The Analogue 3D Drags the Fondly Remembered N64 Into the 21st Century (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0175281097
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/10/18/2349229/the-analogue-3d-drags-the-fondly-remembered-n64-into-the-21st-century
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/the-analogue-3d-drags-the-fondly-remembered-n64-into-the-21st-century/
> Analogue, as is its habit, spent years meticulously re-engineering the N64 in FPGA form -- basically, this means that the new 3D console is, in several important ways, indistinguishable from the original hardware. One hundred percent compatibility with the console's game library is the most obvious one, meaning every single N64 cartridge works with this thing. Perhaps the bigger challenge with the N64, as with many other consoles of that era, is how it produces an image.
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> The N64 put out an analog video signal intended for display on interlaced CRT displays -- something that directly influenced the gameplay and art styles of countless games for the platform. Many retro games simply look bad on modern high-resolution displays not because they are dated or the art is insufficient, but because the display techs are fundamentally different.
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> To that end, Analogue has built in a native upscaler that, rather than cleaning up and digitizing the analog video output of the original system (as some upscalers do, with varying degrees of success), produces a natively digital, 4K signal with imitation CRT artifacts and scanlines. This is something they pioneered early on and produced several versions of to reproduce accurate phosphors and display modes for the multi-system Analogue Pocket. [...] The result is simply that games ought to look how you remembered them, which is to say probably a sight better than they actually looked.
The Analogue 3D is [2]available for pre-order at 8am PDT on October 21. It's priced at $250.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/the-analogue-3d-drags-the-fondly-remembered-n64-into-the-21st-century/
[2] https://store.analogue.co/products/analogue-3d-black
Nintendo C&D place y'r bets (Score:2)
A company that is selling unauthorized Nintendo Intellectual Property... hmm...
How long before Cease & Desist from Nintendo? Place your bets in the reply!
Re: (Score:2)
Emulators are totally legal. They must have written their own firmware as well. The emulators that run aground legally are the ones who copy/paste the firmware.
Re: (Score:2)
If Nintendo was going to do something, they would have done it when Analogue sold their FPGA NES, their FPGA SNES, or their FPGA GB/GBC/GBA, the latter of which probably sold hundreds of thousands.
Fact is, all the patents on the N64 have long expired, it doesn't have any sort of firmware or operating system baked in, the company is based in China, and Nintendo's strategy of threatening to bankrupt emulator developers defending frivolous lawsuits doesn't work on a company that size.
MiSTer FPGA has N64 already (Score:2)
There's already an open source N64 fpga core with full compatibility.
Re: (Score:2)
The MiSTer N64 core doesn't run all games and likely never will.
Re: (Score:2)
The MiSTer's FPGA is not big enough for a complete N64 implementation, and so many games require romhacks to work around the missing bits. That's not exactly full compatibility.
Stop Fucking Around (Score:2)
Doing blatant bullshit like this is likely to piss off Nintendo, and this is the type of case that will make it to the Supreme Court or Congress and the lunatics sitting there may ban emulators and ruin the party for everyone as a result.
CRT scanlines (Score:1)
Honest question. Why is this so desirable? I've never understood this.
Re: CRT scanlines (Score:1)
It's because the graphics were designed with a CRT as an integral part of it and look really awful when displayed an a modern, clean, flat screen.
Like older movies look terrible as you can see the wires etc. of all the special effects that would be hidden by a fuzzy 16" screen.
I have heard that some actresses have had to have plastic surgery redone due to HD.
Re: (Score:2)
Because it is authentic. Modern monitors do NOT replicate how CRTs displayed sprites back then. There are multiple reasons:
* pixels were low contrast
* "free" anti-aliasing due to non-discrete nature of CRT "pixels"
* every other scanline was effectively black due to dot pitch
* aspect ratio is off
There are [1]multiple [reddit.com] [2]examples [datagubbe.se] [3]describing [tumblr.com] [4]desciptions [tiktok.com] of how art looks on CRTs vs modern monitors.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/anwgxf/here_is_an_example_of_old_graphics_on_crt_vs/
[2] https://www.datagubbe.se/crt/
[3] https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318/designing-2d-graphics-in-the-japanese-industry
[4] https://www.tiktok.com/@mylifeisanrpg/video/7164193246401383726
Re: (Score:2)
The Apple ][ used "tricks" to get more color through color artifacting, though I never really liked how it looked even on genuine Apple ][ through a color CRT monitor. It felt very 'cheap' for some reason.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple //s with color CRTs always looked like a blurred mess to me.