Kismet

These are hardware devices first and only designed to replicate the bahvior of a singular device. Complaining that it doesn't do anything else is completely missing the forest from the trees. Someone (who cares who) offers the JB as a way to add capability to the device, of which the device had to have that capability to begin with, whoever is the JB'er can't whole-cloth create a core for a device they have no documentation for. It doesn't matter if it's the same FPGA, it's still wired differently.

Until the MiSTer is a commercial product that someone can buy (even if some assembly is required) that's just going to be something people buy as a hobby, as much as I think it has potential, if a good-enough fpga console game core for a device ever exists for it, it's going to end up in some cheap knockoff retron-like console. We all know this is going to happen because that's what they've done already with software emulators.

My intent there was that it's more likely someone would own 1-4 of these FPGA devices that cover certain hardware groups (eg Nintendo systems, Sega/9-pin controller systems) So you don't end up with an ugly disaster that the Retron devices are. Then you piggy back all the weirdo cart types that have 9-pin joysticks/6-buttons onto the Sega group device and everything that is fine with a SNES 8-button controller onto the Nintendo one. The SNES controller bus is probably more versatile (see the NTT Data pad), so if someone wanted to they could probably make new controllers with a keyboard add-on. Likewise SNES mouse. The Amiga had mice on their 9-pin controller ports, though I'm not aware of any keyboards that did. Some kind of 9-pin to 9-pin pin converter could be made if the voltage pins are wrong for vintage hardware, otherwise I think it's not unreasonable to have new wired hardware. But I digress, A single device is also a single point of failure. Sure you might be able to play SNES games on the Mega SG if it was JB, but where do you get a controller with the right number of buttons? Likewise on a JB SNES SNT, if it can play the SG/MS/GG/SG3000/SG1000 games with a SNES pad, the button order is not right, so you'd need to be able to re-map the buttons, a minor issue, but then you create further potential for bugs just like how the flash carts "extra" features create bugs when they're turned on. Which brings me back to the Sonic 2 bugs. I played it again, but was not able to replicate the tails glitch. However I also need to point out something that I'm not sure is a bug or not. You are supposed to continue right? Well I noticed this time you couldn't always continue (since I was deliberately trying to get to the continue screen, I burned them all.) Last time, after I got one chaos emerald, it stayed with me the entire time, even after being tossed to the title screen and the only thing I remember doing different is hitting start from the options screen without having done anything on it. This time, the chaos emeralds were lost if it went back to the title screen where it didn't last time. I don't know which is the correct behavior.

In all likeliness, if a JB is coming, it would probably defeat the purpose of the pin converters, but it wouldn't negate the desire of having them, since people still want to use the actual carts. If anything it saves Analogue some money in not having to make additional pin converters for systems people might not have, and might not care about. Like the SG has the 9-pin controllers, so conceivably you could put most of the early Atari systems, Commodore C64, A500 , Coleco, ZX Spectrum, MSX, Apple II, etc on it (or even put the NES on it via pin converter.) It just depends how much RAM is actually on it. Who knows if the firmware has space for that many systems though. Whoever did the SNT JB could probably port one to the other if they were so inclined but I don't really think that's a viable strategy as one of the primary motivations for having the FPGA system is not about having one system that does everything, but systems that work with your existing stuff (carts and controllers and other accessories.) A JB is just a nice to have, and people who wait for a JB before purchasing probably shouldn't own it at all. The last time I had a Sega Genesis was way back in the 90's, and it wasn't even mine. So I only recall large fuzzy TV's. I'll play it again while recording it. I did record it last time, but since I wasn't looking for glitches I didn't wait to get a screen grab.

Just as an unrelated, but relevant thing... many laptops will ground static near the touchpad buttons. You should figure out if the shock is jumping from the SegaCD or from your hand. If it's jumping from your hand, that's probably the SegaCD creating a ground path that doesn't normally exist. If someone has both SegaCD units they should see if it happens with both models. If it's actually a shock being generated by the SegaCD unit then that's a worrying sign. As far as bugs go: Master System: While playing Alex Kidd: The Lost Star, during the second level some tiles show distortion as they are animated, I'm not sure if it does that normally. Genesis: Sonic 2 - After collecting one chaos emerald, any time the continue screen appears, Tails is distorted. There are also areas where it seems like the entire game slows down (mostly underwater) while Tails is on screen. I don't have an actual system to compare with.

