I've been following their facebook page for a while and they have now announced that their campaign has started. I might back them, but will just see how it goes first. They have a very high goal of 2 million dollars and I am doubtful that they will reach that goal. Currently they only are 3% funded.
I think the system is a cool idea and that they claim that it will be user friendly to develop on the system. Apparently every Retro VGS console can also be used as a development tool to make games. You can even sell the games you make on your own too which I am interested in.
However again the 2 mill goal will be hard to reach unless the word really gets out.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retro-vgs#/story
Erockbrox wrote:
2 million dollars
Yeahhh... Not going to happen... I'm just curious though, but if this FPGA thing is configurable, does that mean you could make your own supposed new 65xx chip? What kind of limits do these chips have? I still can't imagine how they work, because it sounds like some sort of transformer.
I've been following this project, and it's unfortunate but I don't think this fundraising has any chance of success at this point. They could create something great, but the way it's marketed is killing it. One big glaring problem is that they're wanting everyone to fund it, but they haven't even the beginnings of a prototype. They don't even know what chips will be in it, it's part of the stretch goal. There are reasons why places like Kickstarter strongly discourage (I've heard disallow, but I'm not sure) starting a campaign without a real prototype. And it's for the benefit of the producers as well as (if not more than) the backers. But that rule is why they switched to Indie Go Go at the last minute.
Espozo wrote:
Erockbrox wrote:
2 million dollars
Yeahhh... Not going to happen... I'm just curious though, but if this FPGA thing is configurable, does that mean you could make your own supposed new 65xx chip? What kind of limits do these chips have? I still can't imagine how they work, because it sounds like some sort of transformer.
Yes, with an FPGA you can make anything you want, within the limits of physics and the FPGA's capabilities. You won't be making a 1Ghz 6502, but something like 20-50Mhz should be attainable.
https://embeddedmicro.com/tutorials/mojo-fpga-beginners-guide/how-does-an-fpga-workBasically it is just logic, the same AND/OR/XOR you'd use in code. You can kinda imagine it like writing a program, but every instruction, table lookup, etc. is able to run at the same time, in a single instruction cycle. But that's pure chaos, in practice you would use a state machine to execute entire portions of your program on separate cycles, but in whatever sequence you specify (the state). It's just massively parallel. If that analogy makes sense.
The limit with FPGA is cost, particularly due to the interconnections required inside the chip that allows for such flexibility. A chip with fixed-functions only needs to connect point A to point B, while an FPGA needs to connect point A to any and every point on a 2-dimensional grid. That's over-simplifying it a bit.
I like the idea, but it sounds a bit much like a retro Ouya.
I kind of agree. I would find a "real" retro system to be much more interesting, even if it wouldn't be able to play all the games this machine can with its FPGA chip. I mean like a system with tiled backgrounds and non frame buffer sprites (I'm well aware Sega superscaller boards used this,, and this is just me being picky), even though a line buffer like the SNES, Neo Geo, or GBA would be good. It's just like it would have a little more juice than these, but still be believable as being something "retro". It would be like if you combined the Irem M107 and the GBA together.
I', curious though, and I'm not sure if it varies from system to system, but is this linebuffer just like a 16bpp (at least in this case) framebuffer that is only one pixel tall? If each pixel is an RGB value, how does it tell as to what's transparent and what's solid black? Oh, wait, there's an extra bit that could be used for this, because of 15 bit color depth. But the Neo Geo has 16 bit color depth... I don't know.
Anyway, I've always had the crazy idea of if you could (well, obviously you can, I just mean if it's somewhat practical) hardware mod the SNES to update the line buffer. And thinking about the Supergraphics which is basically a Turbographics 16 with two video hardware chips on top of each other, how possible would it be to do the same with the SNES? I mean, if you could get them both to work on the same linebuffer, you'd get twice the sprite capabilities, and from what I've heard, the BGs are rendered in a way where it checks the top most BG layer, and if it's color 0, it looks down, and the same thing keeps happening until it gets all the way down to color 0, so if you had the BGs from both chips stacked on top of each other, It would be like the background color of the first chip would be the color of whatever the next chip says, so in mode 1, you could have a 2bpp BG, then 4bpp x 4, and then another 2bpp BG. The BG mode for both chips could even be different, in that you could have mode 1 on top of mode 7.
