7 ms·

AVS RetroUSB: FPGA-Based Re-Implementation of the NES/Famicon

101 points by guruz 10y ago

mmastrac 10y ago
Interesting project - I wonder if this uses the 6502 core from Visual6502. The price point might be tough for people. I think you can buy original NES systems for less. They aren't going to be HDMI compatible, but I think those adapters will run you $20 on Amazon.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  On Ebay+Amazon, It looks like the front-load consoles are going for $75 and top-load ones are going for about 30% more. When I bought mine (front load) a couple of years ago, I think I spent $20-$30 on it, so those numbers are a little bit of a shock to me.
  - mmastrac 10y ago
    Hmm. Is this a sign of the publicly available stock dwindling? I guess we could see the market for these original systems start to really dry up and prices increase dramatically.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      Demand increase. Retro gaming is big right now.
      - Tobold 10y ago
        Seriously. I bought The Legend of Zelda (the original one) 10 years ago for <10 Euros. Now it's over 100! And that's a super common game (I assume)!
        khedoros1 10y ago
        Wow. I see it around $35 on Amazon, and I know that I didn't pay that much for it around 6 years ago (can't find the order though, so I probably bought it in a large lot of games from Ebay). A Link to the Past: Bought for $17.56 about 5 years ago, and it seems that I'd be paying around $45-$50 to get it now. Zelda 2: Adventure of Link: bought for about $5 in 2010, selling for about $15 now. Oof! This one's the biggest jump I've seen so far. Metal Warriors on SNES. I bought that in 2009 for $40, and the cheapest listing for it on Amazon right now is for $200.
    - badlucklottery 10y ago
      > Is this a sign of the publicly available stock dwindling? Could be. The front loaders tend to wear out their cart connector due to the weird VCR loading mechanism. It's easily fixable now but at the time it probably doomed them to the trash. The top loaders were always sorta rare because they came out way late in the NES's lifetime (post SNES and Genesis) and IIRC only sold for a couple years.
  - anonbanker 10y ago
    Fear not. In less than 5 years, they'll be back to $20. This is a bubble. Soon, N64 consoles will see similar jumps in prices. Gotta cater to the mid-30's gamer with extra income.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > but I think those adapters will run you $20 on Amazon proper lag free upscaling isn't that cheap.
  - mmastrac 10y ago
    Yeah, I just did some basic googling and it looks like there are very few options. I suppose it all depends on how lag-free you want your retrogaming to be. If you want it as low-latency as possible and you want to use your flatscreen TV (assuming it doesn't have a ton of lag!), this seems like a much better deal.
    - mattdotc 10y ago
      I'm deep into this hobby and I can tell you that the AVS is one of the better solutions for the average person looking to play NES games. There are various mods you can do to original hardware for use on modern displays, but they can be pretty pricey, especially if you need someone else to do the [non-trivial] installation. Furthermore, original hardware can be finicky; the NES has a notoriously unreliable connector for reading carts and requires a bulky AC adapter. Meanwhile, the AVS has an improved design, new/clean cart connector and runs off 5V from a USB port on the back; most people can plug it into their TV, receiver, or any other device in their entertainment system with a spare USB port (like an Xbox or PlayStation). It's a superb value for someone with the cash to burn. I own both the NES and the AVS and think both are fantastic, but would recommend the AVS to friends and the NES to purists.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
> A NES with composite compared to the AVS is a stunning difference in picture quality. So one counter-intuitive complaint of many modern emulation systems is that they provide "pixel-perfect" rendering. I.e. what the console outputs is what you get on screen. Except that's not how the games looked back then! The video artifacts of TVs at the time, composite signal and NTSC, meant you had color bleed and slightly blurry pixels that weren't even square. It's not just scanlines. For practical examples, see this Gamasutra article [1]. Most telling to me is the comparisons of Link (from Zelda 2) therein. The AVS page doesn't mention any of this, so am I to deduce it forgoes emulating these artifacts? [1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_Simulation_in_Super_Win_the_Game.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...
- anonbanker 10y ago
  I attended Powerfest '90 (The Nintendo World Championships)[0], and every game on display was shown on an SVideo connection. The beta Final Fantasy's pixels looked sharp and defined (I spent an hour playing it, though it reset every 15 minutes). They explicitly used the best connections possible to ensure video fidelity and minimize color bleeding. Magazines were the same; outside of the "Take a picture of your TV Screen with a Polaroid Camera" section of the magazine (scoreboards), Nintendo Power always had screenshots of the game using a Super Wide Boy, which outputted the screen to a crisp video feed perfect for articles. EGM used the same device. Nobody wanted blurred pixels or color bleeding. They certainly didn't want cathode ray distortion. There is nothing but anecdotal information that the developers of NES games intended the blurring and bleeding to affect their game designs. The only purveyors of the "CRT Experience" seem to be milennials born after the NES's reign. I didn't have the best TV for my NES, but it looked tons better than some of these scanline effects. If you were using a CGA monitor to play NES games, then maybe the shaders were accurate, but even the black and white TV I had for a while was a superior experience to the scanline shaders available in the NES mini or RetroArch. Playing Bionic Commando: Return of Hitler[1] on the NES right now, with no shaders. You should too. 0. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-12-07/entertainment/9004110423_1_thor-aackerlund-jeff-falco-video-game-showdown http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-12-07/entertainment/... 1. http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2031/ http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2031/
nerdy 10y ago
It's "Famicom," not some kind of organized convention! It's short for Family Computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contracted_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contr...
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  The Japanese transliteration of "computer" (コンピュータ) is written with the "n" (ン) character, but it's pronounced more like an "m" sound because the lip movement for the following sound modifies it. The same dichotomy is seen with shinbun/shimbun, for example. Of course, "Famicom" is the official way to romanize it, so it's usually preferred.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Same thing happens in English: incredible vs important. input is still spelled with an n but pronounced conversationally, you'll get imput.
    - userbinator 10y ago
      It depends on the accent; I certainly say "input" and "incredible" with an n sound.
      - grzm 10y ago
        I pronounce incredible with an n sound as well. I included it to contrast with important, showing how the following consonant influences its pronunciation. When enunciating, I pronounce input with an n; when conversationally, with an m. Different dialects are of course going to be a factor here as well.
linker3000 10y ago
Maybe it's my knackered, 50-year old eyes, but the white writing on blue background is not nice to read.
Tobold 10y ago
I love these kind of projects. I'd love it even more if it was open source. Preservation of the software is the most important thing and I'm glad the game pirates are very fastidious about it, but preservation of hardware like this is - if not as important - at least as fascinating! And still, I won't buy one. I doubt I'll ever earn enough money to make retro game collecting feasible, so I'll stick with collection retro game controllers and connecting them to PCs for faithful emulation ;)

