Retroblox

[Keatah]

These kinds of projects remind me of the guy that lived in the apartment next to me. This back in the pre-dotcom days more or less.

 

Anyways, he got wind of my computer building skills and magically found of a source motherboards. Most had them had the onboard IDE ports blown from cable reversal or somesuch mis-handling.

 

It was my job, in this new "business venture", to build computers from these scrounged up parts and he would sell them. Sooner or later customers got angry started coming back and some loitered in the parking lot till he refunded the money.

 

I had a sense of anonymity because I could hide behind the frontman. But it wasn't really honorable and all that - selling computers with known bad components. Seems all these business "types" get this vision stuck in their head and push and abuse tech to their ends.

 

The guy went on to burn-through 2 more techs and then all of a sudden simply moved out and that was that. I guess the same thing is happening here. Except there'a a lot of barking on the internet and a lot of people getting entertained by the drama.

[youxia]

Rob Wyatt = Keyser Soze?

[Flojomojo]

Rob Wyatt = Keyser Soze?

 

I've never seen Rob Wyatt and Steve Woita in the same room together. Just sayin'.

[Keatah]

Gotta love how the patent contradicts itself in basic technological facts and goals. The last part of 0003 and beginning of 0004. How it says that video conversion (to HDMI and modern standards) is undesirable and basically leads to an un-authentic experience.

 

But all of a sudden, MODULES, like magic, make the ugliness of conversion seem like the cat's ass. It also says that a base module can be consistent in its conversion. Well of course it can. But is it authentic? No.

 

The only authentic experience is the original console and a period-correct vintage display, like CRT.

 

The inventor is dumb enough to think this will work to a gamer's satisfaction - and a whole entourage of stupidity follows along. The Patent Office is dumb enough to not see through something that even I could..

 

And the gamer blissfully has wet dreams about this vaporware.

Edited September 13, 2018 by Keatah

[philyso]

The company had hired several Hardware Engineers over the course of the Eric's tenure, all which failed one way or another at delivering the technology that Bryan wanted.

This kinda explains why 'hybrid emulation' has been abandonned. Again, not so surprising, that idea was flawed from the start.

 

He ended up leaving because he was working 18 hour days with a promise that Bryan had made to deliver a whole suite of in-house emulators which fell squarely on Eric to produce, despite him constantly describing what a difficult task that would be.

Again, this sounds like typical manager pressuring his employees to meet some unrealistic promised goal and deliberately not wanting to care about technical details and difficulties.

 

It seems Mednafen dev was also involved (they mentionned it in one of their twit when saturn support was initially announced and it's a multi-console emulator, so....), can you confirm?

 

He ended up finishing a couple emulators but ultimately left because he felt he was up against a wall and not able to be heard about the realistic expectations.

Now the real question that comes to my mind would be what is the current state of the product and how many of the emulated systems that are advertised for launch (in 6 months!) are currently operational? Seems to me the preorder campaign was launched in urge because they needed funds for development, but the system is likely far from being ready yet.

 

Thanks anyway, this was quite necessary in my opinion to clear some things up.

Edited September 13, 2018 by philyso

[Keatah]

As far as reading cartridges directly. This is 2018. We have processors capable of executing 10's of BOPS. And the pissant data in a vintage game cartridge can sit entirely inside the many varied buffers scattered throughout the chip's architecture. Not to mention the comparatively (to a cart) spacious L1 cache. Then there's the L2 cache..!

 

Furthermore, modern chips can execute thousands or millions of instructions in the time it takes for a single signal to propagate across a vintage 6502 die.

 

So why has direct cartridge reading not become a thing? The existing APIs are bloated and stacked on upon the other 10 layers deep. This consumes a processor's time 100x or 1000x to the point of the user becoming frustrated. And developers are going use that ecosphere to bit-bang a processor to its full potential? Yah, right.

 

In other words, direct cartridge reading would require a whole new set of streamlined tools and APIs. And lesser of them too.

[godslabrat]

As far as reading cartridges directly. This is 2018. We have processors capable of executing 10's of BOPS. And the pissant data in a vintage game cartridge can sit entirely inside the many varied buffers scattered throughout the chip's architecture. Not to mention the comparatively (to a cart) spacious L1 cache. Then there's the L2 cache..!

 

Furthermore, modern chips can execute thousands or millions of instructions in the time it takes for a single signal to propagate across a vintage 6502 die.

 

So why has direct cartridge reading not become a thing? The existing APIs are bloated and stacked on upon the other 10 layers deep. This consumes a processor's time 100x or 1000x to the point of the user becoming frustrated. And developers are going use that ecosphere to bit-bang a processor to its full potential? Yah, right.

 

In other words, direct cartridge reading would require a whole new set of streamlined tools and APIs. And lesser of them too.

The only way it could happen would be to machine-level-code for one specific set of hardware (that you don't, you know, change at the last second).

 

It would would beautifully... until that chipset went OOP, then it would be useless. The entire cycle would take less than two years. In other words, by the time you wrote the emulator, the hardware you were using it on would be dead and buried.

 

This is why hardware abstraction became a thing in the first place.

[elmer]

A close friend of the former CTO of Playmanji who left a couple months back, posted this on Discord and wanted someone to share this information here.

Thank you for posting this, I really, really appreciate actually getting some "close-to-the-horse's-mouth" information after all of these months.

 

I'm just sorry that it took some speculation, including presumably my post, in order to actually get more information about this project.

