Kismet

See this is what people should be doing. Keep and maintain the real hardware that you actually like, and want to use, sell the rest to people who appreciate and want it more. For me only the SNES is worth "keeping" despite them suffering from CPU plague (*glances over at 4 SNES systems), because finding a working one later at any point in the future is a crapshoot. As far as PC/Computers systems go, I'd love to have a Miggy (A500 or A2000) but I didn't actually grow up playing software on it, it was just my favorite computer before the "Windows/DOS MPC 2.0" standard. But the key problem with both of these is that they require a 15Khz monitor/TV, CRT, and the experience of playing on something other than a CRT is pretty crummy. The SNES is one of the least compatible with LCD monitors/TV's things ever due to that slightly out of sync operating frequency. Keeping CRT's around is a bit of a fools errand, as they have an expiry date. So if you're not using it, sell it to someone else who will. You might extend the life of some if you never move it, and keep it in a dark room away from magnets, but it's more likely people just toss it in a corner and it collects junk around it. Eventually we will either have to settle for low-resolution OLED CRT replacements (which can mimic the trinitron effect) or use high-resolution (eg 4K) monitors that can emulate the "artifacts" that people want at the sub-pixel level. Though I think the real project that someone needs to work on is an actual "fake CRT driver" board for some easy/cheap to acquire OLED screen. Hence develop an actual 240p input that drives a OLED screen like it would on a CRT.

I had the newer 1987 version of that 200-in-1 kit (bottom right) that had the plastic knobs and 6 AA battery holders but no lid. The model shown looks distinctively 70's (It's the 1981 model.) That's how I learned to read electronic schematics when I was 8. Apparently they still make them http://www.elenco.com/product/productdetails/project_labs=NTQ=/200-in-1_electronic_project__lab=Mjg1. Made in Taiwan.

As I mentioned earlier these are obvious counterfeits designed to decieve people looking for the NES Classic Mini. You'd be better off reporting them than buying them. If you don't know how the (eBay/Amazon/AliExpress/etc) drop shipping scam works, it's these Chinese companies create a list of all the crap they can get greedy people to sell for them under a "drop shipping" scheme. The mark who creates the eBay listings tends to just copy-paste the same images and descriptions with little changes, and the items themselves they do not even have, hence they can't answer any questions about the items. For a few months or so the seller will just sell things that are low-risk until they get enough feedback to become a power seller. Once they are a power seller, they know they are difficult or impossible to take down (Literately the eBay policy is that you must contact power sellers before taking their items down, thus it's a huge pain in the ass for silver power sellers or higher.) The eBay power sellers all know this, because Chinese eBay staff tend to leak information to the power sellers to weasel around the infringement policies. Depending on what eBay staffer is working, some staff know what a fake item looks like, others just don't care and will find any reason to pull it down even if the item is legit. At any rate, what eventually happens is that the drop ship seller eventually gets swindled and these "Drop shippers" start sending out items that are so low in quality that the negative feedback piles up and they get booted off eBay if their feedback drops below 98% too long. This is why they beg you not to leave feedback no matter how poor the service or delivery time was. So again, you're better off reporting the rubbish items than buying them, because eBay will eventually just remove them due to a VeRO report and you will get nothing.

The negative feedback on that seller suggests they routinely sell counterfeits. So this item is likely just some NOAC famiclone with a worn-out NES Classic Mini mold, like most counterfeit products from China. These are designed to deceive people looking for the NES Classic Mini. Remember that anyone with less than 98% positive feedback is a "bad seller" by eBay staff.

