But yeah, they also had less colors to work with and palettes (which were costier to implement in a software renderer). And this CPU is also faster than of those consoles. I did give myself a more confortable system in terms of RAM and computational power.
But my aim was for a machine that would sit somewhere between the 3rd and 4th generation.
The double buffering I understand as well, if I was working with an FPGA I would not have gone with frame buffers, for sure, but that was the solution I found at the time using the components I was using and it worked.
The attention this has gotten, especially here in HN is still a bit unbelievable to me (and amazing of course). I don't want people to think this is an optimal console design or anything. This is by no means a perfect project or "the way to go" in terms of homebrew video game consoles, it's just the way I found to do one while learning electronics along the way.
And thanks :)
The one thing that irks me about the console design is the amount of RAM it needs. In the age where 8-bit consoles were actually being built, RAM was the most expensive part of the devices by a far margin. It is no accident that the Atari 2600, for example, only had 256 bytes of main memory, and even the very popular NES/Famicom ran on only 2kB of main memory. This "retro" design, by contrast, employs a lot of RAM chips in a variety of places, even where they are not actually needed: the CPU and PPU can be connected with different technologies (as the article hints at), and double buffering via a second VRAM chip is the kind of feature that classical home consoles would never do due to cost reasons.
Don't get me wrong though, it's still an amazing project!