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Heran Bago posted:I don't know if the pinout is the same but the TTL RGB on the left looks exactly like the RGB out for a model 1 Sega Genesis. It's not the same. The TTL plug is apparently for digital RGB (stuff like the old CGA and EGA computer display format) that operates in a different fashion from the analog RGB most everything else uses. Speaking of the Genesis:: I received a Turbo Everdrive from Keyboard Kid today, and in sampling the games and graphics on my Core Grafx, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was playing a better Genesis. Like what Sega should have developed and released instead of what they actually did. Everything just seems more colorful, more detailed, and often with bigger and better sprites. And considering that HuCards had no technical provision for utilizing add-on chips (so far as I know), it's basically all running on stock hardware. On that note, whatever hardware design NEC created seems very robust; I haven't seen any noticeable slowdown in the games I've tried. EDIT: The main CPU can operate in a slow mode and also a fast mode that's 7 Mhz and change - speed wise, about equal to the Motorola 68000 used in the Genesis, though the PC Engine uses an 8-bit CPU. Honestly, the TG16 should have been way more of a contender in the US than it was, but it seems like NEC had no real plan or interest in pushing and promoting the platform that much. Too bad; it honestly is a nifty console. Kthulhu5000 fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 00:13
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Zombie Chow posted:That would had been an amazing controller, although the 'two analog sticks in a game controller with two handles' would had been patented by Sony, or something. No, Sony only ever patented their specific design.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:26
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TheRedEye posted:Yeah, those scanners are great for BOOKS, and anything else that doesn't have art that bleeds into the margins, but something like this magazine would suffer from a loss of some data. Also, for really thick books that aren't mindful binding (like a bound collection of periodicals), you don't just lose art, you start losing WORDS in the margins toward the center of the book. Well I imagine you probably have text heavy books of interest as well. Perhaps I am wrong! edit: What did you use for the de-screening stuff because that stuff is a bitch in my experience.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:35
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Kthulhu5000 posted:
The Turbo Everdrive is badass and is seriously making me consider getting one for my Famicom. Most of the games I have played so far have really great visuals and great, vibrant colors. There where a ton of great games released in Japan that will probably result in a huge time sink for me.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:37
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about turbo ever drive.
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This is why paydays are dangerous to me.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:41
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Honestly, the TG16 should have been way more of a contender in the US than it was, but it seems like NEC had no real plan or interest in pushing and promoting the platform that much. Too bad; it honestly is a nifty console. The reason why NEC/Hudson didn't do better in the US with it was because of Nintendo strong arming other publishers to not release games for it in the US. The Master System was the same way as would have been the Genesis if not for EA. The Turbo was a huge deal in Chicago when it first was released. I am sure it is partially because I believe NEC was based in Chicago at launch. I saw all sorts of Turbo stuff everywhere along with a lot of stories and ads in the Newspapers and TV. Everyone I knew had one or wanted one, only when NEC kind of pulled back support and the Genesis and SNES came out did the Turbo kind of fall apart. Shame we never got the Turbo CD version of SFII CE or Dracula X.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:52
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Kthulhu5000 posted:onestly, the TG16 should have been way more of a contender in the US than it was, but it seems like NEC had no real plan or interest in pushing and promoting the platform that much. Too bad; it honestly is a nifty console. Haven't you seen the glory which is Johnny Turbo and his fight against the dastardly FEKA who claim to be the first CD-system on the market?  Link if you want to read the comics
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Jan 24, 2015 00:59
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Djarum posted:The reason why NEC/Hudson didn't do better in the US with it was because of Nintendo strong arming other publishers to not release games for it in the US. The Master System was the same way as would have been the Genesis if not for EA. NEC just missed out on benefiting from Atari's anti-trust lawsuit against Nintendo by a couple of years. If that lawsuit had been brought against them in 1987 then the TG-16 would have been in exactly the right place at the right time to take advantage of it. As it was, Sega wound up being the people in exactly the right place at the right time (and with the right people handling the marketing).
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Jan 24, 2015 01:02
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Light Gun Man posted:Well I imagine you probably have text heavy books of interest as well. Perhaps I am wrong! This commercial Photoshop plug-in: http://www.descreen.net/eng/soft/descreen/descreen.htm It's magic. For color correction I ONLY mess with black and white levels...basically what I do is find the page that has the best examples of what the printer saw as pure black and pure white, and I make an adjustment layer based on it and apply it to the other pages as I go.
