FPGA Based Videogame System

[ijor]

I don't think Sorgelig even dislikes Kevtris at all, he only hates the general idea of closed source projects and is very committed to his idea of and dream of open source (which is interesting discussion in and of itself in the last few days).

Exactly. Also Sorgelig has, as somebody once defined, a very "particular" personality. But with the amount of work he dedicates for an open source project, it is difficult to blame him. And he knows that.

 

People definitely consider any core or recreation of a chip by Kevtris to be much more accurate than MiSTer's current offerings.

Really? Yes, there are some immature (such as the new SNES one) and not very accurate MiSTer cores. Almost all cores are just ports from other systems. But some are pretty accurate. Both Atari cores, mine (FX CAST) and Foft's Atari 8-bit one, are as accurate as they come.

Edited December 3, 2018 by ijor

[Forsaken]

I don't think Bob "felt" the two frames it's just what he measured. I'm not convinced you'd feel it either tbh. But input lag does accumulate and lower is better.

2 frames is 32ms. A good gamer's reaction time is around 170ms. So when you add another 32ms lag, it's making your reaction time almost 20% slower. That is very significant.

[ijor]

Those boards are supposed to be used to prototype with the FPGA family they install to evaluate performances, flexibility etc...., if MiSTer becomes anywhere close to "commercial" either the price doubles/triples or they have to use a smaller FPGA, not sure what kind of impact that would have to the class of cores it can run then as after all Analogue uses a Cyclone V A4 at less than half the theoretical capabilities of the Cyclone V SE A6 of the DE-10 nano board MiSTer is based upon.

You do can make a MiSTer like board with a smaller FPGA, A5 or A4, and most cores would still run fine. Probably almost all of them with an A5. There are even some ports to other similar Terasic boards with a smaller FPGA. But the FPGA device must be of the SOC type, having an Arm Cortex. You can't use a device from the Cyclone V E family regardless of the size.

 

In anycase, every core must be recompiled, even if the pinout is exactly the same.

[Sho]

Exactly. Also Sorgelig has, as somebody once "classified", a very particular personality. But with the amount of work he dedicates for an open source project, it is difficult to blame him. And he knows that.

 

Really? Yes, there are some immature (such as the new SNES one) and not very accurate MiSTer cores. Almost all cores are just ports from other systems. But some are pretty accurate. Both Atari cores, mine (FX CAST) and Foft's Atari 8-bit one, are as accurate as they come.

 

I should preface and clarify what I'm saying -- I meant what I said in more of a social stance instead of a technical one regarding the cores.

 

At least from reading a number of posts across many forums, as well as Discord & Twitter, yes -- this general (and current) consensus anyways. You even have Smokemonster on one occasion saying that Kevtris is a cut above others (that he knows about) in this part of the FPGA space in a video of his.

 

I don't mean to offend you or anyone else, I'm just going off of what I've been reading across multiple platforms about the MiSTer project and any real links or quotes about Kevtris and Analogue in comparison. Stuff like this:

 

https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?p=1339308#p1339308

 

https://twitter.com/lionheart20XX/status/1052410102228144128

 

https://www.resetera.com/threads/analogue-super-nt-orders-and-shipping-now-youre-playing-with-super-power.8886/post-4212396

 

The last link is more of a "Hay, Kevtris is a god, no one else can do this in the same amount of time!" type of post in Feb 2018. And now here we are in Dec 2018 talking about another SNES core and project. Granted, we don't know how long srg320 has been working on his core to be fair. Kevtris is pretty damn amazing. However, the world is pretty large and there are other amazing people who have been putting just as much work as well.

 

It's more or less agreed upon that MiSTer has a lot of potential, and now because of it's greatly increased awareness to the project, people can consider it as an alternative to Analogue stuff. There are accurate cores that have been ported to the MiSTer, like yours (which I'm aware of), but there are also cores like the new SNES one that has popped up which are unfinished, and some like the Arcade cores which are buggy. Unfortunately, many end-users who jump into an open-source project do not fully realize that it's open-source (complete with bugs and unfinished code) and instead judge based on it's current iteration over all.

 

Another point of reference against Analogue in general is more of a dig towards the lack of any re-release or new iteration of the NT Mini, complete with jailbreak.

Edited December 3, 2018 by Sho

[Sho]

Whoops! A double post.

