FPGA Based Videogame System

[iGom]

 

Aren't they supposed to email us tracking info?.. so much for that eh.

I'm a worry man. :/

[F34R]

 

Little bit of padding of the price never hurt anyone. Especially if they're willing to pay it. And from the looks of it I don't know of anyone that's decided NOT to buy because of inflated shipping cost.

 

If I didn't want to support all the work kevtris put it on it, I would have chosen not to buy it due to the inflated shipping.

[kevtris]

 

That's generic advice, one less chance for the flashing routine to pick up on a totally different file that'd brick it.

This isn't generic advice. I wrote it, and this is how it works. You cannot flash a "bad" firmware, there are multiple checks for proper firmware, and even if somehow you managed it, it will gracefully recover when you try again. If you turn it off mid-update it will detect this on the next power up and flash the LED waiting for you to put an SD card with firmware on it in the slot. It's "unbrickable" via the update mechanism.

[z3razerviper]

Hello Kevtris I just received mine and put in Zelda and its awesome but please please please jail break....

[scott64]

There's a Super NT on eBay today should anyone want to pay twice as much.

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Brand-New-Analogue-Super-NT-Transparent-Super-Nintendo-SNES-Famicom-1080p-HDMI/152895911892?hash=item23994e77d4:g:c6AAAOSwgGFaeRsu

[leods]

There's a Super NT on eBay today should anyone want to pay twice as much.

 

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Brand-New-Analogue-Super-NT-Transparent-Super-Nintendo-SNES-Famicom-1080p-HDMI/152895911892?hash=item23994e77d4:g:c6AAAOSwgGFaeRsu

Who's this retard? You can pre-order the transparent one and it comes march first. Would people pay 150 bucks just to get this earlier? It's just a video game. No one NEEDS it.

[Keatah]

I'd say he's annoyed. He's probably being hounded by countless dopes looking for drama who somehow think the release of the SuperNT undermines all the work he's done.

 

Maybe so. Some of the rivalry between Software Emulation and FPGA is the misconception that FPGA recreates the original circuitry by way of some magic. It does not. Both SE and F are only as good as their respective programmers.

 

Even the first paragraph of this article believes in the magic. https://archive.fo/QvIUG

The original circuitry, the guts, is NOT being duplicated.

And R-Pi is essentially a shitbox for emulation. Proper emulation means proper hardware like at least a mid-range PC. Budget PC and R-Pi is ok for simpler machines.

 

All this talk about about latency and everything and people not having the hardware necessary to achieve the magic 10ms mark in SE is just more nonsense. All these new PC's that've been out now for some time have power to spare.

 

People say F can run in parallel. So can SE. There's multiple cores available or you can do context switching. To simplify it, emulate one chip, then the next, and then the next. Bring all the results together in the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME as if they were running in parallel.

Edited February 8, 2018 by Keatah

[DadsGlasses]

I'm a worry man. :/

Glad you got your tracking.

 

I emailed Analogue but I am still without any response.

[keepdreamin]

 

 

 

Why not just ...

 

realize the world doesn't owe you an explanation for every little thing you think you're entitled to know? That's a good question. A company is selling the product they're advertising, they've fulfilled their obligation. No one is being mislead. If you feel there's going to be nerd-rage because they aren't kowtowing to the demands of whiners, so be it.

 

There's two ways to handle children throwing temper tantrums. Discipline them, or ignore them until they tire themselves out. Seeing as none of you are their kids to discipline, the latter is the appropriate option.

[Keatah]

This isn't generic advice. I wrote it, and this is how it works. You cannot flash a "bad" firmware, there are multiple checks for proper firmware, and even if somehow you managed it, it will gracefully recover when you try again. If you turn it off mid-update it will detect this on the next power up and flash the LED waiting for you to put an SD card with firmware on it in the slot. It's "unbrickable" via the update mechanism.

 

Kev. What I meant was that I've seen this advice given out for other devices such as my DSLR. I don't know what the criteria is for confirming valid firmware. But all the same, they say to use an SD card with a single file on it.

