This is awesome inspiring. All from discrete ICs and fully hand optimised. You could always make it into a kit and do a Kickstarter though.
Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
181–190 of 214 posts
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#182dude, this is not a human, not belong to our universe, sollute
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#183If you wrote a book explaining how to do this, teaching the concepts, etc... I think a lot of people (or at least me) would be very interested!!! Great job
Hmm. What do people reckon the price point and market is like for this? Are people still willing to pay $30 for a book, or is it more of a $3 ebook?
I would pay up to around $50 for a well-produced, high quality, and comprehensive hard copy book that documented the entire process. $30 feels reasonable for an ebook version of same high quality. What would be even cooler is if he partnered with a seasoned EE, who could chime in with contextual commentary on what they would’ve done differently and why. That would be even more valuable to me.
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can hand clock a Z80. There is a certain magic to that.
I'm sorry, but what does "hand clocking" a Z80 mean?
I think GP's use of "hand-clocking" to refer to the factthat the z80 can run on a very low clock rate, to the extent that you can have a hand switch that sends individual clock pulses to the processor. This can be useful for testing purposes as well as for low power operation in embedded applications.
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#185Lemme hijack this opportunity to request someone to make the console I have always fantasized about, as a gamer and a developer:
• TL;DR: Basically an iPad with detachable controllers and open-source OS, SDK, app store and sideloading. OR: Basically a Switch with fewer OS limitations, sideloading and lower barriers to development and publishing.
• Nintendo Switch form factor.
• Capable of connecting to external displays and using wireless controllers, mice and keyboards.
• A semi-multitasking OS, where only one app has screen focus but you can have messaging etc. apps in the background, notification overlays and use a web browser at any time. (I'm mostly thinking of the dear old PS Vita here.)
• A single, centralized app store while still allowing users to run apps downloaded from anywhere else.
• An SDK that lets you write games in the language of your choice (but if we had to choose: Swift, please.)
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks :) I've kept this project to myself and would only describe it occasionally to some coworkers and friends. I never thought that many people would find it cool. And always thought that people with more knowledge than me would find a lot of flaws. So it's really awesome to read yours and all the other comments. :) I don't think I could write a book, but I have though in writing other posts, giving more detail in…
> I don't think I could write a book That's what you thought about building a video game console from scratch, and look how that turned out :) Awesome work!
Plus the blog post is effectively a draft of said book.
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and their English mistakes are pretty uniform due to the specific differences between the languages, esp regarding prepositions and tense This is not the case. Different people make different mistakes, as any exposure to a high-school level English class will allow you to discover. There's a case for clusters of similar errors, but then again any generalizing statement is true for a sufficiently high level of clust…
"Their" referring to the group of Portuguese speakers that I know, not Portuguese people as a block. That implication came about due to you alone. The observation that you quoted is based on both my interaction with them, but also their interpretation and observation of themselves relayed to me in conversation(many of them are in the field of linguistics, so this type of thing comes up a good bit). I can see how you…
> I assure you there was no intent to generalize.
My apologies for misunderstanding, then. And thanks for making that clear.
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#188This is very cool. Doing this all on your own, especially since you're not a computer engineering professional, is astonishing.
The one thing that irks me about the console design is the amount of RAM it needs. In the age where 8-bit consoles were actually being built, RAM was the most expensive part of the devices by a far margin. It is no accident that the Atari 2600, for example, only had 256 bytes of main memory, and even the very popular NES/Famicom ran on only 2kB of main memory. This "retro" design, by contrast, employs a lot of RAM chips in a variety of places, even where they are not actually needed: the CPU and PPU can be connected with different technologies (as the article hints at), and double buffering via a second VRAM chip is the kind of feature that classical home consoles would never do due to cost reasons.
Don't get me wrong though, it's still an amazing project!
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#189This is a brilliant project. I've toyed around with electronics and microcontrollers and I once wanted to build a full "desktop" PC with an STM32 and a PS/2 keyboard input and a VGA output. Unfortunately, school took over me and I left it.
One thing that I am curious about though is whether you could use such a big project as yours for employment. E.g. if you had absolutely no formal qualifications and applied to a (relevant) company by using such projects in your CV, would they consider you?
Re: Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time
#190This is very cool. Doing this all on your own, especially since you're not a computer engineering professional, is astonishing. The one thing that irks me about the console design is the amount of RAM it needs. In the age where 8-bit consoles were actually being built, RAM was the most expensive part of the devices by a far margin. It is no accident that the Atari 2600, for example, only had 256 bytes of main memory,…
Yeah I did put more memory than the old school consoles had, absolutely, however the RAM in those days was only used for data mostly because they also had the cartridge ROM (or ROMs) to store the code. In my case I need to load the code to RAM, so I would always need a larger RAM.
But yeah, they also had less colors to work with and palettes (which were costier to implement in a software renderer). And this CPU is also faster than of those consoles. I did give myself a more confortable system in terms of RAM and computational power.
But my aim was for a machine that would sit somewhere between the 3rd and 4th generation.
The double buffering I understand as well, if I was working with an FPGA I would not have gone with frame buffers, for sure, but that was the solution I found at the time using the components I was using and it worked.
The attention this has gotten, especially here in HN is still a bit unbelievable to me (and amazing of course). I don't want people to think this is an optimal console design or anything. This is by no means a perfect project or "the way to go" in terms of homebrew video game consoles, it's just the way I found to do one while learning electronics along the way.
And thanks :)