I just now found out about all the crap that happened earlier this month regarding this console... and I'm baffled!
Someone mentioned the console here in the forums a while ago, and when I looked it up I was surprised to see it was just a rebranded Retro VGS, after the fiasco that was. Little did I know that things were gonna get much, much worse!
I still can't believe how far they went to pretend they had a working prototype just so they could launch a Kickstarter campaign... From stuffing an SNES Mini inside the Jaguar case for the Toy Show to using an old capture card in a translucent case as proof that they did have a prototype board... This is all too surreal to be true.
The project is definitely dead now, there's no way they'll recovery from this. Right?
The whole thing, top to bottom, baffles me.
Licencing the Coleco name...what? Like the lamest computer name from the 80s. That's like licencing the computer name 'Wang'.
(I don't know if this joke translates well to people outside of the US...'wang' is a joke way of referring to a penis, and also the name of a B class computer company from the 80s).
Using a Jaguar shell...the worst failed console of its generation. What?
With SNES mini guts.
You know, any fly-by-night Chinese tech company could put together a half-decent SNES clone in a month. Why didn't they just make this damned thing, like they said they were going to. What?
And the market for new cartridge system is SO weak...did anybody think this would make a dime?
Baffling.
And they dragged these franken-Snes's to game conventions. If it was just a scam...why even take that step, when smart game experts can have a look at it and tell it looks fishy immediately. Huh?
tokumaru wrote:
The project is definitely dead now, there's no way they'll recovery from this. Right?
Yes and no. The project itself is probably dead (at least from Mike Kennedy), but the scammy style of operations will almost certainly continue from that guy for a long time. In other words: I would expect sometime in the future to see something similar happen, with some other kind of "retro device".
This type of crap has been going on for decades in the console arena, folks. I guess it's just "new" to some younger generation folks, i.e. has high surprise or shock value (I've seen the YouTube videos); this is why people (at those conventions, etc.) don't notice something immediately -- there's a tremendous amount of Stupid(tm) going on in the "retro console" scene right now, filled with hipsters jacking up prices of things (NES was common, and somewhat still is, but now it's SNES and some other 16-bit systems) -- they simply don't know about the thing they're using, instead they just wanna be cool or get in on whatever the current fad is. Scammy people have a knack for noticing trends like this and try to prey off those who aren't smart.
My inquisitive mind always ponders this: once scammers make the choice to travel down this path, they very rarely figure out how to step off it (a good example are Email spammers, where there are cases of them actually having utterly insane fines and some jail time, only to have them start their operations again a week after getting out). Is being a sleazy prick and (trying to) taking advantage of people a behavioural addiction (similar to gambling)? Part of me thinks it must be.
When it comes to projects relating to hardware or any kind of investment (including Kickstarters), I always operate with
caveat emptor in mind. I assume whoever I'm giving my money to
won't come through on their promise, and then ask myself "Can I financially survive if this fails? And how pissed off will I be? Is it worth the stress?" Maybe I was just raised to be slightly cautious and skeptical. Dunno.
The Internet is good for many, many things -- including learning just how commonplace scammers are out there.
Maybe the guy really is that clueless... I mean, he has to be, if he thought any of this would actually work. Maybe he honestly wants this console to come to life, but can't do it without the money, so he went as far as he did to try and get the money. That's obviously not the way to go though, and now I doubt anything real will ever come out of this.
That's why I don't like Kickstarter.
dougeff wrote:
the lamest computer name from the 80s.
Is it any worse than Commodore? Is there some sort of sibilance behind Coleco?
And yeah, I'm pretty sure we know what "Wang" means... Yeah, a bit of an unfortunate name...
dougeff wrote:
Using a Jaguar shell...the worst failed console of its generation. What?
If this thing were to ever have caught on (which I doubt it would have) I'd imagine they'd immediately run into problems with supply.
Honestly, the whole thing is absurd. I was skeptical about them delivering their promises, but this is unbelievable. It seems like they didn't even have a plan, save money. It's almost like the point of this was to be a scam. I lost it at the capture card.
In the time I wrote this, two posts came in...
tokumaru wrote:
Maybe he honestly wants this console to come to life, but can't do it without the money
He could have been given a billion dollars, and he still probably wouldn't have come up with anything. It seems the whole thing was going to be made of off the shelf parts, so that much money couldn't have gone into producing just one to show at game conventions and whatnot.
