mrnarse

I remember Kevtris saying on the MLiG livestream that theoretically porting the cores to the newer FPGA chip would require some work, but that it wouldn’t be very difficult to do. But he can’t comment on anything jailbreak related, it was a technical question about the chips themself and their differences. If porting the cores requires even a little bit of work, then I fear we may never get them on the Super NT. If the ported cores were to just show up in a jailbreak firmware, it would be hard to keep up any plausible deniability about who the jailbreak firmware author is.

An FPGA Genesis without Sega CD or 32X support is attractive enough on its own for me. My only experience with the Genesis has been through the subpar video quality of The Genesis’ RF and composite video outputs. Playing the system with pristine video quality will be like playing the Sega Genesis library for the first time for me. I had a Sega CD in my youth, but getting a Sega CD or 32X now is not a top priority for me. The alternatives: spend around $200 to get a OSSC and RGB cables, or hope my TV supports proper 240p with retro vision cables (mine doesn’t). Not a bad alternative, as the Genesis doesn’t need any modifications for RGB. But If I went the upscaler route I’ve still gotta get everything set up properly and working together, and hope I can grab one when it’s in stock. I already have a working Genesis and power supply, so I don’t have to add that to the expenses. Or I could spend the same amount and just get an Analogue Genesis that hooks up via HDMI. By all means add a Sega CD add-on slot for a real Sega CD unit if it doesn’t add significantly to the cost of the system. It was more popular than the 32X, had a better library, and doesn’t have to deal with the nightmare of a second video output. But I don’t think I’d be interested in that feature myself, unless there was a jailbreak that allowed iso loading, or someone develops a Sega CD ODE. Right now I’m just as interested in all of the upcoming wireless Genesis controller options we have coming. Sega’s got a whole line of officially licensed wireless Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast pads coming via Retro-bit. Krikzz is nearing completion of his wireless Genesis pad. And if Analogue does announce a FPGA Genesis, you gotta think 8bitdo will be working on their own wireless controllers to match the system. Hopefully at least one of those solutions turns out well.

The super slim PS3 was released less than 6 years ago and anyone who wants to play PS1 discs can easily pick one up from GameStop for less than half of what a FPGA PS1 will cost. And PS1 game downloads are on sale all the time on PSN, many of them classics. Even ignoring all of the other features (movies, PS3 games, streaming video), the FPGA version is going to have to have some pretty special features to entice people (other than the type that person that posts on these forums) to spend a few hundred dollars on one. I don’t know if higher-res PS1 era polygons are enough to do that, and they can’t exactly promote iso loading in their official firmwares. Really, the PS3 is perfectly fine for playing PS1 games on a HDTV for 99% of people. It’s not like the 8 and 16-bit systems that need mods and/or upscalers to look good on a HDTV. I think much of the interest in a FPGA version is centered around a jailbreak firmware for iso loading. Sony’s prior devotion to backwards compatibility into the HDMI era might take away a lot of interest from this.

My experience was different. I did the 240p test suite lag test using the Super NT on my HDTV with the SFC30 controller and got 32 milliseconds average lag. I then did it with a wired asciiPad and got 30 milliseconds. So about 2 frames of lag on my TV for both wired and wireless.

FWIW my LG plasma is also set to black level=low, and blacks are much deeper now with limited mode disabled on the Super NT. Everything looks more washed out with limited mode on. I see the SD card speed option has made it into the firmware. Wasnt that only in the JB firmware previously? 🤔

Wow, I didn’t notice it before, but the Super NT menu’s background in limited RGB mode mode was slightly bright and greyish. Now it’s a deep, satisfying black. Any recommended gamma settings? I had gamma boost on with no scanlines in the prior firmware, but now with the sliders I don’t know what the old gamma boost was equivalent to.

I think we’ll hear news of a cheaper plastic NT Mini around the time Nintendo announces when they’re restocking the NES classic this year. It would be a good time to piggyback off of all the NES attention. The AVS has been around for a while now as cheap HD FPGA NES, but it’s not as widely known about as an Analogue product. Analogue is very good at getting product announcements out to all of the major tech and game outlets. The AVS only received a fraction of the media attention that any Analogue product has, so most people probably haven’t even heard of it. So when Nintendo announces the NES mini restock, Analogue can announce their sub-$200 FPGA NES. All the usual media outlets will market it like “Remember that fancy $500 HD NES from a few years ago? Now you can get a better one for under $200”. That’s gonna get as much attention as every other Analogue product and it’s gonna sell like the Super NT is selling.

IIRC, you’ve experienced this problem now with multiple NT minis, and multiple framemeisters? And that you’re using a homemade composite cable to make your composite video connection to the framemeister? Could the fault lie not with the multiple pieces of hardware, but with your composite video cable?

I wonder if a FPGA 32X could work if it was designed as weirdly as the original 32X was. What I mean is it would be it’s own separate add-on that would plug into a FPGA Genesis’ cartridge slot. Then it would have a HDMI input for the FPGA Genesis to output to, and an HDMI output of its own to go into your HDTV. Heck, it can have its own separate power supply too!

Looking at the Analogue twitter account, even Japanese orders received their Super NT units over a day ago. Finally coming tomorrow for me.

If theres a JB firmware coming, I wouldnt expect it to be announced or confirmed until it was ready to be released. Right now the top priority is fixing any bugs in the official firmware that might pop up. We have no idea if Kevtris has had the time to work on a JB with work, job, life, Skyrim and other things also competing for time. Even if the cores are easy to port over to the new FPGA, it still has to be integrated into a JB firmwares menus, tested, etc. Just because the first JB firmware came out a week after the NT mini release doesnt mean its the same timeframe for the Super NT.

If theres a way to make a JB firmware work on everyones console but Wolfs, I hope they implement it 😂 Returning a console that plays cartridges because it doesnt play roms (and never advertised that it would) is like returning a record player because it doesnt play mp3 files. But seriously, I hope we can move on from talking about the merits of 12 year old TVs and return fraud.

Neo Geo is a very interesting case here. I don’t think it would have the popularity to sell well if it were just a FPGA system that runs games off of original cartridges. But thankfully SNK is good with licensing out or porting their classic games to other systems. If an Analogue Neo Geo we’re released, they could market it like the NES and SNES Classic minis, with a couple dozen classic games included with the system, as well as cartridge compatibility. They could sell more games digitally or allow you to use roms as well in some way. It really needs a library of included games to be a viable product because of the price and rarity of original carts. Sega is also very generous with their licensing and it would be smart if they worked with Analogue to include some games on a FPGA Genesis. But they have hurt their brand a little bit because they’ve licensed their games out to so many crappy clone consoles in the past. It would still sell pretty well on its own without any games though, unlike how I think the Neo Geo would fare.

A couple more interesting tidbits from the livestream: -The MLiG guys were hoping for a 7x mode that could be used for full screen Game Boy gaming with a Super Game Boy, but Kevtris shot that possibility down. -This was a theoretical question so don’t go reading into this as confirmation of anything, but someone asked how difficult it would be to port cores written for the NT Mini’s FPGA chip to the more powerful FPGA chip used in the Super NT. Kevtris said it would be pretty easy to do.

A USB data port in addition to a SD card slot would be nice on a FPGA PS1