From what I've seen the issue is not so much the headsets but the fact that graphic cards can't yet keep up with comfortable frame rates. If one needs to upgrade to an NVidia 2080 to get some halfway decent FPS, this one is going to be a hard sell unless they come in some kind of promotion.
~£28, it would be interesting to know from someone experienced in this level of hardware how low the cost could be driven down by selecting an appropriate size FPGA based on the HDL and low frequencies those chips ran on the NES.
Both have an open-source NES core supporting many games (forks of the same original project). They are more expensive than the NES mini, the ZxUno at 70 euros (without case nor VGA adapter), and the MiST at 200 euros with a case [but bigger FPGA = supports more systems such as Atari and Amiga]. There are a couple of gotchas though: neither connects to carts (they could in theory, but the focus was to make them generic so they use SD cards), and more importantly neither has HDMI. That isn't a huge problem but you could expect a slightly higher price to add the necessary parts.
TL;DR the solutions exist, price could be made comparable but probably they can't be bothered to find a hardware guru to do it.
Just take a few big strokes from other computer museums and make most displays as interactive as possible. Obviously talk about video games too. Throw in some robot programming workshops with mini robots doing stuff in an arena for a few minutes. Offer free apps for kids to take away some concepts and continue at home.
Back in the 90s I joked that computers would become so ubiquitous that they would some away when buying a box of laundry powder.... not far away now...
4Mbps with no monthly data caps would be fair enough, the problem I see often is that they also gouge users with tiny GB limits over which you pay quite a bit more. To be fair, I guess they know many ppl would just constantly download and keep those 4Mbps constantly used.
I was the first kid in school to get a CD drive... mono speed... which I brought from a trip to the US. Six months later everybody had 2X because importers skipped directly to the faster version:-D
Nowadays people are trying to reimplement the ZX Spectrum on FPGA, which gives you a hardware clone of the original and (in theory) could be made compatible with legacy hardware. It's still not perfect, but somehow feels closer to the real thing than emulators (and they use less power than a PC).
Thanks for pointing it out, I was wondering the same thing. Probably too expensive for them to use/design a custom SoC (given how the DTV story turned out).
Correction: it's an emulator, as somebody else pointed out in a comment. Meaning that it won't "feel" as close to the original, but might be good enough for those who can't be bothered to hunt for games online or to attach a keyboard to a phone and use one of the existing Android/iOS Spectrum emulators.
You can get stickers for a USB keyboard... it's not the same as the real rubber keys, but at least the solution is future-proof in that it is inexpensive to re-print. Combine this with a system re-implementation (FPGA or dedicated SoC) and the experience should be very close to the original compared to emulators (instant on, no lag, etc.).
The article is light on technical details, so I wonder if it's an emulator like the NeogeoX, or a reimplementation like the C64 DTV. The price also seems a bit steep since it is now possible to re-implement a full ZX Spectrum on a user-friendly FPGA board which loads games from sound files dumped from tapes. Compatibility is still worked on but you get many other systems as an added bonus, and the HDL code for all of it is open source and available online.
I don't think "Windows Phone 8.1" and "Windows 8.1" are really the same though? If they truly released the full OS on a phone it would be fantastic, but in my old experience from the Windows CE days, you get a watered down version of an OS which does not truly compare. So it feels misleading that they call it the same. Now I could be wrong and maybe they've managed to bring some compatibility, which would definitely be interesting.
There are several Linux/Android based handhelds which are exactly this. It started with the GP32 and GP2X (later Wiz / Canoo) and they gained quite a following. Today the alternatives are the NVidia Shield (bulky, but has Android on a powerful GPU) , and the planned successor of the OpenPandora (this one didn't do well due to production issues).
Problem with the above was snobs saying their PSP/NDS could do all that. Kind of true, but the difference is these are completely open platforms. No dedicated (good) first-party games though.
This story reminds me of this guy who has fixed the game by ROM hacking: http://www.neocomputer.org/pro... Quite an interesting read if you're familiar with (or wondered about) Atari or assembly programming.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've seen the issue is not so much the headsets but the fact that graphic cards can't yet keep up with comfortable frame rates. If one needs to upgrade to an NVidia 2080 to get some halfway decent FPS, this one is going to be a hard sell unless they come in some kind of promotion.
this is Wine for classic Macs?
...weed cures farts?
~£28, it would be interesting to know from someone experienced in this level of hardware how low the cost could be driven down by selecting an appropriate size FPGA based on the HDL and low frequencies those chips ran on the NES.
