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Famicom Mini hacked... Homebrew coming?

TLZ

TLZ

Banned
Lovely. Hopefully something easy soon come out to public. I'd strictly use it to play a ton of other famicom games I wanted they didn't add.
 
N

Naked Snake

Member
Mega said:
Worse lag (at least in official emulators like the N64 one), and everything on vWii has much worse picture quality than GameCube or Wii. Still awesome that it runs GC and Wii natively.
Click to expand...

Oh that's really disappointing, wasn't aware of that. I recently sold my Gamecube and gave my Wii to my nephews, was planning to replace them with a Wii U, but now I don't know since I'm a sucker for image quality

Do you know where I can look up more details about GC, Wii and Wii U comparisons?
 
L

low-G

Member
Mega said:
RPi is the worst not counting cheap Chinese clone handhelds. I believe the person who did the tests in the quoted charts said iOS is the best, although Windows has by far the best emulators. If no HDMI is okay with you, the Wii is incredible and has very low lag, probably better than all modern options.




Lying how? Explain what's false about his months of careful testing.

http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5428
Click to expand...

He's a fool that thought he had bought a 1ms display latency monitor? That's not enough?

I can tell you that even with less than optimal settings, Mega Man has nowhere near 100ms of lag here (via testing). That's with tons of shader shit on top...
 
M

Mega

Banned
Naked Snake said:
Oh that's really disappointing, wasn't aware of that. I recently sold my Gamecube and gave my Wii to my nephews, was planning to replace them with a Wii U, but now I don't know since I'm a sucker for image quality

Do you know where I can look up more details about GC, Wii and Wii U comparisons?
Click to expand...

The Wii U's vWii is still adequate and you may not even notice it looks blurry and slurry (best way I can describe)... and really it's crazy easy to get native GC/Wii games and a lot of retro emulators running on it that I can't exactly recommend against it. You can look through the old Retro AV thread, run a search for keywords. We have posted direct captures that show GC>>Wii>>>>Wii U. I've spent hours trying to figure out wtf Wii U does to the picture in terms of scaling and filtering but it's bad and we have no exact idea. I haven't seen anything on the Internet that explains it.
 
N

Naked Snake

Member
Mega said:
The Wii U's vWii is still adequate and you may not even notice it looks blurry and slurry (best way I can describe)... and really it's crazy easy to get native GC/Wii games and a lot of retro emulators running on it that I can't exactly recommend against it. You can look through the old Retro AV thread, run a search for keywords. We have posted direct captures that show GC>>Wii>>>>Wii U. I've spent hours trying to figure out wtf Wii U does to the picture in terms of scaling and filtering but it's bad and we have no exact idea. I haven't seen anything on the Internet that explains it.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll look into it. I still have the component cables for GC (plus modded VGA and RGB SCART cables, and I'm still holding on to my old Trinitron CRT TV)... but after learning about how much these GC cables are selling for, I thought I'd sell them if I can get slightly worse results on Wii U... but "GC>>Wii>>>>Wii U" doesn't sound good.

What about the dolphin emulator? Obviously it should have the best IQ (barring any game-specific issues), but do you know how does it compare lag wise?
 
M

medze

Member
HappehLemons said:
Dude just is posting facts. RetroPi is good for people who like to have everything, but when it comes to actually playing games the thing is pretty laggy for whatever reason.
Click to expand...

Mine was laggy until I changed the settings. Took some googling to suss out the problem but now, there's no noticeable lag.
 
W

Wowfunhappy

Member
Naked Snake said:
Seems like there is a small amount of lag compared to original hardware, but better than other emulators.
Click to expand...

For what it's worth, it is practically impossible for any emulator to ever have as little latency as native hardware. The only way it MIGHT be possible is if the outcome of every possible button combination was emulated AHEAD OF TIME, but this is completely impractical from a performance perspective.

(the linked article talks a lot about latency caused by PC's and Operating Systems, but there are points that would apply to an NES Mini as well)
 
M

Mega

Banned
low-G said:
He's a fool that thought he had bought a 1ms display latency monitor? That's not enough?

