Not so long ago, we covered the fact that there's often a degree of in-fighting within the FPGA retro community – a story which, thankfully, had a happy resolution as the two individuals involved (YouTuber Pixel Cherry Ninja and FPGA developer Pramod) buried the hatchet and resolved their differences.
Fast forward a few months, and it seems that we've got more unrest in this area of the retro gaming world.
Piecing together what has happened, it seems that a tweet regarding fellow FPGA developer Jotego was the cause of the current upset:
For context, Pramod, one of the key developers behind the promising MARS FPGA project, has released a series of cores via the Coin-Op Collection project, featuring titles like NARC, Smash TV and Mortal Kombat.
In this exchange, he criticises Jotego's policy of releasing beta cores early and then fine-tuning them over time. As Pramod states, his own cores tend to come less regularly and are often more polished and "final" once they're made public.
Both Pramod and Jotego are involved in Patreon campaigns to support their work (although Pramod is indirectly so, working alongside developer atrac17 on the aforementioned Coin-Op Collection project).
Jotego currently has 7,184 people supporting his Patreon (4,351 of which are paying customers), and is assumed to be earning as much as $36,000 a month, according to tracking site Graphtreon. Coin-Op Collection, in contrast, has 304 supports, which, at the very most, generates $3,000 a month – but that's just a prediction. We've reason to believe it actually makes significantly less than that.
The funds raised are supposed to go towards the hard work required to obtain original arcade boards, repair them, analyse them and convert them into FPGA cores that run on hardware like the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer FPGA.
Both are doing incredible work in the realm of retro game preservation, it should be noted – and this work requires time, money and (in some cases) additional people to share the workload.
However, Pramod seems to have taken issue with the way Jotego runs his Patreon, accusing him of "gatekeeping" work because he "hasn't got enough subs":
Jotego appears to counter this with a lengthy thread detailing how much work goes into creating an FPGA core and the team of people who are devoting their time to the endeavour:
Pramod and Jotego have previously enjoyed a productive relationship, with the former using the latter's NVRAM system on the aforementioned NARC core. However, things have become a little frosty of late, something which has been spotted by members of the wider community.
"Why is pramod taking shots at JOTEGO, when pramod also releases his cores as betas via Patreon?" says a post on Reddit. "He also claims he does it for preservation, but does not make his cores open source. Am I missing something?"
There also seems to be some disagreement over the Mortal Kombat FPGA core, which Jotego insists he was working on but then stepped away from when he learned that Pramod's Coin-Op Collection project was going to cover the game. As you can see from the posts above, Pramod has a different take on events.
Hopefully, we'll see an amicable resolution to this particular debate.