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Jan 24, 2015 01:15
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Kthulhu5000 posted:Honestly, the TG16 should have been way more of a contender in the US than it was, but it seems like NEC had no real plan or interest in pushing and promoting the platform that much. Too bad; it honestly is a nifty console. Some more great quotes: quote:Though it introduced the TurboDuo, TTi had never had to manufacture more TurboGrafx-16 units; in fact, says Brandstetter, the last 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. consoles were unloaded on the Brazilian market, with their expansion ports disabled. The initial order NEC made in 1989 for 750,000 units never sold through to U.S. customers. As for the Duo? "Turbo Zone Direct had Duos for at least 10 years," Brandstetter says. quote:"I became aware of so many cool games for PC Engine, and NEC was bringing over so many of the wrong games for the TurboGrafx," Ireland says. "The people in charge of picking what games to do were completely out of their element. A main producer was letting her little kids pick which games to bring over because she had no idea what she was looking at. It was absurd."
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Jan 24, 2015 01:29
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McCracAttack posted:All right, we're having a chat about the troubled life of the TG16! I'd like to once again bring up this fantastic write-up by Gamasutra that's chock full of interviews about what went wrong. The answer was lots of things but two big ones stick out to me. First of all, the runaway success of the PC-Engine made them over-estimate their chances in the US. They manufactured 750,000 consoles for launch which cost a ton of money. They also (foolishly) wasted a lot of time and money re-engineering the TG16 to be bigger than the PC-Engine. Yeah, I read that article when it was first posted in here. The redesign really was a bad idea; at least, the way NEC went about it was. If they absolutely felt the need to redesign it (and apparently they did so with both the board and system casing), they should have included at least two controller ports and composite video output, and made the expansion port more discreet. Utilizing the PAL format color scheme would have been a good move, too. The PC Engine and Core Grafx variants are well designed and evocative. They look like portable CD players or external computer drives or something. Even the old chunker consoles from the US' pre-NES era show a design aesthetic - the Intellivision evokes futuristic car and spaceship controls, and its golden colors and wood grain reflect the late 1970s, early 1980s ideas of luxury design. The Colecovision quite solidly evokes the audio/video appliance aesthetic of the era; put it next to your toploader VCR, it'll blend in! The Odyssey 2 looks like a computer. Even the Atari 2600 at least looks like something electronic, albeit more in the digital clock radio vein. The Turbografx 16 is just a slab of plastic with its expansion port awkwardly sticking out. It looks more like vinyl siding than anything electronic. And the contrast of Dayglo yellow and orange with the black just made it seem less like a serious gaming machine. Genesis - looks serious! SNES - looks serious! Turbografx 16...hrmm. It's how I recall things being back in the day, at least.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:09
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Crimson Harvest posted:A DKC game I think, was the flagship title for it? The GB DKC game was real bad, I think you mean Donkey Kong 94 or whatever it was called which was loving awesome
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Jan 24, 2015 04:11
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Kthulhu5000 posted:SNES - looks serious! pause
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Jan 24, 2015 04:54
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You want serious? Let's start off with the SuperGrafx:  ..now, add the Super CDROM2:  ...and finally, throw on a Power Console controller! (if you can find one - they were never release but there are a tiny number of 'em out there) 
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Jan 24, 2015 05:13
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That looks awesome!
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Jan 24, 2015 05:51
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d0s posted:pause Yes, yes indeedy. At least, very much so in a "seeing it on the shelf new in box" kind of way. Same for the Genesis. Not so much for the TG16. Also, cartridge boxes. Pretty wicked and impressive for the Genesis and SNES, kind of lackluster (as examples previously posted in this thread have shown) for the US TG16 games. PaletteSwappedNinja posted:You want serious? Cool stuff! Now sell it through regular retail channels in the US and...oh, wait.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:03
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That thing looks like garbage. To be fair, so does the US SNES. The PAL SNES / Super Famicom and the Genesis/Mega Drive look good.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:15
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The_Frag_Man posted:That thing looks like garbage. To be fair, so does the US SNES. I grew up with the US SNES and didn't find out that Super Famicom/PAL SNES looked different (read: better) until much later. I totally want one just for the aesthetics of it.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:17
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You know, I never thought the original Genesis looked all that cool. Lopsided design, weird white button, obtrusive volume control. But the Genesis 2 had a nice, sleek symmetry.PaletteSwappedNinja posted:You want serious? This looks like you just turned on the lights and caught your radiator having sex with your answering machine. Kid Fenris fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 06:19
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Kid Fenris posted:You know, I never thought the original Genesis looked all that cool. Lopsided design, weird white button, obtrusive volume control. But the Genesis 2 had a nice, sleek symmetry. I'm getting an H.R. Geiger acidic sex parasite vibe.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:27
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I still remember being confused by the consoles my various cousins and friends had. Like one of them had an NES 2 with the SNES shaped controller and the kinda SNES styling, another had an actual SNES. I would get them confused. Same later when my one friend had a model 2 Genesis and Sega CD and another had a Sega Saturn - since the Saturn had a cartridge port (which I know now is for the memory card or action replay) and the cd drive, and the same sort of sleek black styling, and the saturn controller was also 6 button, I thought it was just a combined genesis/cd system for a while and he just played better games on it than my other friend had on sega cd.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:32
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TheRedEye posted:This commercial Photoshop plug-in: http://www.descreen.net/eng/soft/descreen/descreen.htm Thanks for the protips. Maybe one of these years I'll bother to try and scan something again and apply this info.
