In the shadow of the giant Sega Atlus booth, the mysterious ‘Tassei’ booth had several interesting devices up front, presenting some of the unique concepts dreamed up by this company. Working as a partner company, producing hardware for brands like ‘Hyperkin’ and ‘My Arcade’, Tassei Denki had some surprising hardware on show, like their 3rd party portable console ‘Project Nadeshiko’ playing Nintendo 3DS games on HD Amoled screens. While this was a cool device concept to see, some of the most interesting items Tassei brought to TGS were tucked away in a secluded corner of the booth.
With the popularity of ‘mini’ versions of retro consoles over the past few years, like the SNES Mini, the Sega Mega Drive mini and so on, Tassei has noticed this trend and has been working on several concept devices that could prove to be great contenders for the next big thing in the retro console gaming space.
The first of these concepts, is the Retron FPGA console. As a hardware partner of Hyperkin, producers of software emulation based retro consoles like the Retron 5 and Retron SQ, Tassei has created this potential Retron console which uses hardware emulation via FPGA instead of software emulation, which delivers the most accurate way of playing games for retro consoles other than simply playing on original hardware, with the added benefits of being able to upscale the video output to HD and supporting various controller options. FPGA has been seen as the best way to emulate retro games, with its use in commercial products like the Analog Pocket and Analog Nt , as well as open source projects like the MiSTer, which Tassei’s Retron FPGA console is based on, with several exclusive features and additions built on top of that framework. Talking to Andrew Steel from Tassei, the Retron FPGA, if released, would be intended to provide customers with a more accurate way to play retro games with FPGA powered hardware emulation, while being an easier method than trying to set up their own MiSTer based machine and cheaper than Analog’s premium-priced consoles which also are well known for being used to actually order due to limited supply.
Following the Retron FPGA was another FPGA powered device, this time focusing on a single console : The Sega Saturn. Intended as a hardware concept device to be potentially created with Sega as a follow up to the Mega Drive mini, this Sega Saturn Mini console would be a way to easily play Sega Saturn games on modern hardware. Because of the Sega Saturn’s unusual hardware design, with multiple CPUs working in parallel, it had been difficult for hobbyist emulator developers to emulate Sega Saturn games for a long time, hence one of the most well known Sega Saturn emulators, ‘Yabause’, which actually stands for Yet Another Broken and Unfinished Saturn Emulator. While many advancements have been made with newer software based emulators for Sega Saturn games, they do still require fairly powerful hardware, with devices that would be able to emulate the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube and Wii with ease still struggling with Sega Saturn emulation.
Rounding out Tassei’s showcase were a couple of more experimental projects, a Game Boy / Game Boy advance compatible mini console Based on zwenergy’s GBAHD project and a Playstation 2 modified to fit within the shell of a Playstation Classic mini console. If the Game Boy mini console was packaged as a finished product, ready to go out of the box, it could be particularly enticing for those who want a more accurate representation of their game boy games than what software emulation based retro consoles can offer and those who wouldn’t want to have to go through the process of assembling and configuring a homemade solution using one of the various ‘consolizer kits’ themselves. The Playstation 2 in a Playstation Classic seemed like a cool idea, and was reminiscent of some of some other projects the modding community have created over the years, like the G-Boy which cuts down the Nintendo Wii hardware to the bare essentials to make it fit in a portable, Game Boy sized shell.
Tassei is likely to be an unknown entity to most gaming consumers due to their position as a company that produces hardware for other companies to put their brand on, but they seem to have quite a lot of interesting ideas in mind for what might come next. Hopefully at least one of the concept items we saw at their TGS booth can make its way to market in the form of a finished product all of us would have the chance to have at home.
