Retroblox

[FOX2600]

In theory looks cool. Questions still need answering.

 

Great PR btw smh

[DurradonXylles]

In theory looks cool. Questions still need answering.

 

Great PR btw smh

 

Oh you ain't seen nothing yet. I have a number of screenshots I'll be sharing in a little bit with my most recent conversations revolving around Polymega. I even straight up called Polymega out for removing their tweet thanking Mednafen's lead developer, and they not only didn't deny it they straight up tried to guilt trip me into stopping my tweets because, and I quote:

 

Also, supporting this project supports the authors for their hard work and also reinvests in to the cause of games preservation.

 

 

That was part of a tweet PolymegaHQ responded to me with when I made a few tweets telling others that they used Mednafen for the gameplay footage... Even though they deleted the tweet thanking the author of the emulator they used. This is top tier PR response, right here.

Edited September 14, 2018 by DurradonXylles

[godslabrat]

The outright hostility of whoever handles their social media, and Bryan in particular, is staggering. It's like he's lashing out because a dump truck full of cash hasn't just magically unloaded in his driveway. R-Blo... you promised something that wasn't possible, changed it into something no one really asked for, and argue with people who point out the stupidity of this. CAN THE ATTITUDE.

[dj_convoy]

It's stunning. They could have mitigated all of this if they had been normal, openminded and not so arrogant.

[DurradonXylles]

Well I was barking up the wrong tree, it was revealed that Ryphecha herself asked Polymega to delete their tweet thanking her, and also had a thread made on the Mednafen forum at the time of the tweet saying that licensing or private contract work should only be interpreted as that and not as any sort of partnership or endorsement of commercial projects.

 

https://twitter.com/notbobdog1/status/1037775012869099525

 

https://forum.fobby.net/index.php?t=msg&th=1728&start=0&

 

What's funny is that someone else had to tell me about this, and not Polymega themselves. I wouldn't have made two separate tweets about this if they admitted that they overstepped their bounds and assumed the working relationship they have with Mednafen/Ryphecha.

[godslabrat]

Q: has that been Mednafen's policy consistently, or are they making a point to distance themselves from PolyMega?

[elmer]

Q: has that been Mednafen's policy consistently, or are they making a point to distance themselves from PolyMega?

I don't know if it has ever come up before.

 

A lot of Mednafen's cores were originally derived from the work of other people, not just Ryphecha herself, although she's then modified that original code, extended it, improved it, and fixed bugs. The whole Mednafen package of emulators is under a GPL2 license, and it would be really hard for Polymega to license that and keep their whole closed-source, locked-down system.

 

But Ryphecha personally wrote Mednafen's Saturn emulation herself, and so she has the right to license that code to anyone that she wishes to, under whatever terms she wishes.

 

I guess that she just doesn't want her wonderful Mednafen project tarred with whatever fallout may come from Polymega, especially since she is unlikely to have any control of the hardware that they use, or if the whole experience sucks because they go-cheap and make changes to her code.

 

 

I'm going to assume (with no evidence, but it would follow the pattern of the project) that the Saturn footage that Polymega are currently showing is actually captured from a desktop PC running Mednafen, and not from their own new custom Intel board ... because there is no evidence that they've actually designed/built that new board yet.

 

 

If you look at Mednafen's hardware recommendations for Saturn emulation, Ryphecha recommends a quad-core Intel Haswell processor running at 3.3GHz (and 3.7GHz turbo), i.e. the Intel Core i5-4590, as the bare minumum.

 

Playmaji's desired use of a newer-but-dual-core processor Intel Pentium Gold G5500T with a fixed 3.2GHz clock would seem to leave them barely (if at all) meeting the minimum requirements for full-speed Saturn emulation.

 

Passmark gives the single-threaded performace of the i5-4590 @ 3.3GHz as 2114, and the single-threaded performance score of the G5500T @3.2GHz as 1878, i.e. 10% lower.

