rob_ocelot

Easy. We pretend that that the Chameleon doesn't have an FPGA and that Mike is mistaken. Mike on the other hand likes to pretend that it does have an FPGA. What's really inside there is a matter of semantics. It's best to think of it like a Schrodinger box -- it exists simultaneously in all states until someone opens up the Chameleon and the wavefront collapses as the insides are observed -- it'll be either a mini SNES or a dead cat. I vote dead cat come friday.

Making minimal pledges on the Chameleon Kickstarter campaign allows you to post in their comments section. Heck, I'm tempted to do my own Kickstarter that raises funds to make minimum pledges on their Kickstarter campaign, just so 'underpriveleged' gamers can leave their comments.

I mentioned the tactic of setting the KS goal really low before, but on further thought if they do indeed set it too low then they will not be able to fulfill the Kickstarter orders and stay afloat. Short of someone independantly funding them and bypassing the Kickstarter they will fail at the getting-Chameleons-to-customers point. The whole thing will be a dead duck after that. Of course this presumes they actually intend to fulfill orders if they get funded. I'll have to give them the benefit of the doubt here until that actually happens (or doesn't happen as the case may be).

I agree here. Ratting them out to Kickstarter (heck, just even bringing such a thing up in the discussion) just opens AA up again to the sort of scapegoatism we saw when the IGG campaign failed last fall. Let the Kickstarter vetting process take care of this on it's own. Otherwise, it kind of destroys any faith I have that KS can weed out what are obvious scams and what are unrealistic or iffy business models. If they somehow manage to squeak through with their fauxtotype (I think I may have coined a new word!) then the ambiguities in how the gaming press has reacted to the Toy Fair showing will probably chase off most potential backers. If they somehow manage to make it to a funded Kickstarter then I'll have to concede they may have hit the magic numbers for unit cost versus funding level -- and all power to them if they pull that off. At that point, the success or failure of the Chameleon will be down to the competence of the team to get their product to their backers and get to the next step of expanding that into a continuing business model.

Hah! I've been trying to convince Kevin for a while now to include Vectrex in the Zimba3000. There's no 6809 core yet (AFAIK) and even if it existed it would be applied to things like the Williams arcade games first.

I don't think you'll have to worry about Kev selling out. He's much more interested in the technology behind things, how they work, and how they can be improved rather than just raking in money for the sake of it. It might also mean you probably won't see a Zimba3000 any time soon either, but that's more a function of the reality of breaking into the game industry in this economic climate. Put another way... if this was easy, someone would be already doing it. Irony time: Kev wrote the first homebrew for the Colecovision -- wouldn't it be a hoot if Mike accidentally slapped Kevtris onto one of his compilation carts not realising who wrote it? Wouldn't be the first time someone mistook homebrew as PD or free for use.

The other thought that springs to mind... Given how bold (or dumb) they were to think they could pass off what they did at ToyFair what are the chances they will try and bluff Kickstarter when they ask to see documented proof of a working prototype? If they are mentally in the zone of passing off someone else's work as their own then it's not much more of a stretch to pull a bait-and-switch. Does Mike think all he has to do is email Kickstarter a photoshopped picture of the Chameleon with a circuit board in it and a TV beside it showing a game? Or a video of a game running on screen with a feed from another system? A week ago I would have thought that was being hugely biased and negative against them, given their word that things would be different and we were moving on from the RVGS. Now, I have no place lower to set the bar unless I dig into the ground. Remember, we were told that we'd have our socks blown off at Toyfair in Feb. Well, my socks are off, my feet are dirty and you can't unshit this bed.

According to Kev, Mike was all about promises of the sun, moon and stars... big money payoffs, but no money forthcoming until the big money starts rolling in. I'm sure John was fed the same line of BS -- make us a useable widget and you'll get your reward when Mike gets his. I'm beginning to think Mike's modus operandi is that the big promised payday never comes. It's the video game industry version of Hollywood Accounting. "Sorry dude, project made no money. Can't pay you right now. Call me next week"

But real prototypes are HARD. Because: good enough.

aww... you spoiled my segue into a Bigfoot-stole-the-original-awesome-Chameleon-prototype theory.

*ahem* Mrs. Kennedy *ahem* Perhaps "The Boss" has stepped in and put their foot down?

