UK/EU access to hardware
UK/EU Playpower People
Are you in the UK or the EU and wanting to get your hands on a Subor TV computer?
The playpower scheme is as you know to develop decent education, utility and games software to be made freely available in India, China, etc, but the current status on the software side is programming with NES emulators, which aren't currently transferrable to the Subor, while the hardware people come up with reprogrammable cartridges and other hardware mods to allow development/redistribution on the actual end user machines, because current NES homebrew solutions, such as the RetroUSB Cart, don't work yet and aren't scalable; small timing differences, the inclusion of a non-standard keyboard and mouse (!) and the current inability to "download" new software to the machines means access to the actual hardware is vital for continued development Ideally, whatever dev tools we create should eventually be in the hands of the end users as well, in order to get "fit for purpose" IT tools to those that need them. Being a child of the UK 80s personal computer boom where games were less important than the ability to program, I think we ultimately need hardware solutions that are as cheap as the Subor carts, and not reliant upon outside PCs, USB cables, etc, but are self-contained in the long run. To get to this stage we need more people hardware hacking!
The only current UK source for the TV Computer is £60+ from a retro games dealer, with none of the profits going to aid playpower; in the US there is a distributor that sells the hardware for about $60, of which a share goes to playpower. However, if we can raise enough interest/sponsorship to hit about £2000 (2220€) we might be able to order 100 straight from the manufacturers to redistribute at cost to potential playpower volunteers in Europe. NOTE: Although it's a $12 machine in Asia, customs and shipping make it considerably more here, but we can afford it. The normal minimum order is 2000 units from Subor, the Chinese manufacturers, but we are attempting to get a small initial order of 100 to seed people interested in volunteering for playpower in Europe; this is being negotiated by Derek Lomas, the lead man behind playpower in the US, but we need enough donations or potential purchasers to get the minimum order number of 100; if we go over then great!
My estimate of cost per unit is about £20 (23€) to us in bulk to the UK, including shipping and customs charges, which means needing £2000 (2220€) in donations. A small additional cost for P&P, say £10 (11€) but could be less, for getting individual orders out to people, means we could provide "at cost" seed machines for developers for £30 (34€) or less; if my estimate is high and customs and bulk shipping are lower, the reduced cost will be passed on to purchasers, and subsidise individual postage costs to the EU, or the difference donated to playpower. If you compare this with VTec kids toy computers that do far less for £60, it's clear that in the long term there is a market even in Europe for affordable "real" computers for children! Anyone interested in Serious or Educational Games, or wanting to encourage Creative IT skills in young people should be getting involved. Schools and computer clubs with limited resources would benefit, and old TVs would have reuse potential! Universities that teach Game Programming and Electronic Engineering could ultimately use these as an affordable platform for low-level programming and hardware hacking; hey, isn't Retro the new Black? So, you may have friends or colleagues to evangelise to.
It's early days, but with IT professionals involved the playpower dream of capable and affordable computers for everyone is possible. If you are interested in donating/sponsoring or pledging to purchase a TV Computer in Europe where they are costly or hard to get hold of, please contact me.
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Dr. Mike Reddy, Future Technology, Games Development and A.I., Division of Computing, Newport Business School, University of Wales, Newport, Allt-yr-yn Campus, PO Box 180 Newport South Wales NP20 5XR
Tel: +44 (0) 1633 432452 Fax: +44 (0)1633 432307 Mob: +44 (0)7971 170 199 Email: mike.reddy @ newport.ac.uk (remove spaces)
Are you in the UK or the EU and wanting to get your hands on a Subor TV computer?
The playpower scheme is as you know to develop decent education, utility and games software to be made freely available in India, China, etc, but the current status on the software side is programming with NES emulators, which aren't currently transferrable to the Subor, while the hardware people come up with reprogrammable cartridges and other hardware mods to allow development/redistribution on the actual end user machines, because current NES homebrew solutions, such as the RetroUSB Cart, don't work yet and aren't scalable; small timing differences, the inclusion of a non-standard keyboard and mouse (!) and the current inability to "download" new software to the machines means access to the actual hardware is vital for continued development Ideally, whatever dev tools we create should eventually be in the hands of the end users as well, in order to get "fit for purpose" IT tools to those that need them. Being a child of the UK 80s personal computer boom where games were less important than the ability to program, I think we ultimately need hardware solutions that are as cheap as the Subor carts, and not reliant upon outside PCs, USB cables, etc, but are self-contained in the long run. To get to this stage we need more people hardware hacking!
The only current UK source for the TV Computer is £60+ from a retro games dealer, with none of the profits going to aid playpower; in the US there is a distributor that sells the hardware for about $60, of which a share goes to playpower. However, if we can raise enough interest/sponsorship to hit about £2000 (2220€) we might be able to order 100 straight from the manufacturers to redistribute at cost to potential playpower volunteers in Europe. NOTE: Although it's a $12 machine in Asia, customs and shipping make it considerably more here, but we can afford it. The normal minimum order is 2000 units from Subor, the Chinese manufacturers, but we are attempting to get a small initial order of 100 to seed people interested in volunteering for playpower in Europe; this is being negotiated by Derek Lomas, the lead man behind playpower in the US, but we need enough donations or potential purchasers to get the minimum order number of 100; if we go over then great!
