avcrypt

@Slobbert for the most popular cores, yes. Accuracy falls off on some less popular ones like the X68000, but they're still pretty close. The Saturn core is still polishing edges, so it's not quite to the point of Mednafen Saturn. (I'm sure it will, just not yet.)

And it's not selling FPGA short, just pulling it back to reality. In all honesty Analogue did some damage in their marketing claims that has been hard to reeducate the larger enthusiast audience about. The Mister SNES core authors, for instance, got most of their info from BSNES/Higan, the software emulator renowned for how accurate it is. That's not a secret and they're open about it. I'm not well versed in that core-set, but from what I gathered, they're as accurate as one another.

In regards to the article, I've hardly seen any discussion near devs compared to the more charged discussions I see elsewhere. The author here, an FPGA core dev themself, is just being open and honest about putting things into perspective. I've been chatting with a couple core devs on the side since this article dropped and nobody's felt slighted so far (at least in my little nerd network).

@jbrodack I don't think in this case it was Nintendo directly that caused them to pull it down. However, they've used a weird legal interaction as a poison pill in their new consoles.

In the Wii and upwards, all published games must have their copy protection mechanism disabled in order to play via the console's key. Even if you own the console and the game, in the US at least, the act of extracting or reproducing the key in order to access the game software is considered copy protection circumvention which is illegal under the DMCA. Again, even for the game and system you physically own and don't redistribute. Courts have been warming up to the interpretation that, because circumvention is necessary to load software at all, then all activities (the emulation part) afterward must also be illegal since it's tainted by the initial circumvention.

It's my biggest gripe with the DMCA beyond every other restriction it imposes.

@Guru_Larry never in a million years would I have randomly stumbled upon Sepi until I read your comment. That happens to be exactly what I'm interested in and even I didn't know it.

@DeciderVT considering how much of this is production ready, I'm curious if we'll see clones pop up in the usual sites, and by extension, a nicely pressed case rather than a 3D print one.

Good? Hopefully? I guess we can only wait and see, but I'm holding out a lot of hope to see it open sourced. It wasn't the only game in town, but it was a pretty good one.

@TenEighty sure, and the statement of experience is true of most things.

"The more experienced developer will develop more accurate and optimized code when working with the lowest level of technology."

I don't think of optimization in that way. The Mister PlayStation emulator is less accurate than Mednafen (more obvious as an LLE) and DuckStation (less obvious as an HLE). The PSX core has to wrangle a lot more than DuckStation does. This causes the PSX core to struggle more because how they approach the problem is so significantly different, requiring a ton of RTL leg work, and because gateware simply can't exploit the benefits of HLE.

It's more about how you approach the emulation, not necessarily how low level you go that impacts how well a given emulation performs. The hotspot of DuckStation is translating PSYQ calls into native system calls. Turns out that's really performant and can be made really accurate (with some tweaks) even though it's very high level.

@GlamorousAlpaca Hakko FX-888D. It has a very comfortable grip, built solid, been around for years, and comes very well calibrated. Many engineers including myself swear by it.

@TenEighty the problem with your assertion is that FPGAs also can't do what you stated about the SN76489 because it lacks any analog facilities for that sort of measurement. If you look at the HDL for cores that rely on voltage control, you'll see they do mostly the same tricks the software does. They, too, have to suppose the output.

Also FPGA cores rarely match one to one signaling internally because they usually can't match on fabric speed. And that's ok! They, too, rely on hacks to make the emulation as good as it can be. I highly recommend looking at the minimig core which uses dozens of hacks to be the best Amiga core it can be. Unfortunately, its accuracy is kneecapped by the hardware available, so for higher chip specs, UAE surpasses it in accuracy. And again, that's totally fine. It's the nature of the beast.

Edit, also this statement:
"Software emulation is guess work as there is nothing to measure. Just analyzed by what the developer thinks they see or how they think it should behave."

I hate to be so short on this response, but this is not the case at all. This is flagrantly untrue.

Really interested in this. The flip form factor works a lot better than you'd think when you have it in your grip. And of course it's a retroid so it's probably great quality.

This is too high res and high poly count for the 32X. I'm guessing it's the arcade ROM since the easiest way I can think of doing this is by modifying the textures and repacking.

@RetroGames it looks like this survey skewed strongly towards Gen-Xers, who are about 10-15 years older than the median age of the US as a whole.

I don't think it's very surprising older generations hang into older media. The rest of the survey looks fine and I'm fine with it (contrary to other opinions here), only that it describes a narrowed group rather than the whole as implied by the headline.

Several years ago I made a reproduction sound card and sent it to a big retro YouTuber. It looked nearly identical on the front, but the back was totally custom for them. It was a one of one piece. I'm proud of it, it still gets displayed and used in little projects from time to time.

