Wrath Of Khan
Soul soother...
So basically, the VGS developers are smug and condescending towards kevtris about FPGA replications of console cores, when he's the best around at this task, and he makes them look like fools.
But the thing that I'm still really struggling to understand is, why was this ever about using any replication cores, much less super faithful ones? Nowhere have I seen any mention that this is supposed to emulate anything. It's supposed to be about new games. Why do you need to have a bunch of perfect reproductions of classic systems to support new games? Why go through all of that instead of just coming up with some new (and most likely easier to develop for) base system specification and let people tinker with the FPGA (if it'll even still have one - pretty amazing that this is even being discussed after they launched the indiegogo campaign around the concept) to do more things down the road if they want to?
Then I look at the games they're promoting on their indiegogo page and see that the first two are NeoGeo homebrew titles. So I think that's their actual angle, that they want to leverage existing homebrew. Then I look at the other games and see most of them are normal modern indie game titles for normal platforms. And I think, no way are these people going to want to completely rewrite their game to try to make it work on an ancient console. No matter how much they like the concept they're going to look at the actual effort needed and say no way.
Yeah leaving the fpga in the console just to let people tinker with it is a good idea. it may encourage developers to muck about with the console. I think one idea was to allow say intellivision or atari 2600 home brew devs to be able to additionally release their games on the intellivision or atari core in the Retro vgs. I'm not sure I thought this was a good idea as technically the retro vgs would become an intellivision or an atari and this is kind of schizophrenic, leaving the vgs without a clear identity.
They did originally say it would be 150 to 200 dollars and would be as powerful as a ps1 in terms of 3d capabilities. The console they are pitching now is quite a different beast and now their potential audience are wondering why a different console is being presented rather than the one they potentially signed up for.