Retro VGS console

What are your thoughts?

https://www.facebook.com/pages/RETRO-VG ... 51?fref=ts

Well, I'd have thoughts if I knew more about it. They need to be more specific on what they mean. Most people classify both the PCE and the Neo Geo as "16 bit consoles", but the Neo Geo is quite a bit more advanced. How many colors can be onscreen at a time? How many BGs? How many sprites?

Waste of money. As much as I love retro gaming.. this is WHY?

Oh, maybe it would be fun to add USB support. Maybe they could add networking and internet. Maybe some kind of flash storage. Maybe HDMI out. Maybe emulators! Maybe retro-like games with enhanced graphics including the occasional not-really-possible-on-any-retro-system graphics and sound.

Or I could just use my PC and play retro themed games on it.

I kind of like the idea, but it is kind of pointless at the same time.

I think a modern sprite based system would be much more interesting.

You know though, call me pessimistic, but I can't help but think this will just turn out being a cheap piece of plastic with non compelling software.

Based on what I've read, one possible advantage over a PC is that it uses solid-state media. Some people like the sense of ownership of a copy that physical media offer, which is part of why vinyl is coming back. PCs could in theory solve this by shipping games on USB flash media, but in practice they don't. Another is that this console's chassis is based on that of the Atari Jaguar, which is smaller than that of a typical tower PC and therefore more spouse-acceptable next to a television. Third, all consoles will have identical hardware, which allows for certainty as to whether will a particular piece of code will run on the end user's hardware. Finally, lack of choice has benefits, as it gives an impression that a company has vetted the available products for quality. LJN games are crap compared to the rest of the licensed NES library, but they're gold compared to a lot of the no-budget shovelware on PC.

I've written thoughts on why people don't just use PCs:

• Why not single-screen multiplayer
• HTPCs are for geeks
• Consoles are easy

You can play retro-like games on your home console too. Example: Axiom Verge
Why do I need a weird 'retro' machine to play retro?

consoles = constant 60fps
PCs = any random framerate it feels like

I guess you haven't heard of the Xbox One?

I have many games that run at a consistent 60fps on my PC, though sure, lots don't. The majority of XBox 360 and PS3 games don't. I don't see what this has to do with consoles, if anything. Both platforms are plenty capable of good framerates.

This is a nonsensical statement. We all know that consoles sometimes can't keep up: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11040
Or have purposely been programmed to run at a lower framerate: viewtopic.php?p=96831#p96831
And that PC framerates are not 'random'.

Anyway, we don't know what this 'console' even is.. what are the guts made from? Is someone really going to build a true retro machine with 30 year old hardware? Or something more like and android compatible SoC?

It's supposed to be FPGA-based, but from what I've seen that's about as far as the technical details go.

what does "FPGA-based" mean?

It means that the CPU and video hardware is done in HDL (hardware description language, such as Verilog or VHDL) which is loaded into RAM, rather that being an ASIC etched in silicon. So you should be able to redefine the system's capabilities, within the limits of the FPGA's resources.

That doesn't seem very "retro" then.

How advance of a system can you run on an fpga? It would be nice to give every hardware sprite it's own individual memory bank, and fetch pixels from every sprite at the same time, so you have no overdraw limits at all.

I'm thinking you can probably do 128 64x64 4 bpp sprites = 2kB per sprite = 256kB total.

It's pretty retro. An FPGA can be programmed to work exactly like authentic consoles (i.e. implementing the exact same logic cycle by cycle), being capable of 100% compatibility, so this is like having a single console that can morph into various retro consoles.

That's infinitely better than android-based emulators.

SNES level for sure. I don't think you can fit much more though, at least in a single FPGA. Also there's a chance that the FPGA code can't be rewritten on the fly (depending on how they design the hardware), making it pretty much 100% fixed at least as far as games are concerned.

Also I wouldn't complain if this had HDMI out instead of analog, given how craptastic are modern TVs at interpreting analog signals from consoles (and there are already some TVs that don't support analog in any form).

What do you want, a new 5V 3 µm NMOS DIP package ASIC?

They have to screw it up pretty bad to not allow an onboard MCU to handle "firmware updates", where a new bistream is recorded to be loaded onto the FPGA.

Um, yeah... Finding the main CPU shouldn't be a problem (I saw that 14Mz 65816s where being sold online just the other day) but It seems like most systems have the video hardware custom built.


I agree, even if it isn't "retro". I have a TV in my living room that supports 4 HDMI and a coaxial cable, but not a single AV, which doesn't make any sense. Almost everything I have don't even use coaxial cables and only about half support HDMI cables. I can still play the SNES and the NES, but it looks like crap, so I don't play it on that TV, even if it is the biggest. (I prefer to be in my room anyway.)