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Jan 24, 2015 11:30
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Housh posted:That looks awesome! Prepare for disappointment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfASnU3SFQs
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Jan 24, 2015 16:12
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Found a great audio interview with Grant Kirkhope here. http://www.criticalgamer.co.uk/2013/06/18/in-tune-with-grant-kirkhope/ Composed Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, etc..
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Jan 24, 2015 16:34
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McCracAttack posted:Prepare for disappointment. 
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Jan 24, 2015 16:48
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Not sure if I'm going crazy here or if something's up, but I've been noticing on my original Xbox while playing over s-video (using the "official" Advanced AV Pack), that in-game text doesn't seem as sharp or defined as it should be. On the Xbox main menu text and everything looks real nice but once inside a game, I can sometimes spot dithering around letters or large blocks of text close to one another just don't look all that clear. E: I should point out, not every kind of text has this issue. It's most noticeable with white text; for some reason dithering around that really stands out to me. iastudent fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 22:29
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PaletteSwappedNinja posted:
Ohhhhh my god  Also, at Magfest right now and the arcade is amazing. Played some PC10 Dr. Mario with the wife  Dr Mario is her jam, but I actually managed to beat her. I learned I am far better playing Dr Mario with a [very tiny] arcade stick, who knew?I browsed the dealer hall quickly, going back later to buy things, this gon' be an expensive trip. The dealer hall looks ridiculous. e. They also have a TON of old computers! PCs, Macs, C64, Atari... the console/PC room is insane. They also have the most amazing CRT I've ever seen - it's got to be 30", and it didn't look like a Sony PVM but similar box shape. I'll try to get a photo but it's super dark in there. I am going to see if their old Apple machines have Oregon Trail, because it's been like 20 years since I played that on original hardware and that would be so cool Code Jockey fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 23:15
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iastudent posted:Not sure if I'm going crazy here or if something's up, but I've been noticing on my original Xbox while playing over s-video (using the "official" Advanced AV Pack), that in-game text doesn't seem as sharp or defined as it should be. On the Xbox main menu text and everything looks real nice but once inside a game, I can sometimes spot dithering around letters or large blocks of text close to one another just don't look all that clear. OG Xbox has a high flicker filter by default, only modded consoles can turn it off.
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Jan 25, 2015 01:31
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Not directly retro, but retro related. Did you like Clock Tower for the Super Famicom? Do you think Scissorman owns? Do you just like horror games in general? Then loving back this Kickstarter for Project Scissors: NightCry. The pedigree of talent attached to it is insane: Hifumi Kono - Created Clock Tower for Human Entertainment! Made Steel Battalion! Takashi Shimizu - J-Horror director noted for Ju-On/The Grudge. He even made a short film to hype Project Scissors! Kiyoshi Arai - Concept artist for Tenchu 2 and several Final Fantasy games! Masahiro Ito - Silent Hill monster designer. HE CREATED PYRAMID HEAD! Nobuka Toda: Composer for the Metal Gear Solid series! Michiru Yamane: You should know her already but I'll say it anyway. Former composer of well known Konami games, most notably SOTN! Shinji Aramaki: Renowned mecha designer! What he's doing on this game is anyone's guess but he's a Creative Advisor! Plus a bunch of other people who have worked for Konami, Capcom and Platinum Games.
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Jan 25, 2015 02:09
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GamerMage posted:OG Xbox has a high flicker filter by default, only modded consoles can turn it off. Well, that's annoying. Are soft or hard mods the way to go nowadays?
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Jan 25, 2015 02:23
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iastudent posted:Well, that's annoying. Soft is really really easy once you get the usb adapter taken care of.
