How has this not been posted yet? Retro VGS

[jaybird3rd]

Any bets on when they will cancel the indiegogo campaign?

I bet fifty quatloos that they kill it before the end of the week.

[PlaysWithWolves]

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is under "Games Pending" now.

 

I'm not sure how long it's been there.

[Atlantis]

Maybe they will rethink and then go for a RETRO VGS 2 ? If they stop it before the week ends, I won't axe kick my Rayman cartridge and I will stop my satanic conspiracy here... just trying to contribute my share to a better world for everyone to live in.

Yes, I felt sorry for them since before it started. Just that they went trough with it, against all signals is sad.

[sh3-rg]

They just haven't thought things through properly. Think the project is a bit lost, it was the FPGA side that got me interested and I think that was a hook for lots of others, as soon as they started talking to devs they realised ARM was better for them, think they should have made a choice at that point to go one way or the other with the CPU.

 

I wanted to see what the opinion was further afield, so earlier I read through this thread on Sega-16. It starts off pretty cynical, then ChaseTheChuckwagon pops in and posts the same message as (this thread?) on AA re: FGPA info, and that turned things around instantly. People seemed more positive. Then the thread dies off and the more recent stuff points out the abandonment of where it was once pitched etc.

 

How did they not see this happening? It happened here, it happened there, it happened on what I think is probably the biggest and most infamous gaming forum, GAF. Even that website vanished right around the indiegogo started. I didn't check Reddit, anyone follow anything there?

 

Maybe those utterly meaningless facebook [LIKE]s and their predictable throw-away comments of support offset the forum chatter for the RVGS team? Facebook is the last place I'd rely on for any comments turning into something meaningful - it thrives on people throwing their support behind worthy causes with the quickly fired-off comments, their outrage when needed and their clicks to prove just how much they care. But it's all flaky as fuck. That's all it ever amounts to, clicks and guff.

 

Must have been an eye opener.

[phoenixdownita]

 

I wanted to see what the opinion was further afield, so earlier I read through this thread on Sega-16. It starts off pretty cynical, then ChaseTheChuckwagon pops in and posts the same message as (this thread?) on AA re: FGPA info, and that turned things around instantly. People seemed more positive. Then the thread dies off and the more recent stuff points out the abandonment of where it was once pitched etc.

 

How did they not see this happening? It happened here, it happened there, it happened on what I think is probably the biggest and most infamous gaming forum, GAF. Even that website vanished right around the indiegogo started. I didn't check Reddit, anyone follow anything there?

 

Maybe those utterly meaningless facebook [LIKE]s and their predictable throw-away comments of support offset the forum chatter for the RVGS team? Facebook is the last place I'd rely on for any comments turning into something meaningful - it thrives on people throwing their support behind worthy causes with the quickly fired-off comments, their outrage when needed and their clicks to prove just how much they care. But it's all flaky as fuck. That's all it ever amounts to, clicks and guff.

 

Must have been an eye opener.

 

I'm still pondering the 2 shades of awesomeness a couple of posts above ..... ... brain not working.

[jaybird3rd]

Maybe they will rethink and then go for a RETRO VGS 2 ?

Frankly, it's hard for me to see where they can go from here. Kevtris is proceeding with his FPGA system, bringing to fruition an idea that the RVGS team chose to throw away, even though it represented the greatest differentiator that their system could have had. It's questionable whether there's enough room in such a small market for both consoles, and Kevtris is already far ahead of them in making his a reality; as others have said, the RVGS is barely a sketch on a napkin by comparison.

 

I would never presume to speak for Kevtris, but I don't think there's any point in hoping that the RVGS team swallows their pride and mends fences with him: I don't think they have it in them, and as I said before, they need him far more than he needs them. When you factor in the damage they've done to their own standing within the community through their unprofessional conduct during the campaign, they're left with no worthwhile new idea, and nobody left to market it to even if they manage to find one. Unfortunate, but one has to conclude that they brought it on themselves.