Then why doesn't kev just use the Hi-Def NES money to make an actually decent ARM+FPGA console?
As long as we're namedropping, Pat the NES Punk explained pretty well in his podcast what the scamming is, why it occured, who did it, why you shouldn't be surprised, etc. It comes up in multiple podcasts too if you want to hear more opinions on it as it was happening.
dougeff: Coleco was well-known in the 80s, not just for the Colecovision, but for various electronic games and the Cabbage Patch Kids doll line. Coleco doesn't exist as a company anymore, only a branding, and anyone can license the Coleco branding for their product if it's appropriate enough. This is probably why "Coleco Chameleon" and not "Atari Armadillo" or something. The Jaguar case is because the molds for it were made public, and now anyone can use them. The SNES mini is because the original Retro VGS was going to be an FPGA-powered multi-console that featured FPGA cores for a whole bunch of old game consoles (made by kevtris, no less).
So this was basically going to be the Retron 5, except using FPGA cores instead of software emulation. If you ask me, that sounds
fuckin' amazing. The cherry on top would be if it could accept an SD card and just read roms off there like a Powerpak or an Everdrive, but that's just me dreaming.
Still, as much as I'm in love with this idea, I'll never support it if it's coming from someone who's fatally untrustworthy.
tokumaru wrote:
Maybe the guy really is that clueless... I mean, he has to be, if he thought any of this would actually work.
I'm reminded of the 3DO Doom port. Apparently the guy who was advertising it with 'shopped screenshots and empty promises of new content had no idea whatsoever what programming was all about. The programmer he hired only agreed to the short development period because he said there was a prototype, and once she figured out that he thought the fake screenshots counted as a prototype and that the executable counted as source code, she was flabbergasted. Still managed a half-decent port, once she managed to get hold of the source code...
Drag wrote:
The Jaguar case is because the molds for it were made public, and now anyone can use them.
My understanding is that he bought the molds off a dental equipment manufacturer that was using them to make
these.
Espozo wrote:
If this thing were to ever have caught on (which I doubt it would have) I'd imagine they'd immediately run into problems with supply.
The whole point of using Jaguar shells is that they bought
the original Jaguar injection molds, meaning they could start making shells immediately, instead of coming up with an original design and shelling out the cash to make molds for those (apparently, these things are really expensive to make). Interestingly enough,
these molds had already been used to make a dental camera before they got to the hands of the Retro VGS people!
Drag wrote:
If you ask me, that sounds fuckin' amazing. The cherry on top would be if it could accept an SD card and just read roms off there like a Powerpak or an Everdrive, but that's just me dreaming.
The idea is awesome! Unfortunately it seems this never got anywhere close to being real. BTW, what would be the point of having classic console cores if you wouldn't be allowed to load ROMs? Would that be just for homebrew? Sounds like overkill to me. Maybe the unit could come with a special cartridge with an SD slot where you could load ROMs from.
tokumaru wrote:
The whole point of using Jaguar shells is that they bought
the original Jaguar injection molds, meaning they could start making shells immediately, instead of coming up with an original design and shelling out the cash to make molds for those (apparently, these things are really expensive to make).
Well, expensive is relative. IIRC a mold is around 10k, and for slightly higher cost and a lot slower production, they could easily have used 3d printing. Hiring a professional printer like Shapeways, etc, provides industrial quality, and any hobbyist can get a few hundred cases made that way quickly.
koitsu wrote:
This type of crap has been going on for decades in the console arena, folks.
The example that comes closest in recent memory could perhaps be the Konix Multi-System.
First promised, then it failed to ship right before launch time. But the owner, Wyn Holloway, refused to give up and roped an engineer into making a 2nd-gen hardware variant, funded through Taiwanese (?) backers. And then an even later variation was peddled and became the Tandy/Memorex VIS, if I remember correctly.
There are in-depth articles (search the 'net) about the phoenix-like (or rather cockroach-like) lifespan of the Multi-System hardware, and how it got degraded and pandered out (in the Shakespearean sense) in a chilling echo of what may lie in store for the Retro VGS "idea".
There have been no more than three major console companies at one time, and all but the current players (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft and its predecessors) left before the end of the second generation. I count Coleco, Sega, and Microsoft as spiritual successors to one another for two reasons: the technical similarities among ColecoVision, SG-1000, and MSX (which was built on a port of Microsoft's GW-BASIC), and the similarities between Dreamcast and the original Xbox (controller layout, available Windows CE vs. standard Windows XB).
