Carl: Right.  That is the intent, that is why I was talking to Mike, you know, when he popped up on Gamester81’s [Facebook], John Lester and he mentioned he was interested.  I was like, I talked with you till about 12:30 am my time [Central Standard Time].  You know, that is because I want to get all of this out, you know, so people can hear in one place.  That is one problem we are having right now, I believe, everything is spread out–

Mike: Yeah.

Carl: –with all of the information.  Like, for the IndieGoGo page, there needs to be more… You are transparent, that is great.  There needs to be more detail in the IGG page.  There needs to be more detail there like, I read somewhere right before talking to Mike that here is a third level of funding now?  3.1 or something?

Mike: Yeah, John, explain the three levels of FPGA and why we want them.

John: We can actually bring those down a little bit. You know, what we are trying to do is make sure no one has sticker shock. Unfortunately it is one of those things where you are damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  So, we can actually bring those down a little bit, but the idea there is that we have these small margins, in order to cover our development costs, we have got to sell a certain number of units at a certain configuration to make that margin and cover our development costs.  After we have reached more than a certain number, we can afford to put more into the box and still cover our development costs.  The idea all along is to deliver a maximum configuration as much as we can possibly afford to put in the box.  So we start off with a very small FPGA, enough to do the basic functions.  At our first stretch goal [$3.1 million] that, that’s the point we can start doing hardware-based emulation and actually do a lot of these fun functions that can extend what we can do with the system.  Kind of like having an enhancement chip on a Nintendo cartridge.  Then at our second funding level [$3.8 million], that’s where we get to the FPGA that we really wanted all along, and that is so huge it is kind of twice the size–

Mike (interjecting): Carl, we are not increasing people’s prices for those.  What we are saying is, for us to put those in, it decreases our margins so what we have to do is allocate that lower margin across a bigger quantity to cover, you know, [funding of the operation]–

John (interjecting): We amortize our development costs over a larger number.

Mike: Ultimately, if we left that in there, we would have to start with a three million or a three point eight million dollar goal which we all know is even more ludicrous and high than what we have got.  So again, we have tried to engineer a system that, first of all, is going to play all of the games that we are saying it is going to play on the [IGG] homepage.  Right, it is going to play Gunlord, it is going to play all of those games, through the ARM.  It is great.  Ultimately, Steve wanted to put this FPGA in it, not just to do old hardware replication but to also give developers… Steve, kind of explain what that does for developers moving forward, not just looking at the hardware replication aspect but also the benefits this brings to developers, this FPGA.

Steve: It allows them to make their own, I mean, they can have their own sprite engine in hardware done on the FPGA in hardware and I have seen stuff where it is amazingly fast.  You can write your own parallel processor that you can use on your own hardware if you will.

[dogs interrupt for a bit, it is in the audio]

Steve (continuing): If there were some hardware that you wanted to have, to a certain degree, as a software engineer you could actually write this hardware using a high definition language, a hardware definition language, and create some cool things.  If you wanted to just dedicate stuff to particle effects or whatever, you could just offload a lot of that to the FPGA.

John: The FPGA allows us to do this massively parallel processing in real time that you can’t do even with the fastest ARM cores that we are putting in the CPU because that is all sequential processing.

Carl: Another question I was going to ask about is, having an FPGA and an ARM CPU, I don’t remember seeing anywhere on the IGG page that they would be able to work together.  The way it is worded, it seems that it would be one or the other.

John: No, they work together.

Steve: They do work together. [miscellaneous chatter] They can do some really interesting things together.

Carl: Obviously fans are going to understand games rather than a bunch of technical talk. At the base funding, can you ballpark what kind of games that the FPGA would support?  Are we talking first generation like Atari 2600 or…?

John: At the lowest level, we are not doing any hardware emulation in the FPGA.  That FPGA is just providing our circuitry for the functions we need to perform.

Carl: What about the three point one million level? Can you ballpark what that will support?

John: At the first stretch goal [$3.1 million], um, at that level you can do pretty much what you can do with the FPGA Arcade or pretty much anything that is already out there…

Mike: Any of the 8-Bit stuff, Carl.  Whether PC or console side.

John: And then at the higher stretch goal [$3.8 million], that gives us a part that really has a lot more gates than anything else out there.

Carl: Right.  Basically if fans want to be able to play, say, Super Nintendo, they really need to help support and push for the high stretch goal?

John: No.  No, they don’t need that because we already have that covered through our processor. And–

Carl: FPGA or ARM?

John: The ARM processor.

Mike: As software.

John: This is not intended to be an emulation machine.  This plays new games off of new cartridges.  To try and do emulation on it would be trivial with what we are putting in the box, but that is not our purpose.

Carl Williams

It is time gaming journalism takes its rightful place as proper sources and not fanboys giving free advertising. If you wish to support writers like Carl please use the links below. https://www.paypal.me/WCW https://www.patreon.com/CarlWilliams

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