101 points by guruz 10y ago

Interesting project - I wonder if this uses the 6502 core from Visual6502. The price point might be tough for people. I think you can buy original NES systems for less. They aren't going to be HDMI compatible, but I think those adapters will run you $20 on Amazon.

khedoros1 10y ago
On Ebay+Amazon, It looks like the front-load consoles are going for $75 and top-load ones are going for about 30% more. When I bought mine (front load) a couple of years ago, I think I spent $20-$30 on it, so those numbers are a little bit of a shock to me.
- mmastrac 10y ago
  Hmm. Is this a sign of the publicly available stock dwindling? I guess we could see the market for these original systems start to really dry up and prices increase dramatically.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    Demand increase. Retro gaming is big right now.
    - Tobold 10y ago
      Seriously. I bought The Legend of Zelda (the original one) 10 years ago for <10 Euros. Now it's over 100! And that's a super common game (I assume)!
      - khedoros1 10y ago
        Wow. I see it around $35 on Amazon, and I know that I didn't pay that much for it around 6 years ago (can't find the order though, so I probably bought it in a large lot of games from Ebay). A Link to the Past: Bought for $17.56 about 5 years ago, and it seems that I'd be paying around $45-$50 to get it now. Zelda 2: Adventure of Link: bought for about $5 in 2010, selling for about $15 now. Oof! This one's the biggest jump I've seen so far. Metal Warriors on SNES. I bought that in 2009 for $40, and the cheapest listing for it on Amazon right now is for $200.
  - badlucklottery 10y ago
    > Is this a sign of the publicly available stock dwindling? Could be. The front loaders tend to wear out their cart connector due to the weird VCR loading mechanism. It's easily fixable now but at the time it probably doomed them to the trash. The top loaders were always sorta rare because they came out way late in the NES's lifetime (post SNES and Genesis) and IIRC only sold for a couple years.
- anonbanker 10y ago
  Fear not. In less than 5 years, they'll be back to $20. This is a bubble. Soon, N64 consoles will see similar jumps in prices. Gotta cater to the mid-30's gamer with extra income.
serge2k 10y ago
> but I think those adapters will run you $20 on Amazon proper lag free upscaling isn't that cheap.
- mmastrac 10y ago
  Yeah, I just did some basic googling and it looks like there are very few options. I suppose it all depends on how lag-free you want your retrogaming to be. If you want it as low-latency as possible and you want to use your flatscreen TV (assuming it doesn't have a ton of lag!), this seems like a much better deal.
  - mattdotc 10y ago
    I'm deep into this hobby and I can tell you that the AVS is one of the better solutions for the average person looking to play NES games. There are various mods you can do to original hardware for use on modern displays, but they can be pretty pricey, especially if you need someone else to do the [non-trivial] installation. Furthermore, original hardware can be finicky; the NES has a notoriously unreliable connector for reading carts and requires a bulky AC adapter. Meanwhile, the AVS has an improved design, new/clean cart connector and runs off 5V from a USB port on the back; most people can plug it into their TV, receiver, or any other device in their entertainment system with a spare USB port (like an Xbox or PlayStation). It's a superb value for someone with the cash to burn. I own both the NES and the AVS and think both are fantastic, but would recommend the AVS to friends and the NES to purists.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

