Cdrom ODE up for preorder [UperGrafx]

[gojira1954]

beep-shop.com/blog/8154/ - UperGrafx

Nice to see this happening, gonna wait for deunans solution myself tho

twitter.com/upergrafx
http://www.upergrafx.com/

 

[LostFlunky]

Neat.   Didn't know these were this far along.  Not cheap either...

[Gypsy]

Price is garbage and attached to an upscaler. Blah. I'll be waiting too.

[Psycho Punch]

Probably should wait for the GDEMU guy to finish his own.

[NecroPhile]

The price is rather steep, but it's cool that such a thing is becoming a reality.  I'd much rather have something that attaches to the bus than the type of device that has to be hacked into a real cd-rom drive.

Does it have a built in system card?

Yeah, I'll wait for Polymega.

The perpetual wait. 

[gojira1954]

Pic shows a system card being used so nope.
Cool that it can plug straight into the ext bus, wonder what the game compatibility % ends up being tho

[imparanoic]

do you think that the possibility of using usb or sd card within future updates enable the usage of hucards and cd roms via the expansion port, could this be possible? the holy grail?

[Johnpv]

The price is absolutely insane.  If they could make like just the SD Card adapter for 100 bucks, that might be something.

[haightc]

actually for what it can do this isn't a bad price if you thinking about it.
It replaces and the interface unit and the cd-rom.    Getting a working IFU and CD-ROM will usually run you about $150, you'll likely then need to recap the both units and replace or upgrade the BRAM.     Then if the laser go out on a first gen unit, it can be hard to track down a replacement.   If you have a Super CD-ROM2 you can replace the laser with greater ease but these are often plagued with capacitor rot.    They claim the lag is 1 frame or less, which implies that it probably scales from the RGB or even digital output and is likely a good scaler.     The GDemu unit is intended to replace the earlier drives and will still require an IFU and given his current price I would expect it to be around $150.   

I wouldn't likely buy one however for several reasons.    I use RGB monitors, so I have no need to DVI or upscaling.      I have a supergrafx and coregrafx II with already had super CD-ROM 2s connected to them.      My CoreGrafx I has a IFU-30 connected but no CD-ROM, so maybe that'll get an ODE down the road to make it more portable.

[NecroPhile]

$150 wouldn't be bad at all.  $400+ on the other hand......

[CrackTiger]

I would pay the asking price if I could get details and feel it out without a language barrier... if the disc image part still works while lining video out of the console. I don't want to use that scaler and if it's mandatory, it's a deal breaker.

[ccovell]

actually for what it can do this isn't a bad price if you thinking about it.

Actually for what it can't do compared to the hypothetically cheaper solution of a Framemeister+GDemu device, this is a bad price.

They claim the lag is 1 frame or less...

If it is anything like the original Upergrafx, it actually drops/duplicates frames due to a timing mismatch.

It still looks like a half-baked solution that preys on ravenous tech otakus.

[RyuHayabusa]

Looks cool but damn, way too expensive. Plus it better have a massive amount of storage for the iso files.

[RNSpeed]

Awesome! but I think we all agree that the asking price is high.  Hopefully this will brake the ice and will allow us in the future to play CD images out of an SD card or USB on a less expensive add-on 

[Johnpv]

I do wonder if this is something Rene of db Electronics could add to his RGB out board that he makes for the TG16/PCE.

[dshadoff]

It's important to note a few points about what this is, what it isn't, and why the creator states that he wanted to make such a thing in the first place - because most of this information isn't available in English.

I don't actually have an opinion about this machine because I've never seen one in real life.  This information may change - or reinforce - your current opinion.

Video section:

He said that he wanted to make the PC Engine compatible with newer, digital TVs, because he was worried that CRTs are becoming rarer, and wanted them to continue on.  While this statement may seem to be an exaggeration of today's environment, it will be true in the long term.

Because there is a small but real difference in the scan rate between NTSC and HD (ie. 29.997Hz versus 60Hz), there are some technical compromises which were unavoidable (at least, without changing the clock generator crystal inside the PC Engine).

Because of the frame rate difference, I would assume that there would be a hesitation (apparent frame 'skip') once every several seconds.  I had read about this, and that it was 'reduced', but it's not clear to me how much remains.

The term 'scaler' is an oversimplification.  The image is created in an internal frame buffer and output from there (not a line buffer).  My understanding (although I could be wrong) is that this image is built entirely by bus snooping, including background and sprite, and reconstructing the digital values... not based on scanline output from the PC Engine.  Watching R-Type for sprite flickering would prove this (or disprove).

So in other words, it's hardware emulation.  This has good points and bad points (as we all know).
Good points include:
- may get rid of sprite flicker
- SuperGrafx support can in theory be added (although I don't think that it is)

Bad points:
- may not be 100% accurate
- occasional frame jerk

It would be nice to have this matched with an emulated PC Engine with a tweaked clock rate so that the skipped frames don't occur.


CDROM section:

This is clearly emulation, and he currently has something like 75% compatibility.  This is better than early software emulation efforts (back in the '90's), but not quite where we would all like it to be.

On the other hand, he has modified things he felt were drawbacks.  Because of the way PC Engine software was created, these modifications may reveal latent bugs in the original code which wouldn't show on original hardware, but may show when one small variation is introduced.  Thus, these 'improvements' may reduce overall compatibility.

- Seek time reduced to basically nothing
- data read speed accelerated
- Based on the Youtube videos, I believe that ADPCM playback noise (high-frequency artifacting) has been reduced

And it's the first no-moving-part CDROM hardware replacement available.

On the one hand, I am very impressed at the technical work invested in this product, and how far it has come.  I am of course disappointed that the price is high, but no matter what the price, only a limited number of people would ever buy such a thing, so it's a choice of "high price" versus "not worth anybody's time to invest in its creation".  Given this choice, I would prefer for the device to exist.

...But I'll probably wait for the next iteration before pulling out my wallet.

[ccovell]

My understanding (although I could be wrong) is that this image is built entirely by bus snooping, including background and sprite, and reconstructing the digital values... not based on scanline output from the PC Engine.  Watching R-Type for sprite flickering would prove this (or disprove).

So in other words, it's hardware emulation.

Sorry, I don't think you've got this right.  It is most likely sniffing the pixel bus in the same way that the NESRGB sniffs the PPU pixel bus & palette register writes, and re-builds colour values from the indexes 0-511 that the bus sends out.  It does not "look" into the VDC to get sprite tables, etc.  If the VDC can't display all sprites on a line, it just stops (cause it ran out of cycle time on that scanline) and no external device can reconstruct those lost sprites -- well, unless it halts the CPU and access the VDC and VRAM itself, and that would demolish compatibility.

Anyhow, its creator did explain how it works in general terms here, when he started working on the project: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=13502

[dshadoff]

OK, I see what you mean.

So then it creates a full frame 'buffer' based on the raster scan (although digital values), with its own color table based on bus sniffing (i.e. writes to $080x), and outputs them according to a whole separate timing cycle from the PCE's.  If true, R-Type will still have the flashing sprites when there are 17 on a scanline.

I had never supposed that it "looked into the VDC" however; I believed that it was implementing its own emulated version of the VDC based on more bus snooping (i.e. writes to $0400).  This is also possible, but a bit more work (though maybe not as much as it seems).  Maybe a future device (from him or somebody else) could go one step further and implement the 6280 and 6270, at a clock appropriate for HD.

[ccovell]

Well, something like that, except $080x is the sound hardware, and $040x is the VCE. 

[dshadoff]

Doh !
I've been away from the system too long...