Are You Supporting RetroVGS?
Monkey Archive Forums/Digital Discussion/Are You Supporting RetroVGS?
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| This past Saturday the IndieGoGo campaign for the RetroVGS console launched. In case you haven't heard about it. This is a new console focused primarily on catering to retro gamers and developers. If you like retro style games and / or you like developing retro style please check it out. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/retro-vgs I "ordered" mine on Saturday afternoon. The things I like about it: Cartridge-based: first cartridge based system in decades. I play games on my NES and Genesis and the catridges still work fine even now 20 to 30 years later. Should help stimulate new development for retro style games. One system can be configured to "be" many different machines. However, this goes beyond simple software emulation and the hardware basically reconfigures itself based on what the developer has instructed it to do. In a world where game markets are becoming so flooded (there were 174,000 games made in Unity and released this summer alone!) I think the RetroVGS will stand out as a machine where although fewer users will own one they are the kind of users who will buy most of the games made for the system. This kind of thing could basically be like a "whole new beginning". Quality (as far as bugs) of the games should be better than the typical modern day releases we see where devs rely on continual patches after sale. Finally I just am a very passionate retro gamer and want to support it. So anyway check it out. I know there are a lot of us retro gamers and if we united we could make this happen. |
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| I am a retro gamer too but mostly for the PC with emulators. :) I feel like this is similar to the OUYA which Monkey1 had a target for. OUYA is a failed product. I didn't buy the OUYA and I'm not aware of the reason for its downfall, and how this could be different. Would be nice if something like this comes to light. I wonder if an indie-dev person is going to want to pay the high cost of quality control a game destined for cartridges would have to go under to be accepted. |
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| I actually thought the Ouya would do fine because it supported android. This seems like a horrible idea. I am seeing games that look worth maybe $10 costing $30-$60. It looks like it has a proprietary programming framework. Devs aren't going to target something like this if they can't easily port something existing. Look at some of the numbers for Towerfall, the top selling title on the Ouya. This will be significantly worse. I really don't see much good about this at all(and I like retro.) |
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| It's not perfect for sure and the campaign itself could be better too. KS would have been better than IGG because many people apparently only use KS. The price should have been around $250 or less for the standard model. I don't mind the prices of the games. The current race to the bottom is a bad thing I think. Mobile definitely illustrates it well where now devs have to explain why their game is worth 99 cents. LOL Also the nice thing with cartridges is they can end up worth more money as the years pass. Not always of course but many have done so. And piracy is less of an issue. I figure if it makes it then awesome I'll have one. If the campaign fails I'll get a refund from IGG by mid November. |
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| OUYA was a big smashing success on Kickstarter and made the news. Earlier this year it has since gone the way of the dodo. People have short memories, but not that short, and I think nerds will be reluctant to fund a new console, even if it comes with something nifty like cartridges. But maybe it will work out. I don't know how the underlying hardware EPROM or RAM or whatever it is works on the RetroVGS but I'm sure Monkey2 could handle it if the interface can be wrapped by C++, which is probably likely. |
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| OUYA was a great idea, very very very poorly executed. If they had done proper QA/QC at launch it might have done good (still not PS/XBox/Wii level, but good). I still use mine as a NES/SNES emulator on my HDTV, works great. RetroVGS just seems like a bad idea, even worse at $300. I'm sure the games could/will be fun, but someone could probably workout something wifi based for $50-$100. If you want that legit cartridge based retro feeling, find a pawn shop or used game store. |
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| RetroVGS looks quite good and I feel it has a place, but $300? why not just use a Raspberry Pi 2? I just hope they aren't just doing it to try and cash in on peoples nostalgia which is what I see happening with all these products coming out. |
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| "RetroVGS looks quite good and I feel it has a place, but $300? why not just use a Raspberry Pi 2?" Exactly! Slap it in a plastic case, throw in a USB NES controller, good to go. And probably around $80? |
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| If it had been a do it yourself Atari style Jaguar case and cartridge port for Pi2 I would have been there. Same target demographic as this chestnut: http://www.xgamestation.com/about_xgamestation.php |
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| I figure if it makes it then awesome I'll have one. If the campaign fails I'll get a refund from IGG by mid November. Or third scenario, it gets funded, and in several years you realise you get neither. It is an extremely ambitious plan that will require an extremely gifted team to deliver. |
