Retro Gaming Megathread: Disconnect from the present, and Go back to the nineties.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Gaming Megathread: Disconnect from the present, and Go back to the nineties.

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univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Pok�mon Uranium released, get it before Nintendo DMCA's it in about 5 seconds.

http://kotaku.com/after-nine-years-work-fans-release-their-own-pokemon-1785061831

# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 19:45

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 10:30

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Drone posted:

And it's already gone, unless the hosting died from the traffic.

The latter maybe? