FPGA Based Videogame System

[Steven Pendleton]

2 minutes ago, CZroe said:

3 hours ago, SlCKB0Y said:

Didn’t they already state it was $200? I could have dreamed that.

I assume they will announce the price when they open up preorders. This is a weird one since they didn't do that during the product announcement like they typically do.

They already announced it at $199.99.

 

https://www.analogue.co/pocket/

 

Bottom of page.

Edited May 6, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[CZroe]

They already announced it at $199.99.
 
https://www.analogue.co/pocket/
 
Bottom of page.

Thanks. Just waiting on the preorder then.

Hopefully they have a cheaper supplier for those screens.

[Steven Pendleton]

19 minutes ago, CZroe said:

Thanks. Just waiting on the preorder then.

Hopefully they have a cheaper supplier for those screens.

I should hope so if they are looking for something with a bigger profit margin. If not... that's up to Analogue.

[Slipard]

Obviously, they have a deal according to the number of units they are going to produce and get better prices behind the curtain. Also, remember part of their benefit is made through the shipping rates...

Edited May 6, 2020 by Slipard

[Steven Pendleton]

51 minutes ago, Slipard said:

Obviously, they have a deal according to the number of units they are going to produce and get better prices behind the curtain. Also, remember part of their benefit is made through the shipping rates...

Their shipping is weird. I guess people are paying like a ton of cash to get their stuff shipped from the USA to the USA. Meanwhile I pay like $35 to get their stuff shipped to Tokyo. That's basically identical to what I pay to get stuff shipped from Amazon USA, and Analogue is about as fast as Amazon. Both times I bought something from Analogue, it showed up in less than 4 days. Still wondering how the hell Amazon USA got me my PS4 Sakura Wars the day after it launched in the US, and that's not even counting the difference in time zones or the fact that I forgot to charge my debit card and paid for it like a day after Amazon told me to, so I basically got it on US launch day even despite that. I'd love to see Analogue beat that speed.

 

Okay, disregard. I checked my emails and it was actually $49.99 for shipping. Still not bad for international shipping at that speed. Amazon is still faster and cheaper, though.

Edited May 6, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[Kaide]

1 hour ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Their shipping is weird. I guess people are paying like a ton of cash to get their stuff shipped from the USA to the USA. Meanwhile I pay like $35 to get their stuff shipped to Tokyo. That's basically identical to what I pay to get stuff shipped from Amazon USA, and Analogue is about as fast as Amazon. Both times I bought something from Analogue, it showed up in less than 4 days. Still wondering how the hell Amazon USA got me my PS4 Sakura Wars the day after it launched in the US, and that's not even counting the difference in time zones or the fact that I forgot to charge my debit card and paid for it like a day after Amazon told me to, so I basically got it on US launch day even despite that. I'd love to see Analogue beat that speed.

 

Okay, disregard. I checked my emails and it was actually $49.99 for shipping. Still not bad for international shipping at that speed. Amazon is still faster and cheaper, though.

 

To put it bluntly, because of things like vertical integration and Amazon's volume getting them deals with carriers they work with, Analogue will never be able to offer shipping as cheap as Amazon. For Amazon, their game is really fungible goods. You don't care how you get your copy of Sakura Wars, since they are all equivalent, for the most part. You care that you get a copy of Sakura Wars. So it makes a lot of sense for Amazons to play games with margins and integrate vertically to cut costs, and then convert shipping into a hidden cost baked into the MSRP when possible. It lets Amazon reap extra profits from customers that are cheaper to ship to. 

 

Analogue isn't a retailer in the sense that Amazon is, doesn't deal with the volume, and doesn't own their own logistics chain. They could roll the logistics costs into the advertised price like Amazon, but I guess for some reason they like having the advertised price be lower. It is an old-school way of doing things. The Super NT and Mega SG are both "under 200$". Roll in the costs (at least for US customers), and they can't claim that anymore, but they would get fatter margins from folks that are cheaper to ship to in the US. I can't really say if they should or not, they are both trade-offs. Would their sales drop at "$219" instead of "$189"? No idea. But the fact that they tend to run lean on stock in general suggests that they probably aren't hurting too much for a boutique company doing it as they do.

 

Another option is that they could use Amazon as the logistics company, but it looks like they'd have to bump the price up to around 230$ anyways just to cover the FBA fees (ignoring the costs of returns for a moment). So not really any better than using their existing logistics company. 

