Kismet
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Posts posted by Kismet
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Hot damn! I had an FPGA when I was a kid back in the 70's!
For those of us that played with those RadioShack 100-in-1 projects kits.. Those were FPGAs for kids! You got a big-ass cardboard "chip" with various parts mounted in a wood box. You thought of a circuit and wired it up. Or you "loaded" a descriptor from the project manual like so, 1-3, 14-15, 28-17, 54-18-10.. and so on. What a simple visual language. Sometimes you even drew it out on paper first.
Some kits even came with ready made rudimentary Logic Elements in the form of a "visible I.C." or a LS00 Quad NAND-gate. Analog signal processing wasn't forgotten either, you had a variable capacitor and resistor, Microphone and Speaker, and a light bulb and light sensor. But you had to build your own oscillator or you used your finger on a Morse-Code key to tap in a clock. Great times!
science_fair_electronics_kit.jpgdsc_2352-edit.jpgEPKIC.jpg200_1_Electronic04.JPGI 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.
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And one more. Samre thing but not canadian at least.
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.
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Just found this interesting knockoff. Very similar but some differences. No HDMI for starters. Also 9 pin controller ports instead of NES or Classic wii remote ports. I wonder if any 9 pin will work in this like a genesis pad. And it just says various games. No mention of what specific games are installed.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/262916660033?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&fromMakeTrack=true
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.
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FAT32 supports up to 2Tb. You only need to use a 3rd format party utility other than Windows to format it. It's been a known issue for years ever since Windows XP, Microsoft has been forcing NTFS down people's throats, which is AFAIK the only reason the OS doesn't normally let you format a large hard drive using FAT32. 4Gb and larger filesize support isn't needed unless you plan on storing ISOs for 6th gen and up hardware based on DVD tech (starting with PS2/XB0, since Game Cube used minidiscs and Dreamcast used their own proprietary GD-ROM).
In Windows, you can also force format to FAT32 at the command line, but be weary of doing this. If you aren't careful, you might accidentally wipe the wrong drive...
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.
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Really? And FPGA is rather useless in the consumer space unless software has been written. And I don't see that happening for another 5 years easy. That's a given we all know. At least the IGPU is doing something useful, especially in power conscious configurations.
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.
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I never played doom (myself personally) on anything less than a 486 DX2/50. But I heard over and over again a 386-40 would handle it good enough.
Intel has been including FPGA on their high-end server chips for a year or two now. It would be nice to see this trickle down. Since FPGA technology is so esoteric to the general public, whom doesn't care about such things anyways, it will take a big push from intel to get this going. And then many more years before developers figure out what to do with it.
To see FPGA really take off in the classic gaming field, I think new projects are going to need a development team instead of one person. MAME has been going with a team of hundreds, and Stella now has a small group redoing the TIA.
I'd rather have the onboard FPGA than the useless intel iGPU that most people turn off anyway in the high end parts.
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If it doesn't cover at least the 32x and sega cd then it really wouldn't serve a point to me because I would still need a sega genesis in my setup to cover those systems. And if it is powerful enough to cover the mega cdx that means it should also be able to cover the saturn, n64, turboduo, cdi, snes, and neogeo.
Removing 7 consoles from my setup, of which the NeoGeo alone costs like $600 and the ever drive is slated at around $500 for would more than justify a thousand dollar price tag for me. My main concern is the inferior storage capacity. 64gb maximum is simply not going to cut it for cd based systems. Hopefully I could get a 1tb sd card formatted in fat-32 somehow but if not it is going to require internal or external hard drive support or even flash drive support.
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.
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Sorry if this is a stupid question but would this FPGA be capable of an x86 PC core? Could it potentially run the DOS version of Doom?
Edit: I mean the Z3K not the NT mini.
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/
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This is what we have to do with the nt mini, use a HDMI digital audio splitter.
But that means another product between the DAC. It works, but I love simplicity
Thanks for the link Wolf_!
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.
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Since there will eventually be a lack of CRT tubes, I guess efforts are better spent on the rendering side with new hardware?
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.