On that note, how much would it cost to engineer something with an SG-1000/Mark 3 slot, a ColecoVision slot, a US Master System slot, and a Sega Card slot? Pretend it's what Coleco would have sold had the market not crashed. The memory maps differ, but there were other SG-1000/CV clones with dual compatibility. The biggest obstacle I can see is completely rewriting the CV BIOS if the product ends up not being licensed by Coleco.
The only thing I liked about the Chameleon, was the prospect of new homebrew games...
You know what what would be cool...a good modern language devkit for SNES...including a music tracker and a NES screen tool style tile editor.
Is this by the same people who made the so-called Genesis to SNES "converter" that uses a completely separate video/audio cables?
As far as I know, these people haven't produced any actual hardware of any kind...
Although, it is the same people who publish Retro Magazine (I think).
psycopathicteen wrote:
Is this by the same people who made the so-called Genesis to SNES "converter" that uses a completely separate video/audio cables?
No worse than the so-called 32X to Genesis "converter" that likewise uses AV passthrough.
tepples wrote:
psycopathicteen wrote:
Is this by the same people who made the so-called Genesis to SNES "converter" that uses a completely separate video/audio cables?
No worse than the so-called 32X to Genesis "converter" that likewise uses AV passthrough.
Doesn't the 32x overlay it's graphics with the Genesis's video output?
Yeah, and sound (which often went unused anyway), and game logic is still pretty much 68000-side (aside from Doom) because the SH2s were usually left to do graphics rendering. A Super Game Boy would be much closer comparison.
Also on Konix: didn't they at least have some hardware prototypes? This guy didn't even have that.
dougeff wrote:
The only thing I liked about the Chameleon, was the prospect of new homebrew games...
A new system doesn't mean new homebrew games. Existing systems are plenty adequate for that.
Unless it's an uncommon system that costs more now used than it did new, like TG16.
Was there really a need to clarify that "existing systems" did not mean "every existing system"?
There are systems intentionally designed to be restricted to fill that gap too (although their restrictions usually don't even remotely make sense when compared to actual old systems, and usually they're emulating a fake system on an ARM processor or something like that).
I wouldn't mind something grabbing one of those SOAC clones for old consoles and adding new stuff, though. I once examined a TCT-6705 based Mega Drive clone, 49 of the pins went unused o_O (for context, that chip has 128 pins, and a good bunch of those unused pins came in clusters as if they belonged to a bus or something like that)
I don't know about other developers, but I don't just make programs for any old platform just because they're old and full of restrictions, I only target platforms that mean something to me, personally. I'd hardly target a made up retro system just for the heck of it. If it's not a system I have a personal connection with, I might just as well use a modern platform, where I won't have to deal with restrictions that will just make development harder, and focus on making the aesthetics consistent with what I'm shooting for.
tokumaru wrote:
I don't know about other developers, but I don't just make programs for any old platform just because they're old and full of restrictions, I only target platforms that mean something to me, personally. I'd hardly target a made up retro system just for the heck of it. If it's not a system I have a personal connection with, I might just as well use a modern platform, where I won't have to deal with restrictions that will just make development harder, and focus on making the aesthetics consistent with what I'm shooting for.
Well you could use a modified version of a system such as a Genesis with more colors, or an NES with less flickering, or an SNES with a better sprite system.
But then it's not the same system any more. It's as bad as doing it on PC with artificial "restrictions".
And anyway I find working around the restrictions and exploiting the hardware to be a lot of fun. If I could just handwave those quirks away I'm not sure I'd care about this hobby any more. And yes, this is tied into what tokumaru said about the system having to mean something to you. If that conversation I happened across had said "oh, this game would never work on the Genesis", I'd probably have said "yeah, man" and gone on with my life. But it was "this game would never work on the SNES", and I was all "you can't talk about my favourite system that way" and here I am. I've already made the SNES do a few things no one thought it could do, and a couple of them are even kinda useful under specialized circumstances...
If you were to do Bad Apple on a hypothetical "SNES" with a 5.37 MHz CPU and an audio ROM section on the cartridge, what would it prove? Nothing - you might as well go watch the original.
I suppose there's a case for making some plausible changes to come up with an alternate-history version of the system, and writing software for that. But frankly I don't see much point, especially when the limits of the actual hardware still haven't been fully explored (and anyway nobody owns a SNES from Earth-prime, or an emulator of it for that matter, so if you want people to play your game you're going to be distributing an executable regardless).