[Steven Pendleton]

4 minutes ago, Kaide said:

 

To put it bluntly, because of things like vertical integration and Amazon's volume getting them deals with carriers they work with, Analogue will never be able to offer shipping as cheap as Amazon. For Amazon, their game is really fungible goods. You don't care how you get your copy of Sakura Wars, since they are all equivalent, for the most part. You care that you get a copy of Sakura Wars. So it makes a lot of sense for Amazons to play games with margins and integrate vertically to cut costs, and then convert shipping into a hidden cost baked into the MSRP when possible. It lets Amazon reap extra profits from customers that are cheaper to ship to. 

 

Analogue isn't a retailer in the sense that Amazon is, doesn't deal with the volume, and doesn't own their own logistics chain. They could roll the logistics costs into the advertised price like Amazon, but I guess for some reason they like having the advertised price be lower. It is an old-school way of doing things. The Super NT and Mega SG are both "under 200$". Roll in the costs (at least for US customers), and they can't claim that anymore, but they would get fatter margins from folks that are cheaper to ship to in the US. I can't really say if they should or not, they are both trade-offs. Would their sales drop at "$219" instead of "$189"? No idea. But the fact that they tend to run lean on stock in general suggests that they probably aren't hurting too much for a boutique company doing it as they do.

 

Another option is that they could use Amazon as the logistics company, but it looks like they'd have to bump the price up to around 230$ anyways just to cover the FBA fees (ignoring the costs of returns for a moment). So not really any better than using their existing logistics company. 

I know. Still, it would be nice if everyone could have such fast shipping speeds. It would be perhaps mildly interesting to see Analogue's financial statements, but since they are a private company, they are not going to publish them.

Edited May 6, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[Slipard]

Amazon is really efficient, that's for sure. And I pay less taxes going through Amazon for import, too.

[Enragedwhale]

They managed to get a Mega SG to me in the U.K. in 36hrs recently. Almost seemed worth the $50.

 

On the other side of the scale they have sent my repaired SG back to me via USPS on the 2nd of April and it still hasn’t shown up. The only reason it was broken was because of the faulty GG adaptor.

[Steven Pendleton]

8 hours ago, Enragedwhale said:

They managed to get a Mega SG to me in the U.K. in 36hrs recently. Almost seemed worth the $50.

 

On the other side of the scale they have sent my repaired SG back to me via USPS on the 2nd of April and it still hasn’t shown up. The only reason it was broken was because of the faulty GG adaptor.

When I sent them my Mega Sg to have them examine it I think there was a period of 2~3 weeks where I didn't have it. I don't remember ever hearing anything from them saying that they had shipped it back to me. It just randomly showed up one day.

[bikerspade]

On 5/4/2020 at 2:31 AM, Atariboy said:

Top Gear.sfc for instance will be listed below Top Gear 2.sfc despite being the first game in the series. I'm not sure of conventions

It is sorting alphabetically; a space has a lower ASCII value than a period (and all other printable characters). You could add a trailing space so that 

Top Gear .sfc

will be listed before

Top Gear 2.sfc

as a period is less than the digit two.

[Drunk_Caterpillar]

My sorting system in this case was always to add the 1 to the file name:

Quote

Top Gear 1.sfc

Top Gear 2.sfc

More controversially, I treat words like "Super" as though they were "The" to keep series together.

Quote

Contra.nes
Contra, Super.nes

But everyone has their own sorting system!

Edited May 7, 2020 by Drunk_Caterpillar

[Enragedwhale]

13 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

When I sent them my Mega Sg to have them examine it I think there was a period of 2~3 weeks where I didn't have it. I don't remember ever hearing anything from them saying that they had shipped it back to me. It just randomly showed up one day.

I asked where it was and they sent a tracking number. They repaired it and had it back in the mail within a day so can’t fault them for that. Just wished they’d used a more reliable and faster service to send it back. This is mostly the fault of USPS and tbh with the way the world is you can’t even be too mad at them. I’m sure it’ll get here eventually and if not they’ll make it right. 

[cacophony]

On 5/6/2020 at 7:12 AM, Slipard said:

Obviously, they have a deal according to the number of units they are going to produce and get better prices behind the curtain. Also, remember part of their benefit is made through the shipping rates...

They subcontract the fulfillment/shipping to another company, so that company is the one making the profit on the shipping cost. Analogue doesn't have the manpower or expertise to efficiently get 20,000+ orders out to destinations all over the world.

Edited May 8, 2020 by cacophony

[jamon1567]

Thats fine, but there has to be a better option available. There are plenty of small companies selling things on the internet that dont charge $40 to ship a small package.

[cacophony]

32 minutes ago, jamon1567 said:

Thats fine, but there has to be a better option available. There are plenty of small companies selling things on the internet that dont charge $40 to ship a small package.

