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Comment by louhike | Hacker News Reader

Analogue’s marketing is infuriating the retro gaming community more and more. Their products are nice but they always take a lot of time to deliver their products, even before the covid. Their marketing is always misleading, talking about « no emulation » although it is some kind emulation of the systems. It is better than software emulation as it allows better accuracy and far less input lag, but it is emulation through FPGA.

I’m quite interested in the Pocket, but if you want to jump in FPGA emulation of old computers, consoles and arcades, I’d recommend the MiSTer project which is open source, delivers constantly, do not use shitty marketing terms, has a great community and allows to play a lot of old systems already.

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I don't know why but I've never heard of Analogue and their website made me irrationally angry and irritated. I don't know if it was the verbiage or the unclear communication about exactly it is, but it was immediate.

It's the pretentious SV-esque marketing speak that's unbearable, and funnier because they are targeting a niche audience (interested in playing/preserving retro games) who would have absolutely none of that crap.

Seriously, how absolutely out of touch you have to be from the retro gaming audience to create this kind of thing....

So I came into the comments having never heard of these people, and from the comments I was expecting something bad. But actually I had the opposite experience when I then opened the OP link.

They are making something that is similar to a GameBoy Color, but built on an FPGA, and which lets you play games from a few different consoles.

I grew up with GBC, N64, PS1 and PS2. My first console was the GBC. I played N64 and PS1 at friends houses, and got a PS2 of my own when that came out.

Now and then I use emulation and revisit some old favorites. And I’ve also bought a couple of old consoles second hand to play on those in the past.

A while ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, I bought a Nintendo New 3DS XL second hand with the intention of also trying emulation on it. Ended up only playing actual DS and 3DS games, and not doing emulation. Then sold it.

Not sure I'd want this thing, and can’t afford it at the moment anyways.

But the website did a good job of catching my interest. And if I was in the market for a handheld gaming system, this page would be enough for me to begin looking into it further.

And my point is, there may be more people out there than you realize who are interested in a little bit of retro gaming now and then who will respond similarly positively to that page as what I did.

Yes not everyone who would purchase a retro console or updated FPGA clone like the Analogue Pocket is a “retro gamer”.

Sure the MiSTer exists but not everyone wants a project not matter how simple it is.

Now and then I use emulation and revisit some old favorites. And I’ve also bought a couple of old consoles second hand to play on those in the past

You are assisting his point by indicating you are not part of the retro gaming audience and you like the page. Personally I will reserve judgment until there are hardware reviews but everything about that page is a "marketing department is in charge of our company" red flag.

To be fair, being angry is basic state of mind in many gaming communities. Gamer getting angry is default reaction in quite a few gaming subcultures.

Not all of them and not everyone, but it is not remarkable that gamers got angry.

I'll never forget witnessing the beginning of the development of PSIO: a complete CDROM Emulator for the PSX that aimed to provide the ability to boot games off a SD card. At the time in the early 2010s it was considered a far reaching project. The creators took so much abuse for years because so many in the "community" thought it was vaporware and damn these people for even trying. One of the creators was a high school student who took the time to learn low level FPGA coding, board layout and software dev so he could contribute to a lot of the core codebase. Eventually they actually launched and the product works! Now they get crap for other things that are equally silly(ex. Firmware downloads require inputting account, different firmwares for different revisions, not focusing on stupid things like Mem card backups in favor of bug fixes). It also made me think, man I never want to get into a gaming related business. These are the types of customers no self respecting business would want to deal with.

I make software for the space industry and get attacked on things I can and will call utterly silly. Before that I wrote invoicing applications, and that was far worse.

My question is: are there places where people don't scream at you for silly reasons? (and do any of those places need a competent C++ programmer?)

At Antithesis we are pretty calm and working on very interesting stuff. (You would have to relocate to the DC metro area, though.)

Well the most vocal are always those riding on their emotions, like anger. For every angry gamer theres a larger group who couldn't give a s***. Nor is any of this limited to gaming. People will get angry about any form of entertainment, whether its a remake of a cult fav movie, a band changing their sound, you name it there is someone whinging about it. All that anger fuels the net, driving up those ad clicks with divisive headlines so they can fill those rotten comment sections.

They make it pretty damn clear that they are using FPGA chips to accelerate rather than software emulation.

The linked page is littered in headlines that focus on “FPGA”

Criticizing Analogue for saying "no emulation" is a bit unfair. Everyone knows that emulation colloquially means "software emulation." It's really just finding the smallest thing on which to attack them, while seemingly claiming a legitimate basis for that attack.

Every company has to do marketing. Marketing is part of the equation for success. If Analogue has bad marketing you probably wouldn't even know about them. There are hundreds of obscure retro hardware projects that are still yet unknown. It seems you are just penalizing them for making an effort at being successful.

