Polymega announced new controllers for their hardware

At the end of the day you can use your oem controller. Over the years only official controllers, hori and the ascii pad have been worth a damn.

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It’s only whack for Super Mario though, and games with a run button, which imo isn’t a good gameplay mechanic. Every other game play better with the normal angle.

How so? The ability to hold one button down while tapping the other doesn’t seem like it would get in the way of being able to tap each individually. So while normal angle offers both options to me in an easier manner having the switched angle seems to just make it harder for one options while not making it better for the other.

Agree to disagree. I can’t picture any instances where the original layout is superior. The flipped layout allows me to comfortably keep one button held while I press the other, but I can also just as easily access each one indiviudaly.

Exactly. Unless I’m missing something there is no advantage to the layout where you can’t keep one button pressed comfortably.

Looks like they have a FPGA on board. It’s not just another Android SoC. I want to know details about this thing.

I’m gonna keep holding out hope for this thing. I want it to be good.

Well bugger me backwards with a broomstick this just got interesting!

I still find it utterly bizarre that they would not release any information about there actually being an FPGA in any of their official press releases or faq and the function it may or not fulfil, even though they are currently displaying it at E3.

My hunch is that it will be supplementary hardware for either helping to read the cart in real-time or to give more intensive systems a boost by including it in the module when needed and not the base system to keep down costs. But what the hell do I know lol!

Quite looking forward to the upcoming interviews, would be great if one of these devices can actually deliver on it’s potential.

If I were a betting man. Its to bypass the CD based proprietary software without copying the code from Sony, Sega and others.

CD based software?

The bios files that are proprietary to the company. You usually have to find this software online when you are into emulation.

Gotcha, thought you were maybe referring to the copy protection methods used on PS1 discs for example.

There are quite a few emulators that do not require the bios or system files to run content but I have never seen a PS1 emulator that didn’t at least have a simulated bios like xebra, epsxe or pcsxr.

Seeing as this hardware will be closed source they could really easily use the official bios files/ but skip the intros and boot straight into the game and no one would know. I cant help being cynical about this stuff!

FPGA sounds like a cartridge (and disk?) interface like @tomwhite2004 was saying, according to this article:

Here is the question about hybrid emulation specifically.

Bryan: So hybrid emulation at its core is - we are running traditional emulation and that is the way that you would play games that are not inserted into the console. But what hybrid emulation is there’s an FPGA that’s also on the board and we have a custom memory controller that sits in between the FPGA and the CPU and what that does is it interprets cartridge data directly from the cartridge when it’s inserted. So if you have a game that has a special chip on it, like a Super FX chip, rather than trying to emulate that part of the cartridge, we are actually reading that chip directly off of the cartridge itself so that way we’re going to get a more accurate reproduction. You’re getting wider compatibility and all that sort of thing.

When we think about the games 20 years into the future, are people playing classic games? The emulation community is great, they’re really doing a lot for preservation and things like that. But it’s always kind of running with the stigma that publishers who may actually own those licenses are used without permission at times. So we kind of look at it as a bit of a problem that needs to be solved for both the publishers as well as the players. We’re hoping to allow this by using this system and allow more broader audiences to access legal classic games.

I’d love to see Bob from RetroRGB do an interview with them and have them make clear exactly what they’re doing as far as emulation (Edit: apparently they are developing all emulators in-house, I should read the interview I linked), FPGA, etc. I love the idea of a modular emulation box with the capability of using original controllers and media, but at the same time a $300-600 price tag just doesn’t make sense to me when quality emulation can be had so cheaply already.

At 600 bucks you can have a nice collection of native original hardware really.

Man, pass or fail, it’s such an elegeant design imo. Thanks for sharing the interview!

You certainly can. Still, I can see the value proposition when comparing to original hardware. You’d come out ahead by buying this system in overall hardware cost (assuming you were starting from scratch, and getting every system this supports) compared to the cost of the originals plus an upscaler.

I still can’t shake the fact that this is ‘just’ an emulation box though, and when you compare it to other emulation boxes it’s a hard sell. Of course, a sweet design (can’t deny that), CD support, and custom emulators may make a compelling argument for some.

As someone with original hardware and Analogue brand consoles. If I am limited in anyway to what I can do on original hardware I am out. Burning discs with patches or translations and using the everdrive are my bread and butter. Their language is very specific about publishers (many of which don’t even exist in 2018) so they are going to lock the system down tight. I don’t imagine that you can use your backups at all. Which diminishes much of what is attractive about official hardware.

I want this to be something I can be excited about but I see what they are doing and see what analogue has done and I am more comfortable with Analogue’s route.

The one thing I love about this thing is design. It looks amazing.

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You’re completely missing the point of the product.

If they nail the emulation I can see this being a great system for alot of people. Most of us here play on real hardware for the feel of it. Inserting the physical game into the console, playing it with the original controller. That’s all here and it’ll look great on your modern TV too!

Also the benefit of it is that it will work with your HDMI. No loading custom FBX profiles or hoping the OSSC likes your tv.

I like original hardware mostly because I love my CRT. If i ever lost all my consoles again I wouldn’t replace them with a new CRT or go the route I did. I would either just build a PC for it or go the route of a machine like this. I hope its not locked down as tight as I think they will make it. I don’t have a strong desire to replace my expensive games.

Edit. I think they could have made a NES to Fami adapter and put it in the nes module. I don’t think having 2 modules for the same system is needed. I like the way the NT Mini did it. Thats how they could/should have done it.

I agree on the preference for Analouge, but this model has a lot of potential in my eyes.

Okay, imagine this: A base system that is basically an Nt Mini. It has original cart support for NES, but also supports other 8-bit systems. It has the same output capabilities as the Nt Mini as well. This also doubles as a dock for other modules that provide support for other consoles with their own dedicated FPGA cores, cartridge/disk slots, and controller ports.

Alternatively, since we are dreaming, start from the top and work down. Like this system, include a disk drive in the base unit but make it an FPGA PS1 (Edit: Heck, let’s say Dreamcast!) and have each module basically rewire the FPGA into another system (I don’t know if this is possible).

Of course this is a pipe dream, FPGA modules for these consoles are not going to cost $60 or even $100 when quality SNES is $200 right now, and I’m sure I’m oblivious to many of the technical hurdles that this would entail. In a few years I could see this happening with some open cores and becoming the end-all solution for hardware replacement.

In the here and now, this is a neat system that seems overpriced when there are good options in both the cheap emulation space and the upscaling arena. Then again I am a fan of HDRetrovision cables that cost as much as one of these modules, so who am I to say what’s overpriced?