Joined: 8/22/2008
Posts: 118
Location: KUUSANKOSKI, Finland
The main event(Mods: If this is a duplicate, please lock and put a link to the other/original topic.)
I don't even know where to begin. Although I have started with massive amounts of facepalming...
Can someone list all the things they got wrong?
Comment section is also pretty full of criticism.
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6442
Location: The land down under.
Eh cause why not.
Here's the video about the Analogue Nt mini NES they made.
And here's an AVGN video about PS1 Planet of the Apes where they deliberately ignored the fact the the PlayStation has a lack of perspective correct texture mapping.
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"It's not an emulator."
Proceeds to talk about how the reprogramming of a chip.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
Joined: 8/22/2008
Posts: 118
Location: KUUSANKOSKI, Finland
Well. AVGN is a satirical show. I don't mind "errors" there.
But emulators playing mp3 instead of creating the audio in realtime? What? Ok. Some CD based games can have seperate audio tracks when played on an emulator because the OST was originally as an CD audio.
Then the topic goes to electrons... Their machine can repduce how eletrons behave? Oh is it a quantum machine? :o
Maybe I'm just an angry old fart, who doesn't like misinformation to be spread.
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
And here's an AVGN video about PS1 Planet of the Apes where they deliberately ignored the fact the the PlayStation has a lack of perspective correct texture mapping.
James Rolfe, when play-acting the AVGN character, sometimes deliberately plays dumb, even with things he knows better. It can be confusing at times. It becomes even more confusing when this playing-dumb leaks to his supposedly "non-acted" James Rolfe persona in some of his "let's play" videos with Mike and other people.
For example in one of his videos, where he revisited NES Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, he kept his original shtick (from his first video where he commented on that game) that he just doesn't understand why in the Mr Hyde side he just suddenly dies out of nowhere, calling the game idiotic and completely bonkers because of that. Yet, in another one of his videos, where he was showing the game to some friends, he actually explains exactly how the game works and what the idea is (ie. if you reach the same point as Hyde as you reached with Jekyll, you die). In other words he does know the idea in the game, he just pretended not to in that other video.
I don't know if he knows and understands the texturing limitations of the PS1 in that video, but it's possible he does, and is just acting dumb.
As for that emulator thingie video by Mike and that other guy, I have no idea. They seem completely misinformed and idiotic about it, but I suppose it's theoretically possible they are just trolling.
The main event(Mods: If this is a duplicate, please lock and put a link to the other/original topic.)
I don't even know where to begin. Although I have started with massive amounts of facepalming...
Can someone list all the things they got wrong?
Comment section is also pretty full of criticism.
I am a semiconductor physicist and have worked both with FPGAs and emulators, so I believe I am well qualified to judge their claims.
The central claim in their video revolves around the fact that software can never simulate how electrons behave in the circuit. While that statement is true, it is completely irrelevant to the conclusions they draw, namely because
(1) digital electronic circuits can only work because it is possible to perform logic operations without knowing the precise behavior of each electron, not in spite of.
(2) any piece of hardware, including the FPGA they promote, is in fact designed to allow its behavior to be describable by software.
(3) although the emulator can never reach full hardware accuracy, FPGAs also don't, since they are entirely different circuits than the original hardware. So, even if you accept all their points, you cannot conclude that one piece of technology is better than the other.
Now, let me clarify the reason for all the previous points.
(1) Modern electronics starts with the MOSFET, which is a very scalable transistor design. The physical quantities involved in the MOSFET are the electric current and the potential, which, differently from their claim, involve the behavior of many electrons at once, not a single one. This is actually a good thing, because when you are working with statistical averages, you reduce shot noise, which helps the device perform better. This is incidentally a very big problem I see in the applied physics literature. Although they advertise regularly single electron transistors and other nanosystems, nobody bothers to check that when you operate with few electrons, the shot noise is enormous and the device can't be applied for anything. The problem is that academia is very specialized today and no electronic engineer is peer reviewing those articles.
Anyway, since we have a MOSFET, the actual value of the current or the potential would only matter if the circuit was analog, and it is not. Although it is true that, as the signal propagates you expect some variations, the hardware is designed to suppress them with amplifiers so that digital processing is possible.