Check out the MIST FPGA https://github.com/mist-devel/... and Zx-Uno http://zxuno.speccy.org/index_... projects.
Both have an open-source NES core supporting many games (forks of the same original project). They are more expensive than the NES mini, the ZxUno at 70 euros (without case nor VGA adapter), and the MiST at 200 euros with a case [but bigger FPGA = supports more systems such as Atari and Amiga]. There are a couple of gotchas though: neither connects to carts (they could in theory, but the focus was to make them generic so they use SD cards), and more importantly neither has HDMI. That isn't a huge problem but you could expect a slightly higher price to add the necessary parts.
TL;DR the solutions exist, price could be made comparable but probably they can't be bothered to find a hardware guru to do it.
Just take a few big strokes from other computer museums and make most displays as interactive as possible. Obviously talk about video games too. Throw in some robot programming workshops with mini robots doing stuff in an arena for a few minutes. Offer free apps for kids to take away some concepts and continue at home.
I wonder if it's worth hanging the VR set to the ceiling to hold part of the weight...
*give some away
Back in the 90s I joked that computers would become so ubiquitous that they would some away when buying a box of laundry powder.... not far away now...
4Mbps with no monthly data caps would be fair enough, the problem I see often is that they also gouge users with tiny GB limits over which you pay quite a bit more. To be fair, I guess they know many ppl would just constantly download and keep those 4Mbps constantly used.
This is really a problem when your butt has a bigger social life than yours.
Joke aside, with some many people getting one any problems are bound to pop up quite quickly (like this one).
TFA found out precisely which chip it is (U16), covering it solves the problem.
I was the first kid in school to get a CD drive... mono speed... which I brought from a trip to the US. Six months later everybody had 2X because importers skipped directly to the faster version :-D
Nowadays people are trying to reimplement the ZX Spectrum on FPGA, which gives you a hardware clone of the original and (in theory) could be made compatible with legacy hardware. It's still not perfect, but somehow feels closer to the real thing than emulators (and they use less power than a PC).
Thanks for pointing it out, I was wondering the same thing. Probably too expensive for them to use/design a custom SoC (given how the DTV story turned out).
Correction: it's an emulator, as somebody else pointed out in a comment. Meaning that it won't "feel" as close to the original, but might be good enough for those who can't be bothered to hunt for games online or to attach a keyboard to a phone and use one of the existing Android/iOS Spectrum emulators.
You can get stickers for a USB keyboard... it's not the same as the real rubber keys, but at least the solution is future-proof in that it is inexpensive to re-print.
Combine this with a system re-implementation (FPGA or dedicated SoC) and the experience should be very close to the original compared to emulators (instant on, no lag, etc.).
The article is light on technical details, so I wonder if it's an emulator like the NeogeoX, or a reimplementation like the C64 DTV. The price also seems a bit steep since it is now possible to re-implement a full ZX Spectrum on a user-friendly FPGA board which loads games from sound files dumped from tapes. Compatibility is still worked on but you get many other systems as an added bonus, and the HDL code for all of it is open source and available online.
I don't think "Windows Phone 8.1" and "Windows 8.1" are really the same though? If they truly released the full OS on a phone it would be fantastic, but in my old experience from the Windows CE days, you get a watered down version of an OS which does not truly compare. So it feels misleading that they call it the same. Now I could be wrong and maybe they've managed to bring some compatibility, which would definitely be interesting.
(reposting as I accidentally sent AC)
There are several Linux/Android based handhelds which are exactly this. It started with the GP32 and GP2X (later Wiz / Canoo) and they gained quite a following. Today the alternatives are the NVidia Shield (bulky, but has Android on a powerful GPU) , and the planned successor of the OpenPandora (this one didn't do well due to production issues).
Problem with the above was snobs saying their PSP/NDS could do all that. Kind of true, but the difference is these are completely open platforms. No dedicated (good) first-party games though.
just curious, which SNES game runs at 480i? I'd like to try it.
I have one of these. Simple remote, plus iPhone/Android app if you ever want the extra stuff.
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/...
This story reminds me of this guy who has fixed the game by ROM hacking: http://www.neocomputer.org/pro...
Quite an interesting read if you're familiar with (or wondered about) Atari or assembly programming.
I googled around and could not find any ports of MacPaint (the earlier source code release).
Has anybody attempted it?
Kind of like this?
Or rather like this?