Info Tech Nostalgia is a hot-ticket item in the gaming industry, and a new game console that would run any second-through-fifth generation games via FPGA-powered emulation was a major news item last month. The company behind that announcement, Retro VGS, had been trying to crowdfund a project for months with limited success, but announced a major licensing deal with Coleco in December 2015. In February, Retro VGS displayed the so-called Coleco Chameleon, claiming that the platform could run any second-through-fifth-generation game (that’s the Atari 2600’s generation through the Nintendo 64) through FPGA (field programmable gate array) emulation of the original hardware.
Suspicions were raised, however, when photographic evidence appeared to show nothing but an SNES Jr. motherboard jammed into an Atari Jaguar plastic case. Granted, Retro VGS had already disclosed that it intended to use the old Jaguar molds for its final hardware. Then the “custom FPGA hardware” turned out to be nothing but an old PCI capture card. Coleco, which had agreed to lend its name to the project, demanding that prototype units be investigated by independent engineers. Now that the results of that investigation are in, Coleco has withdrawn from the program and Retro VGS has gone dark altogether.
This outcome was foreshadowed when David Giltinan, former managing editor of Retro Magazine, announced he would step down from his position over issues related to Coleco and the Retro VGS platform. He denies any conscious or deliberate desire to mislead, writing: “All we had in mind was to make a modern day retro-inspired console, nothing more and nothing less,” but acknowledges that he “allowed myself to become a vessel for misinformation, and for that I am again sorry.”
Just looking at the proposed specs on the Coleco Chameleon / Retro VGS is enough to raise red flags. The price jump from $150 to $350 and the generic “FGPA + ARM architecture” description of the hardware didn’t engender confidence, even if the initial announcement drummed up plenty of coverage. An FPGA is flexible and there are guides to emulating well-known platforms like the NES and SNES, but the higher up the console food chain you go, the more difficult and complicated emulation via FPGA becomes. The FPGA projects I’m aware of also focus on a single console, not the idea of emulating multiple designs via reconfiguration. Pulling this design off properly as it was pitched to investors would’ve been extremely difficult, even in the best of circumstances. Of course, once the Retro VGS team accidentally posted pictures of a PCI CCTV capture card, well, that was pretty much all she wrote.
Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are the last men standing out of what was once a forest of would-be competitors. Part of the reason these three companies have survived is because they’ve fine-tuned both long-term ecosystem management and their own cost structures. The Retro VGS was the longest of long shots. It may have been born out of an honest desire for a great retro gaming platform, but it ignored the fundamental difficulties of creating a solution that could handle so many disparate architectures and designs.