I can tell you that even with less than optimal settings, Mega Man has nowhere near 100ms of lag here (via testing). That's with tons of shader shit on top...
Click to expand...

That's not what he said... he indicated his monitor is supposedly 1ms lag based on one test he discovered but he isn't sure and can't verify. Anyway, yeah, that's a possible contributing factor but many modern monitors do have single digits to low double digits ms of lag... that's the norm. I seriously doubt his monitor is adding more than 1 frame of lag to the end results which across the board are pretty terrible. My plasma TV adds 2.5 frames and that would be considered exceptionally awful for a PC monitor.
 
M

Mega

Banned
Naked Snake said:
Thanks, I'll look into it. I still have the component cables for GC (plus modded VGA and RGB SCART cables, and I'm still holding on to my old Trinitron CRT TV)... but after learning about how much these GC cables are selling for, I thought I'd sell them if I can get slightly worse results on Wii U... but "GC>>Wii>>>>Wii U" doesn't sound good.

What about the dolphin emulator? Obviously it should have the best IQ (barring any game-specific issues), but do you know how does it compare lag wise?
Click to expand...

Retroarch lag on Windows and Dolphin audio and video glitches drove me into the arms of native hardware and CRTs and HDMI modded consoles in 2015. The new Dolphin came out since then but I'm not really interested at the moment. No idea about lag, but I usually don't like how the games look HD upres'd compared to native 480p on a CRT.


butman said:
With the controller you only can play Gameboy emulator.
Click to expand...

You can connect any Wii remote-compatible controller,

B0037US4IA.01.lg.jpg
Click to expand...
 
L

low-G

Member
Mega said:
That's not what he said... he indicated his monitor is supposedly 1ms lag based on one test he discovered but he isn't sure and can't verify. Anyway, yeah, that's a possible contributing factor but many modern monitors do have single digits to low double digits ms of lag... that's the norm. I seriously doubt his monitor is adding more than 1 frame of lag to the end results which across the board are pretty terrible. My plasma TV adds 2.5 frames and that would be considered exceptionally awful for a PC monitor.
Click to expand...

I've tested my input latency to be 2-4 frames (at 60Hz) personally (various emulators, but all pre 97 console hardware). My tests aren't not perfectly accurate so the '2' was between 2 and 3, but no higher than 4.

The extra latency a well set up computer (hard sync, minimal frame renderahead, whatever you need or can provide) versus the actual physical hardware should be so minimal as to be absolutely impermeable by humans (as if if you think you're noticing something, you're not).

That's not to say you haven't completely screwed the pooch on some setting, bought the wrong monitor, input devices adding latency, what have you. I've also played an emulator which DID provide about 100ms+ of input latency.

Just, the difference between physical hardware & emulation on decent hardware shouldn't be noticeable (and fake numbers are thrown around all the time by people trying to sell their own hardware which claims to solve the problem and reduce latency down to rates that even the real hardware doesn't provide). Feel a little ranty but it's because I've seen a lot of scam work laid down about this lately.
 
PAULINK

PAULINK

I microwave steaks.
So I guess nintendo is going to go out of their way and make the usb port power only in the future?
 
T

ThatsMytrunks

Member
I really thought it was going to take more time for someone to get a hello world up and running on this, but it's using the method I expected. Casual tinkerers should give up on hoping to do this to theirs, it involves soldering all sorts of stuff to get a signal going into it.

I hope he dumps it and shares the info. It'd be cool to try and get the mini's software running on a different device, like a raspberry pi.

Also dumping the roms would be neat, to see if there's any new revisions to anything.
 
N

Naked Snake

Member
Mega said:
I usually don't like how the games look HD upres'd compared to native 480p on a CRT
Click to expand...

I love 480p on a good CRT, but if playing on a flat panel (HDTV or PC monitor) I think I'll take supersampled 4K over upscaled 480p. I haven't used Dolphin before but some of the videos I've seen of games running on it in 4K were glorious.
 