 

That doesn't sound like it bodes all that well for the Polymega's Saturn performance, especially with only 1 other core to run all the linux/sound/drm stuff vs the recommended 3 other cores.

[DurradonXylles]

Q: has that been Mednafen's policy consistently, or are they making a point to distance themselves from PolyMega?

 

There's nothing in the general documentation of Mednafen pertaining to endorsements. However, specific copyright and license notices on various modules contained in Mednafen state: "The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission." I have to imagine that the commercial licensing agreement for Mednafen never had to specify this because people who have licensed the software or asked the team to do private consulting never tried to act chummy toward them.

 

That's because it's contracting work, cut, dry, plain and simple. When you're asked to do such work there's a perceived professional attitude towards it, and the last thing you want is your employer to assume anything about your working relationship beyond what they pay you to do.

 

Long story short, I don't think Ryphecha made that forum post to distance herself or the Mednafen team from the project; instead I think that post was made for posterity since none of the other companies that have contracted them (which includes companies like Piko Interactive and Hyperkin, both of which have abused OSS copyright law) has ever tried to make a backdoor glowing endorsement out of their professional relationship before.

Edited September 14, 2018 by DurradonXylles

[DurradonXylles]

I'm going to assume (with no evidence, but it would follow the pattern of the project) that the Saturn footage that Polymega are currently showing is actually captured from a desktop PC running Mednafen, and not from their own new custom Intel board ... because there is no evidence that they've actually designed/built that new board yet.

 

If you look at Mednafen's hardware recommendations for Saturn emulation, Ryphecha recommends a quad-core Intel Haswell processor running at 3.3GHz (and 3.7GHz turbo), i.e. the Intel Core i5-4590, as the bare minumum.

 

Playmaji's desired use of a newer-but-dual-core processor Intel Pentium Gold G5500T with a fixed 3.2GHz clock would seem to leave them barely (if at all) meeting the minimum requirements for full-speed Saturn emulation.

 

Passmark gives the single-threaded performace of the i5-4590 @ 3.3GHz as 2114, and the single-threaded performance score of the G5500T @3.2GHz as 1878, i.e. 10% lower.

 

That doesn't sound like it bodes all that well for the Polymega's Saturn performance, especially with only 1 other core to run all the linux/sound/drm stuff vs the recommended 3 other cores.

 

Yeah, Polymega tried to point out their specs to me when I questioned in, and they put in the serial number of the Pentium Gold G5500T, which is a dual-core, four thread processor. The Core i5-4590, which is several years old now, already outperforms the newly released Pentium Gold in multiple ways. The fact of the matter is that when you compare the two, the budget-friendly Pentium will not compare to a Core series, even one that is already discontinued. I doubt the Mednafen Saturn core can be greatly optimized to work on budget x86 CPU to look half as good as the two gameplay videos would like to believe.

[derFunkenstein]

Well I was barking up the wrong tree, it was revealed that Ryphecha herself asked Polymega to delete their tweet thanking her, and also had a thread made on the Mednafen forum at the time of the tweet saying that licensing or private contract work should only be interpreted as that and not as any sort of partnership or endorsement of commercial projects.

 

https://twitter.com/notbobdog1/status/1037775012869099525

 

https://forum.fobby.net/index.php?t=msg&th=1728&start=0&

 

What's funny is that someone else had to tell me about this, and not Polymega themselves. I wouldn't have made two separate tweets about this if they admitted that they overstepped their bounds and assumed the working relationship they have with Mednafen/Ryphecha.

 

No, you're still barking up the right tree. It's still Playmaji/Polymega's fault. The tweet (as quoted) implied Ryphecha's endorsement. "who implemented it" implies "for Polymega" which is EXCEPTIONALLY misleading on their part. They never should have made that statement in the first place.

[DurradonXylles]

 

No, you're still barking up the right tree. It's still Playmaji/Polymega's fault. The tweet (as quoted) implied Ryphecha's endorsement. "who implemented it" implies "for Polymega" which is EXCEPTIONALLY misleading on their part. They never should have made that statement in the first place.