My estimate of cost per unit is about £20 (23€) to us in bulk to the UK, including shipping and customs charges, which means needing £2000 (2220€) in donations. A small additional cost for P&P, say £10 (11€) but could be less, for getting individual orders out to people, means we could provide "at cost" seed machines for developers for £30 (34€) or less; if my estimate is high and customs and bulk shipping are lower, the reduced cost will be passed on to purchasers, and subsidise individual postage costs to the EU, or the difference donated to playpower. If you compare this with VTec kids toy computers that do far less for £60, it's clear that in the long term there is a market even in Europe for affordable "real" computers for children! Anyone interested in Serious or Educational Games, or wanting to encourage Creative IT skills in young people should be getting involved. Schools and computer clubs with limited resources would benefit, and old TVs would have reuse potential! Universities that teach Game Programming and Electronic Engineering could ultimately use these as an affordable platform for low-level programming and hardware hacking; hey, isn't Retro the new Black? So, you may have friends or colleagues to evangelise to.
It's early days, but with IT professionals involved the playpower dream of capable and affordable computers for everyone is possible. If you are interested in donating/sponsoring or pledging to purchase a TV Computer in Europe where they are costly or hard to get hold of, please contact me.
--
Dr. Mike Reddy, Future Technology, Games Development and A.I., Division of Computing, Newport Business School, University of Wales, Newport, Allt-yr-yn Campus, PO Box 180 Newport South Wales NP20 5XR
Tel: +44 (0) 1633 432452 Fax: +44 (0)1633 432307 Mob: +44 (0)7971 170 199 Email: mike.reddy @ newport.ac.uk (remove spaces)
Tags: EU, Subor, TVComputer, UK, affordable, hardware
Views: 181
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mr Jonathan James Sang on -
Hmm.. They sell them in TESCOs supermarket and Big C Supermarket at well below these metioned prices. 60 GBP is steep! I picked up 5 8-bit machines for around 1000 THB (Read less than 30 pounds) I am actually using them to teach 8 year olds to program basic!! I picked up another one for 39 THB from TESCOs in RAYONG, Thailand. (less than 1 pound!! ) Also they sell the 16 bit version which is backwards compatible with with the 8 bit ones but has some cool software built into it. I picked this up for 324 THB! Very nice. I want to get some more and donate them to someonewho can pull apart the code andhardware to these machines to make them more accessable and for development purposes. If intersted I will try my best to get a few over to you in the UK.
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Permalink Reply by Paulo Silva on -
'Universities that teach Game Programming and Electronic Engineering could ultimately use these as an affordable platform for low-level programming and hardware hacking' would mean would be great seeing playpower hardware also sold as electronics kit - people envolved with electronics (like engineering), would love to work on a playpower machine built by themselves by soldering pieces from a kit, just like the old time of Sinclair machines ZX80 and ZX81 (and some eastern-european zx-spectrum clones, i think)
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Permalink Reply by Dr. Mike Reddy on -
I absolutely agree. We just haven't had the interest from potential partners to get anywhere near the minimum order required for the supplier.
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Permalink Reply by Paulo Silva on
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maybe partnerships with secondary and university schools would be helpful to reach the minimum order request, and even requesting a bit more for supplying local electronics shops, if interested. It surelly depends on the popularity this kit may have, surelly hugelly more than those completelly useless kits (and expensive) we find on these shops, while a tv-computer people can play and try their coding works, demos and games on a hardware they learnt to solder on as well.. this would be very exciting and brilliant... - just a question: how much are the minimum order ammount? i think also, hacklabs like Foulab, or libre associations like ConstantVZW would help a lot on making Playpower more popular! :)
Dr. Mike Reddy said:I absolutely agree. We just haven't had the interest from potential partners to get anywhere near the minimum order required for the supplier.
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Permalink Reply by Paulo Silva on
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i took a look around the 8 chinese bazaars in my neighbourhood, only one is selling a Victor for around 25eur, what i think can be expensive (almost 3 times!) that price of 10usd mentioned...
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Permalink Reply by Sam Smith on -
Buying in small quantities from overseas retail shops seems a good idea.
Unfortunately Thailiand's TV system is (according to the web) PAL B / M . The UK uses PAL-I and USA uses NTSC. I'm not sure if modern UK TVs can tolerate other PAL standards... it would make sense, since manufacturers could churn out identical units for sale in lots of territories. My newish, cheap TV picks up VHF and there hasn't been VHF TV here since the 405-line system went in the 60s.
So what's a country that has UK / Euro / USA TV systems, and shops full of our machine? Anyone?
Sam.
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Permalink Reply by Sam Smith on
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Of course! Hong Kong! They use PAL I, presumably from being a British colony up til the 90s. Bound to be a shop there does overseas orders. Plenty do. Anyone any information?