It's not an unreasonable thing to try and build a "cd-rom addon emulator" the issue with that, is that it's always seen as a piracy device, even if the intent of many of such devices are rather a way to preserve the console once the optical drive wears out. Also no laptops are being sold with CD-ROM's in the last 3 years, so manufacturers are really desiring to get rid of them and mechanical hard drives so they can sell their "thin and light" experience to all models. And yes, some people do want CRT support, even if no CRT's are still being made. There are plenty of cheap/free CRT's out there if people want them and haven't been smashed for their copper windings.

Analogue should just update the NT Mini without the analog video output. I'm not sure a 4K/8K model is justified, but it would be kinda nice to see if a 1080p to 4K/8K output scaler can be devised to connect HDMI 2.0 panels and get the same low-latency input. It's unlikely we will see any of the CD systems visited since the copy protection features would require more than just RE'ing the system chips, it would require making new drives, and RE'ing the drive firmware. Except maybe the Turbo Duo's CD or CDi's unit which is nothing special and can probably use an off-the-shelf USB DVD-ROM via ASPI. For any other disc-based unit, there would need to be a rip step, thus requiring a drive that can read the original media, reject copied media, and then just emulate the disc from that point. It would also allow the console part of the hardware to straight up offer accelerated load time for titles that didn't stream things from the disc. Since the condition of "disc" media is typically more of a concern than carts, it's also easier to justify asking developers if they want to offer their game as supported on the hardware by selling disc downloads, or re-wrap the disc without sony/sega/etc's boot code so no BIOS ends up being required. Like the path of least resistance is to create something that doesn't require the original bios or boot code, and simply jumps past that on a ISO, but you might run into more clever copy protection techniques. If it's possible to find some software developers that want to re-release their disc-media games without having to go through the console maker, this would be a much easier selling point. But that might invite annoying levels of DRM so watch what you wish for. However it also would allow such devs to just re-release the games on in-expensive SD cards or sd-card images, put everything they have on it, and put a "menu boot" program on it, nothing fancy. Even if it might be possible to FPGA the Sega CD, Playstation, Turbo duo, 3DO or CDi without the drive. The BIOS requirement is going to be an issue. Sure it's possible to clean-room RE new BIOS but, that doesn't guarantee software will be compatible. But it might not have to, it just has to be sold that way. If someone has the means to dump/acquire their own BIOS images then they're not going to be stopped by this.

Alright, so the initial boot of the Mega SG had firmware 2.7 or something on it. It does not run MS games (well it doesn't run Alex Kidd.) I tested Sonic 2 and Sonic Spinball on the MD mode, works fine. Updated firmware to 4.2, settings "default" appears to change to another font, adds a game to the menu, otherwise works. MS game works, but it feels visually glitchy (but I don't have a MS to test with)

Just received mine. 40.98 CAD Import taxes.

Note, note my specialty, but UPS systems don't like it if there are additional surge protectors on the protected outputs, it makes the UPS unable to condition the lines or something: https://www.apc.com/ca/en/faqs/FA158852/ At any rate, I'm just aware there is a connection between noise and surge protectors connected to a UPS. I've killed one APC UPS's inverter from overload, but haven't replaced it, (The switch from Geforce 760 to 1080 sent it past it's capacity), at work there's like 10 UPS systems just in the server room, and they are the case example of what not-to-do (power strips plugged into every one of them.) At any rate I doubt this is the exact reason for the noise. You could probably isolate it by seeing if the noise is still generated if you plug it in somewhere else, or if maybe it's the power connector itself that is acting as an antenna. Or drop a faraday cage over the NT Mini just to rule it out entirely.

Hot-plugging only kills flashrom and magnetic media. Anything else requires static electricity to be involved. Even then, it data has to be written to it while being hotplugged to have any deleterious effect. The reason for the overkill warnings on modern consoles is because people have been hotplugging the savegame carts since the N64/PS1 and ejecting them while the game was autosaving = game session toast. Hotplug a USB stick or a SD card while it's being written to, and you may lose the entire contents of the flashrom since the file table tends to eat it.