EDIT: Naturally this is not meant to be an objective criticism. Subjectivity is the name of the game when discussing why people develop for old systems. This is just how I feel about it.
I just want to see someone try to outfit the SNES with 128KB of VRAM like it seems it was originally designed for. I thought I remember hearing that someone did it with the Genesis and it worked.
The Tera Drive already did it back then! =P
93143 wrote:
But then it's not the same system any more. It's as bad as doing it on PC with artificial "restrictions".
Unless backwards compatibility is involved, then it's an upgraded version of the original system.
I know of a Mega Drive clone that adds more video memory (and I think also adds more color? it sure looked like it needed a larger palette). It's the opposite case of the Chameleon, the hardware was released and they made like four games for it, but it seems the vendor just went poof after that. I got this information by examining one of the ROMs, cue my surprise when I noticed the values it was passing to the VDP (and this was before it was known how to access the 128KB mode on the stock VDP, at that). Even more of a surprise that they didn't just use J2ME like everybody else was doing at the time, though.
Sik wrote:
Even more of a surprise that [instead of cloning a Genesis,] they didn't just use J2ME like everybody else was doing at the time, though.
After
Oracle v. Google, it may have been a wise choice.
Er no you misunderstood what I mean. What was common was to have a Genesis clone and then also attach to it an ARM CPU running J2ME for the new games (this was particularly true of TecToy, but not limited to them). For some reason they decided that trying to improve the cloned system and putting the effort into programming for a weaker CPU was worth it. Makes me wonder what costs were involved.
Also do note that this was before Android was even relevant (hence J2ME instead). These days they'd use Android instead.
Quote:
I suppose there's a case for making some plausible changes to come up with an alternate-history version of the system
I would rather program an alternate history system than a PC. Sure an "alternate history" system would be fake, but programming for a PC is more fake.
At least programming a PC would let you actually earn revenue from your (original) production through GOG, Steam, or the like, unlike programming a system that doesn't exist or was not sold to the public in sufficient quantity.
I keep wondering why somebody doesn't try to create a system sort of like the Uzebox:
http://belogic.com/uzebox/Which is essentially a "modern retro" game console, with a hobbyist community built up around it. It's sort of both a hardware/software hobbyist item.
I keep wondering if someone made a similar system that was more powerful, aimed primarily at software hobbyists, and then promote game jams around it...could a "new retro" cartridge based console become a viable product eventually? The raspberry pi of retro game development perhaps?
I think about how many hundreds, thousands perhaps even, of developers there are trying to build retro games for every modern platform and failing to get an audience. One advantage homebrew developers have is how small the readily available audience is. It's quite nice to have a "tribe" of people who are eager to spend some quality time with the games you spend a lot of time on. You'd think offering a new system like this which would be easier to program than old consoles could take off.
Yes yes I know all modern systems are easier to program because of unity or what not, but... I continue to believe there's an ineffable joy to programming for simpler, older machines that have little or no OS kernel stuff and all the complexity those ecosystems bring with them.
It's probably not viable for so many reasons, but,. I kept wishing the coleco guys would scale back their goals and make "uzebox on steroids."
It's interesting to note there's already a 16 bit modern retro game console called the chameleon:
http://www.ic0nstrux.com/chameleon-pic- ... u9ds-IrJIIGranted it's another uzebox like thing for hobbyists and this one's not even necessarily game specific...but...amusing nonetheless.
So if you want the raspberry pi of retro game development, um... how about the raspberry pi?
What I'd want personally, is a good old, typical-for-the-day hardware, except maybe faster. You can probably get a 68000 at 20+ MHz for less than $5, so why not. Easily the biggest hurtle would be designing the video hardware. I wonder if they designed the video hardware "by hand" back then in the late 80's and early 90's by making a diagram and laying out transistors, or if they had a computer do it with a fancy programming language for processor design. Of course, I haven't even taken manufacturing into consideration. I imagine for a prototype or whatever to show, you could use a wiring board, although it wouldn't be pretty. Once you'd have an actual working prototype and not a Jaguar case with SNES mini guts, then you could ask for money. Actually, the video chips would already need to be printed out, and I imagine that'd cost a lot. I don't know, but it's not my project.
Things like
MAGIC were state-of-the-art in the '80s and '90s.