(2) Nowadays, any processor, like FPGA, SoC's and whatever are first specified in a Hardware description language and then converted into something that you can cast into a wafer and perform photolithography. The code in an HDL is extremely similar to the code we write to make the CPU cores in emulators. In fact, it is even more low-level (it needs to handle microcodes and other stuff that emulator writers don't). In practice, SoC designers would first simulate their HDL code and see if the results are the same as those of an emulator code before manufacturing the chip, since that allows you to test things out without spending much money.
I find this irony delicious. The guy in the video says FPGAs are much better than emulators, while the guys who designed the FPGA most likely used emulators to check that it was indeed working correctly.
(3) The problem with emulation accuracy is that good software design principles were not well established in the industry during the time the games were developed. Most software was developed extremely coupled with the hardware, there were no development kits and in order to work, many games relied on hardware bugs without their developers being aware of that. But, as I pointed out previously, this is an exception rather than the rule. If the game relied on too many undocumented features, it probably would not have been accepted by the publisher at the time.
No design is 100% perfect, and you should certainly expect that some flaws will make some games behave differently on different hardware or software implementations, but unless you have a very good reason to spend more on a product that's claimed to be more accurate, you need to be scientific, you need to demand evidence that the game you want to play does not work that well and the product performs better. If that is not provided, any claim is just pure propaganda and there's no reason to take it seriously.
Joined: 8/22/2008
Posts: 118
Location: KUUSANKOSKI, Finland
Thanks p4wn3r for your expert comment.
One thing that may have advantage on FPGA ans especially on "discrete" original hardware is the input lag. But even with emulators from 2000-2002 the lag hasn't been a problem.
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
I really appreciate the discussion here, I was not aware that people were implementing old gaming consoles in FPGA's. As usual, it seems that whenever you come up with a new technology, people's brains shut off and they believe everything you say. Apparently, this stuff has been featured on Ars Technica already.
Just to clarify, I have nothing at all against redesigning processors for old consoles in an FPGA. As the open source movement gets even deeper in hardware, these things are bound to happen. If someone came up to me and talked about this as a research project, I would say "Cool!", it would be something like SiFive is doing.
However, this company's practices deviate strongly from well-accepted standards. You never sell products based on FPGAs. They are used for prototyping. What they should be doing is to get their design, ask investors for money and hire a semiconductor fab to make the chips for them. It would work just as well and be much cheaper.
The fact that they are not doing this says a lot of things. Either they are too stupid to realize they can do this, or the investors did not like their idea or (most probable) they don't care at all and just want to make money. While the idea of avoiding software emulation is interesting, the devices they advertise simply cannot do what their marketing says and that gets dangerously close to fraud. Someone should report these guys to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Btw, it's unclear to me whether that FPGA is actually replicating the original NES transistor-by-transistor, or whether it's just essentially an NES emulator coded into an FPGA.
I somehow get the feeling it's the latter. In which case the video is doubly dumb, because there is essentially no difference from a software emulator. It's just that the software emulator has been made into an FPGA.
Maybe I'm just an angry old fart, who doesn't like misinformation to be spread.
I mean, you're absolutely right - but this is a world where people believe in chemtrails. I can't get particularly get worked up about people having subtle misunderstandings about a relatively technical topic of mostly recreational interest.
Joined: 1/24/2018
Posts: 305
Location: Stafford, NY
thatguy wrote:
I mean, you're absolutely right - but this is a world where people believe in chemtrails.
And that 9/11 was a government conspiracy.
And that the moon landings were faked.
And that the earth is flat, not round...
I could go on, but you get the idea. :P
c-square wrote:
Yes, standard runs are needed and very appreciated here too
Dylon Stejakoski wrote:
Me and the boys starting over our games of choice for the infinityieth time in a row because of just-found optimizations
^ Why I don't have any submissions despite being on the forums for years now...
However, this company's practices deviate strongly from well-accepted standards. You never sell products based on FPGAs. They are used for prototyping. What they should be doing is to get their design, ask investors for money and hire a semiconductor fab to make the chips for them. It would work just as well and be much cheaper.
One of the bugs mentioned in the video above is already fixed, so that's one reason to not go with ASICs.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
I have found myself disliking their videos a lot lately, maybe I'll just unsub. There was a SNES game the AVGN character complained about an impossible to reach platform, but when I tried the game there was a run button (traditional Y), so the plataform was easy to reach. That's really stupid.
