New NES/Famicom-clone

What do you think of this?
http://analogueinteractive.com/analogue-nt

It's the failed and ridiculously expensive low_budget NES with a case. And an extra $200 added to the price, more than likely, using hardware that will be outdated in 6 months when 2 better alternatives release, hell one is available now. It helps nobody, what a waste of engineering.

So is it a FPGA? Or innards from a real NES (or some clone) with an RGB mod hacked on?

If I can extrapolate anything from their neogeo rebuild, it's probably not an FPGA. Or if it is, they got it from someone else.

It probably is a new motherboard (i.e. what 3gengames said), and given the price, could well be using a 2C03 or 2C05.

That would be utterly ridiculous to do these days now that the NESRGB is out.

That depends on whether patents are pending on what NESRGB does. Years of Slashdot news stories about litigious patent holders have convinced me to guess "design around" for any design decision that I find counterintuitive.

I'm pretty sure this is based on the NES Super 8 - http://www.youtube.com/user/lowbudgetify which 3gen referenced, but if you weren't familiar with his userid, then you probably didn't catch the reference.

Is or isn't it related to the other Super 8?

Unrelated. Is a new motherboard:
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/203257 ... 8-project/
https://www.tindie.com/products/low_bud ... per-8-v18/

Probably does actually solve a number of the problems with inadequate decoupling of analog and digital power supplies.

OK, I didn't catch the "low_budget" reference at first.

???

He was mentioning that if Viletim had his idea of using a CPLD + a Nintendo PPU to generate RGB signals patented and someone else were to copy it, He could sue and would succeed at doing so.

That made me think of Kevtris and the Portendo thing ... (lol)

I'd say it would pretty LOL if Viletim tried to patent his design.

I was about to edit the above quote to say thefox's design then I saw it was your post

Have any official details been released on it yet? I too think it'll be something involving original chips, not any FPGA clones.

Yep, ars has a story on it. Apparently they gutted a bunch of Famicoms that were in poor cosmetical condition.

It looks like a nice package all together. But very expensive.

I get a 404 error.

Haha it's fun it opens like that, because I am of the opinion that all this "audiophile" stuff is completely a huge bluff. Of course part of what they're saying is probably true, but a large part of it is false, like they claim to hear 25MHz harmonics, or they claim old lamps are superior to modern transistors, or whatever.

There's definitely a parallel between that and people spending way too much money on old video game hardware, it's a legitimate passion, but when it goes too far it becomes ridiculous.

*sigh* Here we go again with this bullshit. This right here is why I would never consider this device.

It blows my mind how these crazies brag about "making quality {whatever}" then go and destroy it all by doing the utterly worthless "stereo mod", resulting in faux-stereo that sounds atrocious. What is it going to take for these idiots to understand that the compositions and sequencing were done with mono in mind? Do these people really think "it sounds better" -- or even remotely "the same" -- when you have two square waves coming out of one side, and triangle/noise/PCM coming out the other?

I wish this trend/fad would just die already. I get really spun up about it when I see dudes selling revamped $500 Famicoms, bragging about the grandiloquence and authenticity/compatibility of their "creation", and then fuck with the audio. STOP DOING THIS. But if you're going to do it (especially on a sold device of this type), at least provide an A/B switch for mono/stereo (where mono would output the same audio on both the L and R jacks).

There is a switch to not have the shitty "stereo" mod. That's why I cut it a break in my opinion. I totally agree with you about those "stereo" mods. It's complete crap. I don't understand how anyone expects "stereo" sound to magically exist in NES games.

I mainly like the idea of having both Famicom and NES ports in the same system paired with RGB video output. That's not that hard to add to a stock NES but it takes effort to make it look good. $500 is still a crazy amount to spend. I'm guessing it has a brand new PCB. Think it has the NES cartridge port wired with the expansion audio mod?

I agree completely. It might be valid to have the sound split and a dial to control the level of remixing of the square waves and triangle/noise/dmc. On both channels.

If you want a better stereo effect, have a second 2A03 / APU clone sit there, and put a CPLD to check for writes to an unused APU register like $4009 or $4000D and use it to select left, right, or both. Then, send appropriate data to the APU registers on the other APU. Of course, you'd need to modify anything to take advantage of this and things would likely get screwy otherwise.

Something like that is the only actual "stereo" I can think of.

But people want magical solutions that will work with existing software...

But yeah, we could definitely make a "super" NES with 2 PPUs and 2 APUs that would be capable of rendering 2 background planes and generating stereo audio. That would be cool!

Package in two FDS drives and it could be a Twin Twin Famicom.

If you want a super NES, you know where to find it

Also there is the OneBus clones, which has 2 APUs and more PPU enhancement than the original famicom/NES

That reminds me: When will someone make a clone console that use the Onebus enhancements without losing the quality of sound, and while we need it, add a cartridge port for new OneBus programmers,

Also, A Reminder (even to myself): need to make sure a Wiki article for the OneBus Enhancement mapper and associated formats (BIN, UNIF) as seen with the VT03 code and documentation remains

Where is the existing VT02/VT03 documentation?

romhacking.net has a 15MB RAR archive of OneBus stuff, which includes the Application Note and Data Sheet for VT02 and VT03, among other items:

http://www.romhacking.net/documents/560/