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I don't think display technology should be "preserved", only improved. If you eliminate the nostalgia factor then displays are simply a viewing experience and obviously a better viewing experience is a better overall experience. Right now crts are in a strange kind of niche space because lcd screens add a slight amount of lag, and upscalers as well as converters (often cheaply built into tvs) add a sometimes not so slight amount of lag as well. But once technology evolves and response times can match those of a crt without the chance to kill you if you don't know what you are doing with it, and at 1/80th the size I think it will be time to let go of crts.
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.
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I understand that the CRT tubes have a life expectancy but I disagree that is the most common cause of most CRT TV's deaths.
...
Anyway, the moral to my long story is that I believe most TV's that have ended up in landfills got there from people not calling up the TV repairman, they broke off knobs, they just wanted a new TV, it got cosmetic issues from not taking care of it, they lost the remote, etc. And in more recent times most end up in landfills because people like myself don't get to their curbs before the rain does which has more to do with their boards than tubes. In other words, people being wasteful and not taking care of their shit is the leading cause of CRT death and not dying of tube 50,000 hours old age.
Therefore, if someone was to design a universal FPGA board that could replace the guts of CRT's then those once TV repairmen that now restore old TV's as a hobby would have a new tool to restore them with and with people like retro gamers they would have new customers. They could pull out the old guts, add in the FPGA, wire up the tube, wire up the inputs, wire up the IR receiver for the remotes, add in more inputs, adjust the screen, etc. and then sell them as retro gaming TV's. Then they could be pushed to those 50,000 hours.
If retro consoles are worthy of replacement hardware then so are retro TV's to play them on.
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.
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This makes me wonder if someday when CRT's become extremely rare and need hardware replacements and/or repairs for preservation similar to how consoles do if they will also get the FPGA treatment. I'm thinking something alone the lines of the tube and case of let's say a Sony Trinitron staying original but if you open it up instead of a big mess of wiring there is an FPGA board in there leaving most of the case empty. And the FPGA wouldn't just replicate the internals of a Sony Trinitron but the internals of every CRT with all of their features. By features I mean the specs we used to look at when choosing a CRT like does it have picture and picture, does it have a 3D comb filter, is it NTSC or PAL, does it have a degausser, etc. In other words, it wouldn't lack any features that every CRT had and therefore it would be like the ultimate universal CRT FPGA board replacement that could be fitted into any make and model of CRT. The cases could even be modified for more video inputs and maybe internally have bigger and better speakers since there would be more room for them. What displays on the screen when accessing the menus with the remote would be like playing the ROM's and/or cores of all CRT's.
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
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it doesn't but it could. I didn't want to implement stuff like that if it'd step on peoples' toes if they are trying to sell hardware or something. If it's just 32K + AY-3-8910 I could add it in an hour or two. I have the AY-3-8910 done (it's on the gamate and intv) so dropping it in and adding more RAM would be super easy.
Part of the problem I have on 'fan created' hardware like this is sometimes finding documentation can be very difficult. It'll be buried in some 50 page thread (seems familiar, eh? hehe) making it hard to find. I had this problem with 2600 homebrew mappers and games. Just finding the information was difficult. I had someone ask me what mapper a 2600 homebrew was, but after reading the entire thread I still didn't know. It had absolutely no mapper information listed anywhere so I still am at a loss as to what mapper it is. That game was "zippy the porcupine". 2600 games don't have headers, so I guess you're supposed to determine the mapper by osmosis.
If there's a decent spec for fan hardware people want me to add, I am more than happy to add it! Provided it's not insane. (i.e. YM2151 is kind of insane right now, which I think is on that 7800 expansion doodad). But extra RAM and AY-3-8910, we got dis.
Hmm seems like that's almost enough to do the MSX.
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Really???
I've been working on game translations for the last couple of years, and Mednafen seems to have absolutely no problem emulating and playing CD audio from a .bin file, and it even did a great job of matching 5th-generation video-playback limits when I tested it against real-hardware.
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.
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And the contents of a CD doesn't fit onto an SD card? If one can't play the real thing, then perhaps reading the CD data from the SD card could be a good compromise?
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.