[kevtris]

 

Kev. What I meant was that I've seen this advice given out for other devices such as my DSLR. I don't know what the criteria is for confirming valid firmware. But all the same, they say to use an SD card with a single file on it.

I think it's mainly to reduce confusion and sources of issues.

[Nomenclature]

 

realize the world doesn't owe you an explanation for every little thing you think you're entitled to know? That's a good question. A company is selling the product they're advertising, they've fulfilled their obligation. No one is being mislead. If you feel there's going to be nerd-rage because they aren't kowtowing to the demands of whiners, so be it.

 

There's two ways to handle children throwing temper tantrums. Discipline them, or ignore them until they tire themselves out. Seeing as none of you are their kids to discipline, the latter is the appropriate option.

 

Your hallucination is noted.

[scott64]

There's some real lord of the flies bullshit going on in this thread. Perhaps Kevtris will deem us unworthy of cores.

[keepdreamin]

 

Your hallucination is noted.

 

Says the guy who thinks he's being lied to by a company who has delivered a product with the exact features they said it would have.

[Kismet]

 

I'd like to get into the Neo Geo scene, I just can't just the cost. So for me, it's appealing.

 

From a legal perspective the only justification for Analogue, or anyone really to do a FPGA NeoGeo console would be if they could at least licence one of the games. If kevtris just wants to build one for the sake of doing it, that's his prerogative, but don't believe for a second that just because he can, that it will be come a mass-market item like the NT Mini or Super NT, or whatever MegaNT comes after it. What Analog built first was the CMVS, which was a just the MVS board in a console space, instead of an arcade cabinet. In that case it was using existing parts out there. But it does support the idea like the Analog NT (which rebuilt NES parts originally) can evolve into the NT Mini.

 

The most logical, obvious things is to build a FPGA for the Sega systems (SG1000/SG3000/Master System/GameGear/Genesis) because those can all be hit with one unit, without the 32X and CD unit. It's very likely that Analogue could licence pretty much all of SEGA's original software as Sega does not have a notorious reputation for being anti-consumer. They just have a reputation for not caring enough about the quality of products they put their brand on. The Master System's that I had access to as a kid had different pack-in games (in fact we didn't realize it had a pack in game until it was turned on by accident without a cartridge in it, and we had more fun with Safari hunt than anything else.) So it's not unreasonable to licence those games, even if a lot of those are shovelware. It just wouldn't make the Analogue product as compelling though unless they could get at least one of the Sonic games.

 

As for the SegaCD games, I think that is something doable, but you would quite literately need to find a supplier to make 1X cd-rom's if we're still barking up the accuracy tree. A USB USAP DVD-ROM is as close as you get to viable, and even then it's likely to have the exact same problem that playing segacd/psx/ps2 games on a PC cd-rom does, that it will keep spinning up and down and re-seeking due to overshoot. Rather you want the drive to just straight rip the game and store the raw sectors on flash media or in ram (at 2-16 minutes per disc), and that still adds a problem with playing analog audio at 1x, because when you play an audio disc on these systems, it just tells the cd drive to "play/seek track X" and lets the analog audio path go from there.

 

The 32X on the other hand still sits in the cartridge slot and you can still plug in genesis games into it, but it uses a separate video path, so even using a real 32X on a FPGA console would be an issue. It's not like the Super Gameboy which pushes video and audio through the system PPU, but rather the 32X has an internal genlock, which means that the only way to play a 32X is by sending a composite/RGB signal to the 32X and then to an analog CRT or back into a separate OSSC-type of circuit, thus defeating the entire point of playing on a HDMI screen.

 

Tectoy still sells licenced Sega 16-bit consoles, but what they sell at present is more like a Retron5 that only plays MS/MD games. So there is precedent for Sega doing this, but it may also just be a loophole in the licence that Sega somehow gave them perpetual rights to make hardware in Brazil due to the insane import costs of hardware into Brazil.