Really, tho', designing a new 2D GPU is kinda tedious, and the skills involved have almost no overlap with game development.
I imagine a lot of it could kind of be copy pasted from other 2D GPUs, except we probably don't exactly have the schematics for them...
Just looking at that Magic thing, I don't get it. Are you laying out the processor, because I'd have thought you'd see transistors and lines everywhere, not boxes.
Espozo wrote:
I wonder if they designed the video hardware "by hand" back then in the late 80's and early 90's by making a diagram and laying out transistors, or if they had a computer do it with a fancy programming language for processor design.
That's the least of the issues, the real problem is that it was all pretty much custom hardware. There really isn't anything off-the-shelf that's good enough, the best we have is still the TMS9918A as far as I know, and aside from that you only have OSD screens... and all of this relies on analog signals, probably because for newer digital signals they just assume you're using either a modern GPU or (again) custom hardware. I know the Propeller can make video output but again I think it's analog-only (I could be wrong!).
So for now you'd be better off making this custom video hardware on a FPGA (may want to throw in the sound hardware as well while we're at it, to save costs).
EDIT: OK this isn't bad for the Propeller...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GDA6pbgg68
As i see it, the reasons retro gaming is still a thing are basically nostalgia and personal connection to old game systems. Successful consoles like the NES, the SNES, and the Genesis were sold in large enough quantities that a big number of consoles are still in use, and a lot of people have been impacted by them. Some not so widespread (but still produced and marketed by big companies) consoles have more modest fanbases, but they're there too. Now, a small scale new "old" consoles will reach significantly less people, and are not likely to generate enough interest to be viable. Unless they're "chameleons" capable of simulating the big, successful systems.
The idea of a new retro console might seem interesting for us coding geeks, but I seriously doubt that there's any serious demand for something like this from the general gaming public.
Sik wrote:
TMS9918A
It appears that was used in the ColecoVision? Yeah, that doesn't have nearly enough power for something like a "16-bit system".
Sik wrote:
and all of this relies on analog signals, probably because for newer digital signals they just assume you're using either a modern GPU or (again) custom hardware.
We're talking about video output, right? What's bad about analog signal? It's more "authentic".
Sik wrote:
I know the Propeller can make video output but again I think it's analog-only (I could be wrong!).
Am I missing something? What the heck is Propeller? I looked it up, and I guess it's an FPGA board?
Sik wrote:
may want to throw in the sound hardware as well while we're at it, to save costs
I'm willing to bet that there's some Yamaha sound chip available for use, and you can run it with the main CPU. Now that I know more about this stuff, it really seems like having a separate CPU to handle sound is more of a nuisance than anything.
tokumaru wrote:
are not likely to generate enough interest to be viable. Unless they're "chameleons" capable of simulating the big, successful systems.
The way I see it, if you're into retro games, you'll get the actual systems and the games. Then again, things like Retron 5 and Virtual Console seem to be doing just fine, so I don't have a clue.
tokumaru wrote:
The idea of a new retro console might seem interesting for us coding geeks, but I seriously doubt that there's any serious demand for something like this from the general gaming public.
It's actually kind of strange though thinking about it, how there's no real widespread "2D powerhouse" console. You have the Genesis and the SNES, but I wouldn't exactly say they're there, the Neo Geo would qualify, but we know how sparse they are, the GBA would definitely qualify, but it's a handheld system, (I find the resolution to be way too small also) and by the time the systems because powerful enough for impressive 2D graphics, they moved to 3D and just kind of lost qualities of 2D powerhouse arcade systems. (Video memory definitely comes to mind. Look at the ports of Metal Slug for the PlayStation and Saturn.) You could build a system to fill in this niche, but as stated, I'm not sure how well it would do.
Just thinking looking at all the arcade systems out there, it's kind of crazy how many similar video chips there must be out there. I mean, I'm sure there are dozens of systems out there with 3 BG layers with 256 sprites and 4bpp graphics for everything like the M92. I even think the CPS1 and 2 have these same qualities...
I'm surprised there just wasn't an off-the-shelf video chip available back then.
I would happily design an oldschool video game console just for the fun of it. It would really just be a personal project though, because the interest in such a thing would be so limited, the only person gaining anything significant out of it would be me.
