Seeing Analogue advertise their N64 thing with their "no emulation" tagline is still really annoying. FPGAs are cool but I feel like Analogue's marketing has given people really unreasonable expectations for what FPGA-based stuff is or can do.
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in reply to @dog's post:
For real, I do wonder how much of that insistence is them shielding themselves from legal repercussions because advertising an emulation-based hardware is always sketchy?
(Also I doubt many people can or could tell the difference between an FPGA-based core and an accurate emulator for any given console) (I know I can't lmao)
I really think it's mainly marketing. I've seen many people convinced that any FPGA-based emulation is going to be inherently more accurate than even the best software emulator, and Analogue are clearly cultivating that. (Which is funny given FPGA emulation inaccuracies and bugs happen too - I'm thinking of the new MiSTer Saturn core, which is impressive but also very inaccurate right now.)
I guess I was never personally the target for this marketing because I remember all the old NES hardware clones back when there were millions of them based around the same NES-on-a-chip hardware that was brutally inaccurate.
feel like everyone with an fpga device should be put through something similar to the saturn core's development (bless that man btw, i'm a patron), where you have to watch your games be sometimes playable but mostly inaccurate for about nine months and THEN you get the play the game normally, because you've suffered and you know what hardware emulation is now
I don't even get how FPGA isn't "technically emulation" or whatnot. It just emulates hardware instead of software...?
It is emulation. They're slandering software emulation while pretending hardware emulation isn't emulation. It's just marketing garbage.
as a wise person once said: "everyone who says fpga is not emulation is trying to sell you something"
It's soooo pretentious. And the fact that it comes hot on the heels of the N64 core in the MiSTer is definitely auspicious timing.
The fact that it's so pretentious also makes the three typographical errors (two misused apostrophes and ROM in lowercase in the fine print) feel even worse.
Don't tell me you don't love CRT's and PVM's?? Don't make me pull out the Bob the Angry Flower comic from 20 years ago
like I get what they MEAN but also it's STUPID and arguably wrong
TBH I think this is the first console they've done where the console in question still feels like it was somewhat recently harder to emulate well on lower-end single-board PCs and emulator handhelds, at the very least (which I would imagine is a significant way people engage with roms these days?)
in any case, this is really leaning towards "audiophile" type mythologism. Feel the warm hum of the FPGA and all that
I <3 my Pocket and I'm sure the A3D will do an excellent job of being the thing it is but one thing that's becoming very clear to me exploring the "OpenFPGA"* core ecosystem is you should generally expect a little less of FPGA emulation, because doing anything at all on FPGA is difficult enough the authors probably will not have leftover time or technical-debt elbowroom to add fancy features (or even features that emulators would consider basic, like save states, or a system level pause) or fully chase down compatibility with minor games.
* I think this name actually annoys me a little more than their idiosyncratic use of the word "emulation"
Mmm, yeah, definitely. It's very cool technology and also seems like a huge challenge to work with!
whoa! I haven’t heard of analogue doing an n64 clone but I suppose now that the community has done the hard work of actually making a core the time is right for someone to commercialise it by putting it in a box that has i/o on just the front and back instead of all sides
lol, yeah. Waiting until after the open source community produced something to announce their thing feels very targeted.
I find the lack of ability to run other cores quite frustrating - I have to imagine that FPGAs capable of running an N64 core would be quite powerful for other hardware of the era
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