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FPGA Based Videogame System


kevtris

Interest in an FPGA Videogame System  

682 members have voted

  1. 1. I would pay....

  2. 2. I Would Like Support for...

  3. 3. Games Should Run From...

    • SD Card / USB Memory Sticks
    • Original Cartridges
    • Hopes and Dreams
  4. 4. The Video Inteface Should be...


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4 minutes ago, Kosmic Stardust said:

Seriously?

 

Everyone is evil... ?

That was basically what I saw one of them was saying (I think it was Rysha....I'm not really up on the scene) said on Discord the other day. Which is funny to me because the hardware that that project runs on is manufactured and subsidized by some doubleplusungood corporation, who no doubt does it for the nefarious means of making a profit. And I seem to recall seeing similar sentiments regarding Kevtris and Analogue work in the past as well.

Edited by jamon1567
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1 minute ago, jamon1567 said:

That was basically what I saw one of them was saying (I think it was Rysha....I'm not really up on the scene) said on Discord the other day. Which is funny to me because the hardware that that project runs on is manufactured and subsidized by some doubleplusungood corporation, who no doubt does it for the nefarious means of making a profit.

Rysha is very talented and I respect all she has done with the MiSTer project, but I think she's being a bit too stubborn and closed minded about the Pocket. I think her opinions about Analogue as a company is preventing her from seeing the positive side of what Pocket can do for those open source cores, i.e. get those cores out to even more people to enjoy. How is this a bad thing?  MiSTer will always remain niche of niche platforms.  

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14 minutes ago, jamon1567 said:

That was basically what I saw one of them was saying (I think it was Rysha....I'm not really up on the scene) said on Discord the other day. Which is funny to me because the hardware that that project runs on is manufactured and subsidized by some doubleplusungood corporation, who no doubt does it for the nefarious means of making a profit. And I seem to recall seeing similar sentiments regarding Kevtris and Analogue work in the past as well.

It came up in that Twitter thread too. But in a more understandable sense: Analogue is being a bit protectionist if you can bring your OSS to them, but they aren't bringing their work to OSS. I find that sentiment understandable at least. It's also a bit hard to truly preserve this stuff going forward if the preservation effort is a closed product. But I've never been in the "OSS or else" camp either. I'm not against what Analogue is doing here, but I can see why folks are wary of Analogue and Taber's particular sales pitch.

 

But yeah, it is a little weird when a lot of their work is viable for hobbyists because of Intel effectively dumping cheap dev hardware on the market. They aren't exactly free from the whims of corporations either.

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3 minutes ago, Kaide said:

It came up in that Twitter thread too. But in a more understandable sense: Analogue is being a bit protectionist if you can bring your OSS to them, but they aren't bringing their work to OSS. I find that sentiment understandable at least. It's also a bit hard to truly preserve this stuff going forward if the preservation effort is a closed product. But I've never been in the "OSS or else" camp either. I'm not against what Analogue is doing here, but I can see why folks are wary of Analogue and Taber's particular sales pitch.

 

But yeah, it is a little weird when a lot of their work is viable for hobbyists because of Intel effectively dumping cheap dev hardware on the market. They aren't exactly free from the whims of corporations either.

Which Twitter thread?

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13 minutes ago, Kaide said:

It came up in that Twitter thread too. But in a more understandable sense: Analogue is being a bit protectionist if you can bring your OSS to them, but they aren't bringing their work to OSS. I find that sentiment understandable at least. It's also a bit hard to truly preserve this stuff going forward if the preservation effort is a closed product. But I've never been in the "OSS or else" camp either. I'm not against what Analogue is doing here, but I can see why folks are wary of Analogue and Taber's particular sales pitch.

 

But yeah, it is a little weird when a lot of their work is viable for hobbyists because of Intel effectively dumping cheap dev hardware on the market. They aren't exactly free from the whims of corporations either.

I can respect that stance, but I don't think it was arrived at from any sort of unbiased position. It seems like they're outright hostile to some "evil" corporation "stealing" and profiting off their work and have formed their opinion from the get go. I mean it was, what, a couple hours maybe after news had dropped and that was the reaction? Nobody really knew anything then, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions now.

 

Regardless, I won't be losing sleep over whether or not the cores are ported. It would be nice if they were, but if not, they have their reasons and thats fine by me.

Edited by jamon1567
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People can pick their sides as they so wish. In the end, it comes down to what kind of development community Analogue can set up, and what kind of distribution model they put in place. As the Pocket is meant to be more of a general gaming product, compared to the MiSTer which is a hobbyist device, it would make sense that the act of downloading and installing cores (and ROMs) on the Pocket be as simple as possible, so that non-hobbyist gamers drawn to the plug-and-play nature of the Pocket will want to try what the hobbyist FPGA core coders come up with.

 

It's the simplicity of distribution and installation that will be the deciding factor of success. Make it fun to try new things on the Pocket, and gamers will go ahead and try what's available, just for kicks, as long as they can always reinstall their favorite cores. And given that the Pocket will sell pretty well, the sheer number of owners will make the Pocket an interesting platform to develop for, assuming the Pocket's development docs are complete and easy to understand.

 

Edited by Pixelboy
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Basically, I think it boils down to certain folk looking at a guy like Taber and thinking "you didn't build that". And they're right in a sense, these products would not be possible if not for Kevtris work, but at the same time, running a business isn't exactly some kind of mindless work. If it were, everyone would do it.

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Just what we need; drama from a new source. I certainly don't mean you cats discussing it; I just mean needless drama about porting cores over. Analogue isn't going to hold a gun to anybody's head, and it's up to the authors of the cores or others who understand them if they get ported or not.