Sam.
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Permalink Reply by Paulo Silva on
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here in Portugal (i think Spain as well) uses PAL-B or PAL-G (which is 50hz, 625 beam lines, and 576 visible lines)
as far as i know, PAL-M is only used in Brazil, which is has NTSC luminance frequency (60hz, 525 beam lines, 480 visible lines) using the PAL colour system instead of NTSC - an NTSC hardware connected into a PAL-M tv-set provides a grayscale image, as well as vice versa (i think)
and as i could see, do all those famiclone-nes-computers has video and audio connection instead of a RF connection? i'm really not sure about...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECAM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL-M_%28television%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_television_systems
http://www.thailandguru.com/tv-cable-satellite-ubc-true-visions-ban... - thailand tv broadcast system seems to be the same of Portugal and Spain, PAL-B/G
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Permalink Reply by Sam Smith on
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http://countrycode.org/tv-standards
Is what I looked at. It says B / M there, who knows! I suppose you can't use both in the same country, perhaps they only use B after all. So maybe you and Mr Sang in Thailand should make friends!
We really could do with a way of getting these to Europeans interested, and some form of RAM-cart. Is nobody any good with CPLD and FPGAs? Or even just sticking some static RAM chips into an old 32K (?) game cart/ Maybe a PIC to program them. It's something I've no practical experience with unfortunately.
Sam.
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Permalink Reply by Wily's Apprentice on -
I know that this thread hasn't been responded to since March - I hope it's not a problem if I bump it. If it is, please accept my apologies.
I'm just curious, did anything ever come of the drive to get enough people together to meet the minimum order requirement for importing some of the Subor computers into the UK? (I did send an e-mail, but as of yet haven't received a response.)
Is this still ongoing? If so, I would like to pledge to buy one. I would very much like to help with testing Playpower's software (I'm not a coder, but I have this odd knack for finding bugs), so I would like to get my hands on one of the Subor machines. (For now I can use an AV Famicom for this, but of course that doesn't help with anything that uses the Subor computer's keyboard or mouse. I have a RetroZone PowerPak, and I would like to find out if it's compatible with the Subor or not - I gather that it will work with some Famiclones, but not with others, and the only way to really know is to try.)
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Permalink Reply by Dr. Mike Reddy on
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Wily's Apprentice said:I know that this thread hasn't been responded to since March - I hope it's not a problem if I bump it. If it is, please accept my apologies.
I'm just curious, did anything ever come of the drive to get enough people together to meet the minimum order requirement for importing some of the Subor computers into the UK? (I did send an e-mail, but as of yet haven't received a response.)
Sorry Wily, I have found your email in my junk mail and replied directly. Here is a transcript for those following this thread:
-----Original Message----- From: Mike Reddy
Sent: 15 August 2010 08:49
To: S. Bennett
Subject: Re: Playpower.org / Subor TV computer in the UK
Hello! After seeing your playpower post, I checked my junkmail and there it was. So sorry to not have replied. I would also have replied with an apology on the web site, but it doesn't like Safari on the iPhone and I'm away from home at present.
Sadly, I got absolutely no interest from UK people. :-( So, the bare minimum order of 200 machines at £30approx each just wasn't doable. Normal minimum orders for Subor is 2000! So, the only option is the very few expensive ones that UK suppliers have imported already.
Susanne, there is design and testing of games to contribute to, even if you are not a programmer/hacker. And, of course, advocacy; selling the message and intent of PlayPower to people who may not have heard of it. I'm hoping to put together a grant proposal at some stage.
Will keep in touch.
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Permalink Reply by Wily's Apprentice on
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I've now obtained one of the Famiclone computers. It's an "iNext" model, with no manufacturer info that I could find. The supplied 48-in-1 cartridge seems to be the same one that appears in the YouTube video from Playpower, titled "Demonstration of the Victor-70" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjSLZ-x-GxM ), so I'm guessing it's a Victor and not a Subor.
I'm quite surprised by the build-quality of the unit and some of the accessories - they seem to me to be relatively sturdy, considering the production costs. The mouse, especially, is really quite good. The joypads are pretty terrible though, so I had to hook up a controller from another Famiclone that I already had. It was curious, and somewhat nostalgic, to see that the port labelled as "2" is actually the port which you need to plug player one's controller into (I grew up with a C64, and most often games required the joystick to be in port two). The light-gun is scarily gun-like for what's really a toy gun.
I was quite surprised by how pale and washed out the colours that the machine outputs actually are. I've owned quite a few Famiclones in my time (I find the unusual ones to be quite interesting), and this is the first time I've seen one like this - they're usually *much* more saturated than the colours that come from a real Famicom, and this one is the reverse of that.
Unfortunately - and this is the part that I was disappointed, though not really too surprised, to see - the machine is not compatible with the PowerPak. It just gives a flickering white screen. I guess any testing I do to try to help out around here will have to be restricted to emulators and my real Famicom!
It's certainly very interesting to see what's being worked with. I'm sorry that I won't be able to do any testing on the actual hardware, though.
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