You should also include the Democrats to include the whole picture.

President Total Debt Added (in USD) Percentage Increase in Debt
Richard Nixon $121 billion 34%
Gerald Ford $224 billion 47%
Jimmy Carter $299 billion 43%
Ronald Reagan $1.86 trillion 186%
George H.W. Bush $1.55 trillion 54%
Bill Clinton $1.4 trillion 36%
George W. Bush $5.85 trillion 101%
Barack Obama $8.34 trillion 69.98%
Donald Trump $8.18 trillion 40.43%
Joe Biden $6.17 trillion (as of 2024) 24.75%

Obama was spending to clean up the 2008 crash, and 4.4 Trillion of Trump's was all from 2020. While Reagan was trying to fix the economic mess left by Carter. W Bush was financing an unending war after 9-11.

Due to interest on the debt there's a floor to how low the in the increase can become until the debt is refinancing, even if we had a balanced budget or surplus to pay down some of the debt at the end of the year.

Did set it to lowest quality settings and 540p and upscale with FSR? That's how the Xbox consoles make those areas playable.

The new SOC the Switch supposedly uses does look much more powerful, and having a cut back NVIDIA GPU that still maintains all the modern features will be a major increase.

That said the Steam Deck is three years old. It uses a Zen 2 CPU where Zen 5 is now out, and a custom RDNA 2 GPU, while RDNA 4 just released.

The latest Halo Infinite runs and looks fine on the Deck. If you are playing on the 7" 720p screen, you don't notice all of the detail that is loss versus running at those settings on a 65" 4K TV.

It's only a few of the most recent games that struggle to run properly on the PS5 and XSX that aren't playable on the Steam Deck. Modern games are extremely scalable.

Sony is supposedly also working on a new handheld. I wouldn't be surprised if that releases at the same time as the PS6, but targets PS5 specs and quality settings running at 720. The PS5 itself already lets you set it to only output 720p, so current games already support this setup. With games still coming to the PS4 12 years after launch. The PS5 will likely last even longer. Having a portable that plays your library is a great way to push people away from physical copies.

The Xbox handheld won't need to do that if it runs full Windows. I'm curious on pricing though since they will be from partners versus Microsoft putting it out themselves and subsidizing the purchase.

Are you forgetting the GameGear which was direct competition for the GameBoy? It used 6 AAs and was lucky to hit 5-6 hour run times. And the Lynx wasn't any better.

The GameBoy and GameBoy Advanced having 10-15 hour run times were the outliers.

Now the devices are all rechargeable with a standard USB C plug. You can bring along a power brick, or maybe whatever long haul service you are using provides phone/tablet charging plugs.

The days of begging your parents to buy another pack of AAs to keep you quiet on the long road trip are long over.

The loudest run time complainers are also the most likely to just be using their device at home, and want to sit over here and not have to run a cable versus sitting over there next to a plug.

Yes, Steam Deck is existential proof that portable PC gaming is possible, but the architecture (both of the system and of the processor) is a compromise on power across the board. Yes, they did a really good job given the constraints they were under, but even well-known and reasonably-optimized titles are limited to 3-4 hours of play time, running at 720p. It's not nothing, but compare that to a Switch.

The Switch that's a 720p handheld and hopefully gets 3-3.5 hours on complex games? I'd say it compares just fine. Play a less demanding 2D game on a Steam Deck and it can be down clocked to get 6-8 hours of battery life.

Oh and the Steam Deck can run a Switch emulator and in some cases make games run better than on native hardware. But that's more due to the Switch using an SOC from 2015 and under clocked the heck out of it. We'll see how the Switch 2 stacks up against other devices.

What you called big soft-cover are likely trade paperbacks. The small ones are generally the mass market releases.

I'm not into the Amiga scene, so I'm not sure where it ended up. But someone had a floppy drive interface working on the Amiga core. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amibay.com%2Fthreads%2Fmister-floppy-amiga-is-amazing.2442933%2F

The C64 core supposedly also has real drive support. There's also an optional audio input add-on the C64 core can use so you can load stuff from tape if you really wanted to.