[Algus]

That's why I say the only thing that will save them at this point is a working prototype. Prior to this campaign, they might have been able to crowdsource the funds for a prototype if they had been more transparent about their hardware goals but after this nothing short of "This is exactly what we want to do, here's how it works, and here's a demo unit that we are ready to put to manufacturing" is going to save them.

 

I imagine they are hoping they will get more exposure like the Nintendo Life article and I'd further speculate that given how they've pressed forward with it, they are probably pretty blind to the reality of what a disaster this was. Really all this has accomplished is given Kevtris a ton of great exposure to the very people RVGS should be courting to make their console a success because "why not just buy it on Steam" is the prevailing opinion amongst most of these "casual retro" fans that the RVGS team seems to be pinning their hopes on at this point.

[G-type]

There seems to be an awful lot of schadenfreude going on here. Disappointing but not surprising to see. I still would probably be down to by $150 console that played contemporary 8 to 16 bit looking games on cartridge. I'm just not seeing a must have game yet... you gotta have a game to be your system seller or its a non-starter, no matter who you are. Nintendo and Sega started out as game makers, and then had their own catalog of games to draw on when it came time to make a system. Sony and Microsoft had deep pockets and could just flat out buy developer studios.

[CGQuarterly]

I didn't check Reddit, anyone follow anything there?

 

There has been very little scuttlebutt on Reddit. There really seems to be next to no buzz, positive or negative, outside the various forums and their Facebook page.

 

There seems to be an awful lot of schadenfreude going on here. Disappointing but not surprising to see. I still would probably be down to by $150 console that played contemporary 8 to 16 bit looking games on cartridge.

That's what this was supposed to be to begin with. And when it was, there wasn't anywhere near this much negativity surrounding it. I really don't think that most of the negativity can be dismissed as schadenfreude. Most of us wanted to see this succeed, and at this point are just transfixed by the train wreck that we now see happening. Most of us have backed Parrothead in the past (some of us multiple times) so it would make no sense for us to root for him to fail now. Frankly I would like to see him learn his lesson, end the campaign, take on a more professional demeanor, and re-think what he's doing with this console, if it isn't too late.

Edited September 22, 2015 by Jibbajaba

[+remowilliams]

There seems to be an awful lot of schadenfreude going on here

 

Schadenfreude is not pointing out the inevitable conclusion of where this was going throughout the entire incomprehensible mismanagement of this effort, or where it is winding up at the end. It's simply reality.

 

Had they chosen to react to people pointing out the canyon sized holes in their pitches and presented something other than nothing, or sizzle reels, perhaps this would have concluded differently. And no, calling such people 'haters and trolls infested with negativity' after you've driven the bus off a cliff does not count as reacting...

[leods]

I was looking at the Rendering they have for a board on the IGG page for the RVGS with the subtitle: "Above: Actual output of our printed circuit board design, created using Altium Designer and SolidWorks"

 

That makes it look like they have a Hardware layout ready for prototyping. What caught my Attention is that they have two heat dissipators that are not connected to any visible component. My question is, you guys who know Hardware Engineering: Does that actually look like an actual finished layout, or just a bunch of random components thrown in just to look nice and impress possible donators?

[Chuck D. Head]

I bet fifty quatloos that they kill it before the end of the week.

 

I wager 100 quatloos that one thrawl will withdraw based on the actions of the other two thrawls within days.

[GroovyBee]

That makes it look like they have a Hardware layout ready for prototyping.

To me, that is not a prototype board. It has no logic analyser pod connectors and no other connector you'd use for JTAG or any on board EEPROM programming. Sure they could be omitted for clarity . Debugging that populated PCB without access to a logic analyser (given the complexity of the design) will be a complete nightmare. I'm not entirely sure what the heat sinks are for because there are better ways to create PSUs than use linear regs.

 

Looking again, there doesn't appear to be enough decoupling caps on that "PCB" either .

[kevtris]

I was looking at the Rendering they have for a board on the IGG page for the RVGS with the subtitle: "Above: Actual output of our printed circuit board design, created using Altium Designer and SolidWorks"

 

That makes it look like they have a Hardware layout ready for prototyping. What caught my Attention is that they have two heat dissipators that are not connected to any visible component. My question is, you guys who know Hardware Engineering: Does that actually look like an actual finished layout, or just a bunch of random components thrown in just to look nice and impress possible donators?