The reality is that Analogue makes quality products and sell them at a reasonable price. People get mad at them because their production capacity is low. Try building a hardware company yourself with a niche market, then tell me how easy it is to do inventory management. It's not their fault their products are so good that there is huge demand for them in the secondary market. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. That really shows there is an unfair bias against them.

By the way, I really like the MiSTer project but it does not support hardware cartridges. Analogue does. When MiSTer supports real media then it will be a viable alternative. For now it doesn't and Analogue fills that niche.

I have no idea where the idea that emulation means "software emulation" comes from. Emulation just means "to imitate another system". People aren't getting mad because they can't get one -- I don't want one. They get mad because they act like FPGAs are magic fairy dust, when really it's all code, just at different levels. They aren't fully simulating the chips down to the gate level -- that would be "no emulation", but would also violate copyright so that isn't how it works.

Using FPGA doesn't make the emulation fundamentally better -- there has been various bugs found on the SNES emulation of the Analogue. They get fixed of course.

> Emulation just means "to imitate another system"

Ah yes, I've heard this numerous times. Suddenly when it comes to criticizing Analogue, all the specific context around the term "emulation" in computing is conveniently ignored. It's a totally general word! Let's just ignore the 40 years or more of computing jargon around it.

> Using FPGA doesn't make the emulation fundamentally better

Actually it does. You can run legacy software with zero-latency and cycle-accuracy at a fraction of the cost and power required than you would be able to if you used software to emulate the underlying system. BSNES requires a 3Ghz ~$300 dollar CPU to run games accurately, using FPGAs you can do the same at a fraction of the cost and clock speed. Not to mention, there will always be some latency with a software technique. Please don't counter this argument by questioning the meaning of "better."

Who are all the people who were calling hardware 'emulagion' something different? The reason we (or at least I) didn't use "emulate" for hardware was because people weren't using FPGAs for emulation. We don't need new names for everything when done on an FPGA, when it is still (whatever you want to call it ...simulating?), as opposed to a pure gate-by-gate recreation, which Analogue isn't, which is obvious from its simulation errors, which are often similar to those that appear on traditional emulators like bsnes.

Yes, I agree FPGAs let you use much lower power requirements than a PC, but what I disagree with is, at the moment, the accuracy of the experience is better than a high spec PC running bsnes.

The authors of bsnes and analogue even agreed with this in the past, sharing I formation about how to increase accuracy in both directions.

I can't understand your first paragraph, which is apparently arguing that hardware emulation is not emulation? I don't think there is any historical support for limiting use of the term emulation to only software, or excluding their fpga approach, 40 years or otherwise. Analogue appears to be trying to change the definition, or more charitably, didn't know they were using the word wrong in their marketing.

What I suspect it comes down to is that marketing around the idea "emulation is bad and we don't use it" is easier than having to communicate the nuance that their type of emulation is better.

The exploitation of ambiguity and painting-over of nuance by marketing folks is to me just another one of many ways that marketing practices harm broader society.

A similar situation was when Zoom was trying to exploit ambiguity around the meaning of end to end encryption to support their invalid but nice-sounding claim that they used it. In that case the misunderstanding could lead to bigger problems than just annoying some people & causing argument.

I have a Mega SG. After years of suffering with dodgy Sega Genesis/Mega Drive emulation I now have a system that is damn near perfect, even better than the real thing in many ways. If software emulation could have given me this, great. But it’s never been able to come close.

These are upsides with FPGA emulation. Downside is that verilog devs are scarce and developing these cores are hard, so emulation quality sometimes suffer as a result. But I guess this is only a problem depending on the systems Analogue is primarily targeting.

> Emulation just means "to imitate another system".

Is an AMD CPU an Intel "emulator"?

If one piece of hardware aims to be compatible with another, pre-existing piece of hardware, I wouldn't call it an emulator. Maybe an implementation.

Sure there can be bugs, and a very advanced software emulator may have better compatibility than a less advanced hardware implementation. But a hardware implementation is fundamentally functioning much more similarly to how the original hardware functioned. Parallel logic gates are quite a different programming paradigm than sequential software.

Yes, I agree an AMD chip isn't an Intel emulator.

However, if we were imagining an intel CPU inside a console like a Super Nintendo or Megadrive, then an "AMD CPU" wouldn't be good enough -- lots of games require bug compatability of undocumented instructions, and exact behaviour in terms of memory access, instruction execution (including how partial instruction execution effects memory + registers).

People at Analogue aren't just making something which implements the same instruction set, they have to implement exact behaviour in all ways.

Nowadays people don't write games which require that level of compatability, which is why (mostly) games work on both Intel + AMD.

It also specifies “fpga eliminates many of the problems with software emulation” on the website posted here

Gamer yells at screen, more at 11

I really want to second this. We wouldn't say ASIC wifi chips are "emulating wifi"... What is the real difference between an ASIC and an FPGA... Write once vs write many?

WiFi is a spec, with different implementations, they don't emulate each other.

I can find various references to "emulating" soundblaster cards with an FPGA, which feels more applicable.

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