Guspaz

The screen is the wrong aspect ratio and has fuzzy scaling: it's not a bad low-cost alternative if you can't find an AGS-101 at a reasonable price, but really you should try to find a good price on an AGS-101 instead.

@BuckoA51 Americans don't pay any import tax in the typical case. Canadians are supposed to pay import tax on any item over CAD$20 in value, although that's not applied on most packages in practice.

@Tasuki There is essentially only one source of production (Matt Buxton in the UK), but he ships internationally.

Shipping costs to North America are cheaper than VAT (sales tax) would be in the UK, so it's actually cheaper to order from the US or Canada than it is to order it locally.

@idrawrobots Scanlines are off by default on the OSSC. I don't like the look of 'em, so I leave them off.

@ThanosReXXX The whole plexiglass-top-and-bottom-shell is very common in the retro gaming homebrew hardware community (see also the gscartsw, gcompsw, all the beharbros products, sync strike, and so on) because it's more or less the only cost effective way to make custom enclosures for things in medium to large quantities.

Project boxes don't necessarily come in the right size and you'd have to manually cut the holes in them (sucks when you're making a few hundred or a few thousand units), 3D printing is expensive for larger objects and doesn't scale for large quantities. Injection molding is very expensive (startup costs are tens of thousands of dollars) and requires a bunch of work to design something that will mold well.

That leaves plexiglass panels, which can easily be made to custom shapes and sizes in anything from single to huge quantities using a laser cutter or cnc machine (or even just hand tools for prototyping if you don't mind sharp corners).

@Kafei2006 The OSSC shouldn't really care about the input timing, and it doe support 480i60. As to if your display might support it is another question.

It's worth noting that since the OSSC doesn't have a framebuffer, the approaches that it can use to deinterlace are limited. For most people, your options are to simply passthrough the interlaced signal as-is (just digitize it and let the TV deinterlace) or do a bob-deinterlacing (line-double each field, offset by one scanline). Neither is ideal, but in both cases the OSSC adds no lag.

@tanookisuit The North American retro gaming community standardized on SCART for RGB, which is why you can find NTSC SCART cables at Retro Gaming Cables. In fact, the most popular retro gaming SCART switch (the gscartsw and gscartsw-lite) are made by someone in the United States.

SCART itself doesn't care about PAL or NTSC: it's just a pinout on a specific connector. The only reason there are different PAL versus NTSC cables for retro consoles is because the PAL and NTSC version of consoles didn't always use the same pinouts on their multi-out connectors, so different cables are often required for the NTSC versus PAL hardware. There were often also some differences in terms of what components (capacitors and resistors) that console manufacturers left out of hardware based on region, so the NTSC and PAL cables sometimes have different passive components inside.

There are alternatives: some people use VGA connectors/switches, some people use BNC connectors/switches, etc. But the vast majority of RGB retro gaming in North America is SCART.

@Aurumonado Neither is perfect. OSSC advantages over the Framemeister are that it's cheaper, lower latency, has much better colour quality (4:4:4 unlike FM's 4:2:2 subsampling), and generally requires less tweaking. The Framemeister's advantages over the OSSC are that it's more broadly compatible (by scaling to standard resolutions and display timing), and supports image position/size adjustments (say, resize a super gameboy to take up the full screen) that the OSSC can't easily do.

Personally, I prefer the OSSC, but it isn't the best choice for everyone.

@Dr_Corndog The OSSC has gain and offset controls for R/G/B, so you can tweak the brightness however you want and save it to a profile. So, by default out of the box maybe the brightness won't be what you want (although it's correct for most people), but you can adjust it to your taste.

@Anti-Matter It doesn't have to be, really. In the vast majority of cases, the OSSC is plug-and-play. Plug your stuff in, turn it on, and it just works. You can get better image quality out of it if you tweak it a bit after, but the default line doubling mode is pretty broadly compatible. The only complicated part might be selecting the right cables, but it can generally be summed up as "Either by HD Retrovision component cables, or buy the SCART cable that is appropriate for the specific console".

@GoneFishin I can assure you that René isn't interested in hits for the sake of hits. His site isn't monetized (no ads), and while he does sell some homebrew retro gaming products, none of them are competing with anything Krikzz does. He wrote the article because he had sent several suggestions for improvements in this regard to Krikzz over the years, and never got a response. He wanted to inform people and provoke a change, and since Krikzz has promised to solve the problems on all future products, I'd say the article was successful.

What they mean by "hybid emulation" is well-understood (they intend for their emulator to interface with the real cartridge and/or CD in the same manner the real hardware would, which has benefits in terms of accuracy and the use of carts with co-processors, as opposed to all existing emulators for all platforms which rely on simple ROM dumps), but the actual implementation of that is extraordinarily difficult.

My understanding of the state of HLE emulation for PS1 BIOS replacement is that it's imperfect at best, but IIRC they've claimed that they're not using existing implementations, and there aren't even pre-existing implementations for most platforms. It's certainly possible for them to implement emulation of the BIOS for all these platforms: this one isn't a technical concern, but a time one. It doesn't seem possible that a team that small could do that much work in such a short amount of time.

@SmaMan They didn't actually demonstrate two of their largest claims: their "hybrid emulation" or their claim that they will not be relying on any copyrighted BIOS files for the systems that rely on it. In fact, I saw a report that a demo that they did with the Sega CD did use the copyrighted BIOS, which they can't do in a shipping product.

I don't have any doubts that they're working on the system or that it's real. What I'm worried about is that they're selling the thing with some quite outlandish promises that I think they're going to walk back on, leaving us with a more generic ARM emulation box that isn't nearly as capable as their initial promises.

There is a lot of scepticism for this console among the more technical communities. They've made some claims regarding their "hybrid emulation" that many people who have written emulators or FPGA consoles would argue is, if not technically impossible, is so incredibly difficult as to be effectively impossible. Having written an emulator, I can tell you that even achieving "good enough to play fine" timing accuracy is hard, cycle-accuracy is much harder, but then adding electrical-signaling level timing accuracy on top of that?

Kevtris thinks it's flat out BS. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since it's not technically impossible, and I'd love to be proven wrong (there are benefits to their claimed approach), but they've made some very incredible claims that they need to back up.

EDIT: It's worth pointing out that they have yet to demonstrate or prove anything from a technical standpoint at all, all public progress they've shown to date has involved marketing changes or user interface mockups/prototypes.