We are ready to give the full picture of status and ship timelines for the M64 console, controller, and games. If you don’t have time to read it all, here is the high level. Otherwise, lots of details below for those interested.
- M64 console, controller, and our launch games will be shipping at the end of July from our warehouse in Southern California. This means that fully certified consoles are already being loaded into our warehouse here now.
- We get many questions about whether it makes sense to wait for M64 vs alternates. You should wait. Here are some features that make M64 different:
- Lowest MSRP by far (even after early bird pricing ends)
- 5-second boot to game
- Wireless OTA updates available out of the box
- 16nm process node AMD ultrascale+ FPGA
- Fanless (noiseless) thermal design
- PSRAM architecture allows M64 to unlock significantly higher overclocking
- Full UI control from console
- In-house designed controller and games for deep integration
- Chromatic video passthrough, Chromatic transfer pak (post-ship update)
- Designed to be taken apart easily with no adhesives
- FPGA core will be open-sourced upon launch
- Many more just-for-fun features: cart eject button, LED uplighting, etc.
- The controller will be by far the best value pro-level controller available on the market for any console. Read more below in the controller section.
- As you have come to expect in Chromatic, we will continue working to offer physical games (both new and remastered) for this platform for years to come.
- We are already directly funding the development of brand new M64 games as well. Some are already months into development.
- Dozens of pre-production consoles are already in the hands of testers. After these testers and reviewers receive our latest updates and their M64 controllers, they will be allowed to release their reviews of the ecosystem.
Deep Dive
PRO CONTROLLER
We have been too busy doing the engineering work to send out fancy hardware trailers, and you probably want the money spent on the product anyway. As you already know, we don’t outsource design to our manufacturers or white label existing low-end products from Amazon.
The good news is that we’ve already fully designed the best trident controller ever made and it will ship this summer along with your console. Here is what makes this controller very unusual…in a good way.
- It is overflowing with more features than any other pro-level controller has, at a price point of mass produced non-specialty controllers.
- TMR analog joystick, and we designed it to be user-swappable.
- We have retained the exact ergonomics of the classic trident back shell for muscle memory while perfecting the aesthetic design of the front shell.
- The back shell is made of aluminum for the most rigid grip possible, while only being 30 grams heavier than an xbox pro controller (mostly accounted for by the extra lobe of trident shape).
- You will not only receive a wired option that plugs natively into M64 or Nintendo 64®, you will also receive a wireless rechargeable pack, and you will ALSO receive a swap in AA pack for those of us left who still love AAs. The rechargeable pack is swappable instantly, not integrated.
- We crammed in the largest proper eccentric rotating mass motor possible for a big, retro rumble.
- Bluetooth compatible with M64, PCs, and Android
- Wired USB compatible with PCs and Android
- Compatible with classic Nintendo 64®
- We have incorporated the most cutting edge bluetooth modules into both M64 and the M64 Pro Controller. We will support a brand new standard called “SCI” (shorter connection intervals). There is no other combination of wireless controller and console that will get close to supporting this wireless input latency for Nintendo 64® games. As more devices are released that can also support SCI in the coming years, M64 Pro Controller will work with them.
CONSOLE
Designing the M64 console in under one year from inception has been a heavy lift even for our integrated engineering team. See some of the features we are most proud of in the TLDR section above.
For the CRT enthusiasts out there, we won’t leave you hanging. We have been at work developing a dedicated AV adapter that will work with the M64 to understand if the game is outputting 240p or 480i (you may remember this as “high res” mode on some classic games), and correctly output that to your CRT. We will support numerous formats (composite, component, s-video, etc).
One of the top highlights of developing M64 has been our deep partnership with FPGAzumSpass and AMD to develop an Nintendo 64® core with the commitment to ultimately achieve perfect accuracy, and thus preservation of one of the most influential formats of gaming history. The work on this core will continue for years, and while almost all gains in accuracy will never be noticed at the gameplay level, we invite you to follow along as we open-source the core and continue to work on it.
Let’s have a quick sidebar about FPGAs. “No emulation” is a silly marketing phrase that gets tossed around in retro gaming all the time. Any gap in replicating behavior of another hardware system (Donkey Kong missing the vine swing) is proof of just how silly this phrase is. We use an FPGA to emulate these classic systems because the resources required to emulate an original Nintendo 64® chip with full accuracy on a CPU are impractical. At the end of the day, an FPGA is simply a more practical approach than spinning custom silicon or de-chipping thousands of original systems. In an effort to continue de-mystifying this world for interested bystanders, we will be releasing technical blogs about our FPGA development continually as the M64 core continues evolving.
GAMES
M64 is an ecosystem of games, controller and console. The only way to recreate the Nintendo 64® experience properly is to address every element at a completely integrated level. To this end, we will continue to work to launch newly manufactured games from indie developers as well as re-release and remaster classics. More on these titles soon.
One demonstration of how this ecosystem plays together is our early work on game-specific developer video filter defaults. 4K upscaling of Nintendo 64® format games inherently involves a subjective tuning to achieve the best possible visual experience. The M64 can directly detect a ModRetro game and give the user the option to automatically apply the filters that the developer feels best represents the gameplay experience that they desire.
At the end of the day, consoles and controllers are about serving the experience that the game creator intended for. This is why games will always be our top priority at ModRetro.
Looking forward to getting these products in your hands soon.
Signing off,
Torin