You know, this is way too ridiculous isn't it. (I sure as hell wouldn't be able to make it). I still would like to know what each PPU's role is and how they communicate with one another, in that if you could hijack a data bus connecting them. I got this idea from the Supergraphics and how the Neo Geo costs 3.5 x as much as the SNES, like if there where the possibility of stacking 3 SNESes on top of each other to compare. Obviously, there wouldn't be much a comparison... (384 sprites with 3 affine transformed 8bpp backgrounds.)
Sorry for my little tangent...
Espozo wrote:
Sorry for my little tangent...
It'd help if you'd post the slope.
I fully support everything they're trying to do with this system's hardware, as I believe a community like ours should. The day the Indiegogo started, I shelled out for a gold console as soon as I got home from work. The 2 million funding level is a bit concerning, though.
tomaitheous wrote:
Espozo wrote:
Sorry for my little tangent...
It'd help if you'd post the slope.
It's 37 degrees.
I don't know if the handful of games that are or will be available for this console will get enough people interested. Most of the games are already playable elsewhere even.
For a console like this to work, they'd have to focus on the simulation of classic consoles first, because that's what people care about. Thousands of great, classic games they can play right out of the box. Then release the new software, without pressure.
I thought this system would run only games released by the developer for the system, not some GoodNES set that someone downloaded off ☠s☠n☠t or B☠tT☠rr☠nt. So that's still a few dozen finished homebrew games (source: PDRoms.de, NintendoAge, and the Action 53 project), though not "thousands".
Espozo: A line buffer can be deeper than 16 bits. It might be 18 bits with priority, blend eligibility, etc. Or in the case of the Super NES or GBA, the sprite line buffer might just be 9-11 bits, representing priority (2 bits), palette index (7-8 bits), and blend eligibility (1 bit for GBA or 0 bits for Super NES, as it overlays a bit of palette index)
tepples wrote:
I thought this system would run only games released by the developer for the system, not some GoodNES set that someone downloaded off ☠s☠n☠t or B☠tT☠rr☠nt.
Well, there is a stretch goal to make the system "capable of recreating classic systems through reshaping its own hardware". It will be a major letdown if this is meant for running exclusive and homebrew games only.
tokumaru wrote:
It will be a major letdown if this is meant for running exclusive and homebrew games only.
But wouldn't it be an even bigger letdown if video game publishers successfully sue the producers of this product for contributory and/or vicarious infringement of copyright? RetroN 5 is emulator-based, but because it has cart slots and doesn't (at least with stock firmware) allow dumping, it's incapable of making or using any copies beyond the ones specifically authorized by copyright law (
17 USC 117(a)(1) and foreign counterparts). Perhaps they could sell cart slot adapters.
I kept this to a separate post because I smell a split for the PCE stuff.
tepples wrote:
But wouldn't it be an even bigger letdown if video game publishers successfully sue the producers of this product for contributory and/or vicarious infringement of copyright?
I simply don't think it's possible to raise 2 million dollars when you have less than 100 games for bait, most of which are already playable elsewhere. What's the appeal?
If history has taught us anything about the success of video game consoles, it's that the hardware means nothing, the library of games (and to some extent, price) is what really counts. So they can go and talk about FPGAs all they want, but if they can't secure a steady flow of quality games, this console is doomed to fail.
I guess the appeal of a console as opposed to buying games that are already on Steam or on emulators is that you don't have to crowd around a desk, carry your PC back and forth between a desk and a TV, or buy a second PC for the living room with all the maintenance hassles of another live copy of Windows.
And unlike a PC using paid downloads, a console using physical media is usable in rural areas and urban Seattle, whose cellular or satellite Internet is harshly capped. It's also usable during an ISP outage without occasionally Kafkaesque limits on the offline mode of certain game stores' DRM, such as having to already be online to go offline. Finally, cartridges form a collection that looks nice on a bookshelf, an argument that should be familiar to those who frequent
our Reproduction forum and ask the original poster
why he doesn't use a PowerPak.
Finally, consoles tend to have noticeably lower video and especially audio latency than PCs. A lot of emulators end up with audio latency in the neighborhood of 200 ms, which is murder for rhythm games like
D+Pad Hero or twitch games like
STREEMERZ.
Is there any public information about developer qualifications, the tools available to developers, and the game approval and manufacturing process?
EDIT: Yes.
The FAQ states that it's indie friendly from day one, with manufacturing on demand in lots as small as 50.
We'll just have to see how this goes. I'm not rooting against this project or anything, I actually do like the idea of a new hassle-free cartridge-based console, I'm just questioning its capacity to raise 2 million dollars, since the game library is currently so small.