You're right, the shipping does seem awfully high in certain cases. And I'm sure there are cheaper fulfillment company options. But the company they use at least seems to do a pretty good job in that the packages arrive pretty quickly and are well protected. In my case shipping has always been ~$20, and when I priced the UPS rate for the same package it ended up being ~$15, so the $5 cost for fulfillment + packaging materials seemed reasonable.

Edited May 8, 2020 by cacophony

[jamon1567]

14 minutes ago, cacophony said:

You're right, the shipping does seem awfully high in certain cases. And I'm sure there are cheaper fulfillment company options. But the company they use at least seems to do a pretty good job in that the packages arrive pretty quickly and are well protected. In my case shipping has always been ~$20, and when I priced the UPS rate for the same package it ended up being ~$15, so the $5 cost for fulfillment + packaging materials seemed reasonable.

Well you're the only person I've heard of that has been getting $20 shipping, so consider yourself lucky I guess.

[cacophony]

Just now, jamon1567 said:

Well you're the only person I've heard of that has been getting $20 shipping, so consider yourself lucky I guess.

It has to do with distance from the fulfillment center. Everyone within about 1000 miles isn't paying much.

[Steven Pendleton]

For all of the crap Analogue gets for their shipping, the RetroUSB AVS has even worse shipping prices if you live outside the USA, which of course is the majority of the people of the world. $62 is my cheapest shipping option and $86 is the highest.

[Slipard]

As for Analogue shipping, if you can do better for your customer, do it!

 

As for RetroUSB shipping, glad I ordered my Nt Mini v2. I was frustrated at first to have missed the wagon on this one, but happy ending getting the better version in the end (anticipating questions: better because of the black color and because of the cart port; nothing really hype, just personal satisfaction).

Edited May 8, 2020 by Slipard

[simonbelmont78]

Hello everyone. Would anyone know who I can report to for a controller bug I've found recently? I've contacted Analogue support but they aren't understanding my report. I found out the Sega Genesis 3 controller buttons are not functioning. 

Edited May 8, 2020 by simonbelmont78

[Steven Pendleton]

4 minutes ago, Slipard said:

As for Analogue shipping, if you can do better for your customer, do it!

 

As for RetroUSB shipping, glad I ordered my Nt Mini v2. I was frustrated at first to have missed the wagon on this one, but happy ending getting the better version in the end (anticipating questions: better because of the black color and because of the cart port; nothing really hype, just personal satisfaction).

In my case AVS + insane shipping + Everdrive = about $100 less than the Nt Mini + Nt Mini shipping cost. I have a few unused SD cards sitting in my desk for whatever reason, so I decided to just spend the extra $100 to get the Nt Mini and not have to bother with the Everdrive while still getting more features (aside from interpolation) and support for a bunch of other systems. I still want to get some games for it, but since it can run things from the SD card, which the AVS can't do, it's not really needed. I'm sure the AVS is good, but for the price of getting it + all the games that I want or the Everdrive, I can just get the Nt Mini. Still need the FDS and a few FDS games, but those are easy to find anywhere in town and they are not expensive.

 

1 minute ago, simonbelmont78 said:

Hello everyone. Would anyone know who I can report to for a controller bug I've found recently? I've contacted Analogue support but aren't understanding my report. I found out the Sega Genesis 3 controller buttons are not functioning. 

Are you talking about the controller that comes with the Genesis 3 or a 3 button Genesis controller?

[simonbelmont78]

1 minute ago, Steven Pendleton said:

In my case AVS + insane shipping + Everdrive = about $100 less than the Nt Mini + Nt Mini shipping cost. I have a few unused SD cards sitting in my desk for whatever reason, so I decided to just spend the extra $100 to get the Nt Mini and not have to bother with the Everdrive while still getting more features (aside from interpolation) and support for a bunch of other systems. I still want to get some games for it, but since it can run things from the SD card, which the AVS can't do, it's not really needed. I'm sure the AVS is good, but for the price of getting it + all the games that I want or the Everdrive, I can just get the Nt Mini. Still need the FDS and a few FDS games, but those are easy to find anywhere in town and they are not expensive.

 

Are you talking about the controller that comes with the Genesis 3 or a 3 button Genesis controller?

The Genesis 3  6 button controller model MK-1470

[Steven Pendleton]

2 minutes ago, simonbelmont78 said:

The Genesis 3  6 button controller model MK-1470

Okay. Don't have one, can't help much. Make a video or something and send it to them. Also update your firmware to whatever the latest version is.

Edited May 8, 2020 by Steven Pendleton

[simonbelmont78]

2 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Okay. Don't have one, can't help much. Make a video or something and send it to them.

Ok. I'll try again but their representative told me to contact Sega.

Edited May 8, 2020 by simonbelmont78