shmups.system11.org

Question to BuckoA51 /VGP:

Will you sell the FBX audio board on VGP?

Interested in that too, since FBX doesn't ship outside the US.

of course he does. Just send him a PM or an email.

Sure, But FBX said somewhere that the shipping fees outside the US would be pretty high (something like 30$ IIRC but I can't find the post).

International shipping from the US can get ridiculous. I have had UK customers send me a package for very reasonable prices. Then when shipping it back, the same shipping would be 3-4x more.

I can ship internationally, but it's a chore and you get two options: Expensive, or roll the dice for cheap and takes forever. I believe VGP is making some boards to sell internationally, which would take a huge headache off my work load. As it is, I have to manually keep international orders on a text ledger, then fill out forms to declare the items, mummify the flate-rate boxes in brown tape, weigh the box, send the estimate to the customer, have them do a private payment, and then finally ship it out. With domestic shipping, I just click two buttons and get a pre-paid label to put on the box for less than $8 bucks. SO much easier.

I've ordered something from Japan for $80 before and there was an issue with it. Shipping to the US was very minimal. Shipping back was so high that the seller said "just keep it" and cut their losses.

It's largely because the US Postal Service bends over backwards accommodating other countries shipments without compensation, while those same countries will not receive foreign mail unless their internal rates are paid.

This can be blamed on the Universal Postal Union which consistently has forced the US to subsidize foreign mail delivered to it, and to lean more conspiratorially, by certain entities within the US who let it happen to further erode the USPS's financial solvency.

I am working on finishing the documentation for DIY installs. I wanted to do fancy professional pictures but I will probably just take "real" pictures I already have and use them. The page for the boards is all ready to go for when they are ready for sale.

I will be accepting Paypal, Stripe, and Square for payments. So there are choices for those that don't like PayPal or do like PayPal. I am also trying to get the discount for multiple board purchases worked out. That way I am not charging the built in shipping fees on everything. Per request I added in the ability to optionally have the FBX audio board installed at the same time. I will not be selling the boards myself. They must be provided by the customer and purchased from FBX.

A few people asked about a Donation thing. I probably won't have anything like that on the site. If someone really feels strongly, I can provide a link or way to do so but it's really not necessary and I am not requesting donations from anyone.

With any luck, the boards will be in today or tomorrow. Then I can do testing and sales will open. I will get the email out to the pre-order list first. If you weren't on the pre-order list, don't worry. There should be plenty of boards to go around.

How much the USPS charges/pays when accepting/sending international mail is determined by the Universal Postal Union (part of the United Nations) Check out this great video explaining.. The huge difference in international postage rates between USPS and foreign equivalents must be due to subsidization of postal services by foreign governments. The WTO should really put a stop to this. As it artificially lowers the price of foreign goods.

this is the reasoning one would wish for, but when a country's postal outlet charges MULTIPLES of what private courier services ask (which are not subsidized in any way) and MULTIPLES of what nearly every country asks from its customers, then you have to questions why's that.

It's correct that some countries had been over-subsidized within the UPU's system (like China), but that's changing right now (the UPU changes have already been published) and it will cause a huge drop in small items shipping from China for next to nothing (that's what's actually hurting the postal system worldwide).

The USPS's international rate system is simply incredibly complicated. Splitting it up in service types AND package types simply makes no sense and if you use their postage calculator you're presented with a number of silly expensive options, most of which making no sense whatsoever for their average customer.

DIY documentation is done. I spent a large part of last night finishing it. The website is almost ready. I'm still trying to figure out how I want to handle the shipping/discount deal. What I may do is drop the unit price and just charge a flat rate for the item for shipping, except for international. I have a plugin for my site that simplifies the customs process to make it easy on all of us.

So for the rest of the weekend, I need to finalize all of the last minute details and assuming the boards arrive today.... I will be doing testing on every one. Plus still have customer work to do. It's a busy weekend. Please don't take my comments as complaining, I am just trying to keep everyone informed because I know the hype around this is very high. I think the longest I have slept this week is maybe 4 hours straight.

As soon as I have an update on boards, I will let everyone know. They "should" arrive today.

Alright. The update everyone wanted. SSDS3 FU-RGB boards are in my hands. I am in the process of validating all of the boards. The test rig is built and ready to go, so it's just a matter of popping them in and watching everything go.

I have a lot of boards to validate. I will not sell a single board without personally testing it. My plan is to basically spend the next 2 days doing pretty much nothing but testing. For those who were kind enough to fill out the pre-order survey, I have the emails drafter. All of you will be alerted to the availability of boards before anyone else. When the product goes live on my site, which has now been up for a few days, they will be the first to know.

For anyone who had already noticed the site was live, there are listings for install services but not for the boards. The boards will have install options built into the listing. So you will not need to add multiple items to your cart. My goal is going to be having the boards officially available Monday or Tuesday.

FU-RGB boards are now available. Link below. Every single board was tested with my oscilloscope and also on my TVs. I tested RGBS via SCART, HDRetrovision cables, and composite video. Every board is 100% in working condition at the time of shipping. They are. All shipped in ESD bags as well.