However, I didn't anticipate the hate and rage. People got so defensive about it. Again, one of one piece, not threatening your precious antique card. But then, a guy started selling even better repros than I made and took the heat off completely.

I still get the occasional hate message on VOGONS, but I'm sure nothing as bad as what the mt32 author was getting. From that experience, I really think a lot of hate comes from the collectors.

I remember an article here about a pretty great indie Gameboy Color game that was immediately dismissed because the creator used AI for the cover. Since then, the author has worked to get proper work done on the cover and it's looking great. The game is great and honestly it's a very well made experience.

But from the comments, you'd notice that it takes far too little effort to be negative and get attention for it.

Does it look awesome? Absolutely. Does it look pleasant to type on? I already feel the phantom cramps.

@KitsuneNight I see now. I just popped in Hexen (a game which can't save to internal memory) and noticed I couldn't save if I booted from CD from the Saroo menu. Pretty lame, and I'm sure it's reported as a bug like a lot of things with the Saroo.

I've been doing some hustle on the Saroo side with some custom firmware, but it likely won't make it into Saroo proper. I'll add this to my list of stuff to look into and post it on SegaExtreme when it's ready.

@KitsuneNight off topic, not a huge fan of the Saroo either. On topic: have you checked out the SDLoader by Murzik?

I personally use Fenrir + Fenrir Saturn Kai with its built in save import/export to the SD card.

@KitsuneNight the Saturn has the Saroo which is about $40 shipped from China. I'd consider it the contemporary.

Edit: beat to the punch by a minute

@JayJ honestly I think the article was written to talk about that but from the angle of the usual topics the site covers. TiEx will never talk about how the dramatic, tariff-fueled rise in prices of PID controllers affects the price of poultry, but the same forces that cause it will also cause a MisterPi to rise in price.

Which would be appropriate since, if normal goods are rising in price, then the marginal increase of luxury goods is now more impactful as purchasing power diminishes.

As a believer in unfettered trade, yeah, not a fan of the tariffs. I would happily buy domestic versions of stuff that I use to run my business and do my hobbies if we made that stuff domestically. But we don't, so instead I got to pay more money for the same product for no benefit.

Last time the tariffs were put in place, I ended up selling my company in a few months after they were enacted. I "got out at a good time," but it was sold to a faceless PE firm that'll never do anything with it. That was common back in the late teens with tariffs and small businesses, costs were too expensive, so they sold to bigger companies and empowered the giant beast of consolidation.

I imagine we'll see more small companies folded up. It's sad, but it's what people wanted I guess.

Edit: also they're never taking away or significantly lowering income tax. If there was ever a claim I wish people would never believe, it's that one. No government would vote itself a pay cut.

First off, phenomenal work! I can definitely see this being thankless work for something so beneficial. I know I'll be using it very soon.

Also
> I had to read a 15-year-old forum post, some 30-year-old Sega technical documentation

I think I have a pretty good guess on what forum post he's talking about. I've also been delving into the mines of Saturn memory block structure. Godspeed

I don't need it I don't need it I don't need it I don't need it I don't need it I don't need it I don't need it

Apologies to the future state of my wallet if I cross paths with this.

@AceGrace it looks like tariffs will be announced for the EU and UK later this week. That part may impact you indirectly.

I have a Trim UI Brick that will slip just under the gate as it shuts on de minimus. However, another factor not mentioned here is that shipping is about to take a lot longer. De minimus also skipped customs except on randomly selected packages. That's effectively gone as of March 1st, and expect those shipments to take up to two weeks longer to process.

As a customer, you'll see the package arrive at a US port then stay in "awaiting customs" without any change for a week or two.

What a charming little game!

Very proud of the folks at VGHF! Getting access to historical materials is one thing, but it's honestly still difficult to then present it so you can share that history back with everyone.

Ready for his "I'm always two steps ahead" video.

Putting these awful examples on your website and touting them as improvements is bold. Like I thought my monitor was broken and I wasn't seeing their examples correctly.

80 Euros for a complete soldered board is so cheap I'm suspicious of it. Not that I think it's a scam, only that I don't think the creator knows how much it really costs unless they're okay spending a lot of time on these for little profit.

That said, I'm all for it. Leave no stone unturned with our old consoles, because as I like to say: They ain't making anymore of them.

@RupeeClock to address the legal part: I'm almost fully confident this is legal. There's a bunch of exceptions this would fall under, including secondary source of replacement parts, and the same exceptions that made it possible for companies to clone the IBM PC 5150.

24-Bit ADV7125 Video DAC under the Audio section is in error. I don't believe any specifics around the converters on the audio side have been specified.

@SaltandPixel let me be the first here to stand up and praise the work you've done here. You can absolutely tell the passion and love that went into it and it's beautifully impressive! This is one of those games that will permanently live on every flashcart and handheld emulator I own. It's super fun.