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Jan 25, 2015 02:36
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8-bit Miniboss posted:Then loving back this Kickstarter for Project Scissors: NightCry. Kickstarter doesn't really make sense to me. There are multiple $10,000 dollar tiers. Who would invest $10,000 dollars without any cut of the profits? Who would donate $10,000 dollars? The $18 dollar tier makes sense at least, as a pre-order, if it's less than the launch price.. otherwise people need to learn how to invest their money properly.
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Jan 25, 2015 04:04
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The_Frag_Man posted:Kickstarter doesn't really make sense to me. There are multiple $10,000 dollar tiers. Who would invest $10,000 dollars without any cut of the profits? Who would donate $10,000 dollars? Well there's your first problem. Kickstarter backing is not investing, it's literally just donating. Even the people that run Kickstarter say this. They're just providing incentives for those tiers. They technically owe you nothing.
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Jan 25, 2015 07:17
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Awesome. I just fired up Pokemon Silver, then Gold, and finally Blue, and found none of them are holding saves anymore (I bet Red and Crystal are dead too, but they're halfway across the country right now). Anyone know a good battery replacement service? Unless it's easy to do yourself?
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Jan 25, 2015 08:08
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It's very easy to replace batteries in GameBoy (and other) carts on your own.
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Jan 25, 2015 08:47
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TheRedEye posted:Hi, I scanned the unpublished April, 1999 issue of GameFan and uploaded it here. It's neat to see some stuff that would have otherwise been lost, like a preview of Planescape: Torment. You're likely done with this and it probably wouldn't get you as great an image quality, but have you thought photographing instead of scanning? I've done it on the fly with rather good results, though. It'd maybe have a bit better control of keeping the target pages flat and keeping the spine intact.
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Jan 25, 2015 09:01
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8-bit Miniboss posted:
If I had to guess, i'd say he'll be helping to design the ship itself and/or it's "internal mechanical stuff". I really hope this gets funded!
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Jan 25, 2015 11:41
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Codiekitty posted:Awesome. I just fired up Pokemon Silver, then Gold, and finally Blue, and found none of them are holding saves anymore (I bet Red and Crystal are dead too, but they're halfway across the country right now). Anyone know a good battery replacement service? Unless it's easy to do yourself? You'd need a soldering station to do it right. There are people out there who just cut the old battery out and slap some electrical tape on a new one, but I really wouldn't trust that. Personally I'm using this which came recommended from this thread a while back. You'd also need some solder, and it'd be a good idea to get a de-soldering braid to mop up any mistakes. It's pretty easy to learn though. You might want to pick up some other stuff to practice on first. Personally I grabbed a few NES carts from a flea market and worked on those before trying any of the games I cared more about. The batteries you need are different from those in Gameboy carts, but NES games are bigger and easier to work with. My first attempt was a copy of Al Under Jr Turbo Racing which ended up with the battery on the wrong side of the board, but it works! I've gotten better since then.  If you do go ahead and try your hand at it, be sure to buy batteries that already come with the tabs.
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Jan 25, 2015 13:58
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So, hey, I spent way too much money during Christmas, including on a 32X I still haven't found the time to even test properly. Most stuff ended up arriving way late due to holiday season delays and whatnot. Anyway, I thought the thread would like to see some of the retro highlights. First up, the Mega Drive games. Greendog is another Sega experiment at the 90's radical experience. A surfing dude on ancient South American temples, because why not. It's rad.   Not much to say about Flashback or Sonic 2 that hasn't already been said. Toejam & Earl was yet another attempt at a corporate mascot before Sonic showed up, but it's a really kickass co-op game. The Lion King is one of the most beautiful games in the system -- and also one of the hardest (Mega Man's got nothing on this one). Sega switched future games to those blue covers after the MDII came out in Europe so the games would become uniform and "modern". No idea if a similar change happened in the US.  Next, Saturn. The only PAL game here is The Horde (because I have nearly every other one of them) from Silicon Knights. It's a port (either from PC or 3DO) of a fancy strategy game with a lot of humor but I can't imagine it having aged well. It wasn't particularly brilliant at the time. It did however take me a longass time to find a copy whose cover wasn't ruined (early Saturn PAL games had their cover glued directly onto the case without any protection) and to make matters worse, the limited space of CD and the abuse of FMV and the fact the continent has a bunch of languages meant that every FIGS nation got a version on their own language only, which means there aren't many English versions around (most are German). There's three arcade perfect fighting games here, too. Barely anyone remembers Data East's Fighter History Dynamite (also called Karnov's Revenge) but I would say it's a better SF2 than SF2. Real Bout Special didn't have the impact of the first Real Bout but it's still got some beautiful sprite work. Cyberbots is the best thing Capcom made in the 90's that wasn't Puzzle Fighter. On the right bottom corner, there's something called Linkle Liver Story, which is basically a Zelda-clone with beautiful sprites but everything is catgirls and whatnot. Kinda ruins the experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73woIolpg1Q Up next, the only Dreamcast game I have bought in quite a while.  