 

 

I don't think a GB/GBC/SGB FPGA is in the cards, that's Nintendo's next "classic" since they already registered a trademark for it. Perhaps as an add-on to the SuperNT (eg a SuperGameboy2 but better, by supporting the GBC too,) but kevtris already stated somewhere earlier in this thread that parts for the GB/GBC/GBA are difficult to get, particularly the link cables. So any FPGA project would likely have to come up with some other way of linking the devices (eg an unpowered usb-c connector) but it would only work with other FPGA systems. My personal opinion here is to wait until a GBA can be done in FPGA/FPGA+SoC and then do all of them at once and fake-implement the link cable/wireless adapter/infrared over ethernet (eg Layer 2) or over TCP/IP (Layer 3), then all you need is a ethernet switch/hub. That would also allow software emulators to play with the hardware simulators in theory.

 

But that's also probably getting too far ahead. In this thread the "ARM is out of reach" is repeated a few times, because it IS out of reach for the SD2SNES while still having any other functionality, and would also be out of reach for the SuperNT, as an expansion chip, though likely not as likely as the central processor. Though it's also very likely that it's much harder to reverse engineer an ARM core than licence it, which is why the GBA knockoffs tend to be able to get away with what they do, they're just off-the-shelf arm chips or arm SoC's (like the Revo K101), but lack any ability to play both the GB/GBC and GBA carts and have compatibility issues around the parts they don't actually have in the SoC.

 

The fact that kevtris already has cores for many of the 8-bit systems would logically suggest Analogue might have more success building a FPGA computer platform (C64/Apple II/Atari.) Making something as an alternative to DosBOX with all the hardware support (Eg CGA/EGA/VGA/Tandy/Soundblaster/Roland MT-32) in one unit with an HDMI output would be legally the easiest thing to get away with, since GOG sells those games already. Now imagine a "Retro Computer" FPGA system that also plays Apple II, C64, Amiga, Atari, basically anything that firmware can be licensed for, that opens up an entire additional pool of games that are so far only available to pirates and collectors.

[keepdreamin]

Kismet might put Tanooki out of a job.

[brentonius]

The most logical, obvious things is to build a FPGA for the Sega systems (SG1000/SG3000/Master System/GameGear/Genesis) because those can all be hit with one unit, without the 32X and CD unit. It's very likely that Analogue could licence pretty much all of SEGA's original software as Sega does not have a notorious reputation for being anti-consumer. They just have a reputation for not caring enough about the quality of products they put their brand on. The Master System's that I had access to as a kid had different pack-in games (in fact we didn't realize it had a pack in game until it was turned on by accident without a cartridge in it, and we had more fun with Safari hunt than anything else.) So it's not unreasonable to licence those games, even if a lot of those are shovelware. It just wouldn't make the Analogue product as compelling though unless they could get at least one of the Sonic games.

 

As for the SegaCD games, I think that is something doable, but you would quite literately need to find a supplier to make 1X cd-rom's if we're still barking up the accuracy tree. A USB USAP DVD-ROM is as close as you get to viable, and even then it's likely to have the exact same problem that playing segacd/psx/ps2 games on a PC cd-rom does, that it will keep spinning up and down and re-seeking due to overshoot. Rather you want the drive to just straight rip the game and store the raw sectors on flash media or in ram (at 2-16 minutes per disc), and that still adds a problem with playing analog audio at 1x, because when you play an audio disc on these systems, it just tells the cd drive to "play/seek track X" and lets the analog audio path go from there.

 

The 32X on the other hand still sits in the cartridge slot and you can still plug in genesis games into it, but it uses a separate video path, so even using a real 32X on a FPGA console would be an issue. It's not like the Super Gameboy which pushes video and audio through the system PPU, but rather the 32X has an internal genlock, which means that the only way to play a 32X is by sending a composite/RGB signal to the 32X and then to an analog CRT or back into a separate OSSC-type of circuit, thus defeating the entire point of playing on a HDMI screen.

 

Tectoy still sells licenced Sega 16-bit consoles, but what they sell at present is more like a Retron5 that only plays MS/MD games. So there is precedent for Sega doing this, but it may also just be a loophole in the licence that Sega somehow gave them perpetual rights to make hardware in Brazil due to the insane import costs of hardware into Brazil.

