gingerbeardman

@damo "As noted by the developer, this wouldn't be possible without the unique mappers it has developed."

In fact they say the opposite, they could have done it without the mapper, but it wouldn't have been as efficient or neat: https://twitter.com/somethinnerdy/status/1846038217092448765

@RetroGames in the replies to the quoted tweet the developer says this is "fake HDMA" which is one aspect of Mode 7. They also imply the could get it to rotate but they don't need it for their game.

https://twitter.com/somethinnerdy/status/1845882805529858176

Was this stuck in the drafts box or was the wrong month selected for publication?

Nice little interview. Great tunes!

Good interview. Interesting how candid he was about FPGA cores not being 100% accurate to the hardware.

So many of these answers lead to other questions that should have been asked. When he was with Robert Stein and the Hungarians, had they already found Tetris? I mean come on. Open goal.

I had a game like this on my Atari ST. It was called HACKER, released 1985. https://www.mobygames.com/game/2165/hacker/

Not at all, I'm just going by dates and physical similarity. I'm not going to buy any of them, I'm just commenting on what I see.

These new MSX devices are all the idea of Maxim Vlasov, and all generally using off-the-shelf parts. He's known as maxis at msx.org https://www.msx.org/forum/msx-talk/hardware/msx3-qa?page=1

I have more expectation from any FPGA devices, but these rebadged M5 units are very underwhelming and nothing you couldn't build yourself. Maxim is not responsible for the MSX0 Software emulator

@Bonggon5 please don't involve me in any anti-China nonsense. Thank you. Most electronics are made in China these days. Including Nintendo consoles!

I had one in my basket and then it said $50 + $21 shipping, at which point I decided to look for a similar - though less charming - charging bank on Amazon or AliExpress.

The seem to have taken this design from a guy on Instagram that's been working on it since Delta arrived on iOS. I'm still on an iPhone Xs. So no chance of this for me!

Looks lovely.

Edit: I take that back, the ports on the front contain old school USB, and the additional renders has "Dreamcast controller plug" shaped surrounds upside down. And the device seems about 1.5 times as tall and not as good looking.

Also so many hardware versions at launch, and a dock, leaves me cold.

The very definition of a vanity project. Does Genki have enough fans to make this worthwhile? ***Checks Kickstarter*** £500K ...apparently so!

Super cool concept and execution

Curious how long they'll let the auctions run for

@Daggot thanks. The Kickstarter page wasn't visible last Tuesday

Hopefully a list of games asap

@Sketcz thanks for clearing up the timeline! Now I see.

A really great article, and the many years of effort that led to it are appreciated. Dale sounds like he was one of the best.

Great. I'd seen the maps when they popped up recently on Hacker News.

The only thing I'm not clear about in the text is the jump from 1987 Boston (East coast) to a California (West coast), not sure.

I just noticed that in this article Nasir Gebelli is missing the final letter i. This typo is pretty much everywhere this book is mentioned on the internet, so seems to have been made at the source. 😅

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli

I use a similar but opposite audio filter on my RGB30, that tunes RetroArch audio output for the profile of the built-in speakers. Sounds wonderful! Night and day when it's switched off/on.

Very confusing to use the image of an unrelated device. Also I see some people thinking this is the FPGA handheld. There's a lot to unpack in this article and people are seeing the image and headline and going off at tangent.

Is it my eyes or is this...widescreen?

Ah, it has a 4:3 / 16:9 toggle hardware switch. Interesting!

@RetroGames I agree with you about Analogue Pocket, that's what I was trying to convey with "form over function".

I'm looking forward to reviews of the Chromatic once it's in hand. Let's see!

@RetroGames sorry, I can't rationalize any of them. Just garish compared to the understated sophistication of Nintendo devices or even the form over function of Analogue devices.

The decals on this thing really rub me the wrong way. Hideous.

I think the owner has handled this gracefully, and avoiding drama and hate is always good. I wish them the best. Let's push the feeling on.

Sold my CPS2 boards many years ago! Probably around the time this was first posted. I had a Super Gun to run them, bit would have much preferred this or a candy cab!

@RetroGames for sure! It pains me when i meet people who only play new releases, like they are not interested in experiencing the other 99% of gaming history.

@RetroGames they're only hidden if you're not looking for them! These days there are enough resources online and in print for everything from NES right up to DC and even Wii, that every game is known about you just need to jump in and explore. I stumbled across this game as recently as February this year.

I loved this on the SFC. Especially how it looks! Plays a bit oddly as turning has rotational momentum so you have to steer the opposite way to straighten up after a turn, which is very odd and like nothing else but you get used to it after a while. Excited to see what they do with this.

Seems back now for me

That's no way this is FPGA and the frame rate in the video was slow and uneven.

@user0 you're absolutely right. Amateurs. It seems they've flipped the side view images horizontally.

“Precision cnc'd entirely in aluminum. With uncompromising attitude to quality. There has never been a handheld video game system like it.”

How convenient to forget about the aluminium Game Boy Micro!

It seems LRG have done nothing further about this since the initial email https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT1djmK9vo0

@KitsuneNight it seems the auction place didn't have it in hand, so I'd say "the owner has no means of testing it and can't be bothered to do anything about that" if it was tested it would surely fetch a higher price?

Apparently the player sprite is ripped from a DS game, which sets a bad precedent https://twitter.com/bonzaixx1/status/1810446772541493747

One interesting anomaly is the Iranian-American programmer Nasir Gebelli who "infiltrated" Japan during those Galapagos years, doing great things at SquareSoft.

Interesting!

I'm not sure I agree with your criteria for a company being Japanese or not. For me, if the company was first registered in Japan then it's Japanese. The nationality of the owner is irrelevant, surely?

@Fallingshadow good observation!

The brazen "can do" attitude here is commendable, but I think ultimately misguided. I wonder if it's a difference in culture type of thing?

It would help to know what other projects of a similar size the team has completed in the past. If there are none (seems to be the case) this is akin to wanting to learn game development and setting your sights on something the size of BotW as your first game.

"shifted to a new print partner"? Does that help lower the exorbitant shipping costs in any way?

So much pre-announce with nothing much to show. Why do they all do this?

I created my own artillery game on the Atari ST at this time, after playing Gorillas in QBASIC on a PC. My game was called Balance of Power and it was my first game. It was OK, nowhere near as creative as Worms. My maths teacher couldn't figure out why I wanted to know such advanced formulas.

I think the version of Worms I played most was on either the PlayStation or Dreamcast. Brilliant.

How did I know Limited Run Games would be involved with this, before I even read the article? Gah.

Very cool! The cars are great.

It's really curious why they would change this date, and specifically to a date that coincided with the Saturday after E3 in 2009. I suspect we'll never know the real reasons, or the real history of a game whose origins are still shrouded by the iron curtain. Hank and Alexey's story has changed frequently over the years, this 1985/4 date change is just the most perplexing.

The 1993 interview cited also says it was created in "three weeks", which means if it was first playable in June 1985 it certainly seems that it must have been created not long before then.

Given that this happened 15 years ago now, the "new" date is pretty embedded in the public record. The "old" date had existed for 20 years from 1989 to 2009. Thankfully we have printed material, scans on Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, and Wikipedia's own edit history function we have more than enough information to call upon to see through historical revisions like this.

@RetroGames Nicalis were the Limited Run Games of their day, eh? The less said about each of those companies the better.