You deserve things turn around for you. You clearly have serious chops and the drive to make amazing things happen.

I'm a fan of the Sipeed folks. I've chatted with them a few times on some projects and they've always come across as down to Earth people who support the indie side. That said, they are effectively a marketing arm of GOWIN, which is fine, but it's no Altera (Intel) or Xilinx.

I'm not sure this will be able to meet where the Mister or MisterPi is simply due to the FPGA on board having a rather paltry fabric speed. I've never been able to achieve the switching speeds their speed classes claim, and I'm unsure if that's due to GOWINs awful router or if the chip itself just can't do it. I know I'm not the only one either, and I've met several others in the same boat. I see that as a big hurdle to getting anything beyond the SNES running at parity.

I'm sure Sipeed wants some of QMTech's Mister pie, but I'll need to see how the community adopts it (if they do at all).

I'll be honest: The SuperSega drama is my news junk food. It doesn't help me, harm me, I have no interest in the product it purports to sell, nor would I ever interact with it if it did exist. The dude in charge will never cross paths with me, ever.

But man I love watching this guy find new ways to be a scumbag.

@pinkyShy "As for backwards compatibility, that wasn't really a thing in the console world at the time."

Even though the SNES sold like gangbusters, Nintendo infamously got a ton of backlash for not keeping backwards compatibility with the NES. This is one of the driving factors for releasing heavily cost reduced variants such as top loader.

Sega notably avoided this issue entirely with the power base converter, with the exception of the like 3 games that required SG-1000 video modes (which in itself was a product of backwards compatibility).

NEC had full backwards compatibility with PCE and CDROM2 games/expansion with the SuperGfx, as ill fated as it was.

But to the point, it was definitely a concern at the time. A lot of people were starting to build out their initial game collections at this time, and I'm sure a lot of consumers wanted some level of protection in their investments.

I think the negative comments above should re-read the article since they seem to think this is some knockoff from a Chinese wholesale site rather than an open-source project from a single person trying to help everyone out.

@Coalescence the point of this project isn't just to get them cheaper, but to reproduce an accessory mandatory for certain titles that is somewhat exotic. They ain't making these anymore and the originals will become unobtainium eventually. This stretches that pool.

Noble cause indeed. I'm all for this project.

@DestructoDisk I did read through both your messages. I'd be interested to know which emulator it is you play with a USB gamepad that doesn't feel right. Unless you're talking about an NT or SG, your input is going through some form of serial interface: a clocked serial device on the Pocket and the Linux USB stack on the Mister.

Also:
> Also have never seen an accurate CRT light gun experience through emulation. They have to completely change the way those games work when using emulation, because they can’t operate at the same speed as the hardware.

Software emulators definitely cheat with lightgun games, but it does work. It's a pretty good way to get them working on an LCD or OLED display. FPGA emulation is totally incapable of handling lightgun games on LCDs and OLEDs without special help from the underlying OS (Linux on the Mister) and a special lightgun that can approximate processing the light beam. That's why the Sinden Lightgun is such a necessary accessory.

You can test this! Grab an NES lightgun, plug it into an adapter, into your Mister, or lightgun directly into an NT. Plug your FPGA console into an LCD or OLED display. Load up Duck Hunt. Every bird will get away and you won't land a single shot.

Otherwise, lightguns don't work over digital interfaces and digital displays. They require feedback from the gun sensor to the game code as it's sweeping the beam across the tube, but digital displays require full frames to be sent. By the time the gun sees a white square on your TV, the console is already processing the vblank; far too late for the game code. FPGAs can't overcome that without either using a CRT or with the help of software.

@Deway appreciate you posting this, because it's absolutely on point. FPGAs are not holy grails. They're merely a different approach to emulation. And for the people concerned with latency and accuracy: my sub-$200 RP4 Pro has comparable latency and as-or-more accurate emulation than the analogue pocket's officially supported set, even with it running Android. To say portable FPGAs are superior than current commercial offerings is a shockingly misinformed claim. They're easily on par with each other, but the non-FPGA options being less expensive and more feature rich.

People seem to forget that even the Pocket and Mister both run an OS and process inputs through the OS layer. The reason they work so quickly is only because they poll inputs so quickly.

All that said: I assure everyone the MyArcade will definitely NOT be that. I've never had a single product of theirs that felt quality. Plus that thing looks painful to hold.

@Serpenterror when I saw and read over the article, I was going to head to the comments to mention the same thing. MyArcade has a lousy track record of quality. They cost reduce into the floor and presumably attract IP owners with a turnkey style arrangement that nets large profit margins even at their basement-level price points.

I consider them one of those famiclone 300-in-1 style companies, but with entirely legal boring knockoffs. Good on them for making famiclones business friendly, but I wish the quality improved even a tiny bit.