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| RetroVGS is a joke. Cartridges (talk about something expensive...)? From their page, the cheapest one costs $30 (so, taking this as production-cost, a full game sold to costumers would cost $60!) No updates for both the system and the games? Are they going to do RECALLs if some problem/bug appears? A FPGA console? (Some Android stick with real 3D acceleratos like Mali-400 will be way faster - and cheaper - that that!) And for $299 you could buy a Wii. Not to mention THIS. A programmer working for them, that left the development. I would stay as far away as possible from it. |
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| And for $299 you could buy a Wii. They still cost that much?? |
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| Ha ha! Alright not much support for it here. Ah well I just thought I'd throw it out there in case anyone hadn't heard about it and was interested. I highly doubt it actually will be funded. The amount of the campaign is just too much and the amount of the standard console is just too high. I'm willing to do the $300 for the black unit to support it because I think it would be a cool thing to have and this is my big "splurge for the hell of it" thing of the year. Of course, the fact that the black console is the cheapest and also happens to be the one I think that looks the best also helped. Still, I am surprised at the people putting in $1,000 or more. Not sure if they are getting two elite backer packages, 3 standard consoles or what. For me the key parts are it's ideal for retro and outside of the flooded mainstream markets. If this doesn't come into reality I think I will turn my eye back to that Neo Geo X system I was considering buying before hearing about this. |
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| It is okay to dream. :) And if this did become popular I'm sure someone talented here could make a target for it in MX2. |
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| contains an ARM and FPGA it says in specs, but no specialized hardware for sound geeks! Slightly disappointing to me, if only because that means that retro sound needs to be emulated in software (or the FPGA?). The music in the preview video for the pack-in game sounded like general midi default wavetable stuff :( Everything else seems pretty neato. It is definitely a "luxury" type system, or system for maker/tweaky enthusiasts, however. Something like OpenPandora but with a fresher coat of paint thanks to 3rd party support from a few well-known homebrewers and at least one indie favorite A-tier dev. 9-pin d-sub connectors are interesting, but probably polled and not some straight pin through to an IO, which is unfortunate since no controllers currently on the market support that AFAIK. (Disclaimer: I'm not old enough to remember the 8-bit era joystick ports). DE-9 is probably provided because it is the same port commonly used for the old RS232 serial interface, for hackers to make their own adapters. Not as market-friendly, which is why I'm presuming they threw the USBs on there as well (Which better damn well support xinput compatible devices out of the box!) This "could" work from a marketing standpoint. Ouya tried to follow the "radical" fad where indie games were racing to the bottom with F2P stuff, requiring free demos and the like, and its business model was a failure and probably not sustainable for that particular market demographic it was aiming at. On the other side of that appears to be this product, which goes in the opposite direction, providing the full-service experience, complete with cartridges to collect, (presumably) nice box art and labels, with a price to match almost certainly (I'm going to bet many games will be at least $40 for starters). Could be an interesting niche to look into, even if it is extremely small; the demo it is aimed at seem rather fanatical about their love of classic gaming and are probably willing to pay the premium for the experience. All that being said, the release schedule is too slow. Who knows where the market will be next year. People have been predicting a crash in the indie games market for a while now. Not too surprised that this concept was hatched by an SoA / Tengen alum. I hope that they don't expect every developer to dig straight into Verilog or VHDL to work on this thing. I want to see common system profiles and SDKs available freely to devs, so that the only hardware issues they have to concentrate on is working with the cartridge manufacturer. |
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| If all you want is a "retro" machine, you could do this: get a cheap Android stick from China, write a new homescreen app and have fun with it... ...as I did :) (Audio is in portuguese, but I think anyone can understand what's going on: It's an android stick with Xbox 360 joystick connected on a flatscreen - since I didn't have a microSD card with enough space available to test, I used an old flash drive connected to the device) And yes, the homescreen app is written in Monkey :D |
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| That homescreen app looks pretty cool! Where can we get a hold of that :)? |
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| Why do you want it? It won't work on any android device (at least if not properly set) - it's just a background image, and some code to list the roms in the pendrive, and launch emulators :) |
