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[General Gaming / Re: Hi-Def NES - a 1080p HDMI mod kit!]

I seriously doubt that once kits go on sale, that the market for modified systems will be that high.  The availability of kits will mean everyone can get their system modded (or install it themselves if they got the skills) for a lot less.  People are paying for convenience right now and those that "gotta have it" I guess. 

The lack of build instructions and key parts for the kits is the main reason that the first units are being sold pre-modified.  This was an attempt to get units out on the market as quickly as possible while all the back end documentation is being prepared and the parts are being sourced that go with the bare boards to make it into a proper kit.

The other thing we could've done was just kept units back and did nothing for a month or two while the documentation and parts sourcing occurred.

As for "selling untested units" to people, this isn't true.  The new run of boards is the same design as the last set of protos, so there's nothing new there.   

All the cash made on the auctions is going directly back in to fund the next round of boards, so we're not even making any money on them.   Kind of like a kickstarter, except we have a product we can deliver right away, instead of maybe having something ready in 2 years.

Btw the kit price is $120 and not $150.

[General Gaming / Re: Hi-Def NES - a 1080p HDMI mod kit!]

But frankly you should not be surprised at all by the disappointment of some of us in how this launch was handled. You basically forced anyone who had a system already who wanted this mod right now to partake in high dollar auctions, forcing them to invest in another system they otherwise wouldn't need, or to go buy a Analogue NT.

ooooor, you could just not buy either and wait until the boards are available for sale and install one yourself, or pay someone to install it into your system.   Like anything else of this magnitude, it takes awhile to ramp up production and all the back end things like install guides.  Unless you are paying me directly to advance the project, then I do not bend to your will.

So far, you're the only "disappointed" person I know of on all the forums I inhabit regarding this adapter.  Everyone else has been very supporting of it and me.  I am doing this for "fun" and to breathe new life into the system so it can be enjoyed on the latest and newest TVs as well as the old CRT standby.   

As for testing, apparently you didn't watch my video of me programming/testing the adapters, or read what I wrote about the time I spent testing things during development and the equipment I purchased.

[General Gaming / Re: Hi-Def NES - a 1080p HDMI mod kit!]

Heya, I decided to join the forum after hearing from game-tech.us about this thread to clear up some things.

We discussed the idea of making an HDMI adapter for the NES the first time we got together.   I then went home that night and sketched up a quickie design and got to work in Altium making some PCBs and in Quartus writing some code. 2 months or so after the initial get together I had some working hardware.

Yes, this board is included in the Analogue nt, but gametech had nothing to do with this,  in fact I couldn't tell him or anyone about it until after it was released.  There's no "conspiracy" of any kind involved.

As to the audio issues,  there were only two ways to handle this-  either analog-capture the audio and put up with noise on the audio, and various expansion chip level problems, or recreate the audio internally digitally.

I chose to simulate the audio hardware internally.  I am very sensitive to the quality of the audio, so this was not a decision I chose lightly.  I put a lot of time and effort into getting good audio, including a 256 tap FIR filter to eliminate aliasing, so stuff like the looped noise sounds right on games such as Solstice.  The existing analog audio coming out of the NES CPU is still there, it didn't go away.

The expansion chips must be manually turned on in the menu for Fami carts and on the flash carts too, but on the Powerpak, I modified the NSF player so that it will properly enable and disable the expansion chips for you automatically.  I was thinking of modding the loader code so when a game that uses expansion audio loads, it automagically turns the proper chips on/off.

There's no way to "autodetect" what game is running to turn the right chips on/off.  (Well nothing I could do on the FPGA easily).  Since there's fairly few games with expansion audio, this should only be a minor inconvenience.  The NSF player on the Powerpak is where I do most of my expansion chip listening and fixing it was easy.

Because the sound chips can be turned on from cartridge space, this means in the future homebrew games could turn on and utilize the expansion chip hardware on the adapter.


As to my investment, I have a huge monetary investment in the project-  about 5 figures of investment.  It's going to take selling a lot of boards to pay back the money I am out of pocket, and then more to pay me even minimum wage for the couple thousand hours of code/design that's in it.   I deliberately chose NOT to kickstarter the project because I wanted to finish it on my own schedule and without being beholden to anyone.   

I put a lot of effort and time into testing this mod as thoroughly as possible.  6 or 7 people were involved directly in beating on the hardware and software to test it;  I have 20 sets of CPUs and PPUs, and I tried it on four different NES main boards, both toploaders and front loaders.   I tested it on 10 different monitors, and spent almost $4000 to buy an HDMI protocol analyzer specifically for this project so I could make sure the signal going out fully conforms to the standard to ensure it was going to work on everybody's TV.  I had two runs of prototypes and built around 12 sets of PCBs by hand using a toaster oven reflow rig I designed and built.

You will be hard pressed to find a more thoroughly tested and better designed "hobbyist level" project than this one I suspect.   There's probably hundreds or thousands of things that can go wrong on the release of a complex project like this, so it's inevitable that one or two things slipped through.

The first is the connector is a bit deep on the toploader.  I tested this here, but it seems different cable makers have different "tongue" lengths on the cable ends, so my cable worked fine but someone else's might not.  I knew it was a bit close but it was a concession to make it fit in the nt as well as the toploader, making it cheaper to do boards since they'd both be the same.

The other is the everdrive issues.   We did a bunch of testing the other day and Jason's ED works fine on my HDMI modded toploader here.  Turns out it's the version of the firmware on the SD card.  Using later firmware than 3 doesn't work.  This is why there were conflicting things like how it was mentioned the ED worked then later on in my videos I said it didn't.

Turns out the ED I have has version 10+ firmware on it.  When I dropped the 3x version from Jason's ED onto this ED, it started working too.   Reset was a bit flaky still but the ED functioned and I proceeded to play mario 3, zelda, and some others.

The main reason the boards aren't for sale right this second is there's no installation guide yet, and I am still rounding up things like headers and the foam and cables so people can do the install.  There's not going to be a shortage of boards-  I will make boards as long as people buy them, barring anything outside my control such as parts availability issues.  That and it'd be nice to have a website set up to make it easier to buy them.   Of course in the future I might just stop selling if volume drops to zero, but I doubt that will happen for a long time.

The money made during the sale of the first batch of units is going to get plowed back in immediately to buy the next round of boards.   

I hope this clears up the issues around it.   Long story short, I took a large financial risk to create this device, and hope some day that I will eventually get paid back what I put in to make it.  If I was doing this to make money I wouldn't be wasting my time making HDMI mods for 20+ year old obsolete videogame consoles.  (not that there is anything wrong with that- I wouldn't have made this mod if I didn't love playing NES games).