About FPGAs and emulation, it's impressive how they claim so much accuracy over emulators but on reviews audio was completely different than real hardware and emulation. As if audio wasn't really part of the experience, just a bonus.
As for byuu's frustration, we live in the age of youtube based marketing. I would strongly advise making a well produced video to showcase his dedication.
Joined: 8/22/2008
Posts: 118
Location: KUUSANKOSKI, Finland
Warp wrote:
Btw, it's unclear to me whether that FPGA is actually replicating the original NES transistor-by-transistor, or whether it's just essentially an NES emulator coded into an FPGA.
Interesting thought.
I guess simulating nes chips transistor-by-transistor, with delays, would simulate (most of) the bugs also.
If anyone knows, how the FPGA is actually programmed... post here?
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
I don't know how this particular FPGA is programmed, but I can assure you that it is not emulating the NES chips transistor by transistor. That is impossible. FPGAs are programmed at the so-called Register transfer level, which does not involve actual wiring.
If you want something more specific, you can have a look at an actual project, like this one, which focuses on building a chip based on a free general-purpose instruction set architecture.
But, the idea is, you use a Hardware Description Language to generate the circuit blocks. The most popular ones are VHDL and Verilog. SiFive uses Chisel, one language they created and compile it to Verilog, an exotic choice. Then, you compile it to a netlist, which contains the logic and you feed into a simulator. If things are working out as intended, you compile it into something the FPGA can accept.
Two companies, Altera and Xilinx, dominate the FPGA market, and the transistor wiring is actually done by their proprietary software, because this depends a lot on the FPGA model, and there is no way to guarantee that it will be identical to the NES hardware. In a similar way, if you would try to make an ASIC out of it, this wiring would be done by the foundry, because each factory has a different method to create the chip's cells and layers.
The idea that the transistor wiring is identical to the original one is just plain bullshit. I really doubt that different versions of the NES itself used identical wiring in their chips. Most likely the newer models used better designs than the older ones to improve power consumption. It is very likely that there are differences in the chip design even in the consoles themselves!
In case of the NES a transistor-level reproduction could be possible (via ASICs) because CPU & PPU have been decapped.
https://github.com/SourMesen/VisualNes
Joined: 8/22/2008
Posts: 118
Location: KUUSANKOSKI, Finland
I watched OpenTechLabs FPGA videos some time ago. And yes. It actually makes sense (now) - it's impossible to simulate some chip using FPGA with transistor-level accuracy.
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
So, in essence, it's pretty safe to say that the FPGA they are talking about is just a NES emulator coded into the FPGA, rather than a faithful reproduction of the original NES hardware. Which makes their statement of it being more accurate than a software emulator doubly dumb.
But then, again, they could just be very cleverly trolling. It's not out of the realm of possibility. Poe's Law.
But then, again, they could just be very cleverly trolling. It's not out of the realm of possibility. Poe's Law.
From my experience, I do not have enough faith in humanity to believe this is pure trolling. It's simply lying to get money. Technology is one of the fields most prone to outright fraud, it is sad for me to admit it, but it's true.
I've been to workshops that teach you how to present your business, and it's just plain ridiculous. Essentially you only have 10-15 minutes to present your whole idea, and they actually discourage you from explaining how your technology works, which makes sense, because no one will understand it anyway. They only care about market size, how fast it will give money, etc.
Anyway, in one of these workshops, the organizers gave a prize for the best presentation to a group that everyone pretty much thought was one of the worst. Immediately after the award was given, one of the organizers said that he was happy that one of the guys in the group that won was the president of an important scientific society and would help finance a next edition of their workshop in his country. Seriously, the guy publicly admitted that he had a conflict of interest after giving the award!
If the guys who finance you are really smart, they will require you to provide scientific publications, but I can also say that no matter how mediocre a paper is, it will end up in a peer-reviewed journal if you can tell a good story. One of the most blatant cases I've seen is this. The guys simply copy-pasted a nanoparticle all over with Photoshop and said it was a TEM image. The paper not only was accepted, but still has not been retracted and the authors' institutions did not comment on anything.
