How Hardware Artisans Are Keeping Classic Video Gaming Alive (fastcompany.com) 75
Slashdot reader harrymcc writes, "If you want to play classic Nintendo games, you could buy a vintage Super NES. Or you could use an emulator. Or -- if you're really serious -- you could use floating point gate arrays to design a new console that makes them look great on modern TVs." He shares Fast Company's article about "some of the other folks using new hardware to preserve the masterworks of the past."
Analogue created its system with HDTVs in mind, so every game looks as good or maybe even better than I remember from childhood. Playing the same cartridges on my actual Super Nintendo is more like looking through a dirty window... Another company called RetroUSB has also used Field Programmable Gate Arrays to create its own version of the original Nintendo. And if you already own any classic systems like I do, there's a miniature industry of aftermarket hardware that will make those consoles look better on modern televisions.
The article also notes "throwback consoles" from AtGames and Hyperkin, as well as the Open Source Scan Converter, "a crude-looking device that converts SCART input to HDMI output with no distinguishable lag from the game controller." Analogue's CEO Christopher Taber "argues that software emulation is inherently less accurate than re-creating systems at the hardware level," and describes Analogue engineer Kevin Horton as "someone who's obscenely talented at what he's doing... He's applying it to making perfect, faithful, aftermarket video game systems to preserve playing these systems in an unadulterated way."
And in the end the article's author feels that Analogue's Super NT -- a reverse-engineered Super Nintendo -- "just feels more like the real thing. Unlike an emulator, the Super Nt doesn't let you save games from any point or switch to slow motion, and the only modern gameplay concession it offers is the ability to reset the game through a controller shortcut. Switching to a different game still requires you to get off the couch, retrieve another cartridge, and put it into the system, which feels kind of like listening to a vinyl album instead of a Spotify playlist."
The article also notes "throwback consoles" from AtGames and Hyperkin, as well as the Open Source Scan Converter, "a crude-looking device that converts SCART input to HDMI output with no distinguishable lag from the game controller." Analogue's CEO Christopher Taber "argues that software emulation is inherently less accurate than re-creating systems at the hardware level," and describes Analogue engineer Kevin Horton as "someone who's obscenely talented at what he's doing... He's applying it to making perfect, faithful, aftermarket video game systems to preserve playing these systems in an unadulterated way."
And in the end the article's author feels that Analogue's Super NT -- a reverse-engineered Super Nintendo -- "just feels more like the real thing. Unlike an emulator, the Super Nt doesn't let you save games from any point or switch to slow motion, and the only modern gameplay concession it offers is the ability to reset the game through a controller shortcut. Switching to a different game still requires you to get off the couch, retrieve another cartridge, and put it into the system, which feels kind of like listening to a vinyl album instead of a Spotify playlist."
"Floating Point Gate Array"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I see. I don't think you know what floating point is and in what context to use it. Hint: FPGA is not it.
What you are looking for is "Field Programmable Gate Array [wikipedia.org]".
Where is the slashdot of my youth?
Re:"Floating Point Gate Array"? (Score:4, Insightful)
it's a sad state for a Slashdot story, when all the first comments are about how the editor:
on the other hand, with Slashdot's continual increase of name-calling and threats of violence between Anonymous Cowards (and not), the right-wing extremism, the machismo...
attention to factual information does not seem to be among the main goals of Slashdot.
The Slashdot of your youth is probably gone forever, together with CmdrTaco [wikipedia.org].
My sympathies...
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You forgot left-wing extremism and feminism in your list. You won't have the /. of your youth if you also don't exclude those extremist, intolerant, and hateful groups.
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I came to post this. I haven't done hardware design in 20+ years, but even back in the 90s FPGA was Field Programmable Gate Array. My understanding is that the technology has come a long way since doing VHDL synthesis on SunOS/Solaris machines like we did back at Ga Tech when I was in school.
FPGAs and the Death of Tactility... (Score:3, Interesting)
I came to post this. I haven't done hardware design in 20+ years, but even back in the 90s FPGA was Field Programmable Gate Array. My understanding is that the technology has come a long way since doing VHDL synthesis on SunOS/Solaris machines like we did back at Ga Tech when I was in school.
No, really, FPGAs have come such a long way that they're no longer working in pure binary... :)
And in the end the article's author feels that Analogue's Super NT -- a reverse-engineered Super Nintendo -- "just feels more like the real thing. Unlike an emulator, the Super Nt doesn't let you save games from any point or switch to slow motion, and the only modern gameplay concession it offers is the ability to reset the game through a controller shortcut. Switching to a different game still requires you to get off the couch, retrieve another cartridge, and put it into the system, which feels kind of like listening to a vinyl album instead of a Spotify playlist."
I do love this part of the original story. Kids these days... Watching a movie was a lot more special when you had to go to the video store, physically choose and rent a videocassette, and rewind it at the end. Nowadays, downloading it or watching on Netflix or the pay-per-view on the PVR, it's a lot less special.
If you had a Betamax machine as we did, the dwindling number of titles and even rental stores made it
Re: FPGAs and the Death of Tactility... (Score:2)
Vector graphics were a cool, non-blocky alternative to low-res bitmaps, but a modern "4k" TV (or even 720p, for that matter) can render a smoother-looking line from a 24-bit anti-aliased bitmap than an Atari color vector CRT with .39mm dot pitch from Tempest EVER could. If anything, Tempest at 1280x720 looks TOO good... you need 2160x1440 or better to convincingly render in the alignment & shadow-mask artifacts seen in a REAL color vector display.