 

I apologize to Eric for incorrectly calling him the creator of the massively-hyped "Hybrid Emulation" technology, even though his name is prominent on the patent; and for then speculating that it could have been the failure of Eric's work with that technology which caused the recent changes in the Polymega's specs.

 

 

The picture that is painted in the post is far, far more interesting than that, and honestly, it doesn't make Playmaji as a company sound good, and it absolutely doesn't absolve Eric from his part as the CTO and co-founder of the company, at the time when the CEO of the company was making declarations and promises that Eric knew were outside his area of expertise, and that Eric couldn't deliver on.

 

 

At the end of the day, the blame-game isn't even vaguely important right now.

 

 

What is important, is that the company is looking for considerable pre-order money from the public, in order to manufacture something that is substantially different from what they have actually demonstrated to have had working, even giving all of the misgivings that many of us had about what had really been demonstrated.

 

That seems pretty dishonest to me.

 

 

P.S.

 

Does anyone have any idea what the complaint of "doxxing" and "stalking" in that post are in reference to?

 

I can't believe that it's in reference to the earlier posting of Eric's public LinkedIn profile. Playmaji were certainly gung-ho on publishing Eric's full name and his previous work experience when they wanted to assure people of their "Industry Veteran" credentials.

[dj_convoy]

 

At the end of the day, the blame-game isn't even vaguely important right now.

 

 

What is important, is that the company is looking for considerable pre-order money from the public, in order to manufacture something that is substantially different from what they have actually demonstrated to have had working, even giving all of the misgivings that many of us had about what had really been demonstrated.

 

That seems pretty dishonest to me.

 

 

This, this, one thousand times this.

Edited September 13, 2018 by dj_convoy

[Eltigro]

I'm going to start a kickstarter with a amphibious car prototype, then when all is said and done, just sell them a boat.

[dj_convoy]

I'm going to start a kickstarter with a amphibious car prototype, then when all is said and done, just sell them a boat.

Don't forget to get mad at the boat forum when they all point out how impractical an amphibious car is.

[godslabrat]

Don't forget to get mad at the boat forum when they all point out how impractical an amphibious car is.

After that, I'm going to market an inner tube with wheels, and everyone you ripped off will flock to me, saying "He's the real deal! Have faith! It's my money! Just wait, you'll see!"

[dj_convoy]

Then a mystery dude will drop up on the boat forum, talk about he's a tight compadre with Tigro, and mock everyone for being critical.

[SegaSnatcher]

Another big problem was they were having overheating issues with their original lower powered quad core chip at E3, now imagine what kind of issues they will have trying to stuff a chip that requires over 3x the power into the same form factor? Unless they figure out a proper cooling system they might have to revert back to the original chip and basically remove Saturn support, but then they are potentially looking at tons of refunds.

How they are going to ship this product on time and have it properly function is going to take a miracle.

Edited September 13, 2018 by SegaSnatcher

[godslabrat]

Based on what I've seen the past two weeks, I can't believe either of the prototypes they've demoed were viable representations of the production machine. R-Blo was sticking whatever they could under the table to make it "work" for display purposes. So the overheating at E3 isn't a big deal, because at no point was that ever going to be the production unit anyway.

[SegaSnatcher]

Polymega just uploaded this 25 minute video of unedited Saturn footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHyDVMJs3xA

[godslabrat]

Also: alleged "uncut Saturn footage".

 

[SegaSnatcher]

Also: alleged "uncut Saturn footage".

 

I'm such a noob, how do you embed youtube videos here?

[godslabrat]

I just paste the link. I think there's a media tag or something, I never use it.

[Flojomojo]

Supposedly played on the Polymega itself. I haven't had much experience with Yabuse (which I assume is the emulator in question) but that does indeed look to be running authentic resolution and accurate speed, maybe even a little faster than stock.

 

It's weird to think those games are 20+ years old. When they were new, twenty years before was before the Atari 2600 game out.

 

Still skeptical because they're sketchy AF.

[Eltigro]

My Amphicar 2000 will have no problem with cooling. Its got water cooling.

 

Ill put out a demo video soon. Itll mostly be footage of the actual Amphicar 2000, but theres a snippet in there of the Spirit of Australia II jet boat that was in the wrong folder...

[enoofu]

Supposedly played on the Polymega itself. I haven't had much experience with Yabuse (which I assume is the emulator in question) but that does indeed look to be running authentic resolution and accurate speed, maybe even a little faster than stock.

 

It's weird to think those games are 20+ years old. When they were new, twenty years before was before the Atari 2600 game out.

 

Still skeptical because they're sketchy AF.

Guardian Heroes and Sega Rally seem to be running a lot faster then stock as some of the the sound effects seem to have a Speed Racer vide to it

[SegaSnatcher]

Supposedly played on the Polymega itself. I haven't had much experience with Yabuse (which I assume is the emulator in question) but that does indeed look to be running authentic resolution and accurate speed, maybe even a little faster than stock.

 

It's weird to think those games are 20+ years old. When they were new, twenty years before was before the Atari 2600 game out.

 

Still skeptical because they're sketchy AF.

Its actually the Mednafen emulator. And this was confirmed through a tweet Polymega since deleted thanking the creator.

[DurradonXylles]

Its actually the Mednafen emulator. And this was confirmed through a tweet Polymega since deleted thanking the creator.

 

Wouldn't happen to have a screenshot of that tweet, would you?

[cacophony]

 

Wouldn't happen to have a screenshot of that tweet, would you?

 

No screenshot, but I posted the text of tweet on resetera: "We'll release some videos soon but it's full speed thanks to our pal Ryphecha who implemented it."