FPGA Based Videogame System

[roots.genoa]

Apart from the dock firmware, I think everything relies on Analogue OS 1.2(?) that is supposed to bring every feature promised but also third party cores. And a lot of us think the JB will happen after, since it will probably be based on it (it's an alternate firmware after all). But we don't know why the new firmware is still not available; were some features too ambitious? Is it a legal problem because third party cores imply ROMs? I guess Kev knows but he clearly won't tell me that kind of thing.

Personally I'm not too bothered, because I don't have a dock yet anyway and I already have multiple GB/GBA games to play. I want the NGPC and PCE adapters, but I'm in no hurry. The former is not that urgent anymore since I got the NGPC compilation on Switch anyway.

[cacophony]

8 hours ago, spoonman said:

Finally. Does anyone know if there will still be a way for developers to port their own FPGA cores to the Pocket? Or was that a pipe dream to lure people into thinking this would become something of a portable MiSTer? I know I've thought that it would be pretty amazing to have various 8-bit and 16-bit console cores show up on the Pocket. Perhaps even Kevtris would be nice enough to bring his 20 or so cores over to the Pocket. It would certainly make this portable even more desirable. 

 

I assume that's still the eventual plan but:

 

 

Jotego is one of the most active devs in the MiSTer community, and has 2,924 patreon supporters: https://www.patreon.com/topapate

So if Analogue hasn't engaged with him they probably haven't reached out to anyone.

[spoonman]

I just wish Analogue had better support for their products. They started out strong, with Kevin addressing almost every bug and request with a fix within days, if not hours, but I think maybe he burned out on all of the new products and cores Chris had him working on. I recall hearing that Analogue hired more people to help out, but it seems like since that day there has been less updates. IIRC, there are still bugs on the Super Nt and Mega Sg that seem to have been abandoned.

 

I know it's still far better than a company such as, say, Retro-Bit would do, but if Analogue is going to advertise "perfect simulation", or however they are wording it, they need to eradicate everything so it's 1:1 with the original.

 

I'd also love to see a jailbreak for the Analogue Pocket, since my Everdrive flashcart doesn't work on it. The same accessory which works flawlessly on all of my Nintendo Game Boy systems. So that's a bit disappointing. As well as the support for all of the 8Bitdo 2.4g controllers.

 

I bought extras of those in preparation for receiving the Pocket/Dock. It just seems like they should be much further along on the front end/settings, with all of the hardware delays. I'm hoping Kevin hasn't moved onto the Analogue Duo, or just "moved on".. Which would be a major blow to Analogue. 

[+Gemintronic]

kevtris responded last year to some of my genesis homebrew playing music too fast on the Mega SG.  The sound driver I was using was old and didn't play nice on clone systems.  Don't know if a solution was found but he seemed very interested in improvements to the product. 

 

Been using the MiSTer in the meantime as the genesis core fixed the issue a week or two later.

[Atariboy]

What's the trick to use cheat codes on the Super Nt? I've gotten sick of trying to legitimately complete a scenario in SimCity and decided to cheat (The Detroit scenario) in order to move on to the unlockable Las Vegas scenario, but no codes that I enter seem to actually do anything. 

 

I could of course always use my actual Game Genie (If it still works after 20 years or so of idleness), but I'm curious just what the heck I'm doing wrong. 

Edited May 8, 2022 by Atariboy

[F34R]

Yeah, Analogue has pretty much soured me from buying anything else.  Lack of communication and updates just doesn't sit well with me.

[F34R]

Maybe they should do a kickstarter thing for the update lol.  

[Fester]

On 2/29/2020 at 10:21 AM, Reaperman said:

I believe I got my settings from a 'my life in gaming' vid. (probably this one)

IIRC the 2600/7800 scaling settings were a little illogical and needed extra fiddling.  It was so long ago I can't remember the exact details on that one. 

Generally handhelds are super easy since they've got square pixels, so you just make it as big as you can, while TV consoles get whatever integer scaling is somewhere around the aspect ratio you kept your TV on BITD. (Opinions vary greatly, but the my life in gaming vid above gets pretty close for me)

 

I'm sure some of my settings are still wrong even after all this time.  I've never even seen an adventure vision, so I suspect I've got its aspect ratio a bit off.  That's a really neat display.  The oddball systems of NT Mini are really my favorite parts. 10 years ago ask me if I ever thought I'd be playing watara supervision at 1080p with a full arcade controller.