From a development perspective, we find these old CPUs interesting. However, probably the most defining element of a "retro" game is the stylistic choices brought about from the graphics and sound limitations of its host system. There is no reasonable advantage or reason to use an antiquated out of production CPU that isn't even directly compatible with the logic levels of everything else in the system. Demanding something like that is short-sighted.

If you want a decent middle ground, an ARM7TDMI can still be bought new, yet it was used in the Game Boy Advance. Close enough?

If the FPGA code is in Flash memory and that memory is soldered (without wiring in the write signal), then it's effectively ROM. If you only let the FPGA load code from that memory and nowhere else (just wire in that and nothing else), well, the FPGA is practically fixed hardware by that point then.

They have to do it intentionally (and may possibly be cheaper too) but to say that you have to screw it up badly is a massive overstatement.


The Z80 is extremely easy to get, there's still a lot of stuff using it.

Coffee makers?

Those aren't TVs; they're computer monitors. I thought the All Channels Act as amended required TVs for the US market to include both an ATSC tuner (for full-power stations) and an analog tuner (for low-power stations). If you have an analog tuner, you can tune at least analog RF.

But if they had to choose some sort of analog signal, what in the world possessed them to choose RF over AV?

Because they're required by law to in order to call it a TV.

You mean you have to allow an RF cable, not just any old analog signal? Who in their right mind is going to go out and buy a 50" HD TV to plug an RF cable up to it? You might as well stop by Goodwill and get an old CRT TV.

Too bad there's no one around with a complete retro FPGA videogame console design out there.... oh wait. I think I have one hiding in the closet somewhere. My FPGA console supports currently 17 fully/mostly debugged classic videogame systems. I dunno if they are looking for classic stuff or something totally new, though.

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/systems_V105.txt

This is the list of what's supported.

I had designed a new PCB and had it made that has hardware to support neogeo, SNES, genesis, and TG-16 along with all the stuff I currently have. outputs include HDMI, RGB, composite, s-video, component and VGA.

So basically, if you have an FPGA system, it can be just about whatever? I don't get it, but it seems like the software is somehow changing the hardware? That makes just about as much sense to me as downloading memory.

Is "FPGA" a relatively new invention?

According to Wikipedia, the Xilinx XC2064 (1985) was "the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array". Apparently the '90s were the big growth period.

And it would be really cool if it ever saw the light of day as a finished product, so that us mere mortals who know nothing about hardware design could enjoy the awesomeness of this console.


An FPGA is like a blank chip, that you can program to act like any other chip (or multiple chips) you want. Have you ever wondered how the PowerPak or the Everdrive N8 can run games made for various mappers? They reprogram an FPGA to act as whatever mapper the game being run needs, be it the Sunsoft 5B (extra sound channels, interrupts, fine CHR bankswitching, etc.) or CNROM (a simple 74HC161 4-bit counter).

With a sufficiently powerful FPGA, you can implement recreations of all the chips of a console, effectively simulating the entire thing, with potential for 100% compatibility (provided the person who implemented the logic was faithful to the original design).

tokumaru pretty much nailed what an FPGA is. It's a 'blank chip' that you can load up with your own custom logic hardware to perform a specific task. They exist in the realm between ASICs which are totally custom chips such as the NES CPU/PPU and standard products like logic chips and TTL chips and such.

You get the luxury of being able to change the logic on it at will, but the penalty is cost. It's quite a bit more expensive than a full custom part like the CPU or PPU, but oh so much more flexible.

In my particular case, there is a "hypervisor" system that loads new logic onto the FPGA to emulate a particular system, be it NES or gameboy or whatever. The classic argument is "why run game / system X on an FPGA when I can run it on an emulator?" The answer here is that you probably can- but the FPGA has the ability to interface to actual real cartridges, and not in the way that a retron 5 does- it can actually play the game on the cart instead of dumping it first. Also, accuracy can be higher (depending on the abilities of the programmer) and cycle timing and such can be exact. Lag is non-existent since you're in effect recreating the same logic as the original system and not going through layers of abstraction such as video drivers, input device drivers, OS things, etc.

In my particular implementations, I went far beyond what most emulator writers did, and created a bunch of custom hardware and things to connect the systems to my logic analyzer and poke the deep timing of everything to figure out exactly how it worked, and to reproduce this timing as closely as possible.

I haven't given up selling this thing, in fact there's some slight developments possible in this area so don't give up hope totally. I am finishing up the HiDef NES adapter first though of course.

This is only sorta true. Custom parts are cheaper only when produced in very large quantities. If you only have small runs then a FPGA will be cheaper (and given the obvious niche nature of this thing, that's likely the case here).