 

You're technically right, but I was meaning in terms of reasoning. I still blame Polymega's twitter for the snafu regardless, and still wish they were just upfront about the usage of Mednafen without presuming professional relationships with their contract workers.

 

As promised, here's what my day of twitter interactions with the Polymega twitter account, complete with some other interactions that were of importance.

 

 

I thought that these tweets would've gotten me banned by PolymegaHQ, but at this point I'm far from the only rando on twitter demanding that Playmaji actually show a prototype unit playing Saturn and other consoles. At the time of this post, there was several likes on both of my tweets and someone else even saying that any prototype unit playing Saturn would be more convincing than constantly seeing direct line footage

 

 

Here's the tweet where I found out about Ryphecha's request for Polymega to take down their chummy tweet, it seems I'm not the only snarky one.

 

 

Again, if the people running this twitter, along with Bryan Bernal himself, was just more honest and upfront about info, we would not be so damn critical of everything said on shown. The reason we dig for information is because the less that is told to prospective customers now means more nasty surprises later. Information should not need to be dug up if you're claiming to be on the up and up!

[derFunkenstein]

Maybe Bryan Bernal is the one running Twitter, since there's not much else for him to do but lament the fact he can't have what he wants.

[cybercylon]

Isn't Sega Saturn emulation still problematic and fickle under the best of circumstances?

[Silanda]

Isn't Sega Saturn emulation still problematic and fickle under the best of circumstances?

 

Can be. There's a few games that seem to be particularly tricky, and it's not necessarily the ones that you'd think would cause trouble. I'd like to see Virtua Fighter Remix running, as that one's problematic in Mednafen, and requires significant messing with the settings in SSF.

 

I see that quite a few people, myself included, have called on them to show camera footage of these games running on a prototype rather than direct capture footage, so it will be interesting to see if they oblige.

[DurradonXylles]

I wake up to two boosters trying to hound me about my criticisms. Good times. Here's another bunch of screencapped tweets, this time with only boosters from the last 16 or so hours.

 

Here are the only ones talking to Polymega directly, right after the Fighting Vipers video went live.

 

 

From here I start dealing with boosters. This tweet was simply there to set the record straight about Saturn emulation to one guy.

 

 

From here, boosters ahoy.

 

 

The Brit I'm arguing with is still trying to prove my skepticism wrong, he just responded to me a couple minutes before I wrote this. He's got something to prove, and yet has the hypocrisy to call me stubborn and entitled when all I want is Playmaji to be more straightforward with their rhetoric. Whatever, if he wants to play sucker, let him sink about 215 GBP into the Polymega. I just wish he'd stop being a child about me wanting transparency from the chaps he wants to trust his money to.

 

EDIT: Before anyone suggests it, I am going to start ignoring this guy from here on out. I put in a last couple of tweets responding to his blind optimism and am going to drop it since he says that I want the last word yet responds with some BS logic to everything I say.

Edited September 15, 2018 by DurradonXylles

[Flojomojo]

It's like the Ataribox boosters suggesting that the "burden of proof" is on the skeptics, not the hardware developers. Ridiculous on its face. It would take ten minutes to post some cam videos (not direct feed) showing the device in action, much less effort than all this verbal dodging.

[derFunkenstein]

I don't think I'd waste time arguing with the zealots, myself. But then again that's part of why I deleted my Twitter account. Now I can just live vicariously through AA members.

[DurradonXylles]

I don't think I'd waste time arguing with the zealots, myself. But then again that's part of why I deleted my Twitter account. Now I can just live vicariously through AA members.

Yep, cannot say I blame you. Mr. Ahmed just responded right as I muted him on Twitter, "Why are you even commenting if you're not planning on buying it? Nobody wants to hear your realistic criticism I am deeming as pessimism because your tweets are harshing my mellow."

Edited September 15, 2018 by DurradonXylles

[derFunkenstein]

That almost sounds like someone who's on the verge of canceling his preorder. "realistic criticism" indeed.