 

I'm using altium as well and it doesn't look terribly finished to me. There seems to be a lot missing, like video DACs and the RGB to NTSC converter they were talking about. Where's the power supplies? I see a PMIC (power management IC) with what looks like 5 power inductors around it, but am not sure if that's enough. The heatsinks I think were designed to connect to the heat pipe (lol) they were going to use I guess. I am not sure what the two large chips are, but I suspect it's the TI SOC and the FPGA. Interestingly the FPGA doesn't need heatsinking at all and shouldn't get very warm in operation if all my protos are anything to go by unless you're doing something crazy like mandelbrots at max clock rate or something. Even then the chip just gets warm and not burning hot.

 

As for a proto, what they should've done instead of using cardboard and paper is gotten a cheap-o 2 layer PCB made of just the top/bottom layers and the holes to check fit. This board would've cost under $100 and would've looked 10000x more professional. It wouldn't be functional (missing the inner layers and all) but it'd be a good first round to check fitment of the connectors, screw holes for mounting, and all that physical jazz which is brutally hard to test with anything but a proper job PCB. I have gotten several "mechanical' samples made in the past for just this purpose, since the PCBs are incredibly cheap, under a week to two week turn time at the most (from when you submit the files to when they are in your hands).

 

If you're going to ask for nearly $2M you could at least splash out $100 to get a professional board to test fit.

 

Moving along... contrary to popular belief, I'd still license my cores to them. Their money is just as green as anyone else's. They asked me if I would make the prototypes for them, but I politely declined because I didn't think I was going to get paid to do it (unless the crowdfunding went through). After that, their interest in me kinda waned and I didn't hear anything for a couple months until the blown-off meeting. I can't afford to work on someone else's project free with the possibility of getting paid. If I'm going to work on a project that doesn't pay it is going to be my own stuff.

 

That, and I think me trying to talk down all the insanity was going over like a lead balloon. It was basically a three person hugbox echo-chamber about how cool it was going to be and how there were lots of games lined up and people waiting to develop games for it and nothing at all about making something sellable. The defining moment to me was when Mike was talking about using small *hard drives* in the cartridges instead of commodity flash on one of the podcasts. Hard drives? really? REALLY? REALLY? Even Nintendo's been known to use commodity flash on some of their DS games. If the big N is using it, then I think it's pretty much clear for use by any other game cartridge.

[tcdev]

My question is, you guys who know Hardware Engineering: Does that actually look like an actual finished layout, or just a bunch of random components thrown in just to look nice and impress possible donators?

 

Impossible to say definitively without any copper details but it looks very symmetric and too neatly laid out on a grid to be authentic. Also, there appear to be a mind-boggling large number of passives clustered around what I believe to be the two DB9 ports at the back, yet practically nothing surrounding all the I/O at the front of the rendering.

 

I call BS.

[kevtris]

To me, that is not a prototype board. It has no logic analyser pod connectors and no other connector you'd use for JTAG or any on board EEPROM programming. Sure they could be omitted for clarity . Debugging that populated PCB without access to a logic analyser (given the complexity of the design) will be a complete nightmare. I'm not entirely sure what the heat sinks are for because there are better ways to create PSUs than use linear regs.

 

Looking again, there doesn't appear to be enough decoupling caps on that "PCB" either .

I agree there's not enough bypassing. There's a cameo of the bottom of the PCB in some of the pictures and it's blank. No caps or anything.

 

As for logic analyzer hookup, at the signal speeds on the board, this isn't possible. Fortunately at least on the FPGA side of things, most of the major vendors include a software logic analyzer. In Alteraland it's called "Signaltap" and is literally a logic analyzer that gets compiled into your FPGA design, and works through JTAG. So you can monitor from 1 to hundreds of signals. It uses the internal blockrams to store the captured data, and the limit to the number of signals and depth you can capture is limited by the blockram. Since these things have over 1Mbit of RAM you can do a lot of debugging without breaking out the .1" headers and logic analyzer. It's super duper awesome.