What kind of Mhz rating do FPGA's come in, or do FPGA's somehow generate their own clock signal?

The clock would be external, but I think there's slew rate constraints on an FPGA that would limit their maximum usable speed.

You feed a clock into the FPGA (or multiple clocks- most can accept 8 or more clocks, even cheap/small ones) and then it has several PLLs that can convert the clock into other frequencies you need.

150MHz is fairly doable, the Hi Def NES has some 200MHz stuff. It's not so much about MHz on an FPGA but the parallelism and customization possible. Like, you could make a system with 1000 sprites if you wanted, or 16 background scrollable graphics planes. The main limit for such stuff is RAM bandwidth, which at 166MHz DDR is pretty damn impressive.

And the good news is you can always add/delete specific features and doodads if you need to, to do nearly anything. If you need an extra 20 square wave audio channels, no problem. Add them. Need full duty cycle control? add that too. The only limit is your imagination and gate count.

Unlike a software emulator, the MHz rating is really not a limit to what you can do. The amount of logic you can implement is the limit, since everything is all running at once in parallel, instead of being serviced serially via a CPU.

Ever since my youth coding games in QBasic, C, and x86 assembly language on DOS (I never finished anything though, back then)...I've wanted to get that simplicity back. The NES gives it to me, but with a lot of baggage. How awesome would it be to code retro style games without worrying about any of the constraints, and maybe have the flexibility of a flat framebuffer so I don't even need to worry about tiling systems (except whatever Imight code, myself)

The way I see it is...this VGS will make retro coding freaks happy, but everyone else will still want modern frameworks and multi device distribution. Thus, it is pointless. A cool hobby device, for sure, much like the Uzebox perhaps.

I don't see the point of "multi device distribution". Few smartphone users have MOGA clip-on game controllers or JXD tablets with integrated buttons, and in my experience with Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure (Free) for Android, playing a classic-style game on a touch screen is worse than the Turbo Touch 360. And indie developers need several finished PC or smartphone games before console makers will give them the time of day. So unless your game is the sort of pointy-clicky game that is ideal for a smartphone, why not just stick to PC?

You got a point there Tepples. I've seen several well known indie titles come out on the Play store on my android phone that I used to play on PC...so it's definitely a phenomenon, probably driven by these big cross-platform frameworks that are out there. And undoutedly those things do make some aspects of game dev easier. So I'm guessing it's gonna be hard for the VGS guys to get devs, unless they basically make it yet-another-modern-device that participates in the modern open source software ecosystem. If it can't be looked up on stack overflow, most modern coders probably couldn't be bothered. Haha!

A primarily mouse-driven PC game would be a good match to present Android-powered devices. A primarily keyboard- or joystick-driven game, not so much.


I have 44 answers, 10 questions, and about 5,000 people reached. Am I part of the problem?

Don't forget the part where getting noticed and making money on a phone has less odds than winning the lottery. At least on PC you have a much bigger chance (and aren't forced to go extreme F2P for people to even consider looking at it).

It has to be able to receive both NTSC and ATSC broadcasts.


It's so that people can plug in a VHF/UHF antenna. ATSC broadcasts of the farmer five (NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and PBS) often come in sharper and more free of artifacts than comparable cable or satellite TV broadcasts.

And I'd be interested to learn what make and model of TV is leaving out baseband composite inputs.

I don't know the model, but it's a 55 inch, 1080p Panasonic "dumb" TV. It's all black plastic (none of that transparent plastic stuff) and it sits on a rectangular base that sticks out in the front by a good amount.

Here's the remote though:



I actually just looked for the TV online, and I think I actually found another (it's not the same as mine) Panasonic TV without AV inputs but an RF input:



You know, why do 4K TVs even exist if nothing broadcasts at a resolution that high?

Tepples, http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/14-hdtv ... nputs.html

You're telling me they have to have an RF port? Not having composite is the real crime. You wouldn't even be able to play the GameCube on it, and the GameCube is only 15 years old.

A manufacturer can leave off RF, but then it has to sell the thing as a "monitor" instead of a "television set".

Is that the difference between a "monitor" and a "television"? Seems like a fine line between the two. I was always under the impression that the "difference" was a monitor might not have speakers, but a TV always does.

A TV decodes channels transmitted through RF, a monitor doesn't.

I'm interested too. The next time you need to get behind the TV to plug something in, writing down the model number and posting it here would satisfy my curiosity.


Here is a larger picture of that model's back panel: image. You can see there's a green port and a diagram indicating there's a cable you attach that provides the composite and component AV ports. Maybe your TV has something like that.

Yeah, my aunt has a Samsung TV whose limited back panel space means it has to use a breakout connector for the composite/component RCA inputs.