I don't think there is enough appeal to make anything else to be honest. For all intents the NT Mini, Super NT and Mega SG are "high end" FPGA hardware devices which is why they required pricey FPGA's. What is most likely to happen now is to wait for the price to go down on the next die shrink. Current models are 28nm Cyclone V's on TSMC's process. Everything out presently is 14nm, and TSMC has a 7nm process (iPhone CPU's are built on them) , so in theory 30% and 60% more logic units can be fit into the same chip area, not like the chip's physical size mattered, you're still limited by how many virtual wires can exist between logic. It may make more sense to have two cheaper FPGA's than one more expensive FPGA if all the logic needed for the scaler can fit in the same FPGA chip and be used on multiple devices, and reduce the "boot" time of the entire FPGA if it has multiple cores by not having to re-program the chips. Like imagine for a second if a super-FPGA console/computer had three FPGA's in it, one that acts as the video processor and it's RAM, one that acts as the CPU and system ram, and one FPGA that acts as the various sound chips (of which there are many.) There could be some practical applications of this if the system could switch between various 6502 (Apple II, NES, C64, PCE), 68K (Amiga, Sega Genesis, Atari ST, Original 68K Mac), Z80 (Sega Master System, Gameboy, Gamegear, MSX) CPU cores, and sound chips, because then even emulating an arcade game of this vintage this way becomes possible. Just getting a legal way to play arcade games on a FPGA is zero though. I wish someone like Capcom or Namco would just go "hey Analogue, love what you're doing, can you include our game library?" just to get the ball rolling. The Mega SG hopefully convinces someone at SEGA to make the "classics" collection on their own SD card (maybe even with new controllers) so people can have a legal clean version of the games.

The previous link had a ) at the end of the link. That's usually why I always put spaces before and after links in forums, and with the AtariAge forum it has a tendancy to screw up things that were copy-pasted into it, so two spaces after a paste.

I was thinking along the lines of potentially being able to activate any core that could use the 9-pin game controllers. (eg Atari) if those cores ever exist for it in a future firmware. Right now I'm just wondering if SG/MD/SMS/SG3000/GG games can be loaded onto the same Everdrive unit.

You have to realize that there is a segment of Youtube that is "troll" and it's all about inducing rage in people. Don't watch clickbait, especially that which poses an argument in the title, because the answer is always "fast forward to the last 30 seconds" Ask these people why Retro-inspired games are being produced then. The retro-inspired games (eg Scott Pilgrim vs the World, Undertale, etc) are based on 8-bit or 16-bit game mechanics, but are a far cry from how 8-bit games actually look or sound other than the intentional use of low-resolution sprites and 8-bit sounding instruments. Nobody really wants to make a Retro game have an exact look and feel of a Retro game, because we know those were shortcomings of those platforms, not design decisions (most of the time.) Like, one of the games I was totally engrossed in was Starflight, a game that ran on the Tandy 1000, and had an obnoxious copy protection scheme. The PC version was slow to load, but played fine. However the Amiga version was better on a few technical points, but would have been even more painful to play on a stock system, so the version that is probably the most accessible is the Sega Genesis version which plays a hell of a lot different. That is where I find Youtube videos comparing versions on the vintage hardware to be interesting, but hard to do since not many people had all the systems, and emulation doesn't suffice for showing how these games actually looked, let alone played. So my interests in vintage consoles and computers is mostly on 16-bit era games that had 8-bit ports/prequels and such.

I decided to order the Mega Sg. I'll wait for it to arrive before going shopping for used carts though. Here's a question I am wondering about though. Would it be possible for someone to create something similar to the SD2SNES for it, in that it can emulate all the pin converters in one unit? It seems like that's what the Everdrive X7 does.

