Nintendo announce NES mini...59.99 retro gaming HDMI classic NES console Nov 11
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OMG Day 1. Sony and MS are deaaaaaaadd.
http://nesfun.com/ easily suits any retro nes gaming urge.
I have a Kangaroo MiniPC. I imagine it would work well. I just use it for streaming video at the moment.
Though I wouldn't recommend one to anyone. I had to completely disassemble it and layer in some thermal pads to conduct heat to the casing. Otherwise it would throttle even with just continuous video playback. I also attached a small heatsink to the casing just to be sure. No throttle no more!
You could just scale it up. It'd look blocky as hell, but then NES always looked blocky (and really fuzzy, due to the bad video output hardware used.)
You could probably emulate the fuzziness with enough computing power...
I forgot how crap 8 bit looks. I think in my mind I see 8 bit as 16 bit. But no, it's ugly 8 bit.
I cant get that site to work with a keyboard btw. I tried to press enter and space to enter one of the Mario levels and it doesn't work. And I cant figure out what other button it could be.
I dont have a gamepad on hand anyway. Waiting to get that bluetooth Xbox S controller for easy PC use I guess. Will it work with things like nesfun?
Although somehow a modern Xbox controller doesn't have a suitable retro feel.
They should make a snesfun.com. Oh wait they do, gonna check that out. These are illegal right? Nintendo hasnt got around to cease and desisting them I suppose.
smart choice, you are so lucky to have one. jealousy x 1000. I want one of those lipstick sized, mini computers to have everything with me all the time.
thanks , I was going to get a fire stick for one of my pc monitors and it was like $40 bucks and I saw the compute stick for $150 and I thought sure why not. Its much more useful
I would be a lot more excited for something like this for the N64, considering emulation for the N64 is still lacking...
NES can be perfectly emulated by... anything... if it was a least Snes, and had some way to play more games (via carts or sdcard)...
oh well, it looks nice at least, and it's cool to see it because it's an official product... but... another Nes clone or emulator... ok.
NES can be perfectly emulated by... anything... if it was a least Snes, and had some way to play more games (via carts or sdcard)...
oh well, it looks nice at least, and it's cool to see it because it's an official product... but... another Nes clone or emulator... ok.
Nintendo can't even make 30 N64 games available on Virtual Console. And have rather impressively managed to go backwards in catalog from Wii to Wii U.
If they did manage this I imagine it would cost well over $100.
Speaking of costs, I was thinking more about the comments in this thread about how it's implemented. Ironically, the cheapest way to implement this would not be with an emulator on an ARM SoC but with a third party Famiclone ASIC. These are extremely cheap and contain just about the entire NES on a tiny, package-less chip. The ones I've seen actually include special modes that extend the NES's functionality to include more colors and faster CPU speeds. I've seen handhelds with these chips that cost less than $20 and play both original NES and new games. Unlike the NES Mini, they include an LCD, battery, and modifiable storage, so the NES Mini's hardware could be substantially less.
But I strongly doubt Nintendo would pursue this route, it would be too damaging to their pride.
They may be using an FPGA though. Many people have done NES FPGA implementations already so I'm sure they can bang out their own or license one, and this would still keep costs of external peripherals down. I don't really know what FPGA costs are like but they wouldn't need a very large one.
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There's some disadvantages to doing an ASIC design though, like:
- Much higher initial costs
- Much longer development time to market
- Big extra hits to cost and schedule to fix problems
FPGAs are slower and use more power but that shouldn't be a problem for this application. They're much larger, but the application is so small an ASIC implementation is liable to be severely pad limited even on a pretty old process.
Dynamic reconfigurability may even be useful as a means of supporting different mappers.
But there's probably a much higher cost floor per chip to FPGAs anyway because the volume/demand and competition probably isn't enough to dictate otherwise.
That's not to say they aren't using an SoC or microcontroller, especially since that'd allow them to port one of their VC NES emulators. But that's more likely to require more external components.
wouldn't the ARM SoC needed to emulate the NES be really, really, really basic?
I mean there is even a more or less OK emulator of the NES even on the PS1, without any official involvement
another idea, couldn't they use something based on some of their portables hardware?
something else, isn't the typical single chip Nes clone solution made for composite video, and this thing is HDMI only or is it really simple to make it HDMI?
I mean there is even a more or less OK emulator of the NES even on the PS1, without any official involvement
another idea, couldn't they use something based on some of their portables hardware?
something else, isn't the typical single chip Nes clone solution made for composite video, and this thing is HDMI only or is it really simple to make it HDMI?
Chinese nes knock off usually use blobs of black goo for the chips right?
This needs to be better than just okay, graphical/audio glitches or extra slowdowns (perhaps even lack of slowdowns and flickering) aren't really acceptable.
PS1 has a really low end CPU by today's standards, a simple ARM microcontroller can easily exceed it. But imbnes was possible due to rendering the graphics with the GPU and sound with the SPU, and you'll probably have a hard time finding a microcontroller with suitable hardware or even much of a display controller. You could do it with a very low end SoC, like an Allwinner A13 or similar that costs < $5. But at this point you'll probably need external RAM and a PMIC (maybe you can find some SoCs that don't need the latter). It's not a huge deal, it's just the difference between saving a few dollars in chips.
It may actually be possible to do this with a higher end microcontroller, managing all of the emulation and video signal generation in software. Especially if you use a dual core one. It's hard to really say for sure, and I don't know if the pricing still makes that attractive.
GBA or DS, while they can manage decent NES emulation, don't output the full resolution. So it's not really good enough for this. They'd have to go with 3DS. But I think if they used any of these chips as-is they'd need something to manage the HDMI output.
If there aren't any available with HDMI then that probably wouldn't really make sense anymore. I don't really know what's available these days. There are other requirements like the Wii controller compatibility that also make me think a third party NOAC wouldn't have really been sufficient.
I'm also now reading it supports save states, so that's most likely done with software emulation. Although I don't know how you're supposed to manage those with the controller. Maybe it just auto-saves when you power off and gives you an option to resume when you reload.
That's a good point, an RPi Zero is only $5 and can easily handle NES to the levels a device like this needs. But I think even Nintendo would probably have a hard time producing that board for that price without the connections and non-profit status the RPi Foundation has. And then even they can't seem to actually stock them..
On the other hand, the other RPi models (the ones that cost ~$35) are probably not examples of aggressive pricing and are probably straight up too expensive for this device even with slim margins.