@GravyThief to be clear, I don't have a Saroo, I'm a Fenrir person, but I know a lot of people who do use Saroo's and yes they're very reliable. It's usually the first option recommended to new Saturn owners, even above the FRAM mod. The general warning is to get it from a good seller, which I've not bought one so I don't have great advice here but, there's a Saturn subreddit with a very happy group of Saroo owners to give advice and directions.

@JayJ as an excited teen at the time, the Dreamcast couldn't play DVDs and was the only difference that got me to choose the PS2. I look back on myself like an idiot for thinking of something so silly as a huge selling point, but I was far from the only one. I firmly believe it was the feature that swapped out Sony's hammer for a nail gun to seal up the DC's casket, but not the nails themselves.

@Zeebor15 wow, that's an incredibly well sorted collection. Ours is a tangled mess that tracks against a few archives right now as a handful of db tables. My goal this new year is to untangle it and publish it to get some outside thoughts, just haven't had a few days to do it. Now I have goal to shoot for, because again, REALLY well laid out and researched. Wow!

@HammerGalladeBro I can guarantee that neither Sony nor Nintendo, the legal behemoths they are, truly know what they own. Same goes for EA, Ubisoft, Atari, Microsoft, and any company that has a history of numerous acquisitions. Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox, and Disney are in the same boat.

A textbook example of a game that is in this mire is "No One Lives Forever". It was developed by Monolith, who themselves was chopped up and sold in several different agreements to other companies, and then repackaged and re-sold again. Even if you follow the agreements to the most likely companies to own the rights, none of them can say for certain. If none of the companies that could own this game can step up to claim they own it, how do they know what they own overall? The simple truth is that no sufficiently large company knows what they own overall.

I assist as an archivist to a private archive where we track copyright ownership for every item, and this creates a weird situation where things that are definitely not outside of the length of copyright become defacto abandoned because nobody truly knows who owns it. When companies acquire others, they inherit every poorly worded contract in the process, so it's more or less unavoidable.

@ludotaku absolutely up for Sega to pull a Starfox 2 and give us a proper SegaSonic cabinet, or even box+peripheral. I'd hand over a pretty shiny dime for that.

Sega's unending curse of endlessly fumbling the bag.

@slider1983 Dreamcast homebrew fans will love great new games regardless of how many Ds it's missing

To the article, I super dig the art and story. The gameplay is derivative, but derivative of great classics so that's awesome. I'm looking forward to this.

@Spider-Kev this is a classic gaming website. If you want a Nintendo echo chamber, NintendoLife is also part of the Hookshot media umbrella and your account works there too.

This is the first I've heard of this game and it doesn't particularly pique my interests. The AI art doesn't bother me much, though it looks super tacky and fake. A traditional artist could have done a really good job here.

Also I find the protruding bits a bit much and extra tacky. If that's the theme of the game, fine, but if it's not, it's weird.

@845H the people with the know-how don't tend to favor sleek looks. I mean, I get it. Every project I make ends up in a stained wooden box. It's a nice box, but it's no PS2.

@MSaturn I'm generally against developers and publishers in any industry archiving their own stuff as the sole source. They have a tendency to rewrite things to their advantage. Think "Han shot first" sorts of stuff.

I work with a couple private vaults that keep this stuff stored long term for when the copyrights expire or when a long list of legal requirements have been met (generally no one with standing could claim ownership or when rights change hands but no original exists and the new party requests it). We do this because there's so much perverse incentive to tamper with history as it stood.

@UtopiaNemo I think you're one of the few that read my message the way I meant it. I like to have fun with the what ifs of these neat little boxes. It's like getting to drive a DeLorean. Sure they failed, but they feel so fast for such a weird, slow, dinky deathtrap.

@RetroGames I won't disagree that the PlayStation was the better console of the generation. There's more than power at play, and with both Sony knowing how to court devs and the public, and Sega's tragic inability to stop fumbling the bag through history, the PlayStation was the obvious choice.

I can do some impressive stuff with the Saturn if you give me a year to really craft out a neat solution. I can do only slightly worse with the PlayStation in a month or less. If this were 1997, the latter would actually let me ship games.

I honestly can't think of another company that obviously and consistently fails forward as hard as Sega. They're actually pretty chill especially with like homebrew and stuff, but they constantly choose the wrong option and realize their mistake years after everybody else did.

I love this program, but there's one super critical piece missing: original media. I've purchased a few of their preserved choices, but realized they're effectively a bag full of patched files and usually like dosbox.

And that's largely fine. I want people to be able to play Alpha Centauri, and they're going to do it on modern Windows and that's great.

But I own the original hardware lots of these games ran on and I'd like to be able to buy a well preserved game and play it on there while supporting GOG and the original authors. I don't mind grabbing these games second hand, and I do regularly, but there's an avenue here that I feel would benefit a niche of the niche that enjoys this program.