The only legal way to use the PSX BIOS is to desolder the chip from the PSX. Dumping it is still an unauthorized copy. For reasons specific to the US copyright law fair use doctrine, you can make one backup copy of any software for personal use, that's why you can dump it from your own equipment at all. The reality is that people just download it illegally from the internet which is not fair use, and that is exactly what will happen with a SegaCD or PSX FPGA system that doesn't also re-implement the BIOS itself. That's why when people make offhand remarks about "just get it from the internet (wink)", they're not helping. That's the reason why releasing the FPGA consoles at all is fraught with risk if they enable piracy by being able to play files obtained from the internet instead of the physical media the games came on in the first place. Unlike game ROM's however, it's just a little more than trivial to make a raw disc image as long as you have a drive that can read the game disc, so in a sense, someone who rips their own discs could play such rips on a FPGA SegaCD or PSX via SD card or USB drive without having to download them off the internet. The original game devs could also just release their own disc images for use on such a FPGA system or on a software emulator... provided there is a legal BIOS that could be distributed. Hence it's a chicken and egg problem. Can't produce a sellable FPGA console without it, and can't produce a third party BIOS without official hardware that can accept such a BIOS. If copyright law could change to not cover computer and game system/arcade BIOS's after they are no longer in production, a lot of this could be sidestepped.

Please read the entire message before trying to be clever. You seem to be trying to argue a point that I already mentioned. Emulation is not media shifting. FPGA consoles let you play the original media, but none of these publishers are going to start producing their own carts again, because they needed Sega/Nintendo to make the carts. They can however produce their own CD games again, without Sony/Sega's blessing, if such a console existed to play them without the DRM. I'm sure it would be cheaper to produce MMCplus cards (not SD cards, but can be used in SD card equipment) without DRM, at much lower costs than SD cards, and just create a "dumb" adapter for use it with the FPGA console, or use the same card with a PC in a software emulator. If they wanted to. I don't expect it. What we've so far been given by Sega, Disney, Capcom are half-hearted software emulators on Steam. There's been no Amiga/Atari/C64/AppleII packages because they all also require BIOS images to play them. It is largely the realm of SCUMMVM where some versions can be played against the re-implemented game engine which is not perfectly accurate by design. So someone needs to re-engineer BIOS's for the SegaCD, PSX without decompiling the BIOS's to do it legally, and only then will someone be able to make a FPGA disc console that can be sold, and at that point the publishers could reach out to Analogue to make official versions that run on the console that could be downloaded to a SD card. I no doubt there are people smart enough to build a third party BIOS for the SegaCD or PSX, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem since being able to test a third party firmware on real hardware is difficult, thus a FPGA that can run the official firmware or a third party firmware would have to exist, and it could be shipped with the third party firmware, and be enabled to run the original SCPH1001 firmware. That still requires the FPGA console to be able to emulate a disc interface, even if no disc drive is present. So repeating the issue again, a FPGA console, needs to have both a system firmware capable of playing the game, and a "disc" drive that can play the discs (which only recordable drives were ever able to back in the day, via ASPI layer) without needing to reverse engineer their firmware as well. I'm sure there's a way to acquire suitable drives, but it would have to be something that the user can replace, hence USB (eg via USAP) rather than a 5.25" drive bay with a SATA connector, or just straight putting an eSATA connector on the console. Still that requires whoever makes the FPGA console to have to support any drive someone plugs into it. Too much of a hassle to include a drive, but legally dubious to not have it. Adds at least $35 to the console to include a drive. Honestly, its a bridge that we can't cross until the chicken or egg are produced.

Non-starter of course. Since software copyrights are now effectively 70 years after death of the author, there will not be any legal mechanism to put a copyrighted BIOS on a FPGA re-implementation of the hardware until like 2060, nor any ability to play those games legally in any form but the original media. The discs may last 100 years, but I doubt there will be new disc drives at all by 2030. Honestly, what needs to change is copyright. Copyright is fine for protecting media that can be media shifted (eg CD's, Books, and Films) and then re-sold again and again. But Video Games do not media shift easily, and the holders of the copyright of the software often don't even realize they own it, may not have the source code, or that they can sell it again with a software emulator using the original image they provided to to the disc/rom duplication facility. Given the trend lately of making every new game a microtransaction hell, I think there will eventually be more demand for DRM-free/microtransaction-free games, and if that only source comes from pre-internet consoles, something will shift eventually.

I'm not sure you got what I was getting at, but: http://www.dvd6cla.com/royaltyrate.html, which DVD-RW patents expire in 2025 There are patents on things beyond mpeg-2, which consoles like the PS2/PS3/PS4 and Xbox/Xbox360/XboxOne unlock separately. You need to get a drive that can not read DVD recordable discs to not run into a patent at present. Hence my point about needing a source of CD-ROM drives as all known patents expired in 2017.