You know what though, instead of a video game console, you can make it into an arcade game. All you'd need to do is implement a JAMMA interface, and you'd already have your foot in the door. That'd be a fun thing to show off at indie arcades and the like. If you're going to be the main person developing the software for your hardware, you'd might as well go this route, right?
Espozo wrote:
We're talking about video output, right? What's bad about analog signal? It's more "authentic".
Two words: modern TVs. We're not going to keep finding working CRTs forever. Alternatively you could ditch the TV and feed your own LCD screen, I suppose (would work for a handheld).
Espozo wrote:
Am I missing something? What the heck is Propeller? I looked it up, and I guess it's an FPGA board?
Nope, just a microcontroller (the boards are premade kits)
Espozo wrote:
I'm willing to bet that there's some Yamaha sound chip available for use, and you can run it with the main CPU.
Well yeah but then you'd have yet one more chip and hence it's more expensive =P
GradualGames wrote:
I keep wondering why somebody doesn't try to create a system sort of like the Uzebox:
http://belogic.com/uzebox/Which is essentially a "modern retro" game console, with a hobbyist community built up around it. It's sort of both a hardware/software hobbyist item.
Maybe you're not counting Ouya (and other Android TV consoles) and the Pandoras (and other portables) because they run Linux instead of bare metal?
As for designing a new console, there exists a free VGA gpu core that's both asic and fpga compatible, search phoronix if interested. I really don't see the point in getting some old underpowered cpu and a very limited 2d gpu though, when you can get a modern quad-core Allwinner with a big gpu for 5$ in quantity. The retro games can still be made on it, just without the limitations.
In fact, there's one such portable game console being designed for the EOMA-68 cpu card standard, if that ever comes out. If it does, then any folks wanting a custom console have everything made for them: they only need the plastic case, controllers and the simple pcb connecting the cpu card to power and controllers.
Espozo wrote:
Sik wrote:
and all of this relies on analog signals, probably because for newer digital signals they just assume you're using either a modern GPU or (again) custom hardware.
We're talking about video output, right? What's bad about analog signal? It's more "authentic".
The fact that most people have got rid of analog CRT SDTVs in favor of digital LCD HDTVs, which introduce noticeable lag when upscaling an analog signal. Years ago, I made an NES tech demo that makes the screen white while A is held and black while it is released. I count zero lag on an SDTV and four frames (66 ms) of lag on an HDTV. And in
Punch-Out!!, lag is death.
HDTV vs. SDTV lag, at 1:30 slow motionQuote:
tokumaru wrote:
are not likely to generate enough interest to be viable. Unless they're "chameleons" capable of simulating the big, successful systems.
The way I see it, if you're into retro games, you'll get the actual systems and the games.
Good luck finding a TurboGrafx-16 or Neo Geo AES at a reasonable price though.
Quote:
It's actually kind of strange though thinking about it, how there's no real widespread "2D powerhouse" console.
That's because 3D has become so cheap and powerful that you can just draw a quadrilateral on screen and call it a sprite. The GBA hardware supports up to 128 sprites, but the DS supports 1,536 quads.
Quote:
(Video memory definitely comes to mind. Look at the ports of Metal Slug for the PlayStation and Saturn.)
Raspberry Pi ought to have enough video memory for any 2D game.
calima wrote:
Maybe you're not counting Ouya (and other Android TV consoles) and the Pandoras (and other portables) because they run Linux instead of bare metal?
I had an OUYA. That platform flopped for several reasons, one of which was the inability of developers to record promotional videos of their own games because its only video output was HDMI scrambled with HDCP. In addition, I tried thefox's port of
STREEMERZ in EMUya, and Android-induced audio lag killed its enjoyability.
I also mail-ordered the first Pandora, but my money was refunded because the payment processor was unwilling to collect for products whose shipping lead time is more than 30 days out. And I never ended up seeing Pandora in stores, except for a similarly named jewelry line. Most "other portables" have only a touch screen and no application-usable buttons, and adapting some game genres for touch-only control is painful.
tepples wrote:
The fact that most people have got rid of analog CRT SDTVs in favor of digital LCD HDTVs, which introduce noticeable lag when upscaling an analog signal.
It's not only the lag... Most HDTVs do a craptastic job out of decoding 240p signals. Such signals often show up as interlaced, which means that blinking sprites and scrolling look like shit. Not to mention that the tendency is for TV manufacturers to eliminate analog inputs altogether, since fewer and fewer people use analog devices anymore.