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Sure! Better resolution, and none of that buzzing sound that the deflection circuits in the Vectrex would make as it slammed an ordinary TV deflection yoke with the arbitrary waveforms it took to draw the graphics. I bet it doesn't flicker as much, either.
But again, that's the death of tactility that I'm talking about.
So, do you want the real experience of playing an early video game, or do you just want to pay lip service to the concept?
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Yes - we do verilog now (in the US anyway).
Today's FPGAs are so big that we synthesize entire Systems on Chip including the processors into them.
Retrode, coprocessor support (Score:1)
If I want old games to look good on modern hardware, all I need to do is select the proper options in that emulator
But then you still have to
1. buy a Retrode to get the ROM image from your cartridge,
2. add support to the emulator for whatever coprocessor the cartridge might have (if any, and if it isn't something common like DSP-1, CX4, GSU, or SA1), and
3. deal with greater input lag through a general-purpose PC operating system than this FPGA console would have.
I've talked to Kevin Horton in #nesdev on EFnet, and he explained that the upscaling uses a circular buffer of pixels that adds less than 2 milliseconds of lag.
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It's gone to the same place as your youth.
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floating point gate arrays kind of people are EXACTLY the kind Super NT was aimed for. The "just feels more like the real thing. Unlike an emulator" suckers.
Re: "Floating Point Gate Array"? (Score:1)
Re: "Floating Point Gate Array"? (Score:2)
After reading the initial part of TFA I came here to write about Floating Point Gate Arrays, and found this section filled with comments about them... (disclaimer: I use Field Programmable Gate Arrays to emulate old sysyems)
Now that I think about it though, I kinda want a Floating Point Gate Array. Just think of the possibilities! :)
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FPGA == Field Programmable Gate Array, not "floating point gate array"
You can't say that FPGA != "floating point gate array" due to limited precision.
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floats on FPGA (Score:2)
except that not until the 32bits (some) / 64bits (most) game console era did those start to have any FPU.
(with maybe some custom DSPs embed in some cartridge and the FM synthetisers being exceptions)
so building a SNES reimplementation in FPGA is about the only situation where you don't need floating points.
the editors should stop writing summaries one their phone (with autocomplete on).
"Preservation" and "not emulation"? (Score:1)
If it's not open to be reproduced by anyone it's not preservation, because once the company dies it's dead, and nobody can learn from it / check it / improve it.
If it's not the original hardware, it's emulation. On a lower level than the usual software emulators, but still emulation.
Betcha can't eat just 1CHIP (Score:3)
There are plenty of differences among the revisions of the Super NES chipset. The most obvious from the program's point of view is a bug fix in the DMA controller between CPU version 1 and CPU version 2, and some games reportedly have to slow down somewhat on launch-window consoles to avoid triggering the bug.
But the last revision to the chipset was the "1CHIP", which appeared in the last full-size Super NES consoles as well as the smaller New-Style Super NES (SNS-101). The 1CHIP has the cleanest analog vid
Reader? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Ouch (Score:2)
Hey at least it was free (beer) :)
Analogue Hype (Score:1)
Wait hardware is more accurate? (Score:2)
"argues that software emulation is inherently less accurate than re-creating systems at the hardware level,"
I don't know if I'd believe this. I mean the Genesis is kind of infamous that different versions of the physical hardware from Sega don't get the sound right on the newer revs of that systems so I'm not going to assume a hardware implementation is going to have an advantage over a software solution.
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And that was on a system that was mostly still using the same parts. With an FPGA, there aren't any original parts: it's all new code, only the code is compiled to an FPGA configuration instead of an executable for a host CPU. If you know the exact functionality of the original hardware, you can recreate it in either software or new hardware.
Years ago there used to be cases where it wasn't feasible to do accurate emulation in software for performance reasons, but now there is so much difference in computati
Retro repairs (Score:2)
About 2 years ago I took up repairing and selling retro consoles. I still do programming, but it's a fun hobby that I keep getting better at.
Slashvertisement! (Score:3)
It's an FPGA-based emulator of an old gaming system. There is nothing special except that it can't do save games and more that regular emulators can do. It's not any better than a good emulator, higan can and does match the performance of this overpriced system, even better it doesn't require the original cartridge.
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Most games have lost copyright protection, the rules don't apply and if they did, there are also various exceptions for this purpose. Most cartridges are simply unavailable in the market and if they exist, many have decayed significantly over the last decades.
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It might be better in practice, since PC operating systems are not low-latency environments, but it's not inherently better. If you'd run a minimal OS with the emulator as the only application, you could get extremely low latency with software emulation as well.
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Here's the thing, even Nintendo released their SNES "retro" with an ARM processor and an emulator layer. There is no input lag that is perceptible by a human and you can program physical controllers on both original hardware and emulators to do frame by frame input (although you have to keep in mind that modern systems run at 60Hz and not 59.94 - in the US at least) and they won't skip a beat.
crt (Score:2)
yes, old consoles (or home computers) look horrible on 4k flat screen tv's.
that is why all real retro gamers also keep several crt tv's around.