I mean, hell, most of us are here because we want to believe in this, right? There is something interesting about a Jaguar-shaped console playing some retro and retro-styled games, right? Not for the price, but to watch some stuff flourish. (People put homebrew games onto NES carts and shit) There is SOME kind of market for this, or else the Retron 5 wouldn't even be marketable.
Personally I'm in here for the drama. And the train wreck.
There is potential for an FPGA-styled Retron5. In fact many of us were disappointed when it was revealed that it was ARM emulation. But the people who do buy the Retron5 currently don't care about it. They see the convenience, they see the HDMI, they don't care about accuracy, compatibility or input lag. They just want a quick nostalgia shot a couple of minutes every few months.
He says he wants to market it to the plebe. Fine, but the people buying the Genesis Classic Console or the Atari Flashback won't go for an overpriced, FPGA enabled console. Their nostalgia has limits and once they're ready to spend more they will usually go the original hardware route.
Then he says he wants to target the kids. The kids don't fucking care about an expensive console playing cheap old videogames. They play on their parents phone and tablets, lining blocks on
Candy Crush. If they know about the other kind of videogames, they will want the real deal, aka a PS4. If they are too young for that and parents want to give them old videogames, they will give them the Namco Joystick Console, and we're back to the first category.
If they want to target the adult retrogamer, then yes they will have to go full FPGA and stop their current PR fuckups. There is a market for the Minimig and The Kevtris™, but it's a very small market, maybe in the thousand units at best. And the multi-console aspect definitely doesn't fit in a Jaguar shell. They would be marketing to a very,
very tech-savvy audience and anything less than full disclosure and customer input will result in a failure.
Then there is the (aborted?) Modern Retro Console concept, that would be playing modern indie game in cartridges, aka the Ouya with a cart slot. It
could have been cool, I would have been interested in having a physical edition of modern games that would play instantly without OS bullshit, natively in 240p on a RGB CRT. But this idea is fundamentally opposite to the FPGA concept and can't possibly be merged with it unless making a FPGA+ARM $600 monstrosity that no one would ever buy. Not to forget the lack of software upgrades or general online connectivity that made no sense at all.
