Carl: There is talk of cartridge adapters.  These will support, say, Super Mario World, right?

John: Yeah, yeah.  Whether we need to do hardware or software based, or a combination of both or either, we can do that trivially through a low-cost cartridge adapter.

Carl: Do you think it is confusing consumers offering this, or do you think this is expanding the market?  As you can see on the Facebook page, I understand there is a lot of mudslinging but there are consumers out there that possibly would back this but they are confused.  Is this a Retron 5, which obviously it is not, but they are confused, they don’t understand what [this system is about].

Mike: The by-product of our system is that it can play those old games if we choose to have those adapters.  As I have said before, there are countless ways to play old games.  Tons of ways.  Again, the point from day one on this was to play new games but have the by-product of this able to play old games.  Certainly that is cool and that is certainly something ,but it has never been at the top of our selling point.  What we wanted to try and do when we announced those was to show, to add more value for the cost, to help justify the cost.  This is something in the future that we can bring out that will give this thing the ability to play lots of games right out of the box.  That was never the original intention of this machine.  The intention of this machine was not to do what all of these other systems are out there doing for a fraction of the price.  All of these clone systems that are software emulating [lost to over talk].  It was never the point. If you want a [Retron], buy the Retron 5…

John: Or buy original hardware.  If you want to play a SNES game, buy a used SNES.  If you want to play a 2600 game, buy a used 2600.  Of course–

Steve (interjecting): Basically the nature of the FPGA can allow that to happen.

John: We don’t need the FPGA to do it.

Steve: My choice for wanting the system to be based on that was to allow developers an easy path to go in that they were already developing 8-Bit titles, Intellivision titles, all of these homebrew things that were going on, ‘Hey, as we are developing this hardware, here is a path for you guys, you just keep doing it the way you are doing it.’  That was the initial impetus of the architecture with the FPGA part. I was thinking, ‘What kind of processor do I want in this thing right now that was easy for developers to get their heads around?’  I was like, this can allow us to replicate as close as possible to some of these hardwares provided we have licenses for it.  It was a development path for software people so they can keep making their game while we are figuring out exactly how to build this thing within a reasonable price.  That has been a huge education for me the whole way on this, current-day parts and stuff.  That was initially the reason for the FPGA.

Mike: So, again, we are trying to build a lot of potential and expandability and a lot of options for developers into this thing.  You know, we are not trying to be all things to everybody, it is just–there are so many ways to make games these days.  Ultimately it boils down to what games are on it.  If we limit this thing to just home-brew and low level games, I mean, these guys are making great games.  They really are.  Awesome games that we want to have on here.  But, again, there are also these other great games that people will want to play as well.  So we want to make a system that will cater to all of that.

John: We really have got to point out, we are not seeking to just publish home-brew games.  No, we are publishing games from proven developers, developers that already know and have demonstrated that they make great games on classic game systems.

Steve: I mean, [Mike] has sent me e-mails from developers that explain to me their tool chain of operations and I am going ‘Boom! That lines right up with what we are doing, that will work.’  There is no huge speed bumps in the way that has a clear path to it. Obviously all development paths have some bumps but it looked like a pretty clear one.  So, you know, another developer could come at us from left field with , here is the way they build stuff and we have to look at that, and it is very complicated because everyone likes to build things different ways.

Mike: And John’s, again, we have discussed this [cut due to barking interruption that stopped conversation]

John: We do allow people to develop their own games on this and download a free tool chain that allows them to develop for the ARM core, a free tool chain that allows them to develop for the FPGA.  You can develop for one, the other, or both.  Put all of that code on a cartridge from your PC ,you hit the button and you can upload and try things out, get things going.

Steve: Just like the old days.

John: Yeah, it used be that it cost sixty thousand dollars or fifteen thousand dollars to buy a development station from Nintendo, or back when we were starting to develop for the Nintendo 64, we had to buy these giant Silicon Graphics workstations, and this is really expensive stuff.  Nowadays we are able to integrate this development station functionality right into the box, really, all you have to do is add a USB cable.

Carl: That is a good jumping point here.  Game engines on PC such as Unity and Game Maker and such, how are you going to port those to work on the RETRO VGS?

Steve: So, there’s one company I know is going to be building a game for us.  Basically this guy’s path was, I think, using Game Maker was it, Mike?

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: He is using that to generate his data and then he is using OpenGL ES, or OpenGL, for the graphics stuff, and then compiles it down to whatever ARM processor he wanted to use.  That is his development path right there.  He is using it at a higher level where it is generating data for him as an IDE.  John, I see you want to chime in?

John: No, no.  You’ve got it covered.

Mike: The other thing, Carl, again is that we are going to have develop these plugins.  This is something else that costs money.  We talked with Unity and they don’t provide these.  They didn’t go to Nintendo and say ‘here is a plugin, we can output to you.’  Nintendo had to develop a plugin that developers will output to.  Unity is kind of like the App Store, there are people that make applications for it that are kind of open source for various things.  It is a little open source, people can share things and stuff like that.  There are plugins for Android, there are plugins for Xbox, developers can output to any one of these things so we have to have an option for them to also output to ours.  Again, that is a cost.

Carl: That was my main question, what would be the process to have Unity output to RETRO VGS?  It is basically a plugin.

John: Well, we provide the API so if someone wants to write for Unity, you go ahead and you write for the Unity interface and we provide the library.

Carl: Okay–

John: That also comes out of our development costs.

Carl: Okay, the plugins for the various, such as, Game Maker and Unity, the plugins will those cost the developers, or will these be free?

John: No, no, that is something that we develop and we provide.

Steve: Yeah, we want to make it so, the intention is to go to our website and be able to download stuff from it.  I mean, that is my personal want for it.  Hopefully we would have forums that are constructive talking about, ‘Here is how you use this that or if you want to do this,’ where it is this community of people saying ‘Hey here is the best way to get this to happen.’.  You know, that kind of dialogue going on and ‘You need to download this and that.’.  We want to have as many cool games on this thing as possible.  We don’t want to create speed bumps, obviously we don’t want bad games. But that’s, you know…

John (interjecting): Well, yeah, you’ve gotta start somewhere.

Steve: Everyone has an opinion what is a good or bad game, good or bad movie, whatever, but we want to make it easy for people to put things on here.

Carl: John, we had a question from one of the AtariAge forum members, they were wanting me to ask about the new hardware guy.  I am assuming they are speaking of you.

John: [Chuckles], probably.

Carl: They mentioned that here recently that, I believe it was Mike, had mentioned a new hardware guy.

Mike: Uh huh.

Carl: But, you are the…

Mike (interjecting): John has been with us since March.  Yeah, he has been our main guy since March.

Steve: He is the newest though.

Carl: That must be what they meant, they had just posted it earlier today [Wednesday, September 23rd 2015] so I just wanted to get that out of the way.

Mike: I don’t know what they are talking about.

Carl: You know how it is.

Mike: Yeah, I do.

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

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8