Edited December 3, 2018 by Sho

[youxia]

 

And on that, I didn't know if kevtris or analogue popped up in conversation they got nasty about it, that's a new one on me, but if it's true that reeks of an inferiority complex.

 

You mean it's okay for you and others to slag off MiSTer, but when they do that then it's a nasty inferiority complex? Strange logic

 

I do not really have a horse in this race, but this thread does sometimes "reek" of Analogue fanboyism, the last couple of pages or so regarding MiSTer show that quite well. Seems to me that some people who invested lots of dosh in its products would hate to see an open source, much cheaper solution to do well, hence some heavy rationalizing going on here and anti-MiSTer condescension/sniping too. That on top of the general hype train and the 1337 club feel, which also may or may not be quite "douchey". So, not saying of course that the other side should act nasty but there are definitely two sides to this story.

 

While I personally would much rather buy MiSTer, I do not have any sort of problem with the existence of Analogue's consoles and wish Kevtris himself well. But some opinions posted here really are cringeworthy. Is it really so hard to understand that some folk may prefer to spend ~200$ and have heaps of open source cores available, with very little tinkering involved, than buy Nt Mini for 3 (or 4) times the price? Comparing MiSTer to Super NT/Mega does not even make much sense since they're one-core offerings. And believe it or not, not everybody is forever locked in the SMS/SNES/NES/Megadrive world, there are people very much interested in microcomputers and less popular consoles too.

 

And the added bonus here is some really intense - 0-lag proselytizing. Now we all know that lag is bad for you, mmkay, but seriously...dismissing everything that is not "0" as straight up garbage is just heavy-eyeroll worthy. As someone who plays mostly on a RPi+CRT, with resulting 4-6 (?) frames of lag, does not feel it and yet manages to do quite well in assorted High Score clubs, I can attest to that. Sure, we all should strive to minimalise that unwelcome malady, but that "I'm sensitive and refuse to play on anything <0" humblebragging can get quite tiresome. Unless people like SS here start coming up with arcane equations which involve even the baked in lag, or dissing 2-day old cores, then it's quite hilarious actually.

 

tl;dr: live and let live, and don't turn this Analogue thing into a snobbish ivory tower. It'd be much better if we all just could get along, different markets for different people. Otherwise, don't be surprised if people sneer back at you too.

[jamon1567]

 

You mean it's okay for you and others to slag off MiSTer, but when they do that then it's a nasty inferiority complex? Strange logic

 

I do not really have a horse in this race, but this thread does sometimes "reek" of Analogue fanboyism, the last couple of pages or so regarding MiSTer show that quite well. Seems to me that some people who invested lots of dosh in its products would hate to see an open source, much cheaper solution to do well, hence some heavy rationalizing going on here and anti-MiSTer condescension/sniping too. That on top of the general hype train and the 1337 club feel, which also may or may not be quite "douchey". So, not saying of course that the other side should act nasty but there are definitely two sides to this story.

 

While I personally would much rather buy MiSTer, I do not have any sort of problem with the existence of Analogue's consoles and wish Kevtris himself well. But some opinions posted here really are cringeworthy. Is it really so hard to understand that some folk may prefer to spend ~200$ and have heaps of open source cores available, with very little tinkering involved, than buy Nt Mini for 3 (or 4) times the price? Comparing MiSTer to Super NT/Mega does not even make much sense since they're one-core offerings. And believe it or not, not everybody is forever locked in the SMS/SNES/NES/Megadrive world, there are people very much interested in microcomputers and less popular consoles too.

 

And the added bonus here is some really intense - 0-lag proselytizing. Now we all know that lag is bad for you, mmkay, but seriously...dismissing everything that is not "0" as straight up garbage is just heavy-eyeroll worthy. As someone who plays mostly on a RPi+CRT, with resulting 4-6 (?) frames of lag, does not feel it and yet manages to do quite well in assorted High Score clubs, I can attest to that. Sure, we all should strive to minimalise that unwelcome malady, but that "I'm sensitive and refuse to play on anything <0" humblebragging can get quite tiresome. Unless people like SS here start coming up with arcane equations which involve even the baked in lag, or dissing 2-day old cores, then it's quite hilarious actually.

 

tl;dr: live and let live, and don't turn this Analogue thing into a snobbish ivory tower. It'd be much better if we all just could get along, different markets for different people. Otherwise, don't be surprised if people sneer back at you too.