 

This should be good, fun news, not more typical "evil corporations arrrggghh" stuff.

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4 minutes ago, jamon1567 said:

Basically, I think it boils down to certain folk looking at a guy like Taber and thinking "you didn't build that". And they're right in a sense, these products would not be possible if not for Kevtris work, but at the same time, running a business isn't exactly some kind of mindless work. If it were, everyone would do it.

I think it is a mix of that, but also Taber selling their products as "preservation" because of the use of FPGAs. And that sort of thing rubs me the wrong way, TBH. Preservation is about evoking the idea of something like preserving Yosemite so that multiple generations can enjoy that special piece of nature. i.e. Putting something into the public trust. In software engineering, the rough equivalent is OSS. Analogue is clearly not doing that. And folks working in OSS that do see their work as preservation and putting their work in the public trust see that as a violation.

 

I still buy because the product is good, but I think the manner its being advertised does it a disservice. 

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11 minutes ago, dj_convoy said:

Just what we need; drama from a new source. I certainly don't mean you cats discussing it; I just mean needless drama about porting cores over. Analogue isn't going to hold a gun to anybody's head, and it's up to the authors of the cores or others who understand them if they get ported or not.

 

This should be good, fun news, not more typical "evil corporations arrrggghh" stuff.

Wasn't trying to stir anything up, just disappointed with some of the responses I've seen. Hopefully as more information is available things will change, if not, the product offers more than enough as is.

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18 minutes ago, Kaide said:

I think it is a mix of that, but also Taber selling their products as "preservation" because of the use of FPGAs. And that sort of thing rubs me the wrong way, TBH. Preservation is about evoking the idea of something like preserving Yosemite so that multiple generations can enjoy that special piece of nature. i.e. Putting something into the public trust. In software engineering, the rough equivalent is OSS. Analogue is clearly not doing that. And folks working in OSS that do see their work as preservation and putting their work in the public trust see that as a violation.

 

I still buy because the product is good, but I think the manner its being advertised does it a disservice. 

That's a good point. Perhaps in the future they'll release their code. That would be the best of both worlds. And btw, I don't think Taber is perfect either. He's said some cringy things (just recently about the cart adapters FFS) that I don't care for, but so to do I not think he's some Snidely Whiplash using Kevtris work to take advantage of people.

Edited by jamon1567
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I like Analogue's products, I like the MiST and MiSTer projects.  But I'm not sure why the MiSTer folks are getting bent out of shape over some of that work potentially being ported over to the Pocket. It's a defining characteristic of OSS. If you release code to the public and say anyone can use it (within the terms of the license), you can't really get upset when others do just that.

Edited by Laner
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1 minute ago, Guspaz said:

Essentially all open source code runs on closed-source hardware, the vast majority of them relying on closed-source firmware blobs. I don't see how the DE-10 Nano is any different in that regard than the Analogue Pocket.

In this case, no. But you may not be that surprised how many folks do it grudgingly, and complain heavily about the dependency on the closed source kernel blobs.

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9 minutes ago, Guspaz said:

Essentially all open source code runs on closed-source hardware, the vast majority of them relying on closed-source firmware blobs. I don't see how the DE-10 Nano is any different in that regard than the Analogue Pocket.

Thats the thing, it isn't different.   Analogue just gets singled out for some reason.  

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1 hour ago, dj_convoy said:

Just what we need; drama from a new source. I certainly don't mean you cats discussing it; I just mean needless drama about porting cores over. Analogue isn't going to hold a gun to anybody's head, and it's up to the authors of the cores or others who understand them if they get ported or not.

 

This should be good, fun news, not more typical "evil corporations arrrggghh" stuff.


The problem I see is that OSS falls into two very broad software camps:
 

GNU-GPL-Stallman, where anything and everything not GPL is evil. This is what some of the MiSTer people sound like.

 

BSD-PublicDomain-Preservation, where the core issue is making the software available perpetually without barriers(eg legacy hardware, operating systems, system exclusives, etc)

 

The world benefits regardless of which camp produces software. The GPL crowd however actively villainize anyone who doesn’t use the GPLv3 license because their goal is to have the source code stay public, regardless of security, investment  or other incentives. That tends to work out good for preservation of game engines and software tools, but is antithesis to creative content like game assets and scenario code/script since it means anyone can recompile it, making it impossible to retain control over compatibility and data mining.

 

On the other side, where software and hardware are allowed to have a mix of open (BSD/MIT/PD) and closed code, means there is less effort to get a project to market. But at the same time there are bad actors out there that actively pillage the public domain to sell you things you can get for free if you simply knew how to compile it. 

 

Where MiSTer and Analogue come in is that the latter is building a platform of a known quality and lower barrier to entry than even the rubbish counterfeit game consoles and copier devices have ever been able to do. It may feel like sour grapes, but unless people want to pay around $1000 to get the experience of a 30 year old hardware it’s unlikely that FPGAs will come down in price short of Intel deciding to build its own FPGA retail platform.

 

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The extra thing is that the docked experience outputs 4k. The Cyclone 10, to my knowledge, supports HDMI 2.0. This coupled with a good CRT filter on an OLED would be a pretty amazing experience. 4k and some of the filters you can use on PC emulators make the games look very, very close to an actual PVM when used on an OLED.

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53 minutes ago, PearlJammzz said:

The extra thing is that the docked experience outputs 4k. The Cyclone 10, to my knowledge, supports HDMI 2.0. This coupled with a good CRT filter on an OLED would be a pretty amazing experience. 4k and some of the filters you can use on PC emulators make the games look very, very close to an actual PVM when used on an OLED.

The Dock does not output 4K.   I believe you are misinformed.  

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