The great part is all of this stuff is written in a hardware design language (HDL). If all of the corner cases are worked out, so all of the chips work correctly, and all of the audio and video signals are generated accurately. Then as long as the designs survive, in two hundred years someone could simulate or create physical versions of the hardware and experience how it really was.

The biggest limitation of the MiSTer is it's limited IO directly to the FPGA. It's fine for connecting peripherals but the interface for a full Amiga accelerator likely won't work. But nothing is stopping someone from backing the open source FPGA core and designing a board with the expansion it. The MiSTer core was based off the open source Minimig, which is an A500 computer recreated as an FPGA, it's lacking the expansion you asked about though. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMinimig

The 1chipMSX, is a similar thing, but it isn't open source. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F1chipMSX

Heads up that while MiSTer did spin off of MiST, it's very much it's own thing now. MiST was a custom board that originally targeted the Atari ST, thus My ST. And it spread to other systems.

MiSTer used a commercial developer board anyone could easily buy that gave more resources and capabilities to less than 1/2 the cost of the custom board the MiST had. And then exploded in terms of support. The FPGA cores are being ported to other boards as well, but MiSTer became a standard everyone rallied around.

This project is the real deal versus just software emulators running off a Raspberry Pi. Some people here and saying this isn't a magical silver bullet. But some of the cores like the NeoGeo were developed by decapping the custom chips, and the chip design was written to allow new physical runs of these custom chips to install on real hardware as there is no other available stock of these things.

Software emulators also benefited as there were more eyes and ears on things. And comparison projects were created which analyzed audio from multiple real hardware units, to establish a baseline this is what this should sound like, and then the FPGA cores, and software emulators were changed to match. And the same happened with video as well.

People will continue to argue it's not 100% exact per original hardware. But different tolerances in capacitors and clock crystals in original hardware makes it so two "real" pieces are hardware don't do the exact same thing.

Read up on the MiSTer project for specific details. But the HD15 is configurable through an INI file. It does both 15 and 31kHz. And other configuration options lets it switch from RGB to component output on the port.

It can also be switched from direct analog output, to using the same scaler as the HDMI port. So you can get SVGA resolutions out of it.

At the bottom of the page there is an image carousel, if you cycle through them you'll see there are port covers on the two sides.

One has the five RCA jacks for Component video and audio. The other has the yellow for composite video and the two audio jacks, along with a SPDIF digital audio connector.

The VGA output is configurable to either 15kHz or 31kHz. Or even inbetween if you are running an arcade core as many of those use non-standard odd ball frequencies.

I recommend anyone that's interested, check out the MiSTer project's Wiki https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FMiSTer-devel%2FMain_MiSTer%2Fwiki

The new console is just a new custom board layout, but will run the same framework. The project is setup so you can drive an original CRT TV and use original accessories and have an experience that indistinguishable from original hardware, to allowing you to connect any USB or Bluetooth controller you have and output a compatible HDMI signal to the most intolerant TV that doesn't like anything outside of exactly a 60Hz signal.

It supports pretty much every console and handheld from the Atari 2600 and Coleco Vision, up through the Saturn, N64, and original PlayStation. Currently Jaguar, 3DO, and CDi cores are under development. It runs hundreds of arcade games that are listed on the above Wiki. And tons of computers including the C64, Amiga, MSX, IBM 5150, B&W Mac, a 486 with a Soundblaster, Adlib, and MIDI support. And a whole bunch of eastern European PCs most in the West never heard of.

The MiSTer project has been under development for over six years. It sound complicated and too good to be true. But it is real. And an amazing way to revisit thing for 30-40 years ago. While also playing around with systems you never had access to. The community has created packs so most things just require you turning it on, select a system from a menu, and then select a game. Or with some computers, it boots up and gives a menu and you pick what you want to run. You of course aren't limited to games on the PC core, load whatever software you want to. It's just that games are generally more popular than someone wanting to load up Wordperfect 2.0 or Lotus Notes.

The MiSTer Pi is the exact same thing as this. Only a handful of consoles NeoGeo, N64, GBA will make use of over 64MB due to a small number of games being up to 64MB.

The computer cores can utilize more, but those generally run fine using the 1GB of onboard DDR3 RAM.