Where are you going to procure cd-rom-only drives's from? Every drive that can play a DVD-ROM and BD-ROM has to pay licencing fees, that's $6.00 per drive for DVD units that can record discs, or $4.00 for those that don't. The problem is, that there is literately no business case for making a console that can read discs of any type. But to not have the drive means making it entirely for piracy purposes. Hence the need for someone to actually license a game or two to justify not having any drive come with it.

Have you tried to use a software emulator with a CD drive? The drive constantly spins up to maximum speed to read a tiny bit of data and then spins back down to 1x for the cd-audio. That's not how the original console operated, thus increasing the seek time well beyond what the game wants. You can't control the read speed of the drive in any emulator to my knowledge. There are ways to override it though. Then you're up to drive firmware compatibility RNG. Side note: My first generation DVD-ROM (1998 or so) was MPC-1 and thus not region locked, when I built the second machine with the blueray drive I put hacked firmware on the dvd-rom so I could still read the region-2 discs. Point is, that you aren't gauranteed that a drive will be able to read the PSX copy protection any more than you can guarantee it can read a recordable disc. So building a FPGA Sega CD or PSX is kinda an exercise in futility since one would still have to source a drive that can read these discs and play from them, which none do with software emulators. The likely thing would be for the "FPGA" console to rip the game data track or the entire disc to a 1GB RAM module and only try to play the audio from the disc as a compatibility feature, or try to play it as a virtual cd (which is hard to do even in software emulators.) At least with PSX games there's not many that actually use the CD-audio, but the PCE, SegaCD, CDi, and 3DO all did, a lot to my knowledge.

They avoided that issue because they created a software emulator (Bleem), not a hardware simulator. It defeats the purpose of creating a hardware-accurate FPGA console if you're just going to have to create a compatible firmware. Such a console could in theory run the official firmware, but there's also like a dozen versions of the firmware. From a legal perspective, you can't simply decompile the BIOS, and then compile it again with the copy protection stripped out. Sony was literately resting on the "use of the Sony Logo" (which is why all consoles have a boot logo) as a reason to claim trademark infringement. Sony tried to get copyright claims on everything from the bios to screenshots of the Sony PSX games on the box art. The same issue with the PSX BIOS also exists with the Sega CD BIOS. So in a sense, to create any hardware clone of either, someone has to write a 100% compatible bios that can be shipped, working, in these. There will never be a 100% compatible bios since it would have to emulate the copy protection as well. Hence the myriad of mod chip and game-genie hacks to get imports (and copies as an additional consequence) to work on it. Nobody needs to actually create a new optical drive, and by todays standards, 1x/2x cd-roms aren't going to be produced again. A 40X drive would have to be told to operate at 1X cd-audio mode to play a disc game as designed, and well, it just not a target that can be reached. There's a reason you don't see clone CD consoles. IMO, it would be better for Analogue to reach out to anyone (including SEGA) who produced a CD game and ask if they could include it as a pack-in game on a SD-card, and let people do what they will after that.

Well, the naming of the new Mega Sg is of no surprise. I kinda do want it, but don't have any carts, or original system, that was stuff I played at relatives houses as a kid. The lack of 32X support is no surprise. Though we may see people figure out a way to do it anyway, though it would no less convoluted than existing setups with original hardware. Though I think Analogue slightly missed an opportunity with the SegaCD slot. They should have created a piggy-back cable (think nVidia SLI connection) to allow a second Mega SG to be used as the CD unit, or anything else (eg a FPGA) to it. By not having some kind of cable, even to use an existing SegaCD unit, may require creating mount for the Mega Sg so that it's not held by the slot itself. Anyway it's nice to see this finally happen.

Alright, to jump back two months ago when I got the first SGB2. The original one I was sent didn't work, and it sounded like it was damaging the SNT due to the noises made by the springs in the SNT. The one I got today from a different seller (off Amazon) works fine and has no wear on it. So I'm going to say the problem with the original one I got is that the cartridge edge is either worn or shorted. The new one also doesn't result in a deathgrip by the SNT. The only issue is the analog noise when the audio is turned on. So that was to be expected.