 

For the difficulty switches it's l/r on the 8bitdo controller.  I don't believe it can be done with regular NES controllers, and it's required to unpause burgertime, koolaid man etc. (link)

So, I got the Raphnet SNES to NES adapter, 8BitDo SN30 2.4ghz controller, and NT Mini Noir (JB6.6).

The L & R buttons don't work to change difficulty settings on the Atari 2600 core. I have to manually set it once entering the core & the setting defaults back to nothing checked once I leave the core, which somehow creates super difficulty in some games. No clue how that works.

 

Can anyone confirm the 2.4ghz SNES controller L and R buttons don't work?

[Reaperman]

testing on Noir jb6.2 with raphnet adapter and sn30 wireless (and also an ntt data controller I had handy).

 

L/R buttons unpause burgertime, just like the included controller on the V1 NT mini did, meaning they're actuating the difficulty switch.  Further looking at it--that difficulty setting persists when loading other roms, and going back to burgertime (meaning game remembers to start unpaused), but does not persist when reloading the core.

 

BTW, anyone know if I'm missing anything huge between JB6.2 and JB6.6? Or just minor bugfixes in some games?

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Reaperman

[Fester]

20 hours ago, Reaperman said:

testing on Noir jb6.2 with raphnet adapter and sn30 wireless (and also an ntt data controller I had handy).

 

L/R buttons unpause burgertime, just like the included controller on the V1 NT mini did, meaning they're actuating the difficulty switch.  Further looking at it--that difficulty setting persists when loading other roms, and going back to burgertime (meaning game remembers to start unpaused), but does not persist when reloading the core.

 

BTW, anyone know if I'm missing anything huge between JB6.2 and JB6.6? Or just minor bugfixes in some games?

 

Thanks for the response and testing. Is that SN30 bluetooth or 2.4ghz? I've confirmed it works with bluetooth controllers, but haven't for the 2.4ghz.

[Reaperman]

20 hours ago, Fester said:

Thanks for the response and testing. Is that SN30 bluetooth or 2.4ghz? I've confirmed it works with bluetooth controllers, but haven't for the 2.4ghz.

Yep, the SN30 I used was a 2.4ghz unit. Though it occurs to me that unpausing burgertime really only tests the left difficulty switch, the snes L-button sets left difficulty to A (paused, core default), and the R-button sets left difficulty to B (unpaused). 

 

Per the V2/noir jailbreak's notes, it looks right difficulty would have to be tested from the 2p port, though I honestly don't know 2600 well enough to know a good test for right difficulty. Also in those notes, it appears both switches default to hard on core load.

 

That post you quoted has a (link) which seems to indicate a change in plans. It sounds like the initial idea was for the L-button changing left difficulty, R-button changing right, but then there's really no indication what they're set at then. I also wonder if the NT Mini V1's included 8bitdo N30 BT may have had right-difficulty on player 1's L2/R2, since that controller had the extra buttons. I've never had anything but problems getting that N30 to work, so I can't easily test that.

Edited May 21, 2022 by Reaperman

[bikerspade]

 

[Austin]

Have they announced an update on Super NT stock and progress on the DUO systems?

[NE146]

17 minutes ago, Austin said:

Have they announced an update on Super NT stock and progress on the DUO systems?

No announcement, but the Super NTs were back in stock last August 2021 and lasted for a number of months until Oct/Nov or something. So if I was to guess when the next restock happens, I'd say at best late summer, or around the fall if we're lucky. Just guessing though ? As for any Duo stuff I wouldn't hold my breath anytime soon, but Analogue likes to surprise, but they're also slow.

Edited May 28, 2022 by NE146

[Austin]

1 hour ago, NE146 said:

No announcement, but the Super NTs were back in stock last August 2021 and lasted for a number of months until Oct/Nov or something. So if I was to guess when the next restock happens, I'd say at best late summer, or around the fall if we're lucky. Just guessing though ? As for any Duo stuff I wouldn't hold my breath anytime soon, but Analogue likes to surprise, but they're also slow.

Hopefully sometime soon. Mega SG systems were restocked in April and I was able to grab one.

[Steven Pendleton]

On 5/29/2022 at 4:12 AM, Austin said:

Have they announced an update on Super NT stock and progress on the DUO systems?

I've been thinking about selling my Super Nt (and Mega Sg, for that matter, and possibly the Nt mini Noir), actually. Normally I'd offer it to you if you wanted it, but I'm not sure if shipping to the USA has gone back to normal. I don't think it has. If it hasn't, the cheapest way to ship there that I know of is DHL, which will cost about 8600 yen. If you want to eat a potentially ridiculous shipping charge, I won't stop you, though!