 

There's some great stuff in that post there Kismet. Yeah, I definitely agree that making a Sega System FPGA is the absolute logical next step and we'd all probably throw our money at it just how we are the Super NT. However, I'd bet with the Analogue MD it could definitely be cool if not only they added some Sega branding to it, but built in Sega games such as the Sonic series and perhaps even Streets of Rage. I could totally see Sega being very cool with that, as they are with any random fellow who comes along asking for a license. Sega throws them out like confetti to anyone who asks!

 

I agree that Analogue, the high class company that they are, would not include crap games with the system. It's actually a huge minus for me when companies such as Tectoy or whatever include all those random games / shovelware that nobody cares about.

 

The problem of releasing the 32X add-on seems high mainly due to the fact that not many people have or care about the 32X. It's so niche, it may just be out of the realm of financial sense. I think it would be less popular than the Neo Geo actually. You'd essentially have to pay a bit for that add on, and it only gives you approx. 40 games, all of which are not super high quality. I'd like to see something for the preservation of gaming history, but honestly, the 32X is just the dud of my collection, and the only "console" I keep packed away in a closet.

 

And then the CD Rom drive might be a more popular option, yet then again, they might be forced to create an actual CD system rather than a solid state option to curb the possibility of copyright infringement. One way I think they *could* get around this were if they were to work together with Sega, and come out with a system that attached to the Analogue MD that contains various Sega CD games already in Solid State. There could be an SD card opening on that, and perhaps a year later or something, someone (who knows who!) could make a jailbreak for it.

 

Aside from Sega, I would love to see an Analogue PCE. The idea though, of Analogue working WITH Sega (ie. simply getting licenses for the branding and their best games) is mesmerizing to say the least. It would be the true rebirth of the Genesis... and it would be hard to even call it a clone console. Maybe just a next Gen Genesis!

[Keatah]

The fact that kevtris already has cores for many of the 8-bit systems would logically suggest Analogue might have more success building a FPGA computer platform (C64/Apple II/Atari.) Making something as an alternative to DosBOX with all the hardware support (Eg CGA/EGA/VGA/Tandy/Soundblaster/Roland MT-32) in one unit with an HDMI output would be legally the easiest thing to get away with, since GOG sells those games already. Now imagine a "Retro Computer" FPGA system that also plays Apple II, C64, Amiga, Atari, basically anything that firmware can be licensed for, that opens up an entire additional pool of games that are so far only available to pirates and collectors.

 

It's a shame they aren't updating DosBox anymore. Last official version is at 0.74.

 

As for Apple II, C64, Amiga, Atari..and more.. It's been done already several times over.

http://www.mcchome.arcaderetrogaming.com/

https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=45

 

..both products are widely accepted and used and discussed by hobbyists world-wide.

[brentonius]

 

It's a shame they aren't updating DosBox anymore. Last official version is at 0.74.

 

As for Apple II, C64, Amiga, Atari..and more.. It's been done already several times over.

http://www.mcchome.arcaderetrogaming.com/

https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=45

 

..both products are widely accepted and used and discussed by hobbyists world-wide.

I am probably a huge outlier here, but I would love to see the Macintosh Plus come back. I always loved playing Dungeon of Doom. I have an emulator for it, but the sound is actually all messed up and the game plays too fast. An FPGA Mac Plus. Very small market, but I'd be down!

[_omega_]

 

So much this. Was $40 to ship to my east coast state. They would've been better off charging $210 for the S-NT and then only $20 for the shipping. I wouldn't have batted an eye, but seeing that $40 shipping caused serious hesitation.

ditto.

Also still waiting for mine to ship. It is also interesting that someone that ordered theirs quite a while after I ordered has received their tracking info already.

[Jagasian]

This isn't generic advice. I wrote it, and this is how it works. You cannot flash a "bad" firmware, there are multiple checks for proper firmware, and even if somehow you managed it, it will gracefully recover when you try again. If you turn it off mid-update it will detect this on the next power up and flash the LED waiting for you to put an SD card with firmware on it in the slot. It's "unbrickable" via the update mechanism.

Why tempt fate? Some jackass will try to go out of their way to brick their Super NT, just to be the guy to sink the unsinkable ship.

