Yesterday, I wrote a blog post: What is the Retro VGS?
You can certainly read the content thats there, but basically, the whole can of worms simply boils down to a fundraising project that I have some misgivings and questions about. I am very fond of old video games, and typically get excited for creative endeavors in that arena.
But at some point, this one went awry. To be entirely forthcoming, the project head has actually done other cool stuff that I would have happily endorsed at some time. He seems like a fun guy in the right setting, and likely has similar family values to my own. I have nothing against him personally. I would hope we each see gaming as Something Of Second Importance in our lives and be on great terms in another setting.
All that being said, I still had those nagging questions about the VGS. I sought out Kevin Kevtris Horton, former member of the team that was intending to put the VGS onto market, and was able to get some responses.
I, uh, kinda just jump right in with my line of inquiry. Here it is.
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Eric: What experience do you have in the realms of hardware, electronics, modding, plastic mold injections, etc.?
Kevin: I work for a company, and I am responsible for all our electronic design, circuit boards, and some of the other aspects like software and a little mechanical engineering. I have always been interested in electronics, and as a teenager spent many hours modifying my C64 and making add-ons for it like a pen plotter out of an old Decwriter 4 and even an EPROM programmer.
I personally have not gotten an injection mold made, but we have some at work and my friend recently had one done for the NES cartridge shells. I have known a few people who work in the industry as well.
Eric: How did you come to be a part of the Retro VGS project team?
Kevin: I was solicited back in april or may after someone told them about my FPGA cores. I had 3 skype calls total from what I recall, and the cancelled one.
Eric: What exactly is a core in this context, and how important would it be to a project like this?
Kevin: The core is everything that encompasses a virtual system. i.e. an Atari 2600 core would be everything that makes the FPGA operate like an Atari 2600. The Colecovision core would reconfigure the hardware to operate as a Colecovision, and so on. Cores are not just limited to simulating a single machine. Just about anything could be made into a core such as better graphics or sound capabilities, or even weirder things like bitcoin miners (though that ship has sailed. ASIC miners are a lot better these days).
Eric: Can you describe the mood, the tone, the general feel of the planning stages of the VGS project?
Kevin: It was a lot of talk about what could be done, pie in the sky things such as 100 year flash ROMs. I tried to talk them down to a more manageable/cheap solution like a single serial flash ROM that could hold an FPGA core and the requisite game to run on it but they wouldnt hear me out. I also gave other cost cutting measures and explained how the FPGA should be used to do video processing from an ARM system instead of the rube-goldberg arrangement of buffers and transceivers their HW guy wanted. It wouldve saved money and PCB space and wiring.
Eric: What light can you shed, if any, on where the figure of $1,950,000 came from as a fundraising goal?
Kevin: I dont know anything about where this came from.
Eric: Was there a single moment when you began to have misgivings about being on the team, or was it a gradual process?
Kevin: It started out seeming feasible until the proverbial kitchen sink was added. When I heard them talk about thinking about using small hard drives on the carts I knew this bird would never fly.
Eric: Ultimately, what led to your departure from the team?
Kevin: I got fed up slowly hearing the grand plan of things that could never be on the podcasts, and when they blew off the last meeting, that was it. I knew it wasnt even close to done less than 2 weeks before they launched and was shaking my head. I doubt they have a solid HW plan even today.
Eric: Can you remember the original vision for the VGS product in your initial discussions? And, perhaps: How was that vision different from what ended up being represented on the IndieGoGo page?
Kevin: I cant remember a whole lot. It was originally going to be an FPGA + ARM core I think at first. Then it morphed into an FPGA + ARM core (single chip) into that plus another ARM based SOC (system on a chip- i.e. something youd see in the Ouya).
When it launched it transformed into a TI SOC of some kind with 3D capabilities that was so new the data sheet wasnt even ready, and chips were not going to ship from TI until november of this year. I guess they still are over a month away from having any kind of silicon yet.
Eric: If we were sitting at a bar tonight together, and you had a couple beers in you, and I asked you what you thought of the Retro VGS project, what would you tell me?
Kevin: Haha. It was a dead duck 5 months ago, and it remains a dead duck. Only now the duck has been gold plated and made in the USA and is designed to last 100 years.
Eric: Do you have anything you would say to Mike Kennedy, specifically?
Kevin: Dont discount someone elses opinion, even though it might not be the news you want to hear. Get second, third, and more opinions from people in the industry (not just videogames in this case, but hardware, programming, and electronics as well). Bad news isnt always bad, even if it does poke holes in your grand vision.
Eric: Finally: What projects are out there, elsewhere, that you are excited about and want people to know of? What are you currently involved with?
Kevin: My friend MarshallH over at retroactive is releasing an HDMI adapter for the N64 which is pretty awesome. I finished up my own NES HDMI adapter too, the Hi Def NES. It connects inside a regular stock NES and makes it output up to 1080p video. Quality is emulator like while running on the original chips.
I also had the idea for my own FPGA videogame system for a very long time (11 or more years now) called the Zimba 3000. Theres a thread about it going at Atari Age.
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Thank you for your time, Kevtris.
