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omnispiro

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This weird system has cut not just the load time to start, but load time to actual game play on a NGCD game down to a 1/2 minute from like 2-4 minutes instead which was then and now ridiculous.

I recall popping Neo CD games in a PC well over ten years ago now and running them with little load time. This is nothing new

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Well his enthusiasm is all well and good, but what will all of this cost?

<YAWN> <STRETCH>

 

He had a lot of enthusiasm for the Retro VGS, too.

 

I couldn't care less whether he is enthusiastic about something at this point.

 

He's a marketing-droid with no technical background.

 

 

And I'm not really concerned with the cost, yet. I assume that it will be as much as they think that they can get away with.

 

Remember, these guys aren't doing this to give back something wonderful to the gaming community ... they're trying to start a profitable business.

 

 

I'm more concerned with whether it ... a) really exists, b) does all that they claim that it does, c) does it legally and without ripping off other developer's emulators or BIOS software, d) doesn't break after 3 months because of a shoddy physical design and components.

 

 

The POLYMEGA guys still haven't released any real information that would satisfy me on any of those counts.

 

They're heavily in marketing-mode instead.

 

OK, that's their choice. As long as they're not out there asking for people's money, then I think that they have the right to play the game however they want.

 

<BACK-TO-SLEEP>

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I recall popping Neo CD games in a PC well over ten years ago now and running them with little load time. This is nothing new

I know, emulators right? But that's a PC, and many people don't want to either be stuck on their computer or have their computer part of their TV experience. It just never took off for most or everyone would have caught on into that decade old wave of media center computers that consoles (PS3/360) tried to emulate. A stand alone box that fires up NGCD games fast would be tempting, and this rollover would also affect any other CD based system with moderately annoying load times as well. I recall some TG CDs I had taking their sweet time or sticking loading up audio doing seeking which sucked but it wasn't a standard like with the Neo. Not trying to defend this bigfoot unicorn of a device at this point, but there is merit in making legit media on a console based device fire up far faster than originally intended.

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That Gamester81 video provided absolutely no new details. I still question that the system will be able to run ie Game Boy Carts through a Super Gameboy, which has no means to dump tne Gameboy ROM through the SNES slot. And flash carts would supposedly work but not be dumpable, yadayada...

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they went in the tank for months to come up with a new name because...x? and all they could come up with translates to "a lot of millions". says a lot about the brilliant minds behind this product.

 

who funded this crap behind the scenes? oh we all know...he's baaaaaaaaccccckkkk.

 

and that major video showing off no hardware just some mediocre android interface, after months of silence? what a joke.

 

some interesting ::cough bs:: comments from the shillster81 video.

 

Can I ask the big question about the BIOS used for the CD games? Reverse engineer or potential legal trap?

POLYMEGA will ship with custom HLE BIOS files for all of its supported systems. You can see an example of one of them in our Neo Geo CD video, posted earlier this week on our channel.

 

::wtf does that even mean hle bios? lol::

 

Will this work for ALL Games/Playstation Content? For example I've got a stack of the old PSX Demo Discs, will those show up in my collection complete with box art?

Eventually, yes. During the launch window you can expect the mainline releases in the JP / EU / NA collections to be supported.

 

::wait so what happened to "hybrid emulation" where everything played perfectly? what kind fo bios/emulation are they using if only certain games are supported, this is soooo dumb::

 

also they're claiming 0 to 1 ms input lag in 240p test suite?

Edited by Tusecsy
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Guys, even if this little box does everything it has said it can, which at this point I doubt, are we honestly going to pay $100+ for the main system and then $60 for each console addon? You'll be paying $500 by the time you've collected all of the add-on boxes, and most likely it's still just a shit retron with the same sleezeball tactics of stealing open sourced emulator code without credit.

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<YAWN> <STRETCH>

He had a lot of enthusiasm for the Retro VGS, too.

I couldn't care less whether he is enthusiastic about something at this point.

He's a marketing-droid with no technical background.

One among thousands..

 

 

Remember, these guys aren't doing this to give back something wonderful to the gaming community ... they're trying to start a profitable business.

 

When love of the hobby is not present, mediocrity is the outcome. Too many details and ineffable fun factors are simply left out. Compare that to some of the homebrewers and what they're cooking up these days.

 

 

I'm more concerned with whether it ... a) really exists, b) does all that they claim that it does, c) does it legally and without ripping off other developer's emulators or BIOS software, d) doesn't break after 3 months because of a shoddy physical design and components.

 

The POLYMEGA guys still haven't released any real information that would satisfy me on any of those counts.

They're heavily in marketing-mode instead.

OK, that's their choice. As long as they're not out there asking for people's money, then I think that they have the right to play the game however they want.

 

A lot of today's pre-release info pages and stuff look like marketing exercise for school. This one is no exception. Till I see a shipping product that's all it is. A marketing exercise.

 

---

 

I've noticed that when brochures and articles and reviews mention "it will", it's more often than not a statement that never happens.

 

At the same time I'm not interested in a product debut 6 months or a year away. It's too long, the hype builds, and the product never lives up to it all. I prefer the olden days, read EGM - buy game in a month. Loads of fun! Not all this pre-release crap.

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Guys, even if this little box does everything it has said it can, which at this point I doubt, are we honestly going to pay $100+ for the main system and then $60 for each console addon? You'll be paying $500 by the time you've collected all of the add-on boxes, and most likely it's still just a shit retron with the same sleezeball tactics of stealing open sourced emulator code without credit.