No the reason you're not supposed to use FAT32 is because it lacks journaling, so if you eject the disk or power it off while it's writing, you destroy the file. Since large files might be stored all over the drive once fragmented, you can't recover them easily. The journaling on exFAT and NTFS is supposed to solve this. You use FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 when you don't care about data integrity, and the larger the files get the more likely you're to damage a file somewhere where you don't notice it for a long time. Given this was an issue primarily with mechanical drives because of cache buffers would still be writing when ejected or powered down. SD cards on the other hand do not have buffers, so you're going to destroy actual blocks on the card if you eject it while it writes. Anyway not to keep beating a dead horse, but none of this matters because the reason has more to do with patents than it does technical reasons. Hence 32GB is the safest you can have a SD card formatted at FAT32 and have everything be able to read it. SDXC and newer UHS-II cards require exFAT or they will not be read/writeable. That's the point. You can still format a USB drive to whatever you want, but the SD card reader might not be able to read it (indeed many SD/SDHC card readers will just see a SDXC card and say it's unformatted.) NTFS is not a viable format to use on removable storage, and the SD card people actually say not to reformat SD cards using the OS https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/ because it destroys the protected area.

No, a FPGA is completely useful if it's programmed to act as a h.265 decoder/encoder instead of baking Quicksync and a useless GPU into the CPU. In an i3 part desktop part or a laptop, the iGPU serves a purpose for a cheap system, but if you've looked at the iGPU's over time, you'd notice that they barely have the performance of a $50 GPU let alone a $100 one, and only the laptops ever get the Iris Pro parts that actually have decent performance. The server parts do not have the iGPU part to begin with, that's why they've been coming with 8 cores.

I'd rather have the onboard FPGA than the useless intel iGPU that most people turn off anyway in the high end parts.

We've been over the storage capacity issue before. It simply is not going to happen until the patents expire for exFAT. The alternatives are also all terrible other than maybe UDF. The other option is using the Z3K as a middle man for another storage device. eg you plug the Z3K into the PC via USB, and the storage device into the Z3K, the Z3K presents a file system to Windows/MacOS like it would if it was Fat32, but you actually tell the Z3K to flip through the storage partitions to present to the computer, and basically it just shows up as 1 drive letter at a time, along with whatever is plugged into the cartridge slot. This is why most SD cards top out at 32GB, because that's the largest supported size for fat32 without doing anything hacky, and most cameras and toys will be confused with larger SD cards. Speaking of hackyness: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htmshows it's possible to just keep using FAT32 up to 2TB on 512byte sector drives "FAT32 is limited to 2^32 sectors. With 512 byte sectors that means a 2TB drive" So logically with a 4096 byte sectors, that increases by 8, so 16TB is the maximum that FAT32 could ever be set to. The reason you rarely see 32GB+ SDHC cards is because FAT32 is only allowed for sizes up to 32GB on SDHC cards. SDXC cards are exFAT, always, because that's the specification. USB storage devices might be a better option, but there is no way to ensure that you actually have a fast enough USB drive, unlike a SD card.

Not likely. The DOS version of DOOM you were lucky if you could play it on a 386. A Pentium implementation requires around 1 million logic elements (for a chip that has 3.1 million transistors) while a 386 has 275,000 transistors thus puts that around maybe 100K LE. The 8088 is 3X larger than the Z80/6502 that the NT Mini pulls off. That is for the CPU alone. Like a 49K FPGA, at most is going to do 16-bit systems (eg 68K, 8086) easily. Anything more difficult requires a larger FPGA, and quickly goes out of the $300 price range for the FPGA alone. But then again emulating 386+ hardware in a FPGA is a bit ridiculous since you have to emulate multiple VGA/SVGA cards and sound cards to support "everything" The Z3K I think should aim for 8/16-bit consoles(NES, SNES, Megadrive, etc) and computers (eg MSX, C64, Apple II, Tandy 1000, Amiga 500, Atari ST) but save trying to hit 32-bit systems until there are FPGA's large/fast/cheap enough. Like when people say "support N64, PS1, 3DO" etc those are systems that one person alone could probably spend years trying to reverse engineer. Like IMO FPGA's will likely be built into high-end desktop/servers sometime soon, and that will bring the cost of entry down. But that's not right now. It might be soon though: https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/03/14/intel-marrying-fpga-beefy-broadwell-open-compute-future/