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All these updates and cores are simply incredible!
The question I have is how accurate are cores? I know they are not emulation and simulate the chip but how the heck does that happen? Are the chips from the original system ran through some reverse engineering process and the individual gates, etc.. are simulated with the core? Must be something like this since it is much better than emulation?
I truly have no idea as you can tell.. just curious..
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.
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From my understanding of what Kevtris has said, it's just not possible to release a full PCE core on the Analogue NT Mini.
The PCE has a very high memory-access speed in comparison to all of the other 4th-gen, 16-bit, machines, and IIRC, he's said that the Analogue NT Mini hardware just isn't quite fast-enough.
Folks that aren't technical, don't necessarily understand the tradeoffs in the PCE design, and how darned good it was, and just see its 1-backgound-playfield, vs 2-background-playfields on the MegaDrive, vs 2.5 background-playfields-plus-rotation on the SNES.
As someone that professionaly-programmed the big-two machines back-in-the-day, I can point out exactly where the limitations are in each of the three machine's designs, and now that I'm semi-retired, it's the PCE that I go back to, and not the Genesis or the SNES.
The SNES has some of the best games that have ever been made ... but so does the MegaDrive ...
... and so does the PCE, although a lot of them were Japan-only.
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
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it's certainly be doable, but I'd rather go onward and upward vs. making what amounts to an FPGA on a cart. I wanted other things like 4 USB ports for controllers and a "pony" connector (i.e. I want everything and a pony!) for other add on stuff like cart adapters.
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.
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Just an idea/question, probably no point at the moment. Technically could the NT mini be upgraded through the cartridge slot to make it closer to the Zimba 3000 spec?
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.
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The thing is, that the NT isn't really all that expensive when you consider a pre-modded HDMI NES will cost you $425-$500. Sure, the AVS is a steal at $180, but it doesn't have the same amount of features in terms of compatibility with accessories and video options.
While it can be argued all the "best features" are as a result of a free jailbreak, that doesn't change the fact that Analogue was the company that chose to hire the developer who programmed the FPGA and gave away the jailbreak software, and that should be considered in the value comparison.
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.
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Probably not the same people complaining. Lots of people dumped their old CRTs and only have flat panels now
No more CRT's are being made.
https://boingboing.net/2017/03/06/supply-of-old-fashioned-crt-ar.html
The last manufacturer of arcade-sized cathode ray tubes is out of the business, with one supplier having only 30 or so in stock and no chance of ordering more.That's it.
And yuck at the suggested replacement. Curved OLED's.
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It's trivial (not many LEs) to make the FPGA double the lines and output 480p. The problem is that technique isn't fully VGA compliant in many cases, as the sync frequency might be slightly out of VGA spec. HDMI is even less tolerant.
Kevtris' idea for the Z3K is to ship with an internal upscaler, but technically it's not much different to hooking an upscaler board to RGB out. Of course it's more convenient to have it all in one box, but the caveats regarding framebuffer and such still apply.
That said, if you buy yourself a 4K TV, getting an independent high quality upscaler is not much of a stretch if you really care about latency.
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.
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Isn't the VGA port on the NT Mini technically 15kHz VGA signal, provided your monitor is one of those rare models that support this sync rate? This could easily be adapted for JAMMA too I think. It would have been great to allow line doubling over VGA for use with 480p tube monitors.
Not really.
It's designed to be able to use pre-existing cables like these:
https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=562
VGA (HD15) to 5 BNC Component (RGBHV) adapter cable.For adapting VGA to 5 BNC connectors typical on Sony and broadcast quality video equipment.For RGBHV only. Will not work with 3 BNC component video (Y, Pr, Pb)Beige color cable and connector housings.This cable is intended for use with projectors that use a VGA connector for its component (YPbPr) video connection. This cable DOES NOT CONVERT VGA signals to component video or vice versa - it functions only with devices that use the VGA connector for component video.
This cable has an DE15 (HD15) VGA/SVGA connector on one end and three, color-coded RCA connectors on the other end. The connectors and pins are gold plated for smooth, corrosion-free connections.
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.
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CRT Sets
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
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.