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Post by Xeogred on Jun 23, 2019 21:49:51 GMT -5
I have 3 Samsung HDTV's, an ancient 32", 40", and my main 50". I'll be sure to dig around for some de-interlacer info on my next purchase haha. Weirdly enough, when I was first playing some PS2 stuff on my 40" via component, I got way better results with an HDMI adapter. Which I know is just forced upscaling but somehow this adapter got rid of a lot of ghosting/artifact issues I was getting with component. So I've been sticking with this upscaler on my 50" but it's still a little flawed. Some of the menus and text in Shadow Hearts Covenant can get a little jaggy, I don't recall noticing it as much in the original Shadow Hearts. So I guess the quality just varies between games and it's always a gamble. lol
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Post by Ex on Jun 23, 2019 23:20:20 GMT -5
I have a few monitors in my dork cave. I've got a 20" flat screen CRT TV I bought in 2007, that I use solely for 6th gen gaming. I've got a 17" flat screen CRT computer monitor I bought in 2006, that I use for classic PC gaming. And for 7th gen gaming, I use a Samsung UN32EH4003 32-inch 720p HDTV which I bought in 2015. All of those are pretty small screens I guess, but I sit rather close to the screens, so it works okay. I'm not all crazy about having giant screens just for the sake of them being giant.
That said, in the living room we've got a LG 65UK7700 65-Inch 4K Ultra HDTV. (Which has an amazing picture; I recommend the model for anyone looking for a large 4K HDTV.) We only bought a TV that big for that room, because our living room is quite large. In order to have the HDTV on the fireplace mantle as I wanted it to be, it had to be large enough so that sitting on the other side of the room one could still see it clearly. I would never buy an HDTV that big for a small room, especially to sit less than ten feet from it. I mean maybe that's super immersive, but seems kinda overkill for the situation IMO.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 24, 2019 13:00:43 GMT -5
Mine is pushing it for my gaming room. 50" screen, and I'm probably five or six feet away. It's definitely nice to not have to strain to see stuff like my old 32" at that distance. There were some Wii U games that didn't help in that regard, either, what with their tiny text sizes!
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Post by Sarge on Jun 25, 2019 16:30:16 GMT -5
I don't think it got brought up in detail here, just tangentially, but KRIKzz is working on a new NES flash cart. Apparently the FPGA in the old N8 is at end-of-life, so new one of those and more memory (apparently 16 MB of RAM compared to 1 MB, so there can be some massive hacks if folks wanted).
Only problem with this, of course, is that the v20 firmware that hasn't officially released may be all the work on the old cart at this point. They're not particularly stable as they progress, which is unfortunate given all the nice features they bring to the table. I'm trying to lobby (probably unsuccessfully) for KRIKzz to make that firmware open source. I know there have to be folks that would want to iron out some of the issues if KRIKzz doesn't have time for it (which is probably true given how large his product line is).
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Post by anayo on Jun 25, 2019 18:52:46 GMT -5
I don't think it got brought up in detail here, just tangentially, but KRIKzz is working on a new NES flash cart. Apparently the FPGA in the old N8 is at end-of-life, so new one of those and more memory (apparently 16 MB of RAM compared to 1 MB, so there can be some massive hacks if folks wanted). Only problem with this, of course, is that the v20 firmware that hasn't officially released may be all the work on the old cart at this point. They're not particularly stable as they progress, which is unfortunate given all the nice features they bring to the table. I'm trying to lobby (probably unsuccessfully) for KRIKzz to make that firmware open source. I know there have to be folks that would want to iron out some of the issues if KRIKzz doesn't have time for it (which is probably true given how large his product line is). I'm inclined to look at this as a chance to swoop in a get a cheap past-gen NES cart but not if this instability you mentioned is game breaking. What kind of stability problems do they have?
