The Retro Vgs (now the Coleco chameleon)

The Retro VGS was a planned console that was to bring back the glory days of the cartridge based console and the promise of bug free games, a while back it was launched on the indie gogo for funding and it did very badly. I think looking back on the cartridge era can be a bit rose tinted though fact is they were certainly not bug free and while people may argue about loading times fact is if you are playing a retro game on a modern system loading times are not a issue at all.

So after the disaster of the indiegogo campaign they purchased the rights to use the name Coleco so it will be called the Coleco Chameleon and it was due to come to kickstarter the friday just gone but now it has been delayed.

Now a lot of this info is from what i have watched and read so take that as what you will ,what i have heard is the creators of it fired the engineer working on the Retro VGS and pretty much blamed him, now they have said they have gone to the drawing board and had a showing at a recent toy show now where a lot of the controversy has come in is the " Prototype " they have shown was running Snes games using a hardwired Snes controller and at the back it seemed to be a proprietary Snes video out and the Snes power port and a lot of duct tape to cover things, in some forums they have basically took apart a Snes Jr and put it in a atari jaguar shell and it looks the same and they have said they used the back of a Snes as it was easier but people are saying if the full console is supposed to be HDMI and having to connect the back of it to a FPGA as well as a hardwiring a snes controller how can that be easier then just a hdmi port and a usb connector, but as i am no hardware expert i really do not know.

That is all the things i have heard and seen so i have to take their words for it, but the things i do know is on there facebook pages they are deleting negative comments and failing to respond on what has been happening and it seems in the recent update comments are private.

Rumours are now that they are looking for investors and the reason they have not started the kickstarter was because there is not prototype.

Now at the start i did not believe it was a scam as the head guy Mike kennedy has been so much involved with the Retro scene and such a public face for it, i just believed that after the failed Indigogo they became desperate to get money to fund it, but if it turns out that it was a Snes JR in the atari shell then that is deception and i would class that as a scam.

In the end i think a lot of people would be very hesitant to buy into this, if at the start they just said it was a emulation machine perhaps along the lines of a retron 5 that would have been a better bet.


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#WTFU

So this has been a pretty big thing of late and i am all for this, and for the people how do not know about it then it is called Wheres The Fair Use.

In the past few years Youtube has gone downhill, where before it was people just doing there own vids, Vlogs, Lets plays and many other things now it seems to have become more corporate with many big corporations muscling in, but the biggest issue is with the copyright claim systems which promotes a guilty until proven innocent attitude.

The fact is it is being abused, say for example you do a review of a game which is almost a definition of fair use if the developer or the publisher does not like it then they can do a copyright claim to take the video down or claim ad revenue for it. And even if you are successful in getting that claim overturned and that was clearly just a false copyright claim there are no repercussions for them, if they have taken some ad revenue then you will not get it back and some channels have been deleted because of it.

Last year i did a video called my Top 10 Killer instinct Music tracks (see below) and i got my first content id claim at first i had a bit of a panic attack as i thought my channel got a strike but no it just meant i could not monetize it and i thought fair enough i was not sure that fell into fair use and i make no money anyway. but after a bit of digging around i found that the tracks they had claimed was done by Mick gordon and this group actually had done the same to him, see link here. And that annoyed me they basically went after the guy who made the music in the first place so i just disputed it and thankfully 10 days later it got taken off (though no details on why ).

Fact is Youtube really to need to have a major revamp on how the system works and employ people who Youtubers can contact directly to resolve situations because a automated systems CANNOT tell what fair use actually is.

Creating a #SubThis tag

So after the Fine bros debacle it had got me thinking a lot of the really big Youtube channels are just not my thing, Of course i do like a load of them like Boogie2988. Jeremy Jahns and many more but some of the big channels do seem very corporate.

I thought it would be a good idea rather then having people band together to #Unsub to a channel how about people create blogs/videos or tweets of channels they think deserve the attention using the #SubThis Hashtag.

First one i will do is Retro Core. He has been going for a while he used to record episodes and put them on to disc to sell them, Puts a lot of effort into the vids and if you love retro games it really is a winner.

Second is Play3r, now i have to say in advance i have started writing for them recently but i always acting like a cheerleader for them since they started and i think they will become bigger as they have the productions to do it.

Will do some more later but if anyone else does some let me know