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| Lool. This project has been crashing and burning hardcore, but at least one good thing has come out of it: kevtris is considering commercializing his FPGA board. It's probably not going to be designed for indie developers to easily put anything on it, so most likely it will be for classic gaming only, but if it does end up packing a modern CPU on the side ( again, unlikely because of the audience) using monkey would still be possible, even if gms and unity aren't. This has also opened up my eyes to the world of Raspberry Pi machines, particularly ones running off retroarch. Newer versions of retroarch have a core which supports indie games made in love2D. I bet some smarty here could write a core which supports a custom monkey target; just a slightly modified version of the desktop target optimized for running on retroarch. That would be pretty neat, even though chances are most people will never use it, if you're making free games then people running retroarch on their machines will want to find games to fill out their core system. Food for thought I suppose. Back on the subject of the retro VGS. Somebody made a parody of their crowdfunding trainwreck, and it pretty much hits all of the major flaws this campaign had: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yH76tRLVTQw I'm still awaiting the system which rescues us from the race to the bottom and the inevitable crash which will come from the glut of indie games exceeding the currently static demand... |
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| Wait, the built in fpga is programmable by the cartridge. Since that's the case we're not talking about emulating a good sound chip. You can have a good soundchip of your own design!! :o This thing looks amazing and the price is spot on. The reason ouya was a resounding failure is it's success at being the bottom of the barrel on pricing. Do you want quality, or quantity? I'll take this over an ouya any day of the week. |
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| Ouya failed because of poor hardware quality assurance. Wifi and Bluetooth were both horrid. So it was a pain the butt to get online. Controllers were spotty too, and was unplayable with a 2nd controller causing lag. Partly because of the case design causing radio signal blockage. Partly because of poor antennae. Had they launched with working antennae, it may have been a different story. And those are components that should only cost a few bucks on mass. |
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| I never bought an Ouya, but I feel like that was doomed to failure by the content distribution model. Free demos and trying to scrap up a living on in-app purchases is only sustainable on a platform with a huge audience, and a reasonable likelihood of your project getting seen. We've all seen some of the issues getting our Android builds to maintain consistent and reliable speed; they were trying to bill the thing as being a system for more than just casual mobile games, and weren't hitting the mark on the target for a number of reasons, not just QA-related. Devs with business models that didn't reflect the mobile market were hamstrung by Ouya's model. RetroVGS, on paper, is an amazing concept for promoting high-quality "boutique" videogames, and I fully support the idea it represents. Unfortunately, it seems that the guys behind it have nothing to show for it but the molds for the old Jaguar case and a sizzle reel that wouldn't have even been allowed on Kickstarter since it shows photorealistic renders and not an actual working prototype, as well as showing gameplay on other systems, not the actual hardware (ie: It's misleading). Kevin Horton's the engineer with the actual goods that could be used to promote a console of this nature. However, he needs to be pushed to do it, because he's more of a hobbyist when it comes to this stuff than a salesman like the guys behind RetroVGS are. And yes, bitJericho, provided the FPGA has enough free gates to handle it (and there's a 1:1 hardware implementation available), I suppose it could use any soundchip the developer could want. Obviously, at the time, I didn't realize that the pack-in developer wasn't going to be using any of that functionality. It probably wasn't the best example of what this system's supposed to do. Too bad that no game is going to be a good example, since they don't even have a working prototype and the FPGA isn't even a guaranteed to be a part of the final proto. Right now, it's starting to look like well-intentioned vaporware..... |
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| They'll be back with a better campaign and strategy. They just made several mistakes that alienated their target audience. I funded them about $350 and then found out they had plans to provide support for development in Unity and GameMaker Studio. That put me off big time so I refunded. And I wasn't the only one. I may or may not support it the next time just depends on whether they plan on making it wide open so it can be flooded with games the same as what is ruining the rest of the markets. |
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| There's no way they'd be able to support Unity and GM:S without either 1. using an OS that already has a target, or 2. paying the people behind those tools big bux to make a target for their platform. Probably not bloody likely! Though I think having easy tools for a platform is a boon. The QC would have to be done by the guys behind the console, just like the old times with the "seal of quality" crap. Maybe as a condition of letting them buy copies of the game cart to be produced with the original jag molds, or something. Might be sufficiently draconian/old-fashioned for the types who don't want indie game detritus on the platform. Of course, knowing these guys, they'd probably let your game go through regardless if you waved enough money in their face, so don't be expecting to be treated like anything more than a money source as a consumer here. The technical hurdles having a unique platform poses also offset the chances that such a console will be commercially viable, and as a result also severely limit what can be made. There will be no dream system to return to the old days, but there is still the possibility of making the Casio G-Shock of consoles. (I'd say Rolex, but that would be something more like the Analogue NT, wouldn't it?) |
