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Hey Hamburglar, maybe this is a really stupid suggestion and you will tell me so, but rather than having a dedicated four player CP where everything is cramped why not have a really good two player panel and build two separate control panel boxes for player 1 & 4 connected by some sort of a quick disconnect wiring harness that you can plug in and unplug as needed when you need four player support? Maybe even build legs for the control panels so that they stand upright, or find a way to hook the extra two panels on to the cabinet when needed, sort of like a food tray hooks on to a car window at a drive up restaurant? Like I said, probably a stupid suggestion but don't kill the messenger for coming up with stupid alternatives.
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Aug 19, 2016 03:44
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 04:14 |
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In my opinion the best usage of a Repro is not buying one for yourself to play through and beat and pretend that 1993 never ended, but rather as Chainclaw said: gifts, and the best repro gifts are not made out of the romhack some dude made in his mom's toolshed in 2006, but rather some AAA game that came out in Japan but never saw the light of day in the US. There are certainly plenty of those for the SNES that turned out to be not only good games, but genuine clasics that we were utterly robbed of here in the West, and if some dude with a soldering iron , a printer and a stack of label paper wants to make that game available on the original hardware to a US audience for the first time I say more power to him/her, and I think there's nothing wrong with the production and sale of these things at all. It's basically abandonware (though I know Nintendo will never see it that way at all), and when every high dollar SNES game you can think of from Earthbound to Evo and Dracula X is available as a Instant Sunrise posted:Question about the Super Everdrive/SD2SNES. How deep in the cartridge shell does the SD card fit? Does it stick out when inserted all the way?  I'm kind of ashamed to admit this, but a couple of months back I got really drunk one night and woke up the next morning to find that I'd bought a Super Everdrive "China Edition" for $50 shipped from Aliexpress. It took a few weeks to get here as all orders from China do, and I expected it to be a really lovely knockoff that didn't work for half of the things that it says that it supports, but the thing is actually a really surprisingly well built piece of electronics so far. There hasn't been anything that it's not played outside of the enhancement chip games that a legit Super Everdrive wouldn't play, either, but it does have the spots on the PCB for the DSP-1, 74HCU04 and clock generator should I decide that I really need to play Pilotwings and Mario Kart that bad, I should be able to upgrade it the same as a more legit Super Everdrive. Otherwise it's performed flawlessly, though. From what I understand the SED China version is a different story from the other "China versions" of Krikzz' flash carts found on aliexpress and such in that they were officially licensed Super Everdrive 1.0s that he gave permission to the Chinese to produce under the agreement that they'd only sell them to the Chinese (whoops) and that they'd never get further hardware or software updates beyond the 1.0, so don't be a fool and upgrade the OS if it's not having problems, whereras the other China version flash carts are all unauthorized bootleg clones that have very spotty rom support and could just outright die at any minute taking your Genesis or whatever with it. I do feel a bit guilty buying this knockoff instead of giving the money to the guy that actually developed this really cool product, but I also have some real mixed emotions about having a morality conflict in buying a bootleg device that's primary function is to act as a bootleg device that circumvents intellectual property law. Oh well. I will keep using it and if it dies on me randomly then so be it, and I will turn around and buy a real Super Everdrive to replace it (it's impossible for me to justify spending 4x the amount that I spent on this thing for a SD2SNES when the only advantage that the SD2SNES has that actually even slightly appeals to me is the unofficial fan made CD sound options, which honestly seems more gimmicky to me than the 3D functionality of my TV that I've used a total of four times in four years). Anyway, to answer your question since this is a lovely china version that was never meant to be sold in the US it has some cheaper parts than what you'd find on a >1.0 Super Everdrive, like the fact that the SD slot isn't spring loaded on this and sits flush with the spine of the shell casing. It was such a pain in the rear end to get the card in and out that I would have to use a 1/8" flat head screwdriver bit from a computer repair bit set to "walk it out" a little bit at a time for each side. I ended up taking the same needle nose pliers I used to remove the region locking tabs to the casing and did roughly the same thing to this cartridge casing, weakening and pulling out piece by piece until I had a hideous jagged gash all across the rear of the casing, but at least I can take the SD card out now with 30% more ease, even if I've cut myself on the jagged plastic at least a couple of times by now. I've thought about desoldering the SD card socket from the PCB and soldering in a spring loaded one like you'd find in a non-knockoff Everdrive, but that seems like a good amount of work for something I'm likely to only need to access once every four months at best anyhow, not to mention that if I start going down the rabbit hole of replacing parts on this to bring it up to snuff with a real Super Everdrive straight from Ukraine like adding a DSP chip, replacing the SD socket, putting a non-poo poo universal cartridge casing on it, etc. I may as well have just bought the real deal to begin with it. The price difference isn't THAT large. I think I'm just going to give the SD card one final once over to see if there's anything I feel like I need to add or rearrange on it for the immediate future and stick it in the casing to SNES Mortal Kombat, since I know I"m never going to play that game again.  