 

I don't know what the beef is between the two crowds, and frankly I don't care either, but I gotta admit I got a nice chuckle out of you "having no horse in the race", then proceeding to dump on Analogue and it's fans.

Edited December 3, 2018 by jamon1567

[LewisD]

I love my Analoge products and Im also planning to buy a Mister rig in the next several weeks, so nothing but love from me to both sides. That said, I honestly fall into the open source camp. Kevtris has done fantastic work, but unfortunately advancements to his cores seem to stop as soon as all of the known bugs are squashed. What happened to the revamped scan lines for Super NT that we were promised? With open source, others can continue to contribute and advance cores when original developers move on. With Analogue products, we rely on one man.

[F34R]

Man... I wanna get this lol.

 

https://www.analogue.co/editions/ghostly-super-nt/

 

Just for the sake of it lol, Ordering it from Ghostly directly, shipping was 12.28.

 

Now I'll have to sell some stuff because I have a black one (being used), sealed US color scheme, and now this one. /shrugs

Edited December 3, 2018 by F34R

[vanfanel]

I have both, the SuperNT and the MiSTer. I REALLY love the SuperNT, I enjoy it every weekend and makes me happy as it's just PERFECT for me.

But as you guys have already said, the closed-source nature of it's core makes it "mortal". Whenever it's production stops, this perfect SNES will be dead as the original SNES is.

 

However, the MiSTer SNES core being open, that's what we will be playing in, let's say, 10 years. That open source core, which now you see plagued with small bugs, IS the SNES of the future, thanks to it's openness. It will be improved, it will grow, it will be ported to different boards in the years to come: it's ALIVE. That's what open-source is about: it's alive. Thanks to it, the SNES will live forever.

 

That's the "only" difference. A phylosophical difference. But very important to me. Even if, while we get to the point of perfection of the open-source SNES core, I will be playing the SuperNT while I wait. And what a sweet waiting that is being!

 

And, who knows, maybe some day, Kevtris cores will be open-souced, too. But it's up to him, I admire his work for what it's right now.

Already pre-ordered the MegaSG, but I check for the open-source MiSTer Genesis core everyday, test it and report bugs, because in the long term, the future of the MegaDrive/Genesis is not on the MegaSG, but on the open-source core that Sorgelig and others work on.

 

@ijor: your AtariST core is just incredible.

Edited December 3, 2018 by vanfanel

[Jurai]

SUPER NT LE POST:

 

A limited edition All White SuperNT is available right now from Ghostly

 

https://ghostly.com/products/ghostly-x-analogue-supernt

 

LIMITED TO 1000 UNITS

Edited December 3, 2018 by Jurai

[F34R]

I have both, the SuperNT and the MiSTer. I REALLY love the SuperNT, I enjoy it every weekend and makes me happy as it's just PERFECT for me.

But as you guys have already said, the closed-source nature of it's core makes it "mortal". Whenever it's production stops, this perfect SNES will be dead as the original SNES is.

 

However, the MiSTer SNES core being open, that's what we will be playing in, let's say, 10 years. That open source core, which now you see plagued with small bugs, IS the SNES of the future, thanks to it's openness. It will be improved, it will grow, it will be ported to different boards in the years to come: it's ALIVE. That's what open-source is about: it's alive. Thanks to it, the SNES will live forever.

 

That's the "only" difference. A phylosophical difference. But very important to me. Even if, while we get to the point of perfection of the open-source SNES core, I will be playing the SuperNT while I wait. And what a sweet waiting that is being!

 

And, who knows, maybe some day, Kevtris cores will be open-souced, too. But it's up to him, I admire his work for what it's right now.

Already pre-ordered the MegaSG, but I check for the open-source MiSTer Genesis core everyday, test it and report bugs, because in the long term, the future of the MegaDrive/Genesis is not on the MegaSG, but on the open-source core that Sorgelig and others work on.

 

@ijor: your AtariST core is just incredible.

I mean, my original SNES is still working lol. I imagine the Super NT will last a good while as well. Nothing wrong with having the Mister snes core and all, but let's not treat this as if it is any different than any other emulation that's already available when saying "Thanks to it, the SNES will live forever". That's absurd.

[Jurai]

I mean, my original SNES is still working lol. I imagine the Super NT will last a good while as well. Nothing wrong with having the Mister snes core and all, but let's not treat this as if it is any different than any other emulation that's already available when saying "Thanks to it, the SNES will live forever". That's absurd.