> A NES with composite compared to the AVS is a stunning difference in picture quality. So one counter-intuitive complaint of many modern emulation systems is that they provide "pixel-perfect" rendering. I.e. what the console outputs is what you get on screen. Except that's not how the games looked back then! The video artifacts of TVs at the time, composite signal and NTSC, meant you had color bleed and slightly blurry pixels that weren't even square. It's not just scanlines. For practical examples, see this Gamasutra article [1]. Most telling to me is the comparisons of Link (from Zelda 2) therein. The AVS page doesn't mention any of this, so am I to deduce it forgoes emulating these artifacts? [1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_Simulation_in_Super_Win_the_Game.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...

anonbanker 10y ago
I attended Powerfest '90 (The Nintendo World Championships)[0], and every game on display was shown on an SVideo connection. The beta Final Fantasy's pixels looked sharp and defined (I spent an hour playing it, though it reset every 15 minutes). They explicitly used the best connections possible to ensure video fidelity and minimize color bleeding. Magazines were the same; outside of the "Take a picture of your TV Screen with a Polaroid Camera" section of the magazine (scoreboards), Nintendo Power always had screenshots of the game using a Super Wide Boy, which outputted the screen to a crisp video feed perfect for articles. EGM used the same device. Nobody wanted blurred pixels or color bleeding. They certainly didn't want cathode ray distortion. There is nothing but anecdotal information that the developers of NES games intended the blurring and bleeding to affect their game designs. The only purveyors of the "CRT Experience" seem to be milennials born after the NES's reign. I didn't have the best TV for my NES, but it looked tons better than some of these scanline effects. If you were using a CGA monitor to play NES games, then maybe the shaders were accurate, but even the black and white TV I had for a while was a superior experience to the scanline shaders available in the NES mini or RetroArch. Playing Bionic Commando: Return of Hitler[1] on the NES right now, with no shaders. You should too. 0. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-12-07/entertainment/9004110423_1_thor-aackerlund-jeff-falco-video-game-showdown http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-12-07/entertainment/... 1. http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2031/ http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2031/

nerdy 10y ago

It's "Famicom," not some kind of organized convention! It's short for Family Computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contracted_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contr...

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
The Japanese transliteration of "computer" (コンピュータ) is written with the "n" (ン) character, but it's pronounced more like an "m" sound because the lip movement for the following sound modifies it. The same dichotomy is seen with shinbun/shimbun, for example. Of course, "Famicom" is the official way to romanize it, so it's usually preferred.
- grzm 10y ago
  Same thing happens in English: incredible vs important. input is still spelled with an n but pronounced conversationally, you'll get imput.
  - userbinator 10y ago
    It depends on the accent; I certainly say "input" and "incredible" with an n sound.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I pronounce incredible with an n sound as well. I included it to contrast with important, showing how the following consonant influences its pronunciation. When enunciating, I pronounce input with an n; when conversationally, with an m. Different dialects are of course going to be a factor here as well.

linker3000 10y ago

Maybe it's my knackered, 50-year old eyes, but the white writing on blue background is not nice to read.

Tobold 10y ago

I love these kind of projects. I'd love it even more if it was open source. Preservation of the software is the most important thing and I'm glad the game pirates are very fastidious about it, but preservation of hardware like this is - if not as important - at least as fascinating! And still, I won't buy one. I doubt I'll ever earn enough money to make retro game collecting feasible, so I'll stick with collection retro game controllers and connecting them to PCs for faithful emulation ;)