NES-style light guns require a 15KHz/240p CRT in order to work. The reason that the AVS is not compatible with light guns is due to its HDMI-only 720p video output. The original Famicom Expansion port also was able to output sound but the AVS's cannot due to the lack of any DAC inside the system. The Famicom Expansion port also accepts most peripherals and should work fine with most peripherals which plug into that port with the exception of light guns such as the Famicom Gun and Bandai Hypershot. Controller ports 1 & 2 are spaced so that you could attach an NES Four Score or NES Satellite Receiver if you wished to do that for some reason. The Controller input ports accept anything you might expect them to accept and should work fine with all standard peripherals with the notable exception of the NES Zapper. (No FPGA device displays PAL Micro Machines properly, neither do most emulators.) The APU simulation is pretty good, certainly good enough to pass casual inspection. The PAL PPU simulation is not quite as near-perfect, Micro Machines has glitches in the menus but is playable. The NES NTSC PPU simulation is very solid, difficult games like Micro Machines work flawlessly. The AVS after firmware updates is pretty well compatible with almost any NES game. The AVS supports Expansion Audio from both the NES (from flash carts) and Famicom slots. The native NES resolution of 256x240 is scaled to 768x720, with the horizontal scale adjustable. The AVS outputs a 720p signal in either 60Hz or, for PAL games, 50Hz over HDMI and uses 48KHz for audio. You can currently get a $5 discount on RetroUSB's Wireless Controller by ordering one or more with an AVS. The AVS requires an original NES or Famicom controller, not included. The console does come in a box with artwork on it for a more professional presentation. It comes with an HDMI cable, a USB Type-A to mini-USB cable, a generic 5v/1A USB power adapter (U.S. The console provides an NES cartridge slot, a Famicom cartridge slot, four NES controller ports and on the back, a Famicom Expansion port, an HDMI connector and a mini-USB connector for power and data transfer. The AVS is powered by a Xilnix Spartan 6 XC6SLX9 FPGA. The Scoreboard would let you submit your high scores in recognized games to NintendoAge's server, but when NintendoAge was sold off to GoCollect in May of 2019, the functionality was broken. The AVS originally had one unique feature, the Scoreboard. Audio was found to be crackly or broken on some TVs as it was output at 44.1KHz, a firmware update giving 48KHz output fixed that. Fortunately the NES cartridge slot is fixed on a riser board and a fixed connector was made available at no cost beyond shipping to early customers who asked for a replacement. Then the NES cartridge slot was found to be unable to read some licensed NES cartridges with the "green stripe" due to the recessed pins. Many early adopters found that the mini-USB port would break off due to insufficient structural support. Things were a tad rough for the AVS at first. FPGA simulators like MiSTer also will factor into the discussion as well but are not FPGA consoles. The 1chipMSX, the AVS, the Nt Mini and Nt Mini Noir, the CollectorVision Phoenix, the Super Nt and Mega Sg are all FPGA consoles. An FPGA console to me is one that comes pre-assembled, in an enclosure and runs that system's original media and peripherals directly without doing a wholesale copy of ROM to RAM. If you are dying to own one now, there are some "Limited Launch Edition" units still available for $650.40.īefore I continue further, I must define what an "FPGA console" is. The AVS cost $185 at launch and the price dipped for a while to $170-175 but the pre-order for the new batch is for $189. The Analogue Nt Mini would be released soon after in January, 2017 but was not sold after September of that year and cost $449. The only immediate FPGA predecessor of which I am aware was the 1chipMSX, sold over a decade before and pretty much only in Japan. The AVS simulates the essentials of the NES and most of the Famicom. As this console is almost five years old at this point and is the only NES FPGA console you can currently pre-order, I think it is time to see where it has progressed and how well it has held up over the years compared to more recent competition.įirst released in September, 2016, the AVS was the first FPGA console to be sold for a long time. That changed recently thanks to a friend of mine who let me borrow his for testing and review. The RetroUSB AVS was the first NES FPGA console made available to the public, and while I have discussed it before on this blog, I have not done a full review of the AVS because I never had one in my possession before. The NES is undoubtedly the most cloned video game system ever, and in the 2010s FPGA technology had decreased in price to the point where it was affordable to implement retro video game systems on an FPGA.
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