 

yeah I mean, down the road both the supernt and mister will become irrelevant eventually, technology never stops improvin

[cacophony]

2 frames is 32ms. A good gamer's reaction time is around 170ms. So when you add another 32ms lag, it's making your reaction time almost 20% slower. That is very significant.

 

Sure for a speedrunner it would be noticeable, but that doesn't mean Bob felt it.

[Riptide]

Analogue's products and the MISTer are for two different audiences. Personally I own both. Any hate in either direction is unnecessary and if it exists I hope those who harbor it can heal. To often we see fighting among people who are really on the same team but don't seem to realize that.

 

Yes I like OSS, but I also respect the decisions of those who choose to keep their code closed. Kevtris has made significant effort to give as many people as possible the ability to use his cores. If the deal with Analogue had never happened, and Kevtris decided to release his cores for the MISTer, do you think more people or fewer people would be using them today compared to the current situation? While I like the long term preservation that OSS offers, and I would like to see further development/bugfixing on the cores that run on the NT-mini/S-NT, the current scenario allows for more people to get to enjoy those cores and gets Kevtris paid.

[Tanooki]

They sure do, I've witnessed it on the discord chat so far. I still am trying to figure out what I ever did to them to result in such negativity and hate from them.

Well given the quote below and others seeming online to mirror that sentiment, it seems he's a bit of a tunnel vision close minded a-hole who has a ring of loser followers. Not everything has to be a form of digital socialism when it comes to programming online, not everything has to be open source and free for anyone to stick their fingers into. And I agree it's very naive and highly immature to think that way and get other lackies on board to negatively troll you for it. You've never been anything but pretty open and kind on discord when we've talked on there before on the account I have there (under another name.)

 

It just seems there are some entitled babies on the Mister crew if their attitudes are as such. Very defensive, very childish, and like to lash out like a little elementary school kid when their way isn't had. Veruka Salt syndrome going on...mine mine mine.

 

yeah, I don't get it. It seems to mainly come from Sorgelig who has the attitude that if it's not open source it's pure evil, which is a pretty naive and immature position to take IMO.

 

 

youxia your strange sense of attraction to making strange amusings posts never ceases to amaze me.

[Kaide]

 

Sure for a speedrunner it would be noticeable, but that doesn't mean Bob felt it.

I’d say that it’s more that the lag manifests in words differently, not that Bob can’t feel it. A speedrunner would be looking at the footage and notice the frames, and say, “yeah, this move was X frames late”.

 

The average player will manifest it more as “Why is this <read: timing sensitive> part of the game so damn hard?” Where they may not have a reason to explain what’s going on, but they

 

The latter is more how I experience input lag. Places where games have these sort of strict timing sensitive periods where the input lag eats away at the slop you have, leading to more “but I hit the button” moments while playing through them.

 

 

yeah I mean, down the road both the supernt and mister will become irrelevant eventually, technology never stops improvin

That’s the real problem down the road, IMO. Will HDMI get deprecated 20 years from now and replaced with some crazy new thing?

 

That said, a good OSS core will at least be a usable starting point for anything new on that front, though. Once you have a good, well-debugged core, you can focus more on how the PPU outputs are being handled and less on fixing the various esoteric edge cases that devs relied on for their particular games.

[TPR]

SUPER NT LE POST:

 

A limited edition All White SuperNT is available right now from Ghostly

 

https://ghostly.com/products/ghostly-x-analogue-supernt

 

LIMITED TO 1000 UNITS

 

Thank you for the link! Ordered!

[NE146]

The average player will manifest it more as “Why is this <read: timing sensitive> part of the game so damn hard?” Where they may not have a reason to explain what’s going on

 

Do you think that's the case for the majority of games? . I mean obviously lag can affect some game's difficulty significantly like Battletoads, Punch-Out, and for speedrunning: Mario.. but, it doesn't really affect things like Shadowgate, Lolo, and Dragon Warrior, etc. But what about the in-between games? I mean does a couple frames lag really affect lower reflex games like Kirby, Zelda, Dr. Mario, or even Duck Tales for example?

[Kaide]

 

Do you think that's the case for the majority of games? . I mean obviously lag can affect some game's difficulty significantly like Battletoads, Punch-Out, and for speedrunning: Mario.. but, it doesn't really affect things like Shadowgate, Lolo, and Dragon Warrior, etc. But what about the in-between games? I mean does a couple frames lag really affect lower reflex games like Kirby, Zelda, Dr. Mario, or even Duck Tales for example?