[Pixelboy]

The fact that kevtris already has cores for many of the 8-bit systems would logically suggest Analogue might have more success building a FPGA computer platform (C64/Apple II/Atari.) Making something as an alternative to DosBOX with all the hardware support (Eg CGA/EGA/VGA/Tandy/Soundblaster/Roland MT-32) in one unit with an HDMI output would be legally the easiest thing to get away with, since GOG sells those games already. Now imagine a "Retro Computer" FPGA system that also plays Apple II, C64, Amiga, Atari, basically anything that firmware can be licensed for, that opens up an entire additional pool of games that are so far only available to pirates and collectors.

Nice! I actually like that idea a lot: A plug-and-play FPGA box with HDMI out, to which you could connect some basic USB devices, mainly a generic keyboard, mouse, joystick, maybe a printer, and this little box could be configured to become a TRS-80, Coco-2, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, Atari 8-bit computer (XL, XE, etc.), ADAM computer, MSX, Amiga, early Macintosh or perhaps even an early PC just powerful enough to run Doom relatively smoothly.

 

All external storage devices (floppy discs, cassettes, etc.) would be routed through the SD card, so no big hassle there, but it could still be made to work like the original stuff (like pressing on a keyboard key to "press play" on the virtual tape drive, or something like that).

 

A multi-computer FPGA box like that would be quite trippy, especially if it had some kind of extra "virtual modem" component that would make any of these "simulated" computers connect to the internet, even in a purposely slow fashion. It would actually be fun to create a sort of generic HTML-like protocol that could be used by browser software created for each of the computer cores. So you could open a BBS or similar peer-to-peer connection between two FPGA multi-computer boxes running different cores.

[Kismet]

 

It's a shame they aren't updating DosBox anymore. Last official version is at 0.74.

 

As for Apple II, C64, Amiga, Atari..and more.. It's been done already several times over.

http://www.mcchome.arcaderetrogaming.com/

https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=45

 

..both products are widely accepted and used and discussed by hobbyists world-wide.

 

Actually it's been updated a lot, but you need to get a dailybuild, eg http://blog.yesterplay80.net/dosbox-ece-en/

 

The problem however is that DosBOX by it's very nature is not even a "software PC emulator", it's a "dos emulator", if you try to run something like 8088MPH on it, major fail. No benchmarks run on it actually have it approximate anything resembling an 8088, or an 80486. Like it's more of a wistful "try it, it should work, if not, screw with the settings until you lose interest." Out of the box MT-32 support doesn't exist, and trying to by a real MT-32 is basically impossible now. It would be nice to have a FPGA system that actually replicates the machine accurately, but it's not like the accuracy is as much of a problem as the NES or SNES is. What I'm I'm trying to point out here is that there is a huge library of software that currently has no accurate emulator, and a system that could do that + more as pre-packaged disk images+deltas (eg save games) would legitimize additional software sources such as the Amiga, Apple II and C64 where currently nobody wants to buy a SoC software emulator, and GOG doesn't have the option of licencing emulator firmware on a per-title basis.

 

Anyway it's just an idea, that's something I'd like to see, because that is where there is money, and I would pay money for. Think big, and then implement smaller things on the platform rather than sit around and wait for Intel to release better FPGA's big enough to emulate 32-bit systems.

 

edit: That MCC-TV doesn't appear to have HDMI output, and I already mentioned MiST in the previous post.

Edited February 9, 2018 by Kismet

[DadsGlasses]

ditto.

Also still waiting for mine to ship. It is also interesting that someone that ordered theirs quite a while after I ordered has received their tracking info already.

Im in the same boat. I ordered in October. Why are December orders getting their tracking?

[cacophony]

Im in the same boat. I ordered in October. Why are December orders getting their tracking?

 

They're using a separate company for the shipping, so the order here has nothing to do with when you bought. Most likely it's related to destination. Or just random.

 

Every single order shipped on either the 6th or the 7th but many tracking numbers were not sent out (mine included). But I was able to get the tracking number by registering at the UPS site with my address. You could also send an email to Analogue's support to ask for the tracking number.

Edited February 9, 2018 by cacophony