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Post by Sarge on Jun 26, 2019 12:46:46 GMT -5
anayo : So the situation is basically that KRIKzz dropped some new firmware that adds all sorts of interesting stuff, like a new FDS audio core, full MMC5 support, more mappers, the works. Unfortunately, the later release candidates tend to be unstable, at least on my systems. RC3 seems to be solid at this point, comparable to official v16. Others have no issues at all, and can use right up to RC6 (RC7 has issues with MMC3 based on some bad feedback from some of us on the forum, so don't use it). Even one of my older NES systems works just fine with RC6, so it's definitely an edge case going on here. The biggest problem I've had from the start with the EDN8 is that the FAT file system stuff tends to be very sketchy at times. In general, you have to reformat your card to install new firmware, and even then, it tends to "hold on" to the old location in memory, often not parsing the update correctly. It's a very strange thing that probably ties into how low-level the access for the bootloader is with this FPGA. It's an annoyance, but not game-breaking. It does make things feel a little more cobbled together, though. Another thing to be aware of is that the menu system does affect the reset state of the console. So if you're into speedrunning, you can't use it for something like Final Fantasy and get the correct outcomes. For the most part, it's a solid piece of kit, but it does feel a little more fiddly than others in the product line. Much of that is just the difficulty of getting the mapper emulation right; other systems typically just have one or two ROM types with nothing arcane going on in the background. If the discount on the old carts is significant, I'd say it would probably be worthwhile, but if the new cart sells at the same price and seems solid, I'd probably wait and go with that. I'm not sure it quite parallels the SD2SNES base/Pro, since the older SD2SNES models are practically feature-complete already.
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Post by anayo on Jun 26, 2019 18:04:41 GMT -5
anayo : So the situation is basically that KRIKzz dropped some new firmware that adds all sorts of interesting stuff, like a new FDS audio core, full MMC5 support, more mappers, the works. Unfortunately, the later release candidates tend to be unstable, at least on my systems. RC3 seems to be solid at this point, comparable to official v16. Others have no issues at all, and can use right up to RC6 (RC7 has issues with MMC3 based on some bad feedback from some of us on the forum, so don't use it). Even one of my older NES systems works just fine with RC6, so it's definitely an edge case going on here. The biggest problem I've had from the start with the EDN8 is that the FAT file system stuff tends to be very sketchy at times. In general, you have to reformat your card to install new firmware, and even then, it tends to "hold on" to the old location in memory, often not parsing the update correctly. It's a very strange thing that probably ties into how low-level the access for the bootloader is with this FPGA. It's an annoyance, but not game-breaking. It does make things feel a little more cobbled together, though. Another thing to be aware of is that the menu system does affect the reset state of the console. So if you're into speedrunning, you can't use it for something like Final Fantasy and get the correct outcomes. For the most part, it's a solid piece of kit, but it does feel a little more fiddly than others in the product line. Much of that is just the difficulty of getting the mapper emulation right; other systems typically just have one or two ROM types with nothing arcane going on in the background. If the discount on the old carts is significant, I'd say it would probably be worthwhile, but if the new cart sells at the same price and seems solid, I'd probably wait and go with that. I'm not sure it quite parallels the SD2SNES base/Pro, since the older SD2SNES models are practically feature-complete already. Sarge, That's very informative, thanks. I might have to research those some more before I completely understand all of them, but I didn't even know it was something to be aware of.
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Post by Ex on Jun 26, 2019 20:44:47 GMT -5
anayo If you don't understand any of that stuff, I'm sure Sarge would be more than happy to explain. He's too humble to mention it, but the dude's got a degree in computer science. This stuff is in his blood. That sounds kernel level (probably an OpenCL construct). Considering it's an SRAM based FPGA, couldn't a BIOS update could fix it? Assuming an updated BIOS exists...
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Post by Sarge on Jun 26, 2019 20:58:59 GMT -5
I haven't done any FPGA work in a while, but I do know that there's a kernel involved that's extremely basic before the FPGA can get to true FAT32 file system support, at least with what he's using. I suspect (but am not sure) that however he's reading the data, if the data still looks valid in the last memory location, it just continues to use that block on the SD card and doesn't think it needs to reconfigure the FPGA. I do know that renaming folders isn't enough, because that doesn't actually move where the files reside. I did that one time, and managed to watch it continue to save in the renamed folder, lending credence to it hanging on to the old location outside of the normal FAT32 file system. That's all pure conjecture on my part, though. I'd have to dive into his code and... oh, wait, it's closed-source.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 27, 2019 16:47:52 GMT -5
Per a post by ShakeWell over on Talking Time, TerraOnion has added Neo Geo CD support to their (super expensive) flash cart. www.retrorgb.com/neo-geo-cd-support-on-neo-sd-pro.htmlHonestly, the Neo Geo is my final white whale console. I'm going to cave one of these days and get one. If someone would make a flash cart that was a bit cheaper, that would make it even easier because holy moly are NG games expensive.
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