Of course it will be very different across games, and how they are played. But perhaps Mario isn’t the best “speed running only” sort of title. The first game in particular tends to ramp up the leap of faith jumps in later worlds, and Mario World likes to offer up challenges that make it possible for folks to exist in more than two categories of Mario player. So it’s not just speed runners that start relying on good timing.

 

Think of it this way: For the sake of argument, let’s say that the average response time for a person is 200ms (wrong, but simple to think about), but the range in their response time is +/-100ms from that average.

 

There’s a couple interesting cases to think about here. Consider a game where tricky parts have timing requirements around 300ms. This hypothetical means we have a person who, without any input lag, will pretty much never fail. But add in two frames of input lag, and they find themselves failing more than ~15% of the time. “Huh, that’s weird” may be how they respond to suddenly having to replay a section they usually haven’t needed to before. Or the cases where the timing required is in the 200ms range, where this hypothetical person goes from succeeding more than half the time, to failing more than half the time, again with them failing a little over 15% more often than they used to.

 

I’d honestly love to see some material research in this space, TBH, since I’m pretty certain people’s thresholds for noticing this sort of effect will vary, and it’s obvious that you’d need to account for that person’s reaction time and deviation from their personal mean that’s possible.

 

Keep in mind, I’m not arguing that this makes a game unplayable, or is always relevant, but I am trying to suggest that it’s possible to notice the effects of input lag without necessarily even knowing it’s the lag that causes it.

 

As someone who grew up playing twitchier games, Sonic in particular is one game where I really notice the difference, personally. Mario I notice it in some of the later sections of the games where it starts cranking up the accuracy required.

[Jurai]

 

Thank you for the link! Ordered!

 

It comes with new custom bootup sounds also which is pretty rad, here's one of them https://twitter.com/goldpanda/status/1069632280371519489

[ijor]

I should preface and clarify what I'm saying -- I meant what I said in more of a social stance instead of a technical one regarding the cores.

At least from reading a number of posts across many forums, as well as Discord & Twitter, yes -- this general (and current) consensus anyways.

...

Oh, I understand what you mean now.

 

Granted, we don't know how long srg320 has been working on his core to be fair. Kevtris is pretty damn amazing.

Both Kevtris and Sorgelig are amazing, and it is absolutely childish to argue which one is more talented than the other (yeah, I know that you didn't). They just seem to have very different styles.

 

About srg320 that is developing the open source SNES. I don't know for how long he is working on his core. But, at least according to him, he NEVER HAD AN SNES !

 

Well given the quote below and others seeming online to mirror that sentiment, it seems he's a bit of a tunnel vision close minded a-hole who has a ring of loser followers.

I'm not here to defend Sorgelig. And I agree that having such a negative attitude to closed source projects is too bad. But trust me, he doesn't have any followers.

Edited December 3, 2018 by ijor

[Sho]

About srg320 that is developing the open source SNES. I don't know for how long he is working on his core. But, at least according to him, he NEVER HAD AN SNES !

 

Yeah, Rysha spoke about it in the SG Discord. It's pretty god damn amazing & unbelievable to be honest. She had to tell him what Zelda: A Link to the Past was during testing of the first beta port of the MiSTer core. To go from never having a authentic Super Nintendo and not knowing some of it's most popular games to creating an FPGA implementation is something else entirely. I think at this point he's been sent a DE-10 Nano so he can work on the port now as well.

[jamon1567]

Not everything has to be a form of digital socialism when it comes to programming online, not everything has to be open source and free for anyone to stick their fingers into. And I agree it's very naive and highly immature to think that way

 

Couldn't agree more with this and it pains me that so many in the gaming community seem to think that commerce is evil.

[SegaSnatcher]

 

Yeah, Rysha spoke about it in the SG Discord. It's pretty god damn amazing & unbelievable to be honest. She had to tell him what Zelda: A Link to the Past was during testing of the first beta port of the MiSTer core. To go from never having a authentic Super Nintendo and not knowing some of it's most popular games to creating an FPGA implementation is something else entirely. I think at this point he's been sent a DE-10 Nano so he can work on the port now as well.

 

Well, Kevtris never owned a Genesis when it initially came out and only played a few games on it through the years which was mainly Sonic games, yet now he is knee deep in Mega SG development.