D.Lo

D.Lo

Member
Mega said:
Worse lag (at least in official emulators like the N64 one), and everything on vWii has much worse picture quality than GameCube or Wii. Still awesome that it runs GC and Wii natively.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't say much worse. It's not perfect but for me personally it is good enough to not skip for the excellent connivence. Wii is still the best (well, Gamecube is best but has less support), but I find vWii far better than any other straight digital connection alternative, eg Pi and mini PCs.
 
M

malfcn

Member
Maybe this is why they are trickling supply. Hardware revision every shipment to combat home brew.
Not likely.
 
E

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Mega said:
You do that and enjoy your copious amounts of input lag. Android is truly the worst for retro emulation. The NES Mini running Linux is a proven improvement in this area over Android clone consoles. If this is a cheap way for people to play 8/16-bit games on their HDTVs with little/no lag, that's great.
Click to expand...

IDK man, even my budget-ass phone runs emulators great, granted the one I got seems to have been bumped up a generation from previous budget line phones, but still!
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
I guess the rumors of the Nintendo Classic using Linux are true. But I guess that shouldn't really come to any surprise as the Linux Kernal was listed in the user agreements for the system.

But this is a case of hackers installing their own Linux Kernel's to the Famicom Mini, which does open up some interesting possibilities for installing other (more than likely Android based) console emulators to the machine. The AllWinner R16 APU _ 256MB's of system memory should be more than capable of emulating quite a few different classic emulators.
 
MrCunningham

MrCunningham

Member
Novocaine said:
Yeah. It's good for him to be able to say he can do it and all.

But I mean just get a raspberry pi at this point if you want to fuck around.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the innards of the NES/ Famicom Classic are actually quite competent, but there is nothing there that can't be done better with a cheap Raspberry Pi. It is still kind of neat though. Someone needs to install Doom on a NES Classic just so it can be added to the "It Run's Doom" blog.

Turrican3 said:
Absolutely.
There's even the full source available on the Nintendo website.
Click to expand...

Ahh, well there ya go.
 
M

Mega

Banned
D.Lo said:
I wouldn't say much worse. It's not perfect but for me personally it is good enough to not skip for the excellent connivence. Wii is still the best (well, Gamecube is best but has less support), but I find vWii far better than any other straight digital connection alternative, eg Pi and mini PCs.
Click to expand...

I think vWii is significantly worse next to a shining example like the Wii U's own GBA emulator which basically looks perfect. I do agree it's not worth skipping out due to the options it opens up with a simple soft mod.

Naked Snake said:
I love 480p on a good CRT, but if playing on a flat panel (HDTV or PC monitor) I think I'll take supersampled 4K over upscaled 480p. I haven't used Dolphin before but some of the videos I've seen of games running on it in 4K were glorious.
Click to expand...

My only problem is that in some games there's too much stark clarity that isn't flattering to the game's textures and can make environments look unusually barren and empty.

Easy_D said:
IDK man, even my budget-ass phone runs emulators great, granted the one I got seems to have been bumped up a generation from previous budget line phones, but still!
Click to expand...

Same on my phone, but the game running well and accurately is a separate issue from input lag. Try making either of these jumps below in SMB running on an Android emulator. Not impossible but a lot harder than it should be. Also any NES shooter, certain stages of the Mega Man franchise, platformers, etc.
6a017742b59543970d017c36a70765970b-pi
qswnKZG.jpg
Click to expand...

low-G said:
I've tested my input latency to be 2-4 frames (at 60Hz) personally (various emulators, but all pre 97 console hardware). My tests aren't not perfectly accurate so the '2' was between 2 and 3, but no higher than 4.

The extra latency a well set up computer (hard sync, minimal frame renderahead, whatever you need or can provide) versus the actual physical hardware should be so minimal as to be absolutely impermeable by humans (as if if you think you're noticing something, you're not).

That's not to say you haven't completely screwed the pooch on some setting, bought the wrong monitor, input devices adding latency, what have you. I've also played an emulator which DID provide about 100ms+ of input latency.