Be careful with solutions like that, make sure you use as-short-as-possible cables, because some devices (WiiU, and MacMini both do this) will fail to do a HDMI handshake with long cables. I'd be a bit worried about latency too, but that might not be high enough to matter (eg 2ms or so.) My game setup had a splitter and a HDMI switch, but the WiiU kept triggering the switch, so I wound up just plugging that directly into the TV, but then it turns out the MacMini wouldn't handshake if both the switch and the splitter were used either. Splitters require a monitor/TV handshake to work correctly. At any rate that's just my experience with splitters and switches.

Unless people are storing their CRT's in a sealed metal box, they are going to be ruined even if they are left in storage. Most multi-sync monitors have an auto-degauss circuit, but older ones do not. If the shadow mask gets magnetized, then it's ruined. The phosphors also are still activated by ambient light. Like it's far more likely that a "CRT emulating" OLED driver PCB will be designed at some point. But until then you're looking at HDMI 2.0/USB-C as the end game to getting a retro console displaying accurately. The irony is that a 4K monitor can do a better job at emulating a CRT than a HD screen does. This is because you can get an exact 9x integer scale rather than a window-boxed 4X or cropped 5X at 1080p. If you happen to like scanlines (real CRT's never had "scan lines" as they are emulated straight instead of in a sinusoidal pattern) you could literately could emulate the staggered trinitron mask at 4K. But I think emulating these CRT effects are silly and aren't intended effects on games with more than 16 colors.

For the Arcade, nothing but a 30" CRT gives the "correct" view and play performance. However I believe OLED's (as much as I hate them) can fill this need since we're not asking for 4K OLED smartTV's, we're asking for just a low-resolution LVDS panel and a driver PCB that behaves like a freesync panel. It almost seems like finding a driver PCB without framebuffering is the real problem. For the Console/computer what we want is a "TV" with no "smart" bits in it at all, basically a freesync-enabled computer screen that can run at any refresh rate thrown at it. You only want a monitor of the exact resolution needed for that machine, or at least one that integer scales with the correct aspect ratio on a line-by-line basis, not a framebuffer basis. As for light guns and 3D glasses. Those likely would not be supported without a specialized screen that can do unbuffered "freesync" (freesync goes between 30hz and 144hz, though no indication if it supports weird Nintendo 60.08) to the needed refresh rate.

My grandparents had this wooden-box type (probably from the 70's or before, no coax) TV well past the point of needing replacement (it was only replaced because nobody wanted to put the thing in a truck and take it to their new place, as it took up more space than a chest-of-drawers.) That was replaced with a TV of roughly the same size but took up 1/4 the space and was twice as bright. Then when Grandma moved to the final place she lived, that was replaced with a 720p LCD HDTV which was even brighter. Even when you can get an old CRT off eBay (like a Commodore Composite, Tandy TGA, Sony PVM) you often are going to get one that is only half as bright as it was when it was new. People don't store those things in their original boxes, and 50,000 hours is the half-life of the phosphors brightness, or roughly the point you'd replace it. You can overdrive the brightness with the controls, but that's completely defeating the purpose of playing on a CRT. This is why no two people agree will agree on what a CRT "effect" looks like. The point is that people replaced them like any other appliance up until the LCD's became so much cheaper than the CRT's. Then everyone took any opportunity to replace them to save space and now the only people with CRT's are those who took care of them. Nobody can really fix them, the people who could fix those pre-1980 TV's are all retired or deceased. Even if you could build a new board, you're not going to get anything useful out most CRT's, as I said before, CRT's power supplies (of 1990 and later units) tend to go BANG, and they are then toast. Because they are so toxic, nobody wants to fix a CRT, and even those arcade cabinets people would really prefer a better piece of technology rather than put a heavy dangerous CRT in the cabinet. There are warehouses of CRT's out there, but they're likely damaged or destroyed and in no condition to be repaired. That is what I mean by they are more likely to be replaced by large pitch OLED's. You can make an OLED screen of the exact resolution you want for the game, no aspect ratio, scaler, or buffering monkey business. But there is currently no demand for that. For retrogaming at home, if you didn't keep your CRT from the 1990's, you're not going to find a large one in salvageable condition anymore. If you look on eBay right now, you will only find 13" CRT's, mostly of the VHS-combo kind. No manufacturer wants to make them, and the only demand out there for CRT's are legacy government and hospital systems that probably should be retired too.