 

Dumb people who like to spend money, just to spend money

 

Hope someone opens this up & look what emulators they use

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I know, emulators right? But that's a PC, and many people don't want to either be stuck on their computer or have their computer part of their TV experience. It just never took off for most or everyone would have caught on into that decade old wave of media center computers that consoles (PS3/360) tried to emulate.

Remember them Convergence Computers of the mid 1990's like the Gateway Destination? The industry has been trying to mix TV + computer for like 30 years now. Get a fucking clue! It isn't gonna happen ever. Goes to show you how smart them marketing types are.

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That Gamester81 video provided absolutely no new details. I still question that the system will be able to run ie Game Boy Carts through a Super Gameboy, which has no means to dump tne Gameboy ROM through the SNES slot. And flash carts would supposedly work but not be dumpable, yadayada...

 

Well maybe flash carts can be modded or flashed to make them behave differently and become compatible.. Woot! Gonna flash ma'flash cart!

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There's a solution for that too. Have the flashcart firmware run a test to see if it is on genuine hardware, then have it switch to the appropriate mode. Or put a switch on them to go back and forth between real machine and machine-that-needs-dumps.

For an emulator with cart dumper hardware, all you'd need for flashcart is a pin adapter for SD card, with appropriate 5-3V level shifter. There was a GBA clone that had a "flash cart" that was naught but a pin adapter for the SD card. It supported a bunch of ROM formats IIRC.
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A message from the Libretro devs to anybody interested in these FPGA-based game/retro game consoles...

 

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spvhu2

 

 

 

FPGA is a smoke and mirrors field right now; everybody reinvents the wheel, nobody shares information on anything because everybody is just looking to peddle 'product' or to form some kind of business around it without giving consumers and the world at large anything back in the process, anybody can claim they invented something from scratch when it's just cobbled together from various copyleft sources, etc. Needless to say, both the tooling and the actual landscape itself is very anti-open. The aim of most of these boxes is to just cash in on a fashionable retro gaming market, and it needs a desperate shakeup.

Without saying much further, we are working on certain stuff that you will probably see announced later. Whatever we will do, one of our promises is that in much the same way we tried to fight against the attempts to commercialize emulation with RetroArch on mobile and the desktop and to keep everything fair, we will try to leave a positive effect on the FPGA landscape; even the level playing field, so that most of these proprietary boxes will lose their appeal. We put RetroArch on the Play Store for free, without ads, without any 'monetization SDKs', because it was the right thing to do. We are still to this day saying no to various monetization SDK providers who are flooding up our inbox who just want to 'leverage' our userbase, but our userbase is not there to be monetized and its privacy abused.

With RetroArch and libretro, the fact that it's open source means a win for hobbyist developers, it means a win for the community at large, since the public gets something back without having to pay so much as a dime. While the rest of the world seems these days to just aim for basic profit maximizing and couldn't care less about giving back to the public, we do believe it's important that RetroArch and libretro as a platform remains an open (as in libre) project much in the spirit of Linux and similar projects like that. We don't believe in creating TIVOized boxes which restrict your freedom and are just there merely to serve as a box for some service and which don't have any other decent secondary purpose otherwise.

Please keep an eye out on any future announcements when we are getting ready to reveal more about this. In any case, we just wanted you to know this before you go throwing all your money at some random kickstarter made by 'random company who used an AI to pick a new corporate logo for themselves'. Without naming any names and without singling anybody out, most of these guys are relying on basic FPGA smoke and mirrors to disguise the fact that it's simply the same thing millions of other people have already peddled. We will keep things open and transparent meanwhile when we are getting ready to announce stuff. The future of Libretro/RetroArch will not be TIVO'ized :)
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A message from the Libretro devs to anybody interested in these FPGA-based game/retro game consoles...

 

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spvhu2

 

 

I don't think the author knows what "smoke and mirrors" actually means.

 

Definition: the obscuring or embellishing of the truth of a situation with misleading or irrelevant information

Edited by cacophony
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I could almost say the title is click-baity. The gist of the article doesn't have anything to do with FPGA. But they use "FPGA" because hot-buzzword. In fact. More and more of these boxes rely on free emulators.

 

The first paragraph is wrong. FPGA developers aren't sharing information because of competition and getting the upper hand, but because the field is extraordinarily niche. Classic videogame emulation through software is small enough in the worldwide scheme of things. FPGA even smaller. Microscopic in fact.

 

The few FPGA efforts out there simply do not compare to the size of large collaborative projects like MAME or Libretro/Retroarch. Thus the sharing of information remains slow. It will change in time.

 

I do agree that emulation should be open and free. And I applaud their efforts at keeping it as such. But the monetization train has already left the station. There's all this kickstarter "boxes" that people just fall all over each other for. RetroN 77 is coming out. You get the privilege of paying $50 to run Emulator Stella..

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A message from the Libretro devs to anybody interested in these FPGA-based game/retro game consoles...

 

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spvhu2

 

 

hehe, lets put Reatroarch for free because is the right thing to do. So people can pirate other's IPs and play for free! You know, because is the right thing to do lol.

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I don't think the author knows what "smoke and mirrors" actually means.

Definition: the obscuring or embellishing of the truth of a situation with misleading or irrelevant information

 

It may have been used as a tongue-in-cheek expression. No one needs to bet on a kickstarter campaign to play classic games via emulation. No one.

 

When I'm commissioned to build an exotic state-of-the-art emulation rig for you. I don't profit. I show you the bill - and you pay the exact cost it cost me for parts. You're even welcome to get the parts and materials on your own and give them to me.

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