You ever wish there was a pre nes console

[Jim Pez]

I would love a console that was designed with the same quality as a play station or xbox and could play old colleco, intellivision and atari games. I thought about getting one of those plug and play consoles but they all seem to get bad reviews. You would think with today's technology someone could make a good console that would play old pre nes games

[+GroovyBee]

You might want to investigate this thread (pinned at the top of this forum) :-

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/242970-fpga-based-videogame-system/

[Newsdee]

If running original carts is not a requirement, check out the MiST FPGA:

https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki

 

It now supports 20 computer systems and 10 consoles. And is fully open source hardware with quite a few devs involved.

[Flojomojo]

Or check out one of the "ultimate colecovision flashback" or "ultimate intellivision flashback" threads, in which ByteKnight offers to put a raspberry Pi and controller adapter into a retro style case for you, fully configured too. Seems like a good offer to me.

[spacecadet]

Another option is just a basic small HTPC running various emulators through some kind of front-end. That would take a little more setup on your part, but would probably be more configurable and would also be easier to update with new emulators or updated ones.

 

All these retro systems run on emulation anyway (well, 99% of them) so it's no more or less authentic.

 

Alternatively, if all you want is Coleco, Intellivision and Atari VCS games and you *do* want real carts, you could just buy either a Coleco Vision and Intellivision with a system changer for one of them, and then you'd just have two consoles that could play all the games you want.

[0078265317]

Yes but emulation is illegal so real carts would be nice.

[Jim Pez]

I was thinking of a console where you could get a DVD that would have all the old collecovision, atari 2600 and intellivision games good and bad. That way you wouldn't need to search for the carts or the games could be built in.

[Newsdee]

I was thinking of a console where you could get a DVD that would have all the old collecovision, atari 2600 and intellivision games good and bad. That way you wouldn't need to search for the carts or the games could be built in.

In the MIST and RPi you can use SD cards, more storage than DVDs.

[CatPix]

Yes but emulation is illegal so real carts would be nice.

No.

On such old hardware mentionned here, there isn't any onboard ROM that can be copyrighted, so the design of those systems are only hardware, and hardware copyright fall after 20 years (never wondered why there is now NES clones for sale everywhere without Nintendo going bonkers? It's because they can't legally oppose the sales of those systems since 2003).

You can use flash carts or anything you liek as long as you own a legal copy of the program, or if that program is in public domain, or that the original copyrighter allow downloading (such as Vectrex games : the multicarts are all legal tender since the games were put into public domain - some other editors did that, for example Amsoft for Amstrad CPC computers allow to download their games, etc...).

 

Emulation break certain legal barrier for systems that use internal ROM and software, such as the Philips CD-I, 3DO (that both use a ROM and an OS) the Playstation, and in a general matter all 32 bits and later systems, one exception might be the Nintendo 64. It's legal to emulate a Playstation hardware, but the internal ROM is copyrighted for like 90 years so you need to make your own copy of the ROM to make your emulation work. But the hardware emulation part is legal.