Quote Originally Posted by Leo_A View Post
Obviously he's talking about what the signal the console's video circuit is putting out. Not what you can do to it after the fact with things like scalers which I'm sure he's quite aware of.
It's still nonsense because when we are talking about a "clone" or remake of a console, the only limit to the design putting out analog RGB or a digital signal is how the video has been generated and encoded. You can either encode (as an upscaler does) source analog RGB into a digital signal, or you can work with the digital data internally generated by the CPU and other components to create a digital signal. Creating a good replacement for any analog components (which create a good portion of a system's sound) would be challenging, but might not be a big deal depending on how the sound CPUs work (i.e. if they have a DAC internally or externally - I know on many of these older systems the DAC is a separate chip, which means you might not need to deal with analog components in that area at all). Another example of analog and digital confusion is the NES colorburst generator. Does it need to be done the way the NES does it? By no means.

Old things of course die. But when it does happen, old things are often the best candidates to actually maintain and repair compared to something like a NOAC. But old game consoles tended to be built to a very high level of quality. Particularly in the pre CD drive age. Look at all the heavy sixers from the 1970's that are still ticking in the Atari community today just fine today. These clone systems aren't built with the same mentality.

In general, I put my money on the best of the Sunnyvale class of 1977 outliving the best of 2013 from whatever little factory in China that Hyperkin has hired to assemble and build these.
When I took my Atari VCS controller out of a closet a few years ago - which had only been very lightly used and never by me, and was sold by a reputable member here - one of the joysticks was so brittle that just light handling caused a part to break off. '90s consoles? Filled with tons of cheap crap, like the capacitors. So yeah, we're gonna need new stuff man. But delude yourself as much as you like, it's probably future hardware sales for me.

If we're going to nitpick (I think the total of incompatible Genesis games is two on the Genesis 3), then most consoles lack perfect compatibility with their own library of software. Wasn't there a earlier Genesis revision that refused to play things like EA releases? Most any system that has had revisions has either had a few games that don't work in a later run of the console or vice versa, sometimes intentionally broken and sometimes not. Atari 2600, Intellivision, Playstation 2, etc. Didn't even a small run of earlier Xbox 360's have issues reading new game disc when Microsoft expanded the writable portion of a DVD area for game software a few years back?
If even original systems aren't internally compatible, it makes that "guarantee of compatibility" claim seem rather windy, doesn't it?

I'm appalled by the lack of imagination here. I'm not saying - and I don't accept, as I am sure you don't - that a new console entirely is the likely answer. But it's a fact that over time many components - including some rather expensive ones (i.e. certain parts of laser assemblies in CD-ROM systems) are going to need to be replaced, at a minimum. And most people don't have the skills to troubleshoot even a blown fuse, let alone replacement of surface mount CPUs with thin traces. And the more you have to fix these things, the more it's likely there will be a cascade of little faults and problems introduced with the fixes that may eventually render them unserviceable.

For now many of the components that are likely to fail in these old systems are mass-produced, especially the capacitors but also many families of logic chips (like the TI 7400 series) are still in good supply. But apart from the magic of "this was made years ago and still works," there's nothing that a reissue of old hardware couldn't accomplish. It might even have better functionality than the original - just look around at the hardware modding guides and you realize the horrible shortcuts and problems that arose in many old systems, and a new release that either went with more up-to-date components (one reason the Genesis 3 is neat is that it uses a much newer and better Sony RGB encoder) or ditched some of the more or less totally deprecated features in favor of new ones.

Not everybody is super concerned about it, or can/does play at a level where they would notice it or want to be concerned about it, but reportedly you get a frame of lag (at least) even in game-oriented upscalers, and pretty soon those will be one of the few ways to even work with the output from many old consoles (unless you have a stockpile of TVs and get lucky and have none break on you while sitting around, which can also happen). This is one of the completely obvious areas in which a really rather moderate reworking (some people are doing it with just minor surgery to old consoles, of course) of display output would help keep old consoles alive.

As a final thought, back to the NES - there are a lot of folks still looking for those NES arcade RGB PPUs, even with their horrific problems they represent an upgrade to many people. If (and perhaps, given the relative simplicity of the NES, this might actually be an issue of "when") there is a replacement for that component, that will be actually a great service to many very seriously-minded, accuracy and nostalgia-oriented classic gamers. I don't know what we gain by sitting around and going "welp, (I don't think) it doesn't affect me, therefore it's useless" like that's an amazing service to the world.