So, I suppose one good reason to reinvent the wheel (ie. Make a new retro console) is to make it compatible with modern TVs.
Or you could get a scaler (though those themselves also introduce at least a frame of lag - is there any that races the beam and generates the display at most a couple of scanlines later? (scanlines compared to source signal, that is))
Then again if we ever make a new system I'd say this should be a priority.
As an aside, I'd like to see a community-developed HD upscaler. We know what we want out of an upscaler, so could scrutinize it all we want, and it'd work perfectly and hopefully be more affordable, versus third party upscalers that gouge and have unsatisfactory performance.
Now back-ish on topic, a big problem with the OUYA is that games take a lot of effort to make. One person doing it in their spare time with no budget and a highly varying amount of skill in all aspects of game and asset design, there's only so much effort they can put into it. Multiple people each with a focus, plus a budget for outsourcing things they're weak with, a lot more effort can be put into the project in the same amount of time. Relying on crowdsourced games alone is never going to do well.
The TI-83 graphing calculator is popular in schools (at least while I was in highschool, it was), and anyone who owned one knew that putting games on it was a must. All the games were indie games, usually with no budget and just a one-person team. However, the difference is that the TI-83 is very limited in what it can do. The display is low resolution, 1bpp, no grayscale, and there's no sound so asset development is greatly simplified. Plus, you'd mainly only play in short bursts between classes, at lunch, or during free time in class, so short and simple games (the kind viable for a one-person team) worked well. The catch is, you wouldn't buy this as a game console, would you? When you got home, you'd just play your gameboy instead. You only had it because your math classes required it, and being able to put games on it was a nice bonus, plus everyone else had one too, so you were all playing the same games. A successful, though limited, indie market, but not because the calculator was marketed solely on it's indie gaming capabilities.
The Retro VGS had a shot at being successful while it was an FPGA-driven multiconsole. The main motivation behind it would've been the multiple consoles' libraries of professionally developed games that you've likely already played. Even if you had several indie groups producing new homebrew games specifically for the RVGS, that was never going to be the reason anyone bought it. Like the calculator, the indie games would've just been a bonus.
Bottom line, an indie-driven console where you support indie games by using it, though a nice idea, just isn't successful at the moment, and the RVGS/CC was going to see trouble if it kept focusing on that rather than on already-existing retro gaming.
Sik wrote:
Or you could get a scaler (though those themselves also introduce at least a frame of lag - is there any that races the beam and generates the display at most a couple of scanlines later? (scanlines compared to source signal, that is))
But the HDTV still won't display the result that fast. It seems to me that if you discount the availability of actual CRTs, the only real solution is an HDTV that can emulate the behaviour of a CRT, down to the scanline level, complete with phosphor decay (yes, it matters). This would also eliminate the deinterlacing issues, since an interlaced signal would simply be displayed that way, and an accurate enough CRT emulation would properly display 240p without explicit support being necessary (like how bsnes dodges lots of emulation bugs simply by doing what the SNES did instead of by hacking around them).
Could the firmware of a normal HDTV be hacked down to that level of functionality? Or would this have to be a major "retro" project to actually produce a TV? The leaving off of analog inputs is worrying...
...how long is the current worldwide stock of CRTs likely to last? Will it outlive the consoles you'd want to plug into them? Will it outlive the people who currently want to plug consoles (or FPGA emulations thereof, or suchlike) into them, and if so, will anyone else care? (As a quick nod to the topic, I just noticed that the Wikipedia page on
Calico_(company) says "Not to be confused with
Coleco"...)
dougeff wrote:
The only thing I liked about the Chameleon, was the prospect of new homebrew games...
You know what what would be cool...a good modern language devkit for SNES...including a music tracker and a NES screen tool style tile editor.
There's a C devkit for the SNES by Shiru. I'm not a C expert so I can't tell how good or bad it is.
I would like to see a graphics editor designed specifically for the SNES. Color choosing is something that is difficult with most general purpose painting programs because I need to look at a text document with every step from 0-31 to find a color. I would much rather pick colors with an RGB slider that is already fixed at 32 levels, so I can't pick a color the SNES wouldn't be able to display. Also being able to draw in indexed mode and being able to edit the palette.
Quote:
There's a C devkit for the SNES by Shiru
I don't believe there is...
I see 2 SNES homebrews (1 w source code) and a music tracker.
93143 wrote:
...how long is the current worldwide stock of CRTs likely to last? Will it outlive the consoles you'd want to plug into them?
