It doesn't have to be mass market to be very, very successful, though. I see the Replay potentially succeeding in the same way the Amiga succeeded: it may not saturate the entire market, but it will find itself achieving some real success and popularity within certain niches. It's already exciting the Amiga world; there's also the Atari world, the C= 64 fans, arcade and console fans, etc.
The nature of the Replay itself also means it has more potential than simply being whatever retro system you want it to be; it can become any system you wish it to be; retro with modern elements, a convenient development platform bridging two different technologies, etc.
We won't know exactly where and how the Replay will distinguish itself until it has started to ship in real numbers, however, and people get their hands on it and start to mess around with it. That's when we'll see the real excitement and ipotential take off, IMO.
Well said,
While I have a soft spot for the Amiga (having gone the VIC-20 -> C64 -> Amiga route) the retro aspect alone likely wouldn't sway me to purchase. The fact though is this hardware can be almost anything you want it to be, it's the perfect FPGA dev board for alot of different applications.
I've been looking at FPGA dev boards for quite a while, and they are all either too sparse on features (power supply + FPGA + pin headers is all you get), to full of features (I don't need 8 LED's, 8 switches, numeric keypad, LCD connectors, and array of 7 segment displays, I really don't), to expensive, or to proprietary.
What I want is an FPGA dev board that I can load descent sized designs into, has some on-board ram, video out, and some sort of expansion header. The Replay Board meets that requirement very well, and that's why I've asked mike to put me on the list for a board. It's of interest to many markets I would expect.
It'll be interesting once a few more boards are in the field, more people become aware of them, videos start popping up on youtube and such places. It won't be long before it's noticed by hardware forums and the like which will spike more interest.
A key ingredient the Amiga had was that in the market that existed back then, it could basically sell it's self, lucky for the Amiga since Commodore didn't do a great job marketing it. I feel the Replay Board is capable of selling it's self in the present market.
I'd like to see some crews from the Demo Scene pick it up and see what they can pump out of the chip with some HDL demo designs. It would go a long way toward changing the ideas what can be done, and what is done with FPGA hardware.