There's mention of dual RAM. That's using two RAM modules, but it has nothing to do with RAM capacity. It's down to RAM bandwidth limits. While a core is in development it's easier to use the extra bandwidth and get things into a complete stable state. Once the primary development is complete, then optimizing takes place. So far every core has been made to work with a single RAM module.

The SuperSystem is a nice thing for most people. The science fair project look of the MiSTer Pi is what everyone has been using for the last 6 years. For anyone that's waited this long, the console is more likely what they've been waiting for. The Pi bundle isn't currently available to preorder, and the current sale price of the console is $5. Full price will be a $40 difference. But that's still less than the cost of the official DE-10 Nano people have been paying after the price hikes for the last 4.5 or so years. So whatever you get, you're getting an amazing bargain.

This can output the original 15kHz signal. It also has the option to enable a simple line doubler to convert the signal to 31kHz so it will work on a VGA monitor that doesn't support multi sync.

But a cheap consumer VGA monitor will give a very similar look to the PVM and BVM displays that retro gamers chase after. The only issue is original lightguns won't work on the 31kHz display. But some later ED and HD CRT TVs models will convert everything to a 31khz signal and cause the same issue.

Some games on the Genesis/Mega Drive used dithering and blurring of a composite signal to create effects. These are broken even on consumer CRT TVs when simply upgrading to S-Video. Never mind using an RGB signal. And this was all on original hardware with period correct displays. The FPGA core has an option that will intelligently recreate the blurring effect only on the area that needs it without blurring the whole image. There are also other filtering that can give the look of a worn out 80s arcade monitor that has a lot of burn in. But this also works looks great over HDMI, I'm not sure why someone using a VGA monitor would try to ruin the image like that.

I have some bad news for you. All PS3 revisions use only software emulation for PS1 games. This is why every single revision supports playing games off original PS1 CDs.

PS2 has both the CPU and GPU as hardware, the GPU only as hardware, or all done in software depending on the revision. But even the "full hardware" versions have software pieces in them that are 100% accurate that do cause issues in a handful of games.

This FPGA core for the PS1 does some extra buffering on audio playback due to limited memory bandwidth. But it causes around 0.1 to 0.01ns of a delay in audio playback versus original hardware.

This also adds software emulator features like fixing texture warping due to not having a z-buffer, and overclocking. But it is accurate enough where you can output an analog signal to a CRT TV, and connect an original PSX lightgun, and it will just work like original hardware. Considering how timing sensitive that is, it outside the range of even the people with the fastest reaction times not being able to detect any difference.

Where's this $75 more coming from? It's currently available for $30. The shipping always always high. Someone I know in the US ordered at $150, and it was $196 after sales tax, the $5 addon dock deposit and $36 for shipping.

This is a new custom designed board that uses the MiSTer framework. Rather than using the Terasic DE-10 Nano which was created as a development board. This is a new layout with the same functionality.

Previous boards for the MiSTer were limited in terms of size and layout to match the foot print of the DE-10 Nano. So you had cables spidering out from every side.

This new version has the majority of the IO at the back, and a USB port and the PSX controller and memory card ports on the front. The two sides do have some audio video outputs. But they are only there to let you use RCA cables you might already have.

The VGA port on the back can output for 15 and 31kHz signals and can use a normal DB15 VGA cable. Or ones that terminate to three RCA connects which can be configure to output either RGB or component video. Or you can get a DB15 to SHART.

There's also a 10-pin mini-din connector on the back. I haven't seen official confirmation but speculation is that it's keyed to the Sega Saturn layout like other MiSTer boards that also include that connector. So any of those cables terminating to composite, S-Video, RGB, component, or SHART should work.

As for complaints on the price. The base DE-10 Nano without any of the add-ons boards started at $130, and has crept up to $220 USD over the year. A full MiSTer stack was costing over $400. Even the non-early bird pricing makes this an excellent deal. Considering the price of bespoke retro cables, if you can reuse on of your existing SHARTs, you just saved the extra $30 your catching for not being able to stay up on the weekend with a weeks notice. At least they have extended preorders versus being just flagged as sold out, with no one knowing when a future batch could be made available.