Kevin's tutorial about how to cook bacon is great, the man must indeed be a genious.

Jagasian: Thanks for your quick response, I got the impression you were acquianted with Kevin yourself

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Jagasian: Thanks for your quick response, I got the impression you were acquianted with Kevin yourself

Sorry, I should have made it more clear. I can help you get into contact with Kevin, and I am definitely going to try to sell Kevin on the idea myself, but in the end, he will care more about technical information on porting to the ASCII platform and an ASCII platform dev kit. As I stated in my earlier posts, I have been following Kevin's FPGA system for a long time now, eagerly waiting for its release, but he has stated a few times now that he doubts if he will ever be able to sell it due to the initial costs of manufacturing the hardware.

But from what I have heard Quietust, Memblers, and other prominent NES developers say about his platform, after seeing a live demo of it, is that it is the end-all-be-all emulation of the NES... and considering that Quietust is the author of the most accurate software NES emulator, Nintendulator, that is saying quite allot. Kevin aka "kevtris" can be a difficult guy to contact. I typically just post questions to him at the NESWorld forums and he would post replies there. Other people claim that he is bad at responding to emails, but he seems to know Quietust and Memblers on a personal basis... and those guys are far easier to contact.

Does Bazix or ASCII have detailed English language documentation on their platform? I think that would be the best thing to gather together right now, as that way we can at least get a comment from Kevin as to how easy it would be for him to do the porting. If he thinks it is easy, then further convincing might just require a dev-kit.

Probably the One Chip could also support C64, Amstrad, ZX Spectrum and Sega Master System.

The One-Chip could support all 8-bit gaming systems. The problem is that it takes allot of work to recreate each system at the circuit-level, which is what is required when creating a new core for an FPGA. Maybe we could convince the C-One group to switch over to the One-Chip platform? A console that natively supports MSX, Famicom/NES, and C64 would be very popular.

that could be a great step forward
they should work together
that means cheaper 1chmsxés

Working together would be great. But it won't happen.

Why not?

Because I'm an old grumpy bastard.

A grumpy old bastard who is no member of MSXA, ASCII or BAZIX and is thus prolly talking smurf ^_^

^_^

@Jagasian: I really like your idea, but I must say its doubtfull (imho) that ASCII would consider such a change, certainly at this stage. (taking smurf here ) The fact that ASCII doesn't (oficially) support it doesn't mean that you can't continue with the idea though. The One Chip MSX probably would be an excellent 'platform' to make all kinds of retro systems with, and it shouldn't be that hard to adapt the existing code for the NES version to work with the One Chip MSX board. The only 'problem' I see so far is that the MSX slot connector has only 50 pins (some of which are double) and the NES has like 973... I guess that means making a slot-to-slot adaptor would probably involve a bit of work...

For me it's more a marketing strategy. ASCII, MSXA and Bazix have chosen their marketing strategy already. Within a month from now, there have to be pre sold 5000 units in order to make the production happen. It's just too late.

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@Jagasian: I really like your idea, but I must say its doubtfull (imho) that ASCII would consider such a change, certainly at this stage. (taking smurf here ) The fact that ASCII doesn't (oficially) support it doesn't mean that you can't continue with the idea though. The One Chip MSX probably would be an excellent 'platform' to make all kinds of retro systems with, and it shouldn't be that hard to adapt the existing code for the NES version to work with the One Chip MSX board. The only 'problem' I see so far is that the MSX slot connector has only 50 pins (some of which are double) and the NES has like 973... I guess that means making a slot-to-slot adaptor would probably involve a bit of work...

Again, the FPGA NES doesn't have a cart slot. It only supports playing games images off of SD flash cards, which isn't too much of a problem as almost every NES game has already been dumped. If ASCII doesn't support and advertise NES support, then they most likely won't meet their preorder requirements. Furthermore, Kevin will most likely just produce his FPGA NES on his own, as I am sure he would be satisfied with only 100 preorders. Meanwhile, ASCII is only satisfied with 5000!

It seems the bottomline is that ASCII doesn't need to do anything special, just add an extra target-audience and add some new VHDL code..

right?