – this includes “giving away” a pre-installed RetroPie with your commercial product. Including copyrighted games with RetroPie is also not allowed.
If you are selling hardware that supports RetroPie you should provide a link to our site for your customers rather than including a RetroPie image with your product.
RetroPie does not ship with any copyrighted ROMs or games and does not condone illegal activity.
Yet...
Micro NES: Raspberry Pi RetroPie Console
DescriptionThis is a brand new made RetroPie console enclose in a micro NES case. It comes with all the classic games. If you have any requests please feel free to contact me. It comes with two controller (contact me for the choice of either 2 NES type controllers or 2 SNES type controllers as pictured), the power chord and a fully loaded 8GB card.About RetroPie:RetroPie is an operating system that has many classic game emulators on it. It has a nice and easy to use interface which will allow you to play hundreds of games using any usb controllers. This particular one that I am selling is already all set up so all you need to do is plug in the power cable, HDMI cable (not included), and the controllers and your ready to play 100s of games. -
I think you are missing the point. The point isn't rather or not Nintendo downloaded the Super Mario Bros. ROM from the Internet. The point is that them dumping the ROM themselves or downloading it from the Internet results in the same bit for bit identical ROM and they are using the same header to get it to run in an emulator. This was your claim:
That is a claim that most of what people load on the Raspberry Pi doesn't work, the reason it doesn't work is because they didn't dump the ROM's themselves because they don't know how, and this is the problem with software emulation. I take that to mean that if they did dump their own ROM's most of what people would load on the Raspberry Pi would work because they would get better results than could be achieved from downloading the ROM's off the Internet. This clearly isn't the case because there are people that know how to dump ROM's, know how to check if they are good dumps, and distribute them on the Internet with the same quality that Nintendo does because they are bit for bit identical matches.
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.
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I was using the video as a response to your point that the problem with software emulators not working is from those who commit copyright infringement not dumping their own ROM's with evidence that Nintendo's Virtual Console works because of dumped ROM's they downloaded from those who committed copyright infringement. It had nothing to do with what you just said. I was just making the point that the issues with software emulation isn't bad dumps and from people not knowing how to dump their own ROM's because good dumps exist from those who do know how to dump their own ROM's. They are so good that Nintendo even uses them.
Nintendo European Research & Development wasn't probing all the chips with an oscilloscope like Kevtris either for creating the emulator for the NES Classic Edition. So, I'm not sure what that point has to do with NES emulation on the Raspberry Pi vs. it on the NES Classic Edition.
Edit: Also, what Kevtris is doing works with ROM's dumped on the internet by copyright infringers. Kevtris himself is a copyright infringer.
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.
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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.
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Better is such a subjective term,
Many of you Atari Agers make the mistake of thinking everyone is as smart as you. I like to think I'm not a complete dummy, or maybe I should wise up haha...
I plug in my Nintendo Mini and it works!
I know they're supposed to be easy, but If I'd plugged in a Raspberry pi, I'd probably be one more of those people in the comments section complaining it doesn't work. It probably works if you know what you are doing...
If I bought one and had Flojomojo and Keatah come over to install it (Free Beer!), Then it would probably work like a champ...Hell it'd be easy as Pi (Errrrrrggg!) ...
But I bet things don't always go so smoothly...
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.
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Yes but the UK version is not japaneese. So is it the same as usa.
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.
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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
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.
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But I thought differently and switched to PC!
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.
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Does you tv have a analog tuner?
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.)
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Now. With today's manufacturing techniques one could do a lot. And if it is of high-quality materials consumer's won't mind the extra buck being tacked on. That's what was impressive back in the day, the Apple II was built of sturdy stuff. I can't see Apple doing such a thing however. They're not going to be interested no matter how much we scream and clamor.
Part of the identity of the Apple II are the expansion slots. I don't know how that would go over today. I'd assume the most popular cards and their functions would need to be built-in - like how AppleWin emulator simulates a SuperSerialCard and 80/64K card.
In counterpoint, The Apple II was a popular hobbyist computer. So in a roundabout way it would be fitting that hobbyists end up doing it. Replicas, refurbing hardware from ebay, building tiny emulator boxes, lot's of possibilities.
