Originally Posted by
jgenotte
I am confused about all of the excitement here. First, let me say that I agree that this is a major achievment and that Kevin has put a lot of brilliant work into the project. However, dosent a regular old NES already do this perfectly? Out of the 800 or so games avaliable to the NES only about 100 are worth playing, and only 50 are really good. I am fairly certian that you could get an actual NES with those 50 great games for around $350 (ballpark). So my question is...why?
-james
PS: please dont flame me, I am not trying to be rude. I just dont understand.
It is your opinion that there are only 100 games worth playing. What about homebrews, fan translations, pirates, etc? Many people would prefer to be able to play every NES and Famicom game on a real NES/Famicom. The FPGA NES aka Kevtendo is basically a real NES, so this is for those people. Furthermore, the FPGA NES will also have circuit designs that can be loaded on the fly, for perfectly recreating the Atari 2600 and many other 8-bit consoles.
So really the hype is about extremely accurate circuit-level recreations of 8-bit consoles. The FPGA will be small enough to be able to be installed inside the original console cases, whether it be a 2600 case, NES case, Famicom case, etc, and will support all peripherials of these systems. Unlike software emulation, where hardcore fans can tell the difference in a "taste test", this system will be indistinguishable from the real thing (aside from loading games from SD flash cards).
Therefore, calculate the NES games worth playing plus all other 8-bit console games worth playing, as the FPGA NES will eventually support them. However, since recreating the NES is the hardest because it involves recreating 100s of different cartridge circuit boards, kevtris started with it first. Other 8-bit systems won't take nearly as long to implement ontop of the FPGA NES... and these updates won't require any hardware modification due to the nature of the fully programmable gate array. So the FPGA NES is also a FPGA 2600 and possibly even a FPGA T16.