avcrypt

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.

@NinChocolate Have you checked out the RetroRGB video for composite/s-video? For best results, you're likely going to need Mike Simone's MisterCRT board.

It doesn't use VGA per se, rather the DE-15 port is configured to pass RGB signals through which are mixed and modulated via the adapter. Modulation, by its nature, is going to degrade the picture quality by virtue of the limited bandwidth. If you have S-video available, it's going to look significantly better with less smearing and light bleed.

@RejectedAng3L "so by trademark Supersega ≠ Sega."

That's not how that works. If it can reasonably create market confusion, and it's easy to show here that it can, then the mark is too close and must be withdrawn from the market.

This would be a slam dunk case for Sega. They could quickly and easily get an injunction approved. Resolving the tort in full would take longer, but still be relatively quick.

I'm a homebrew dev. I've worked on PS1 and Saturn emulation in the past.

The Saturn is more powerful than the PS1. MIPS for MIPS, but also in how you can utilize it.

"But it's pointless, it lo..." Ssshhh, I don't care. They both came out, that's all that matters to me. The SGI Onyx was more powerful than the PC for its time and it'd be super silly to claim it didn't matter.

Also check out IRRÉEL sometime. I honestly don't think the PS1 could pull it off as well.

To the topic:
An important point not mentioned here is why the Saturn was so hard to develop for. This is a relative statement at heart. I like to point to the thousands of pages of Saturn documentation and errata versus the pretty lean manual Sony put out. You had to understand the Saturn to develop for it. You only had to know how to interface with the PS BIOS and high level libraries/RTL to program the PlayStation.

In fact, ever wonder why Bleem! and Connectix came out a good decade before any decent Saturn emulator? It's because all you needed to do was stub the OS (N64) or RTL/BIOS (PS1) routines to get 95% of the functionality. You can actually, pretty trivially, swap out every system call or interrupt routine with an equivalent host platform call. With the Saturn, where every game created its own bespoke engine, we had to effectively emulate every chip, every synchronization primitive, and model the timeline of these processes accurately to the platform. Saturn emulation existed very early on, but was unplayable in the realm of seconds per frame. Modern Saturn emulation is recent and honestly a miracle.

Someone above mentioned that you could yank an example project from the Psy-Q examples and start from there. With the Saturn, as I understand, you got the massive tomes, a dinky dev kit, a phone number, and a hearty "good luck".

As a side comment, I don't like calling the Saturn a 3D console that used quads. It just doesn't feel like that when you render anything lol. It's quad based because everything is essentially a rectangular sprite that's had affine transformations applied. It's why draw order was so critical to get right, as this method effectively gives you no way to do hardware z buffering. (PS1 didn't have a hardware z buffer either, but it was trivial to do in memory reordering)

I have roughly the same ultrasonic cleaner and I love it. One of my hobbies is buying and restoring old keyboards from the 80s and early 90s and these things make the meticulous process of cleaning every key a breeze. I also use it to clean paintbrushes and flux off of PCBs. It was money extremely well spent.

Also digging the bluesky embeds.

@AG_Awesome "and act like they did something legit"

They are legit, but not because they're fast. Anybody can make a fast TAS, but it takes someone extremely disciplined and studied to make a TAS that changes how we understand games.

Look up Pannenkoek2012 sometime and you'll quickly see that, where RTA (the "legit" one you're thinking of) emphasizes the physical excellence of speedrunning, TAS emphasizes discovery and understanding. TAS runs are showcases of what's been learned. The most prolific TASers have deep, intrinsic knowledge of the game's logic and the platform it's on.

And as a life pro tip: if something is popular, seek to understand why it's popular before you attack its community. TASing is a fun hobby for some incredibly smart people and it helps enable achievements like in the article.

Big love to the preservationists. The beers are always on me!

@PopetheRev28 independent contractors cannot sue for wrongful termination.

@wiiware there's no planned policies to help people in this position. It'll probably get worse as the incoming FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has historically opposed all regulations around these sorts of relationships. He wrote the entire chapter on the FCC in the Project 2025 book if you're curious to learn more about his positions.

This man played the long con and is finally cashing out.

Masterful stand-up routine they have going on.

My last comment was in July, and with this new footage in October, I can firmly say I still don't buy it yet

The cut at the beginning, the overemphasis on putting in the cart, and hiding the controller while he played is more than enough to want further evidence. Better yet, give it to an independent third party to plug it into a TV and play it.

Additionally, they need to show what's under that heatsink. It's too easy to plop an ARM SoC under it and do this entirely in software. All of the tools exist to fake that portion easily.

@ChaseIQ if this was any other platform than the Saturn, I'd agree. However, the Mister core is getting close to surpassing the best software emulation. Emulating the Saturn in software is genuinely difficult and even the best has very apparent issues.

@Przemyslaw To put it simply: you can't buy most of those parts new. They haven't been produced in decades. Also, many parts in old consoles are proprietary, such as video chips as a super common example.

We can, however, emulate that functionality in FPGAs, but if we do that for one chip, why not the entire system? From there, you can hopefully see how we got to platforms like the Mister. That thought process is what has guided us to this point.

@BulkSlash You can mux in as many enhancement chips as you have wattage for.

Bravo to Taki Udon for making this happen. The FPGA scene has an important place in the archival and preservation of aging media, and improving accessibility to the Mister is a giant win on that front.

Good on you for declining the interview. They shouldn't get the podium until they've coughed up a reason to speak at it.

There's no way this thing would make money at $350 unless the creators have one heck of a supply chain agreement set up.

I'll believe it when I see it. And no, I'm not giving them a dime until then.

Croc with updated controls is exactly what I've been wanting from Croc for a super long time.

@PopetheRev28 it's been a bit, but at some point they were saying they would override or overwrite the firmware of the disc drive to read GD-ROM discs. Very pie-in-the-sky goofiness.

@Steel76 I'm not sure of what claims Nintendo would have here. As long as the user provides their own assets from a purchased copy, Nintendo can't do anything.

For the fourth time: I'll believe it when I see it.

It's too easy, too fast, just too perfect to be real. It might as well be a SNES in an Atari Jaguar shell at this point.

I'm still pretty firmly in the "when I see it" camp. That Dreamcast core is a massive lift and, until I see it, it's still vaporware to me.

This has all the trappings of a project set to over-promise and under-deliver.

Damien starting every Minecraft port article with "Blockbusting News" is a mood into itself.

I'll believe it when I see it