Slashdot Mirror
How Hardware Artisans Are Keeping Classic Video Gaming Alive (fastcompany.com)
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."
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".
Where is the slashdot of my youth?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Harry McCracken is the editor of Fast Company, and as you can see all he does is submit their own articles. The technical term for that is spammer.
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 more likely you'd sit through a movie you'd rented, even if it wasn't the best. Hamburger, The Motion Picture. A review at the time said, "A very funny movie could be made about the fast food industry. But this isn't it." What the hell, that movie stands up today as a remarkably bad piece of 1980s nostalgia - and actually worth seeing for that very reason. And I watched it, and remember it fondly, because I rented it at Beta Barn (okay, Jumbo Video)... then stuck it out because I wasn't going back to the video store.
Waiting for the TV to warm up before you watched it is not at all like the modern experience of turning on your modern TV and waiting for it to boot. It was a lot more tactile, too. You'd turn the knob and hear the hum of the degaussing coil for a half-second or so, and then you'd look into the back and see the heaters in the tubes slowly coming to their dull-red glow. On most TVs, usually the sound would come in, faintly at first, then more forcefully as the horizontal circuits warmed up and the audio output tube started to get B+ Boost from the Damper tube. You'd start to hear a 60Hz buzz as the vertical output tube came up and was rattling around the laminates in the vertical output transformer and the deflection yoke. And then finally, the high voltage rectifier tube, powered off the flyback and therefore dependent on the horizontal stages, would warm up and a picture would appear on the screen. But don't sit down, you're fiddling with the vertical hold control and the fine-tuning for the first half hour until the set is at its normal operating temperature and all the components have stopped drifting. Then you get to dick with the rabbit ears (and if you're rich, the tint control!).
The death of tactility in my media is the thing that I miss the most. The smell of vacuum tubes and beeswax-impregnated paper capacitors in my radio and TV, the satisfying sound of the reel brakes in my Roberts 770X as it brought 1800 feet of tape to a stop without tearing your hand off, the frustration of having to repeatedly re-dial your pulse-dial phone to get past the busy signal at your newfangled ISP before you got a carrier and had to rush to get the phone into the cradle of the modem, and the tick-tick
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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 video output, but certain aspects of its behavior are about as different from the common console ("2/1/3", or CPU version 2, PPU1 version 1, PPU2 version 3) as the PlayStation game support in the PlayStation 2 is from a PlayStation. This affects games like Air Strike Patrol. So I'd say that if the low-level emulation is as least as close to a 2/1/3 as the 1CHIP is, it's Good Enough(tm).
You still have a point, however, about what happens to the design once Analogue goes under or if something happens to Kevin Horton.
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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