Reply 40 of 201, by Doornkaat
Some variant of this thread pops up every now and then:
The OP has an (in principle) good idea for a new production piece of hardware to tackle a (preceived) scarcity on the market or to create a convenient one-size-fits-all solution for certain applications, and would like to ask wether it is worth his time to pursue the idea.
There is generally a decent amount of interest. Wether the idea becomes reality seems to depend on the OP's ability and dedication toward the project though.
This is why I'd say if you want this thing to happen stop asking for permission here and start inquiring with your people who have that expertise about how you can do this and how much of an investment you'd be looking at. It's time to nut up or shut up! 😉
Personally I'm doubtful that currently it is feasibly to produce anything like what you're envisioning but you make it sound like you have people that will be able to give you a much better assessment than I can.
If you want it here's some more feedback on the idea itself:
-Sony and Nintendo went for emulator boxes when they released their mini retro consoles. Both have the engineering capabilities and all data required to recreate their vintage consoles in hardware (plus add some ease of use features) and still decided to go for emulation.
-A great majority of games will run good enough even on current hardware and OS. Sometimes there's a bit of tweaking or a workaround required (and this forum is originally dedicated to finding/creating those) but a lot of stuff just works. Commercial re-releases of old PC games mostly rely on those solutions instead of the user buying dedicated hardware to run a game.
->This is why I believe that to appeal to a broader audience you'd need features that aren't avaliable on modern systems/OS and can not be fatihfully emulated. You need to identify the relevant shortcomings of emulation and make a finished product that avoids those shortcomings.
-Likely you'll also need some sort of software bundle to (optionally?) go with the hardware. Most of us already have the hardware and the games. If you want to appeal to a broader audience it only makes sense to be able to conveniently deliver the OS and at least some of the all time favourites.
-Here on Vogons/Marvin you're inquiring/arguing with a very niche market that is interested in running software on real hardware because of certain nuances and special features. Here on Marvin we are always feature creeping with our builds. We want those extra rendering modes even though we probably aren't really going to use them. If you ask here people will tell you they want nearly all the possible features implemented or at least expansion ports to use our own cards to add specific features. This forum is probably a good place to ask for the make-or-break features but if you only want to release a basic x86-machine with no special features I think most of us are already set.