Turbinosamente posted:I know flash carts make more sense at this point, but I think its the shelf candy/ regret of not getting it cheap years ago when I had the chance thats eating me. Technically a repro wouldn't fill that void very well either since its not a "real" one. There are more than a few hacks that I've gotten into enough to devote several hours if not beat them outright several times. The best ones that I've played are Mario hacks, which shouldn't be surprising seeing as how probably two out of every three romhacks ever made is a Mario hack of some variety. Return to Dinosaur Land for SNES is absolutely ridiculously polished and has almost perfect difficulty. It feels like the long lost direct sequel to Super Mario World. There is one level in the game where it borders on stupid and unfair where you have to do the semi-tricky maneuver where you have to trick the game into letting you pick up both a key and a P-switch at the same time in order to find the real exit for the level. It's not super difficult and once you've done it a couple of times it honestly becomes more natural and fluid than even knowing how to bomb jump in a Metroid game, but it's such esoteric knowledge that it's kind of ridiculous to expect a person to be able to get past that without googling the answer. That aside, this and maybe 3mix down below are the only hacks that I've played where if someone told me that it was a Miyamoto creation I would believe it without questioning the truthfulness of that statement. Whatever it was about golden era Nintendo first party games that made them unmistakably feel like a first party Nintendo game, this one has it in droves. Super Mario Bros 5 Reborn is another fairly vanilla SMW hack that has a modest difficulty level and is adequate for Mario players of all skill levels. The graphics in this one are particularly nice because a lot of the pixel art comes from Yoshi's Island and various Mario All Stars art, so while it plays pretty well identically to SMW there is an actual feeling at times that you're playing a lost Mario sequel more than you're playing just some dude's rom hack. Super Mario 3mix for the NES is absolutely amazing. It's a Mario 3 hack where each world represents a different game in the Mario series, with levels ripped straight from those games and power ups and abilities that I never would have thought possible on a NES prior to this. World 1 is Mario 1, World 2 is Mario 2, but from there on it gets really interesting, with one world being Mario World so of course you spend a lot of it riding Yoshi, and one of the later worlds is Mario Galaxy so you actually jump from planetoid to planetoid with gravity bouncing from normal to reversed to weightlessness right in the middle. It makes what Irem did with Metal Storm seem lazy by comparison. More than anything else it's just a really great, complete game that is mostly a joy to play all the way to the end. Again, Mario rom hacks have a tendency to be made for only the most die hard players that want something Dark Sous style bullshit hard, but this game and Return to Dinosaur Land can be given to just about anyone that's ever played Mario 3 or world a decent amount and they can play it without tearing out clumps of hair too much. Both are still harder than the original game that they are based on, but not so hard as to be an order of magnitude jump like you see with so many level hacks, and this game is so very much more than just a level hack. The game is just a big ole love letter to everything Mario throughout the last thirty years and even though I'd imagine it works just fine on a flashcart this game is one of a select few that I could actually see myself buying or making a repro of somewhere down the line. Super Metroid Redesign, Super Metroid Eris, Super Metroid Zero Mission all seem quality enough, but frankly they all seem to bleed together for me. They all just feel like more Super Metroid, which isn't a bad thing at all, but they also seem to lack any qualities that separate them out. Same thing with Link to the Past: Parallel Worlds and Goddess of Wisdom. The Legend of Link for the NES, however, is something special. It's an enormous romhack that replaces most of the original Zelda's sprites with those of Link's Awakening. It looks and plays amazingly, but if you're looking to play that as a repro good loving luck with that. It's such a complex game that the only way to make a repro of it is to sacrifice one of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, which are fairly rare, expensive, and the PCBs are really large, so it's not even like you can use a Famicom version for cheaper and put it in a 60to72 pin converter, because it will be bigger than the cartridge casing itself.
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Aug 19, 2016 08:38
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Most homebrews seem kinda eh in general?
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I hope this isn't too  ey to ask, but is there any way to resurrect a modchipped OG Xbox with essentially no access to the original hard drive and also without a backup of the files that were originally on that hard drive? I tried to upgrade the hard drive in my Xbox while pretty much falling down drunk several months ago and it was about as much of a disaster as that description deserves. As it stands right now I've got an Xbox with a Matrix no solder modchip correctly placed and two blank IDE hard drives. Is there some sort of a recovery CD/DVD that I could burn that would allow me to format the hard drive correctly and install all of the files necessary to make it run? I've had Steel Battalion sitting unplayed in a closet for months now because I decided to make a bunch of really stupid choices with a bottle of bourbon.