It's not going to be possible. The reason CRT's die has more to do with the phosphors wearing out (which are toxic) and the CRT's leaded glass being toxic, to reduce x-ray emissions. To say nothing of the amount of voltage in the power supply that can kill someone. The problem is not the board, it's the CRT tube itself. You have about 50,000 hours max on a CRT or Plasma, and that translates into either 12 years of heavy usage, 6 years of 24 hour usage, or 24 years of typical usage. Usually the power supply goes BANG (and maybe lets out some smoke) before the CRT becomes too dim to use, but we're talking about the difference of a PSU failure versus the CRT tube itself inevitable becoming useless. What is likely going to replace CRT's for arcades are curved "trinitron" large-pitch OLED style screens with a specialized anti-glare filter. But until someone comes up with that, the more likely things are just conventional TN-based LCD screens, with the mirror being removed from the cabinet to ensure the viewing angle is useful. What would be useful, albeit limited audience would be to design a LCD/OLED driver that connects directly to the LVDS that uses the kind of line-by-line scaling found in the OSSC. That would eliminate all the latency, but the tradeoff is that it likely would only be useful for making arcade monitor replacements, since building your own LCD monitors would still involve buying the panels from LG/Samsung/Japan Display/etc

Hmm seems like that's almost enough to do the MSX.

Virtual CD-reading is kludgey, redbook audio can be off by entire seconds, and this goes back to the entire issue about timing. The software may say "Seek to track X" which is fine, but if it wants to seek to an exact minute-second, to sync with animation, it may miss the mark, especially if the disc image compressed the audio. Games that use the cd redbook audio for speech may miss the mark if it can't cache the entire disc image to memory. There are Windows "cd emulators" that will not play redbook audio, and then there is DOSBOX where the problem I mentioned above exists too. Most software emulators that let you use a disc image don't actually emulate the cd-drive, they translate the commands, thus you get a smoother experience. If you actually try to use your real disc drive, the drive tries to read too fast, and thus constantly tries to re-seek. Anyways, my point was that FPGA systems try to emulate all the exact hardware, and I think this might be something that works against it, since you can't exactly buy a "bare" CD unit with no PCB in order to emulate the exact mechanics of a 1X or 2X CD drive. The choice comes down to either emulating the drive, and using something like a ramdisk in it's place, or listening to the expansion bus and trying to map that to physical blocks on a SD-card, which then relies on the characteristics of the SD card.

A SD-card that can read at 6MB/sec = 40X cd-rom, but it doesn't have the same access time as one. Since a Sega CD or PCE is 1X or 2X class hardware, you have a timing issue already in that the card doesn't align with the access pattern expected. This is critical for redbook audio. Low level CD-ROM access is a huge pain to emulate, even in software emulators, and it's often why you're forced to rip the disc instead, but when you rip the disc, you typically lose access to the redbook audio. Even cd-emulators tend not to emulate redbook audio, even if the image has it. In the case of the PCE, I think the cd-rom is just a regular off-the-shelf NEC SCSI drive, and the expansion interface board is just a bridge+sram. The SegaCD likewise appears to use off-the-shelf Sony cd-rom units and JVC manufactured units using the same Sony IC's, except the entire "segacd" unit is the interface and bridge board. But overall I think the difficulty has more to do with having to emulate something unnecessary when there is no real hardware to interface with. Like if you look at the SNES SuperDisc: https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13907,you'll see that they reversed engineered the commands from the BIOS. So perhaps with the other consoles it may be be less involved by looking for the CD commands on the expansion bus and just move pointers around on a memory-mapped disc image stored in RAM.