[spoonman]

On 5/27/2022 at 11:50 AM, bikerspade said:

 

 

"FPGA Development"

I wonder if this is where they might start allowing developers to work on porting FPGA cores to the Pocket.

 

I'd personally like to see the Memories beta, but I think this is more appreciated with a jailbroken Pocket, which we need.. Especially since there is still no ETA on the Atari Lynx, Neo•Geo Pocket Color, or PC Engine/TG-16 cart adapters. 

 

[Atariboy]

I thought the Mega Lo Mania bug on the Super Nt was fixed back about when the system first launched (Several pixels on the intro screen with the sword are misplaced and appear at the top of the screen)? Happening for me on the latest firmware in both the European and Super Famicom roms.

 

If it was indeed resolved at one point like I thought, it's interesting that a once fixed bug is again broken. But not the first time I've heard of that happening. 

Edited June 2, 2022 by Atariboy

[bikerspade]

On 6/2/2022 at 5:07 AM, Atariboy said:

I thought the Mega Lo Mania bug on the Super Nt was fixed back about when the system first launched (Several pixels on the intro screen with the sword are misplaced and appear at the top of the screen)? Happening for me on the latest firmware in both the European and Super Famicom roms.

 

If it was indeed resolved at one point like I thought, it's interesting that a once fixed bug is again broken. But not the first time I've heard of that happening. 

I don't see that bug listed on the issue tracker. Maybe create an issue ticket there?

[Atariboy]

Those don't get looked at and addressed, so there's no point.

 

I mostly posted out of surprise that a once fixed bug is now rebroken (Digital Foundry Retro found it on the lead up to the Super Nt launch and it was quickly fixed).

[blzmarcel]

On 5/4/2022 at 4:16 AM, roots.genoa said:

Is it a legal problem because third party cores imply ROMs?

I don't see why this should be an issue at all when there exists the likes of EverDrive, Retro USB's PowerPak, and other flash carts, as well as the MiSTer FPGA and other FPGA systems, and hardware that is based around RetroArch/libretro and other emulators, all of which allow one to use ROMs, some as the only or primary method for loading titles, and I've yet to see any sort of trouble there. I'm genuinely curious: why should Analogue need to worry about that when it doesn't appear to be a problem for others?

 

These days, ROM support should be consider essential. The ability to use carts is nice, indeed, though it also makes sense to preserve original carts which (especially ones from the '70s and '80s) can start having issues due to age and wear. And especially for the Pocket, it makes so much more sense to have a large library on single flash media than to carry around carts and adapters, especially for cores for non-portable systems like the NES that had carts that were quite large, or NeoGeo (toting a few of those around is like carrying a sack of bricks.) Also, is it not reasonable to expect such an expensive device to be able to more than RetroArch + an M30 on my phone can do, as far as being able to carry around a complete library of games for systems from the late 70s to the early 90s (aka, the golden age of video gaming) ?

[Toth]

There are also small indie devs making games for some of those old systems which is another reason to have ROM support.

Edited June 8, 2022 by Toth

[roots.genoa]

3 hours ago, blzmarcel said:

I don't see why this should be an issue at all when there exists the likes of EverDrive, Retro USB's PowerPak, and other flash carts, as well as the MiSTer FPGA and other FPGA systems, and hardware that is based around RetroArch/libretro and other emulators, all of which allow one to use ROMs, some as the only or primary method for loading titles, and I've yet to see any sort of trouble there. I'm genuinely curious: why should Analogue need to worry about that when it doesn't appear to be a problem for others?

Because piracy is illegal.

I agree ROMs are convenient to play homebrew games, especially during development or if they're not released as physical carts, but we all know people will use that feature to download and play games illegally. Of course most people do it anyway and they'll never be in trouble because no publisher will sue thousands of gamers, but as a company, Analogue won't endorse it officially. MISTer is not a company so they don't care, they just provide tools for free. Regarding flashcarts manufacturers, I think only the ones for current systems are targeted by lawsuits. But that doesn't make downloading ROMs of old games legal. It may seem stupid and/or unfair, but that's the law. ?‍♂️

[blzmarcel]

45 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

Because piracy is illegal.

Having a collection of ROMs does not equal piracy. For example, there are many straight forward ways to dump your own cartridges available these days.

[+Gemintronic]

19 minutes ago, blzmarcel said:

Having a collection of ROMs does not equal piracy. For example, there are many straight forward ways to dump your own cartridges available these days.

 

There are people who feel strongly about ROMz and feel justified in downloading anything even currently sold homebrew.  There are companies that will sue if another company allows ROMs of any sort on their devices.  Neither are fully in the right.  But, here we are.