[godslabrat]

This is what sets off red flags. You're right, because of the hardware changes, the previous demos are irrelevant. I would argue they were NEVER relevant, but that's different issue. There has been no Public demo of the hardware that's up for pre-order now, all demos were for a product that no longer exists, and probably never did.

 

Thought: can we confirm that the specs listed are consistent with the dev board that was being fabricated a few months ago? Kevtris?

[derFunkenstein]

This is what sets off red flags. You're right, because of the hardware changes, the previous demos are irrelevant. I would argue they were NEVER relevant, but that's different issue. There has been no Public demo of the hardware that's up for pre-order now, all demos were for a product that no longer exists, and probably never did.

 

Thought: can we confirm that the specs listed are consistent with the dev board that was being fabricated a few months ago? Kevtris?

 

Forgot all about that. I would have to assume that this thing (the video you're referring to) no longer exists.

 

I wonder if Gamster81 has any regrets or if he thinks everyone forgot about his shill video from a year ago?

[Flojomojo]

I pity the fool who looks to Gamester81 for endorsements or advice. ??

[godslabrat]

 

Forgot all about that. I would have to assume that this thing (the video you're referring to) no longer exists.

 

I wonder if Gamster81 has any regrets or if he thinks everyone forgot about his shill video from a year ago?

I don't know about that. I'm thinking this wasn't a quick decision, and they wouldn't have sunk the money into making a dev board knowing it would be scrapped soon. There's a good chance they were telling us the dev board was the original design when, in fact, it was the new architecture.

 

As for Gamester81, I'm sure the check cleared.

[cybercylon]

 

Can be. There's a few games that seem to be particularly tricky, and it's not necessarily the ones that you'd think would cause trouble. I'd like to see Virtua Fighter Remix running, as that one's problematic in Mednafen, and requires significant messing with the settings in SSF.

 

I see that quite a few people, myself included, have called on them to show camera footage of these games running on a prototype rather than direct capture footage, so it will be interesting to see if they oblige.

 

I am not an expert on CPUs, but it seems like there is some agreement that it is going to be problematic to pull off Saturn emulation with the specs for their system. And it is not just getting games to run... some games might have glitches or not run very well at all.

 

I supposed it is possible that they might have some sort of prototype, but it is not running very well. So we get a Polymega front end running on a laptop and the games are running from that instead. Or this whole thing is a steaming pile... and we are still seeing a PC running a front end and doing emulation. Hence the complete lack of transparency.

 

I am siding with steaming pile at this point, because there are more examples of those than not.

 

So... looks like I'll just hang onto my Saturn and my clumsy way to hook it up.

[elmer]

Thought: can we confirm that the specs listed are consistent with the dev board that was being fabricated a few months ago? Kevtris?

See kevtris's thoughts on that board, and a picture of it, here ...

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/261689-retroblox/page-56?do=findComment&comment=4056440

 

... and my comment on his comment, here ...

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/261689-retroblox/page-56?do=findComment&comment=4056682

 

 

That dev board couldn't have been their main console board, because it had no ARM/Intel CPU, no RAM and no HDMI.

 

It was likely built for prototyping the FPGA code that would be used in each of their modules to interface/dump the cartridge, and read the original controller ports.

 

As kevtris pointed out, the components on that board are too expensive for it to be anything close to a shipable test board for the actual modules. That Spartan6 FPGA is over $60 just by itself!

 

 

The card-edge connector at the bottom of the board looks like it *might* be a standard connector that you could plug into a desktop PC somewhere, and so be consistent with their change in design specs, but someone else would be in a better position to say if that's likely.

 

Personally, I don't think so, because it looks more like a PC RAM SIMM/DIMM card edge than a PCI/PCI-E card edge.

 

I kinda suspect that it is left over from their original ARM-based-system plans.

 

We have no concrete confirmation of when that board was actually manufactured, or which of their many defunct hardware guys actually designed it.