I just noticed this version that integrates Genesis and NES samples.
3 Likes
Because every game is a sponge of novelty, Iāve spent years making terrible UIs and gradually refining them, and there are absolutely bad UIs and good UIs and design patterns that can be recognized to distinguish between them. Clicks-to-action, surfacing user intent, organizing data in the right way by its bucket size, hidden vs. exposed information ā this is real design work.
I think thereās a lot of perceived backtracking in the interfaces we use because the problem set keeps changing, the intended user keeps broadening, and UI design is terribly susceptible to inappropriate inspiration, leeching specified solutions where theyāre not needed. Windows might need sophisticated content search because people have a great number of data objects on their PC, but is that an appropriate template for a dedicated games box?
11 Likes
Yeah, I was going to make a followup saying that there are certainly bad UIs and good UIs but my problem is with the label āintuitiveā
There is no intuition in UI design, there is only affordances borrowed from the real world, the fittingness of metaphor, and how much excavation is needed to access a feature
6 Likes
Yeah, Iād be fine tossing it in the āgameplayā trashcan
6 Likes
9 Likes
Aha, so the Analogue Pocket was just a fundraising ploy to get this niche fetish project off the ground.
5 Likes
they only made 10 pockets, couldnāt have helped them that much
Oops, Thatās my kink!
I do kind of wonder if they plan to make more Super Nt systems. It seems like that one sold out pretty quickly and is impossible to get now. Is their whole business model based on making limited edition hardware you can buy to flex on other people? Does it work for them?
At least the Mega SG is still in stock. Itās an incredible product if you ask me. There are two factors that would lead to me making a purchase:
- Availability.
- Wink wink āunofficialā jailbreak firmware that lets you load up games from the SD card slot.
2 Likes
I would be astonished if this doesnāt come out eventually, FPGA consoles that can only work with limited-availability original media is such a self-defeating niche imo
6 Likes
yes
5 Likes
honestly, considering the prices Iāve seen on original PCE hardware, 200 bucks for a new thing is kind of a steal
5 Likes
iām pretty sure itās less than a supergrafx and an arcade card, or at least, not much more.
i still canāt afford one though lol (and i donāt have a 6 button pad to take advantage of most of the arcade card games anyway)
3 Likes
Analogue are the absolute masters of making video-game hardware that looks neat, that I am not going to buy.
4 Likes
considering the pc-engine doesnāt even have native RGB out and this thing has built-in 1080p HDMI, to fully consider the value proposition you need to compare it to something like
a pc engine (recapped to remove jailbars) + super sd system 3 + rgb cable + OSSC or other upscaling solution
versus this thing plus their DAC. however you could also go for a MiSTer FPGA device which does all of what this does and all the other retro consoles too, though without kevtrisā specific expertise and polish
also, this thing will have bugs. all analogue products have had bugs and incompatibilities and have received some fixes, donāt get carried away by the āno emulationā marketing (not that i think anyone here necessarily would) - performance is still contingent on implementation
9 Likes
yup, well said. I still want an excuse to buy an FPGA but I just havenāt seen one that fits a real need I have yet
5 Likes
When they find a bug, are they able to send firmware updates to reflash the entire FPGA to something different? Or are there parts of the hardware that are ābaked inā and they canāt fix anymore? (Iāve never used an FPGA and Iām not sure exactly how āfield-programmableā they actually are.)
the FPGA can be reprogrammed, but there are some limits on the complexity of the modeled chips due to the way it works, and there is a write limit
other than that, yeah, they could reconfigure how it works with a firmware update via sd card to reprogram it, and they will release fixes of this nature, as well as a ājailbreakā firmware which will probably do other consoles and roms from SD
usually these things come with a (co-)CPU that has limitations of its own that canāt be flashed away, too, but the pc-engine stuff itself will largely not be relying on this, itād be more of a coordinating thing. i donāt know exactly how the analogue stuff has been laid out historically
1 Like
This is one thing Iāve never been clear on actually. For something like the MiStER where you can switch it between a bunch of different systems does that mean it gets rewritten each time you do so? And that that each of those times contribute to this understood write limit? Or is that only the case when you update any of these cores?
1 Like
actually i take that back
Altera does not specify the number of times you can reprogram or reconfigure FPGA devices because these devices are SRAM-based. An SRAM-based device can be reconfigured as often as a design requires; there is no specific limit.
5 Likes
Ah, cool that you chose a Xerox example, as they used to have a pretty neat research division (PARC) staffed by ethnomethodologists. Start of Lucy Suchmanās publication career with Plans and Situated Action: The Problem With Human Machine Communication and her research on a new copier resulted in a video that I sometimes show to discuss UI-issues with an optimistic interaction design class:
10 Likes