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| I was surprised when I heard it. However, I am sure there are many people who would like such tools to be available that way they can make their games for mobile and easily export over to the RVGS as well. I am not against Indies and especially not the Indies who are truly retro gamers. I just don't want the ones who really could care less about retro stuff, know nothing about it other than thinking hey big pixels that's what it's all about and would only jump on it thinking this would be another market to port their games to to make a bit of extra $. As far as the RVGS concept and meaning of it I am all for that. I think it would be cool to have a "new" retro console to get games for. Hopefully some "clones" of some of the older games as well as original "old school" style games. And I'd like to see the games developed more in the "old school" way. Back when people had to actually know what they were doing using Assembly language or C and learned the ins and outs of the hardware to push it to its limits. I talked with a rep at RVGS briefly and he said he completely agrees on this and they are reevaluating their tool chain. So that is promising at least. They are also going to work on lowering the price down to $200 among other things. These will all help a lot and will address the biggest issues people had with it based on comments on the FB page and in the forums. A lot of people like the idea very much and it did generate over $50k the very first day. However, it was about the second day things started coming to light such as hoping to add support for Unity and GMS and other things that resulted in people starting to refund so although new people were funding the progress slowed due to people refunding. I found out several days later and did my refund. I think it has a lot of potential for the target market which will (or should be at least) small and focused and hope they come back with a strong campaign. I think they will. This first time around was a great learning experience I think. There are a lot of people who enjoy playing retro games, there are many who collect them in cartridge form and there are many who enjoy programming on retro hardware. I like messing around writing assembly language programs on the C64 for example. Out of all of these I think there is a good market for it. I don't mean a huge amount of people. Perhaps in time they can get a base of 10,000 to 20,000 users. In the beginning maybe 500 to 1,000. The difference is they should be pretty hardcore retro gamers who appreciate the console, the games and the development style itself and are not afraid to spend money on what they want instead of complaining about games costing more than a dollar or two. |
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| "I never bought an Ouya, but I feel like that was doomed to failure by the content distribution model. Free demos and trying to scrap up a living on in-app purchases is only sustainable on a platform with a huge audience, and a reasonable likelihood of your project getting seen. We've all seen some of the issues getting our Android builds to maintain consistent and reliable speed; they were trying to bill the thing as being a system for more than just casual mobile games, and weren't hitting the mark on the target for a number of reasons, not just QA-related. Devs with business models that didn't reflect the mobile market were hamstrung by Ouya's model." There was definitely that too. |
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| I backed the gamestick on KS and that (I think) is dying a slow death. They were late actually delivering the devices and when it arrived it was quite an underwhelming experience. I would agree with the above sentiments, just because its using Android as a platform doesn't guarantee success, especially when you have your own eco-system which doesn't attract players because there aren't enough titles and you can't attract devs because there is not enough players. |
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| I wonder if a console would just be better off being Linux based than Android. Android is heavily dependent upon Java and while there's some benefits, it's also a limitation in many ways too. There's been times my OUYA was sluggish or stalled responding to input, then caught up after a few seconds, and I mutter to myself "yeah... Android/Java....." |
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| In my opinion the Indie games / software business model works because people don't need any special hardware. No one, except maybe some hardcore fans, will get a new console just to play Indie games. Before that they just get a Wii (U) or even an old Nintendo or just play on their mobile phones. I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool but in my opinion any project which requires you to buy special hardware is doomed from the beginning. |
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| USA Kickstarter of RetroVGS been cancel due not enough Backing !!! |
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