FPGA development of chips is done by typically probing the original chips with oscilloscopes. Basically you put a probe on all the (usually clock, address and data) pins, and record it (which an analogy would be recording multi-channel audio, except you're recording sometimes as many as 64 channels at once.) Sometimes you have to sample from more than one chip to get a big picture of what is actually happening. Like to re-implement a game console you likely have to probe all the chips and the cartridge bus. If there are expansion chips in the cartridge, or external expansion parts, you need to probe those too. Like the SNES is probably more complicated by the fact that some expansion parts have since stopped being usable (like the BS-X), so even if you can do a FPGA of the base unit, you will never be able to use a real BS-X unit, and emulating one might never be possible either.

I think the limitation was actually the size of the FPGA, because a smaller FPGA would require PSRAM/SRAM and not just DRAM to make up for the lack of block memory. Hence bandwidth comes into play. Like if you physically look at a SNES and the PCE, they sometimes use the exact same PSRAM. https://console5.com/wiki/SRAM_256Kb:_32K_x_8-bit

Odd idea, but would it theoretically be possible to reverse the i/o to use the NT-mini as an upscaler for other things? eg plug composite/component/s-video/VGA into the analog ports and push it through the HDMI? Only suggesting this since the framemeister is no longer going to be produced and the NT Mini is right at the same price point.

It probably could. But you're basically just sticking a new FPGA in the cartridge slot, and having to tell the FPGA in the NT Mini to just operate as an upscaler. It would have the same effect as the Super Gameboy.

At worse, the Aluminium just makes it slightly more expensive. If they were to sell the exact same thing but with just a polycarbonate shell, it would not dramatically reduce the cost. Compare the MacBook and iMac versions, and even various Dell systems. The NT Mini is a "complete, finished" product. The RetroUSB AVS is a "Complete, Finished" product for $170, with a much cheaper FPGA. The NT Mini and the AVS both have some issues with Japanese accessories (the FDS doesn't actually fit on the AVS, and the 3D glasses doesn't fit on the NT Mini) Given the rarity of these items, and the US-centric market for the console, it probably wasn't considered, but both products can work-around those problems with cartridge/port extensions. But for the Z3K, I think we need to consider that unless Analogue wants to pay him to make essentially a "Super Analogue NT Mini" with a SFC/SNES ports, it may be up to kevtris to sell/license the PCB plans and do something like the SD2SNES where other people can build it.

No more CRT's are being made. https://boingboing.net/2017/03/06/supply-of-old-fashioned-crt-ar.html That's it. And yuck at the suggested replacement. Curved OLED's.

In most consoles cases, I think it's possible to detach the CPU and PPU (it's just PPU2 in the case of the SNES) and run it at a different clock speed. But the easiest fix is always to slightly under clock the NES and SNES to an even 60. Other consoles have issues too for example the Atari 2600 can output arbitrary resolutions, but doesn't even have composite or s-video connectors let alone RGB, so what does a FPGA 2600 output? If I look at this http://archive.espec.ws/files/VESTELChassis2017MB26_SM.pdf(which is an European TV circa 2007) there's a block diagram showing essentially that the Analog inputs all go through a mixer and decoder stage, while HDMI inputs go through only a switch before going into the SVP-LX. So the block diagram thus suggests that there are many more stages to an analog input than there is a digital one. Perhaps instead of trying to mod the console we should be trying to mod the TV.

It's designed to be able to use pre-existing cables like these: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=562 https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=2409 https://support.analogue.co/hc/en-us/articles/115000923948-Using-Analog-Video-output-with-the-Nt-mini At any rate, VGA CRT's do not support 15khz 240p60, they typically support [email protected] QVGA 31khz , so not many monitors would support it, but run it through a scan doubler and you push it through the [email protected] mode.