They won't. They're all pretty much already starting to die, they suffer from burn in that eventually results in the display being completely unable to show dark colors, and when they break there isn't anybody willing to fix them anymore (even if the broken thing is something easy to get like a capacitor rather than a scarce spare part).
The consoles themselves are another issue, those look like they have a long time to go yet (when they break it's still usually a discrete part you can buy easily). Those with mechanical parts (optical drives!) will be having a harder time though, but I guess that if people really care they may just replace those with SD card readers.
psycopathicteen wrote:
I would like to see a graphics editor designed specifically for the SNES. Color choosing is something that is difficult with most general purpose painting programs because I need to look at a text document with every step from 0-31 to find a color. I would much rather pick colors with an RGB slider that is already fixed at 32 levels, so I can't pick a color the SNES wouldn't be able to display. Also being able to draw in indexed mode and being able to edit the palette.
In a generic paint program such as GIMP or Photoshop, if you pick your colors and then "Posterize" the image to 32 levels, each color will be rounded to one of the acceptable colors.
GIMP and Photoshop also allow you to draw in indexed mode and edit the palette.
I think the idea is to have coarse steps in the color slider to make the palette. That said, if you don't mind white being a bit darker than usual, just stick to multiples of 8 for the RGB values (assuming a 0~255 range).
Sik wrote:
if you don't mind white being a bit darker than usual, just stick to multiples of 8 for the RGB values (assuming a 0~255 range).
That won't work. Once you convert the image, there will be a crossover point where two adjacent values come out the same.
Try out an actual indexed paint program like Grafx2, or run an Amiga emulator with the Brilliance paint program.
Either one of these lets you set the bit-depth (of the colour sliders).
93143 wrote:
Sik wrote:
if you don't mind white being a bit darker than usual, just stick to multiples of 8 for the RGB values (assuming a 0~255 range).
That won't work. Once you convert the image, there will be a crossover point where two adjacent values come out the same.
...how? What I said pretty much ensures that the topmost 5 bits of each component will remain unique for each possible value. That's like the whole point.
I think I was making an unwarranted assumption about the converter. I guess truncating (rather than rounding) does actually work in all cases, doesn't it? (Unless the input has not already been posterized or otherwise snapped to approximate 15-bit values, in which case rounding will work better.)
I don't quite recall what pcx2snes does, except that I know it messes with the hue to try and match luminosity, even when the input is already posterized to 32 levels, which is why I don't use it.
Is there any actual interest in a "modern retro" console rather than something like the NES? Classic gaming systems have kindof an advantage (nostalgia, wide distribution, widely known and liked), plus the development scene even for actual retro consoles is not large, so I imagine the scene for a "modern retro" console would be even smaller.
Having said that, I've kicked around the idea because it'd be fairly easy and cheap to do with real hardware. Here's my idea:
CPU is one of the modern 6502s produced by western design center. These run at up to 14 mhz which could be interesting.
"PPU/APU" implemented in software via an atmega or PIC or something that sits between the ram and the 6502. This chip would actually drive the display and audio, but would provide an NES/C64/Apple 2 like interface to the 6502. The atmega would do the heavy lifting like dealing with flash memory, drawing to screen, receiving input, etc. but would have absolutely no hand in the actual execution of game code (the 6502 would do that).
It would be relatively easy to implement something like this in hardware (the software for the atmega is another matter, but still).
tepples wrote:
Then why doesn't kev just use the Hi-Def NES money to make an actually decent ARM+FPGA console?
Because it takes A LOT more than "hi-def NES money" to do it. I'm still in the red on that project, by the way. It will be quite awhile until I have any net profit at all, and even more time until I make something that approaches minimum wage for the time I put in writing all the code and debugging it. Making hardware costs a lot more than you'd think compared to something like software which has no real costs except time (and maybe the cost of a compiler or IDE).
There is also the massive time investment it'd take to design it. I still have plans for my Zimba 3000 (the FPGA videogame system) but I got other things to do first, and that project is going to take a really long time.
I am not going to ask for money to develop it, because then I'd be under the gun and that would make it horrible and no longer fun.
We are all looking forward to the Zimba 3000... I hope it remains a labour of love and fun for you, rather than pressure or misery, until it finally sees production.
I really hope you finish it up soon, at the very least just to raise the bar for all the Pi/Arm pretenders to the emulation box throne.