 

Without Signaltap, progress would be extremely slow. In Xilinxland they call it "Bitscope". And for everyone else I dunno :-)

 

I posted a picture earlier in one of the threads that shows off Signaltap. I'm watching like 50+ signals.

 

[leods]

That, and I think me trying to talk down all the insanity was going over like a lead balloon. It was basically a three person hugbox echo-chamber about how cool it was going to be and how there were lots of games lined up and people waiting to develop games for it and nothing at all about making something sellable. The defining moment to me was when Mike was talking about using small *hard drives* in the cartridges instead of commodity flash on one of the podcasts. Hard drives? really? REALLY? REALLY? Even Nintendo's been known to use commodity flash on some of their DS games. If the big N is using it, then I think it's pretty much clear for use by any other game cartridge.

 

I have been keeping track of the Project very closely, and I was also Scratching my´head at that whole HD Thing. Do you know what tech is inside Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS and Playstation Vita Cards? I thought it was all normal Flash. Like, proprietary Flash Cards. Do someone actually use masked ROMs, or EPROMs?

[tcdev]

I think what has been overlooked here with respect to the PCB rendering is that it's a pretty serious lie IMHO especially considering it features prominently on the IGG campagin. I think they should be taken to task over this and possibly have IGG made aware of the situation which arguably amounts to fraud where soliciting funds is concerned.

 

EDIT: On reflection and re-reading the post I guess technically they're not claiming anything other than the rendering was produced from their Altium Designer files. They're not claiming it's any more functional than something they could produce in Minecraft.

Edited September 22, 2015 by tcdev

[GroovyBee]

The heatsinks I think were designed to connect to the heat pipe (lol) they were going to use I guess.

So as well as the manufacturing jig(s) required for the hand fit stage, they need to fit a heat pipe too? Madness!

[leods]

I think what has been overlooked here with respect to the PCB rendering is that it's a pretty serious lie IMHO especially considering it features prominently on the IGG campagin. I think they should be taken to task over this and possibly have IGG made aware of the situation which arguably amounts to fraud where soliciting funds is concerned.

That was more or less my Point. If you just think about it, they have right at the start a Video of games being played on a System. Then they have a PCB, and then they start the descriptions. They do say they still Need to make their Alpha prototypes and start testing and developing, but the visual material they have and the introductory text does sort of imply they have things pretty well layed out, just needing to finish up and start production.

 

At this Point that's sorta irrelevant.

[tcdev]

 

and I was also Scratching my´head at that whole HD Thing.

 

I almost fell off my chair when I read that, thinking it had to be a mis-quote. Pretty sure someone got their ass chewed behind closed doors after that announcement - or at least I hope so!

[tcdev]

Not sure if it's a bug on their page, but the CrowdCharts prediction is now 3%.

[leods]

Today in the last hours they LOST Money. The algorhythm is probably not made to consider a negative development, so it's just considering the Project is simply stagnated. Which is actually very acurate.

Edited September 22, 2015 by leods

[CGQuarterly]

Today in the last hours they LOST Money. The algorhythm is probably not made to consider a negative development, so it's just considering the Project is simply stagnated. Which is actually very acurate.

 

Yeah, I think so. Whatever algorithm that site uses to predict the outcome of the campaign is probably using a simple best-fit polynomial of the data points representing what's happened so far, and then integrating the area under that curve. Look at that chart; it looks exactly like exponential decay. Using that as a theoretical model, their prediction is probably spot-on, since it doesn't account for external forces driving more supporters to the project down the line (media coverage, etc.).

Edited September 22, 2015 by Jibbajaba

[goldenegg]

It's pretty clear that many people still don't understand how sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo work. There are several people posting on the RetroVGS Facebook page, stating that a successfully funded campaign is a guarantee that systems will be delivered. While those crowdfunding sites need to make the public more aware about how they work, I feel that those running campaigns need to be a little more transparent with their backers. Fact is that crap can happen and the could run out of money for any number of reasons.