But back to the list, other favs of mine are like Space Raiders II (Star Raider's clone) and Star Dance, OO-Topos, Serpentine, and Horizon V.. And god knows how many others. Side-loading would be an absolute must..
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.
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If you recall, we had that rumor earlier from a few different sources. Basically it was that Nintendo was going to stock the NES Mini throughout the year and then come out with a SNES Classic Mini this coming holiday. The first part of that reporting obviously fell down, so we have reason to be skeptical about a SNES Classic Mini. It would be strange for Nintendo to go through with one part of the original rumored plan and not the other.
For now, I'm going to say this is just an old rumor resurfacing, and, based on what Nintendo just did with the NES Classic Mini, they're not going to go ahead with the SNES version (even though it may very well already be designed). Who knows, though? Nintendo is anything but predictable these days.
(and Nintendo has yet to issue a statement in response to IGN's claims, obviously)
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.
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Piece of crap. Buttons are laid out wrong. Why no love for the Dog Bone arrangement? Also the twin sticks are borderline useless as a modern controller without a full diamond button pad. I honestly want to know what went through the designers' heads when they created this monstrosity.
/endrant
A dpad and a joystick electrically are the same thing; you just use different muscle groups to actuate them.
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.
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Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's an equal if not superior chance they'd do a SNES one given the power of the hardware. That way they could just reissue the NES if they so wished not having to further deal with licensing issues, and have something fresh they'd get a larger pool of buyers from. Given that Square, Capcom, Konami, Tecmo and Taito took an interest in the NES you could vaguely divine a game list from those guys minus any licensing changes (like no TMNT from Konami.)
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.
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The official Famicom 3D System Glasses should work perfectly with the games that support it on the Nt Mini and its analog video output. The 3D Glasses plug into the Famicom Expansion Port.
Of course, the Famicom 3D System Glasses are very rare to find outside of Japan. It is much more common to find the Sega 3-D Glasses instead. While they both work similarly, they are made for different systems. I am sure those individuals who have the Sega 3-D Glasses would like to play the Famicom 3D games just as much as the Famicom 3D System Glasses owners would like to play the Sega 3D games.
I assume the Zimba 3K will have GPIO pins that can be reconfigured as the core needs them for peripheral support and physical adapters instead of adapters with active converter circuitry.
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.
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Yes all that. And I'm certain several arcade games have been reimplemented like so.
But I do ask if it's worth the time and effort to do it again in Verilog or something? What would be the advantages over a dedicated mame computer?
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.
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You know.. I don't give a hoot about branding or anything else. Back in the day I bought the Apple II not "because Apple" but because it had A2-FS1 (among other reasons). But branding wasn't an influence. Hell I was too young to know what 'branding' was anyways.
And it's true. Make a good product that has no DRM (now that it has been bought up) and build your own brand on the merits and capabilities of the machine. It won't effect me one way or another if they build brand now prior to selling. No matter how hard they try.
OTH an example is kevtris built his own 'brand' built through reputation. That's a good thing. And select emulators, too, have done the same thing.
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?)
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A job is a job and the only thing required for someone to take one is that they find they pay tempting. The vast majority of people hate their jobs with a passion and without money no one would just "go to work". And I completely agree what Retroblox is doing with some kind of custom half hybrid system that is going to be entirely up to them to support because it is so unique no one else will probably work with it on the fan side, is dumb. Which is why from their point of view it would be super incredibly smart to hire the one guy that seems to know what the hell he is doing when it comes to fpgas.
From Kev's point of view making money is important and it looks like this project is generating enough of it to make him a tempting offer to prevent it from being a hot mess.
"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.
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How about one of these? It does look kind of promising although it is meant for arcade usage and mounting could be a problem for those looking to use it for regular game consoles. Based on the manuals it appears that the converter board could be upgraded - perhaps one with filters and scanlining options. These are, of course, RGB Analog only but it is easier to RGB mod a console than mod it for HDMI.
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.
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FPGA Based Videogame System
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
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.