I lived up to my promise and all boards are sold at cost. So is shipping. International shipping unfortunately, there isn't much I can do about.

https://mobiusstriptechnologies.com/pro ... s3-fu-rgb/

Just ordered. Order # 594.

Lots of demand indeed. Thank you again, for all of your tireless efforts, mobius. I've got the FBX audio board sitting in cue, and once FU-RGB shows up, I'll tackle both at the same time. Will post some results.

Please do. I am very interested in seeing other people's experience.

I took scope plots last night of the original circuit for comparison purposes. I think they are very telling. Sync is somewhat interesting as it does have a change but it less noticeable. The signal is about 100mV lower and there is less jumping around in the peaks. The frequency has also changed.

Another note is that the original circuit is constantly jumping around. The vpp is all over the place. If you watch it the signal is in a constant state of flux. Versus the corrected circuit where the plots are very accurate to how static the signal is. These were all taken under the same conditions with the same cabling, etc. The SSDS3 unit was different however since I don't own a stock one anymore. This is all under load using the 240p test suite on a white screen.

Blue



Red



Green



Sync

Well, no noticeable improvement on my sad edge case SSDS3. Thanks anyway, mobius, hopefully others are having better success, and again, it's still an improvement over the stock implementation.

https://youtu.be/clQuVeXHVNM

That is definitely unfortunate. From the video it looks fine but that could be YouTube compression hiding noise elements. I wish there was some type of magical silver bullet that would fix every single case, I really do. The only other thing I can offer is taking a look at your SSDS3 and console to see if I can find something that is continuing to cause your noise issues.

To answer folks questions from earlier yes we'll be stocking both FU-RGB and FBX's audio board.

Mobius are doing the FU-RGB at an amazing price though, I'm not even going to try and compete as I'd be running at a loss. Even with international shipping factored in you're getting a good deal from them.

For folks that need installs we can sort them from the new workshop in Greece.

VGP and I have discussed this quite a bit in the last few weeks. They are going to do the best they can on pricing and I wholly support that they need to charge a little extra. Don't look at us as competitors. We are both trying to serve the market as best as we can. No matter who you source from, you will get a quality product.

Is there a reason why none of these developments ever get posted in the official Tarraonion forums? Just curious if they are prohibiting it or something. There must be a ton of customers who are not regulars in these communities that would love a shot at fixing audio and video.

I was posting updates to one of the tech support threads. Including screenshots. I stopped once the boards were released. There was no mandate from the team or anything like that in regards to stop posting. I'm happy to put the word out anywhere I can. Since I am selling at cost I don't get my money back until every board is gone anyways.

Although I still get noise on those games that are known to display it more prominently, most of the games that I play don't have that problem, and it's mostly just that OCD thing that often fuels us in this hobby.

I am convinced, however, that colors are more vibrant with the new FU-RGB, and the image is possibly slightly sharper. Is that possible? Either way, I'm loving what I do see in the games that I normally spend some time on (Castlevania, Super Star Soldiers, Street Fighter Champion Edition). Not at all disappointed, in the end.

And the FBX audio board is a nice improvement on the audio quality as well. Audio elements that were a bit "ruddy" and not quite as sharp as they should be are now crystal clear.

Now if terraonion would send me that beta firmware to fix the swapped audio channels...

Yes I would expect the colors to appear differently. The attenuation on the circuit is correct now and the noise level has decreased. This will help keep the colors more true to what they should be. Rather than having the peaks and valleys from before. Sharpness might also increase for the same reasons. Along with sync being driven properly now.

As a side note, I will no longer be accepting Stripe on my website. I am still getting details but it appears that someone issued a dispute from their credit card company and in turn, Stripe has seen fit to close my account and refund every payment that was made to me. This is the most ridiculous thing I have every heard for a payment company to do. As such, I have no interest in continuing to use them if this is the level of support I can expect.

I hope that issue gets worked out. Far too often these payment processors abuse their power. They know it will cost you more to wage a legal fight than you will ever recover. Even when you are 100% in right.

So far Stripe has been less than helpful. It is disabled on the site though and I have no intentions of ever re-enabling it. This is an example of why people normally do try to profit some on board sales. However I will not be altering prices or anything like that. If any customers used Stripe and happen to get a refund sent to them by Stripe, but would like to resubmit it to me via another means. Please do reach out. Otherwise I guess this gets listed as a loss on the old tax forms.

For anyone that cared, Stripe contacted me and admitted they made a mistake. Unfortunately now that I know their policy is a single fraudulent charge results in a complete reversal of all your funds, not a processor I want to do business with. My apologies to anyone that liked the use of Stripe. Some of the benefits would have been nice but I can't risk losing all of my income due to a clerical error or fraudulent charge.

Yep, fuck that. I've been doing 'okay' with Paypal, though it has a few of its own things I don't like. For example, the transaction ID is completely different for the customer than it is for the seller. So if a customer contacts you with an issue they need corrected in their order and gives you their transaction ID, it won't show up in your paypal ID search. Why on earth paypal thought that was a good idea is beyond me.