Just, the difference between physical hardware & emulation on decent hardware shouldn't be noticeable (and fake numbers are thrown around all the time by people trying to sell their own hardware which claims to solve the problem and reduce latency down to rates that even the real hardware doesn't provide). Feel a little ranty but it's because I've seen a lot of scam work laid down about this lately.
Click to expand...

It's possible you are getting different results from him and that neither of you is lying (someone here said he tweaked his Pi to have less lag). That person who made the charts however isn't selling anything nor does he appear to be pushing a biased narrative... he's just neutrally cataloging his experience across various platforms and not trying to single out anything. If he has bad lag with RPi and others have said the same before, I'll say there's at least some truth to it even if it's variable from one setup to the next.

The bolded parts are subjective, dependent on the individual and something I disagree on. I play a lot on CRTs and on my HDMI modded systems which add near 0ms lag on top of my TV. When I play on software emulators either via a Windows PC (i5, GTX 760, Win 8/10) or an Android handheld, I can feel the difference despite making every effort to reduce lag. There's always some, and to some of us it's very obvious. Arguing it's all in our heads is pretty arrogant... try telling that to serious Melee players who can literally show you moves they can't pull off over emulator + HDTV vs native hardware + CRT). I see it reflected by my own in-game performance. eg. clumsy misses of easy jumps in SMB1/3, struggling and losing for days at Zanac on emulator portable vs. winning on 1CC on the first chance I got to sit and play on NESRGB + CRT (this was a few months ago). Keep in mind that others' experiences and sensitivities may indeed be different from yours and it doesn't mean they're lying or imagining things.
 
C

Cmagus

Member
Nintendo really should have given the NES classic the ability to connect to the eshop for additional games, it feels like a missed opportunity and would have made a nice retro box.
 
T

The Abominable Snowman

Member
bomblord1 said:
lmao what?

The cheapest android box out running actual ps360 games is the $200 Shield TV
Click to expand...

I'm late AF but there's a ton of 4K media boxes, though mostly chinese made, that range from 40-80 that (again, on-paper) go toe-to-toe with PS3/X360. I made the on-paper distinction for a reason. Devs are not going to put forth the effort to port or make use of the potential of a single chipset like that unless it has a wide market, and these devices run Android and may or may not have decent cooling to run at a consistent 100%, but even at the most modest estimate they'll be much improved over this box.

Anyway, I expect a GUI port soon
 
D

DekuLink

Member
Mega said:
Worse lag (at least in official emulators like the N64 one), and everything on vWii has much worse picture quality than GameCube or Wii. Still awesome that it runs GC and Wii natively.
Click to expand...

For me it looks better, Wii games look sharper over HDMI than over component on wii. I guess some people don't like sharp 480p graphics on an 1080p LCD/led/plasma TV thought, but at the distance I have from the TV it looks noticeably better to me.
 
G

georly

Member
Cess007 said:
Hmm, I wonder if Nintendo will release a revision with update security, and the first wave of NES Classic will become extra desired.
Click to expand...

conspiracy theory: that's why wave 1 was so rare, they wanted to see if it got hacked and put in countermeasures before making more waves :p
 
M

Minions

Member
Can't believe they had so much on board storage. Was only a matter of time till it was cracked open.

dan2026 said:
Aren't the controllers for this thing supposed to be crappy and have bizarrely small cables?
Click to expand...

Short cable yes, crappy, no. Its the same as the og nes controllers other than cable length. Extension cables are $2~/ea from China though.
 
S

SwordStruck

Member
Hoping someone dumps the OS this is running. From what I understand it's just a Linux distro but being able to use that front end would be great.
 
Nitty_Grimes

Nitty_Grimes

Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
Cmagus said:
Nintendo really should have given the NES classic the ability to connect to the eshop for additional games, it feels like a missed opportunity and would have made a nice retro box.
Click to expand...

And they could charge £3 to £5 a time for 30 year old games to. Bet they're cursing themselves now.
 
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