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Retro VGS: A NEW cartrige based home console




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Strike105



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 41
PostPosted: Mon May 25, 2015 9:30 am Reply with quote
I heard about this a few weeks ago from a Facebook post by my town's new local retro video game store/hangout spot. Just spreading the news around to see if anyone has any sort of interest, or if they think it's doomed to fail. I wouldn't mind seeing something like this succeed, but I can easily see why it wouldn't. I'll just share what I know, and post a couple links at the bottom.

A few months back, the people behind the Game Gavel auction website and Retro Magazine (both focused on old-school video games) announced that they were developing a new cartridge-based home video game console, with a very firm fixation on making it as old fashioned as possible. Mike Kennedy, one of the main people behind the idea seems pretty optimistic (perhaps a little TOO optimistic) that it will succeed, due to the amount of attention retro-styled indie games are getting from major game companies and players alike, and he claims to have support from several gaming industry veterans (including the console's co-creator Steve Woita, who designed Quadrun and Taz on the Atari 2600, and was one of the main programmers for Kid Chameleon, and contributed to Sonic 2 and Sonic Spinball on the Sega Genesis) so they're not just jumping in completely blind, and they say that they have a good number of developers signed on to produce games for it. The Kickstarter is expected to launch sometime this summer, though no solid date has been announced yet.

As of right now, the full technical specs have not been released yet, and there's a lot that's still unknown, but here is what is known so far:

It will be an entirely new console with mostly new retro-styled games provided primarily by indie developers, with some ports of some currently existing indie games in addition to original titles, and hopes for some support from "big" companies to release new IPs and some long overdue official sequels to classic titles. It will not be a clone system that plays old carts like the Retron consoles. It currently has one confirmed pack-in launch title: "The Adventures of the Tiny Knight", with more hopeful to be included. It is intended to be very developer-friendly, and Kennedy has talked about providing special "dev-carts" that developers can connect to their computers to port their games over, and can play test on their own RVGS consoles.

The last I heard, the Retro VGS console may sell for about $150-$180. There has been talk that games may be priced depending on their developers. Indie games may sell for around $20, while big company games may sell for around $40. They will be sold online, but if it exceeds expectations, the creators hope to have them sold in retail.

The Retro VGS will run off of a FPGA with ARM architecture.

The reason for the focus on cartridges is not only for nostalgia's sake, but game and console longevity as well. As there will be few, if any moving parts in the Retro VGS, and cartridges are usually far more resistant to damage than discs, it is expected that they will be able to last a great many years longer than most disc-based consoles and games before they stop working. With the advances to flash memory, and many other memory storage mediums, including some that could hold upwards of 500GB of data, game development on cartridges should not be limited nearly as much by memory constraints as they were in the 70s-90s, which was one of the reasons why cartridges were originally dropped in favor of discs.

The console and games are not intended to be graphics-intensive. They can be expected to output graphics as simple as the Atari 2600's to as advanced as the Playstation 1's, though some preference has been expressed towards 16-bit styled pixel graphics. It could be expected to be HDMI compatible, but so far, there is no solid confirmation that it will ship with an HDMI cable.

The shells for the console and cartridges will be made using molds from the Atari Jaguar, as the molding plates still existed, and were used to house dental cameras after they were sold to Imagin Systems. Purchasing the Jaguar molds from Imagin Systems was a far more cost-effective measure than designing and manufacturing new shells from scratch, though the innards for both will be completely new. Kennedy has said that the purchase of the Jaguar molds were "what makes the Retro VGS possible". There will be no CD add-on.

It will have two USB controller ports, and two 9-prong controller ports for Sega Genesis/Atari controllers. It will come packed with 1-2 USB controllers based on one of the Wii U's SNES-like Classic Controllers. I keep hearing conflicting reports on whether the included USB controllers will be wired or wireless.

It will not have online connectivity, meaning no online play, no game patches (so the game developers have to make ABSOLUTELY SURE that they squash as many bugs as they possibly can before the final product is released), No DLC, and no firmware or software updates. The only multiplayer will be the good old-fashioned "two to four people in the same room" setup.

So... yeah. It's pretty ambitious for this day and age. It's certainly not going to appeal to everybody. Everywhere I see information for it, the comments people post are overflowing with skepticism, with many believing that an offline, cartridge-based home console does not have a place in a world where most games are moving more and more towards a mainly digital format and mobile platforms, and online multiplayer with complete strangers is almost mandatory now. Many are saying that the Retro VGS will go the same way as the Android-based Ouya. Even though it's not meant to compete with the "Big 3", It certainly does have a heck of a mountain to climb, and I do believe that this console will not succeed without a good marketing push. Even though there's still a lot that's still unknown about it, This idea genuinely interests me, and I'm curious to see how things would go if it succeeds. I'm hoping that by posting this here, I manage to spread awareness and interest, and help improve its chances. Hopefully, some more technical details will be released soon, and we'll have a better understanding of just what this thing is capable of.

An interview with Mike Kennedy: http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/08/this-is-how-you-make-a-new-cartridge-based-retro-video-game-console/view-all/

The official Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RETROVGS?fref=ts%7C

The (currently very small) Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retro_VGS

"The Adventures of the Tiny Knight" WIP gameplay (gameplay starts at 4:00): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbFjBmVT_J4
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