Maken X, from Atlus and with the Persona artist directing the art, is a first person brawler/shooter with some of the most original and impressive looking bosses that I can recall. It wasn't particularly notable at the time but it was rather unique. For some reason it got a remake (Maken Shao) on the PS2 later on that switched the first person view for a third person one, probably as a response to Devil May Cry, except it kept the controls exactly as the Dreamcast version, so it was a mess that no one can rightfully recommend.  Next up, GBA and, let me tell you, those boxes are awful to find in any acceptable quality. As a Sega collector it made no sense not to own every single Sonic Advance game on the system. The first one was developed by Sonic Team, while the sequels were developed by Dimps. Neither is impressive nor downright awful (i.e. Sonic 4), but, yeah, I prefer the first one. Yoshi's Island is Yoshi's Island. Astro Boy is a pretty cool game by Treasure, but it's also rather short. Pretty rare to find in Europe, though.  PS2 next. Speaking of Astro Boy, here's another creation based on a work from Osamu Tezuka: Blood Will Tell. It came after the DMCs and Ninja Gaidens, so it didn't get much attention, but the pretty unique feature is how you start with swords for arms and, as you regain missing parts of your body, the gameplay changes accordingly. KOF98 Ultimate Match is the best version of the game ever made. Recently got a port on Steam that lost the 3D backgrounds on the transition, but (after a patch) got pretty faithful with decent netcode. Virtua Fighter 10th Anniversary was supposed to be a remake of VF1, except it plays closer to a de-evolved VF4:Evo than its actual origin. It's a rather weird package, but it mostly works. Also, for some reason, all versions I can find other than this one have an Akira cover. Mine's Jacky (and it's not a reversible cover), which makes me wonder if they made one for each character. That would be fun to collect (god, no, please). Finally, Monster World Complete Collection, which I have been gushing about since it arrived last week. This is from M2, and if you have been paying attention to the 3DS you'll know that M2 are those insane guys that do things like recording the mechanical noises of old arcade cabinets to recreate the "full experience". The collection here has every single Wonder Boy/Monster World ever released with every version from arcade to regional consoles, all of which can output from quite different resolution settings (there's two 480p modes for instance). Dragon's Trap includes both Master System and Game Gear versions, including the Western ones so you can play in English. Same for Monster World III. The games that relied on password systems have a suspend save feature now, as well, though you can use the passwords for the "authentic" experience. Dragon's Trap, Wonder Boy in Monster World, and Monster World IV are some of my favorite 8/16 bit games ever made. It was really a pleasant surprise to find how much attention to detail this Sega Ages release had got. I will close this lengthy post with an oddity that I fell in love with soon as I spotted it on a local flee market:  A long box copy of the ZX Spectrum port of After Burner. ZX Spectrum games were always low key, so a basic tape case was enough for pretty much 98% of them. To find a long box of a 1988 game in pretty good condition was rather neat, but the surprises didn't stop there. For starters, this is a Sega arcade port from some guys called Software Studio, who pretty much specialized on those for the microcomputers of the time, published by freaking Activision who were already active at the time as a publisher it seems.  The inside has an unused sticker, a hugeass poster, a prize coupon to win "the flight of a lifetime", a pretty cool looking manual (looks like a passport), and the tape itself (built with better materials than most tapes of that time).  It's followed by the back where you can see Marketing 101 at its best: screenshots of the Amiga and Atari ST versions. You see, the ZX Spectrum isn't known for being a looker, but goddamn, that is some classic Activision work. For reference, this is what the Speccy version looked like: 
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Jan 25, 2015 15:59
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Sweet post Saoshyant. That Project Scissors kickstarter looks okay. I want to say that the people lined up to do it really understand psychological horror of the self and mind. I don't really trust Japanese horror anymore since the Ring has irrevocably changed Japan's approach to horror. Not that Western horror in recent years has been any better. It might just be a corporate thing and the video on that page has me cautiously optimistic. At $18 it's a good gamble. Music chat. The 16 bit audiophile project has two new ones up, Super Fantasy Zone and Ecco: Tides of Time. http://www.16bitaudiophileproject.org/ Do you ever play a game pretty much just for the music? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJxHEgBRqhM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRxmApO9gFg
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Jan 25, 2015 16:29
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