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Feb 25, 2017 20:04
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Miles McCloud posted:As long as it isn't a 1.6 and you can load homebrew off disk with the modchip you can flash the TSOP and it won't care about HDD keys anymore. I'm assuming you're referring to me, but that's not the problem here at all. I didn't have the HDD locked to begin with. The issue is that my hard drive is blank. It's missing all of the OS files that are normally on there. Without that I can't get it to boot a game or anything at all. I either need some sort of a recovery disc if something like that exists, or if there's a zip file or something out there containing these files I could fix it from there.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:15
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Wise Fwom Yo Gwave posted:You seek the Slayers disc. If you have a DVD of Slayers burned on it, then boot the Xbox with a new drive, it'll format it straight away. Thank you, I actually had the Slayers disc already from when I tried to fix it a few months ago but I ran into problems so I asked earlier thinking maybe there was a better solution. After a bit of poking and prodding at the system I tried it again tonight and was able to get everything back up and running. Since I was starting from scratch anyhow I figured I may as well give it a go with the 80gb HDD I was trying to install when I killed the whole setup, so I was even able to complete the upgrade, with the only casualties being some Metal Wolf Chaos saves. I'd actually tried to fix this situation with Slayers months ago on the day after it happened but I couldn't even get the system to boot the DVD without giving me an error code 12. I finally figured out the problem tonight and it made me feel incredibly stupid: I had the IDE cable reversed. Like the side that's supposed to go into the motherboard was going into the DVD drive and vice versa. If I'd had this problem 15 years ago I would have known what was wrong with it immediately, but I can't remember the last time I had to mess with anything IDE so I can see how I made the mistake. It's amazing how quickly you forget the basics of a given technology once that technology goes out of mainstream. Now that I got the whole thing working again I immediately put Steel Battalion in and expected to lose the entirety of the rest of this weekend to that game, but that is most certainly not going to happen. I immediately recognized that this is not a game for me. The whole concept of a mech simulator that treats itself as seriously as it does is pretty cool, but within 20 minutes of starting it I knew that this thing is now destined to get sold to someone that will actually play it. I just don't have the patience for poo poo like this anymore.
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Feb 26, 2017 03:33
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Does anyone here happen to own Steel Battalion by any chance? Of so I was wondering if some lovely darling of a person might be able to do me a favor and measure one of the 8 screws that go on the bottom of the controller to hold the three large pieces together. A picture of them would be super helpful as well, since I got this thing used and it didn't come with any of them and I was thinking of going to Home Depot and getting some replacements. On the subject of the original Xbox, has anyone here ever used a program called "FlickerFucker"? If you have a modchip or a softmod in your Xbox and install your games to the hard drive this program supposedly allows you to remove the "flicker filter" from the default.xbe file. I have no idea what this flicker filter is that they're talking about (I was thinking maybe some form of AA?), but doing this improves the image quality to a seriously huge degree, at least it does on a CRT. The image is just a lot sharper and, true to its title, there is much less flickering going on when panning the camera around. I always thought the original Xbox's graphics in general held up like total poo poo, but assuming this isn't some placebo effect I'm seeing here, it actually makes things a lot prettier to look at.
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Mar 7, 2017 15:07
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univbee posted:I do own it, and can do it for you later today if no one beats me to it. Thank you, I would very much appreciate it. It still holds together okay without the screws but this thing is so expensive that I'm terrified of using it without the screws too long and have something like one third of it separating and ripping out the IDE connector.
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Mar 7, 2017 18:14
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univbee posted:drat, the screws weren't were I thought they were, I'm going to have dig a bit more which won't be until tomorrow, and no guarantee they'll turn up then either, so if someone else has the answer handy that'd be better. Thank you anyway. I appreciate the effort. Djarum posted:If you find out what the screws are let me know. My copy has been missing them since I got it as well and even Capcom couldn't tell me what they used. I might just walk into Home Depot tomorrow with 1/3rd of a giant rear end joystick setup and start trying different bolts until I find a winner. I'll feel like the biggest neckbeard on the planet doing this, but it will pass. I can't seem to find any information on the internet about it and I don't have the giant owners manual thing that came with the game, assuming that might have had some information in it so this might be my only option. If I find a good match I'll post the details.
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Mar 8, 2017 01:19
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univbee posted:I found my stuff, here's an album with relevant manual pages and pictures of the screw and bridge boards with a tape measure (in cm). The screws have an Alan Key head, there's normally an Alan Key holder and Alan Key under the center console. I appreciate the effort. I actually just got back from Lowes with some bolts for it. Djarum: I ended up using Philips machine screws, #6-32x1/2“. That should fit pretty well.
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Mar 8, 2017 21:01
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 04:14 |
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I know I was using a cheap Chinese clone of the 360 wireless receiver on Win10 around when Win10 released. Honestly, I've never understood the hatred for the unofficial dongles. Mine has never been a problem in any situation, including working without any special assistance on an Android box where I was certain it was going to give me problems. You just plug the thing in, press the pair button on both dongle and controller, and from there it just works.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:20
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