It's going to be a long slog of days until the Kickstarter starts, isn't it? While I appreciate the effort of people looking into the technical and financial feasability of a SNES (or as Make calls is 'SNEZZ') FPGA I think it's probably not necessary given past performance. It's far more likely that it's Mike running off at the mouth spouting an impressive sounding acronym in an attempt to sound knowledgeable. A good con man already has a rehearsed counter to the most obvious questions -- "An FPGA is an emulator, right?", "I didn't know what FPGA actually meant", "What? <feigned surprise> I've been tricked again by my hardware guy?" That Toyfair video is well on it's way to becoming the most scrutinized piece of footage since the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film though.

Why have buttons removed from the controller (and swap the start/select), other than to provide a convenient place to put your logo? Wouldn't you want at least one button other than the standard PS1 Dual Shock -- one that you can hit at anytime and go back to the main menu to switch games or emulators (note: I didn't say FPGA cores :-) Make it the Coleco logo you hit, just like the X-box and be done with it. No one wants to remember having to hold select+start+Lt trigger to go back to the menu or some other arcane combination. The less the Chinese manufacturer has to retool the mould the cheaper everying will be -- at least, that was the nugget of wisdom imparted when people questioned the use of Jag shells. One reason I can see the manufacturer waiving the cost of retooling is because Mike convinced them they would be getting orders in the millions or something.

This is not true, so please stop repeating it. ..Al Was there a reason for why two threads related to the RVGS/Coleco Chameleon were locked in December? It was frustrating enough that I stopped reading and participating on AA for more than a month. If an explanation was given it's entirely possible I may have missed it in that time, so my apologies if this was the case.

It's not wrong to comment that it's fucked up. What's wrong is going above and beyond that on a crusade to make sure the project fails, and stating your intentions to do so on a public forum. They've already leveraged getting this discussion shut down twice before with legal threats. I'm sure it'll get shut down again when it comes time to find their scapegoats without your helping the process along. You've gone and already identified who is going to be a victim of Mike's possible future misdeeds -- and are using these straw men in the here and now to rally people to get their torches and pitchforks. All over some trade show hocus-pocus. edited to add: I've said this before but there's no way in hell this is ever going to finish its Kickstarter unless they set the threshold levels so ridiculously low that it gets funded after the first ten people pledge. Mike and his own antics (and also general ignorance of how crowdfunding and Kickstarter in particular work) will kill the project faster and more cleanly than your call to arms ever could hope to achieve. Self-limiting behaviour, but don't be surprised if we go to round three with a new tie-in partner.

You are assuming again that I would use terms such as 'crazy' and 'retarded' and you obviously have no idea who I am (or for that matter I know little about you). I would caution you against amateur diagnosis of mental and developmental disorders -- in particular over the internet as it tends to give permission to apply those labels to people who you don't like or disagree with. Even If you are a health care professional you still have no business throwing these terms at someone who is not directly in your circle of care. There are some speculating here on Mike's mental health which crosses the line into libel if you think about it. Somewhere along the line the fun and entertainment that was supposed to go hand in hand with video games has been sidelined and the posturing schoolyard politics have taken over.

You've not only decided he's disabled you've also appointed yourself his protector. Over a game console that doesn't yet exist and likely never will. Perspective time here. Mike's schemes seem to be mostly self-limiting. The last crowdfunding campaign went so spectacularly bad and garnerd a lot of attention in gaming circles I'm almost positive there are jokers deliberately fanning the flames and being obtuse just because of it's entertainment value. If these blind 'rah-rah' supporters of Mike are on the level then they've got far bigger problems than wasting their money on game console scams -- problems well out of your reach and influence. When I hear people in this community talking about how Mike's scamming makes classic game collectors look bad to the outside world I'm tempted to hold up the funhouse mirror to their faces and point out they look just as foolish arguing about things of 'earth shattering importance' in their isolated corner of the playground.

I'm pretty sure he's taking the piss here. Pure parody. The numerous jump edits, the sweater vest, the tie, the inability to actually look at the camera, use of the word 'debuff' instead of 'debunk'. He's making fun of the many self-styled armchair online gaming journalists who decide they can make a career out of this and never have to leave their parents basement (where their collection is). Droning on and on about gaming like a sports commentator because gaming is 'srs biznss'.

Futher to that, the Coleco booth is not on the main floor but off in the boonies where the smaller fish are. Low traffic zones coupled with not everyone interested in your product (it's a toy show, not a video game show like E3) means you probably wasted your money setting up a booth when you could have networked some deals via skype.

