Anyone planning on backing the Retro VGS on IndieGoGo? https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retro-vgs

It looks pretty cool, as it's replica of the Atari Jaguar in various color options, it has both 9-pin Atari and USB controller ports, analog and HDMI video output and is using FPGA technology, somehow implying that it might do emulation.

The founders are firm believers of cartridge-based systems, so it's gonna be cartridge-only.

I'm hesitating, because at $299 plus $40 for each cartridge, it's going to be a rather important investment. Also, even though it's not very retro, since they are bundling their own controllers, it would have made more sense to make them wireless.

I own an open-source reconfigurable FPGA machine that already does everything they claim, minus direct connectivity to cartridges (it reads files off an SD card) and minus specific cores (no NeoGeo available).

Its a very neat machine and very friendly to develop for (free OSS tools); I contributed an extension to the firmware to remap USB controllers (so e.g. you can map Up to a button to jump).

The only downside of it is that you can't plug real cartridges (except maybe via Retrode if somebody does a driver for it) and that it being open source means that HDL programmers willing to contribute hardware expansions are rare. Still people are active on it and e.g. a new Gameboy core was released some days ago.

So naturally your post piqued my interest and started reading forums until I found
this thread with a very interesting perspective by Kevtris (a guy working on FPGAs for a while).

It bothers me they don't even have a prototype yet and seem to be asking for a lot of money compared to the value added on top of stuff that already exists. There seems to be very vague hardware specs as well and the in-house devs do not seem to be super involved in hardware. Perhaps they plan on working on it if it gets funded, but there's not much to show off their abilities as it stands.

Also I think Indegogo doesn't refund all your contribution if they pull the plug? They don't seem to have people queuing for the system right now.

On the plus side some of those Neogeo new games are extrmely expensive, so for the price of the AES cart you could buy one of these consoles plus the game. But that assumes these guys can pull a Neo Geo FPGA core off (assuming the game will not just be compiled to ARM)




[download a life]