Got to thinking today about how rotten Mike's luck is. I mean, what are the chances that you end up with two hardware engineers in a row that both flake out and either overdesign a not-cost-effective product or hand you a piece of garbage that would be an embarassment at a grade school science fair on the eve of a big industry trade show reveal? It's possible, I guess. Bad luck and all that jazz. I don't know John Carlsen personally but my research turns up a guy who seems pretty capable and versatile. He's been in the Silicon Valley tech/computer/game scene for a few decades and his orbit seems to cross those of people like Nolan Bushnell quite frequently. A casual look at his Linkedin shows everything from designing automation for the railroad industry to key roles in a lot of the underlying technology that made ultraportable high quality audio an inexpensive reality. https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncarlsen (and yes, I've verified this is the same person) So this is the guy that Mike says went rogue from the RVGS project and designed an unprofitable dream console (a 'Ferrari' in Mike's words) when all that was being asked for was the console equivalent of a grocery getter with a radio tuned to play your favorite classic rock songs. OK, I can maybe buy that if you painted John as an overenthusiastic newcomer to the industry trying to make a name for himself but that really doesn't square with the professional who has a listing on the IMDB and holds several degress -- not just computer science but also in business management and another in accounting. I'm beginning to think John probably knows a thing or two about how tech finances work and what kind of compromises have to be made to get a product to market. http://www.johncarlsen.name/ (again, same John Carlsen) Curiously, he lists that he worked on RVGS *and* Coleco Chameleon (like they are two separate entities). Even curiousier, the date of his Facebook announcement that he was no longer involved in this project predates the announcement of the Chameleon by a couple of months. I'm still finding it hard to reconcile the Silicon Valley professional detailed above with the guy waxing on about lab power supplies with a table full of junk in that infamous video. A video Mike says he knew nothing about and that John was doing his own thing without prompting and nearly doomed the whole project, until it was saved at the 11th hour by this amazing deal with Coleco. Flash forward to the present and here we are being set up for more hardware people being thrown under the bus. Only this time we don't know who this mysterious person is. For all we know it's still John. He does list the ColCham as one of his projects. Hmmm.

Duuuuuh!!!!!! Someone needs to be able to drive so we can back the truck full of money up to our headquarters and unload it! That's a job for a COLECO EXECUTIVE. The 'New Business' way of doing things is to do it backwards: File for bankruptcy first, then you'll have a pile of money you can give back to the gaming community!

You know, if I was really serious about showing the world that the new Coleco means business I would clean up the website a bit. Maybe actually proofread the damn thing and fix those nagging spelling mistakes. I'd also spend some bucks and have professional pictures taken to at least show these people work in something resembling the same office (or even just an effing office!). Ditch the picture of your VP of Marketing riding a Greyhound bus and tell Steve Woita to not pick something from his hawaiian shirt collection because damnit, it's school picture day. I know Atari under Time Warner was a fun place to work in between lines of coke but I doubt the modern gaming world is ready for a full frontal retro revival of that magnitude.

My whole reading is this situation is "good enough". As in: Good enough to look reasonably authentic at the ToyFair so he could do some more schmoozing (sorry! I mean 'networking') with other industry bigwigs, maybe talk big and rope in another trademark squatter. It's too bad you 'haters' blew the whistle on him. Now he's out of pocket money for his trip to NYC. Good enough to pass the needs-a-prototype test to barely scrape into a Kickstarter. Hey, at least he didn't write the letters PROTOTYPE on a cardboard box in marking pen this time. Let's hope someone at KS asks for proof and doesn't take his word for it -- anyone with half a brain will hopefully realize that piece of garbage doesn't come close to passing the sniff test. Good enough for him to think he can go back to the community and say, "Hey, I gots yer proto-ma-type right here. Fulla FBGA goodness, so shaddup ya haters! Gimme money. I'm a gamer, just like you". The hard thing for the zealots to swallow will be that Mike fed them a steaming log of bullshit in December, complete with crocodile tears and promises they will "do it right" this time. The 'AA haters' will get blamed again. Someone will start slinging pseudo legal talk and the forum owners will get spooked and lock threads as damage control. Rinse, wash, repeat. Get ready for Round 3. (and remember: it's never, ever Mike's fault)

I bet if you profiled a few of the zealots Mike has lined up to white knight for him on social media it would be a real eye opener. Many of this stripe lose their peacock feathers quickly when under the microscope. "Collectards" might be a pejorative, but it's so fitting.

Just wait until it's all your fault for talking negative about the Chameleon... Setting my watch by it, in fact.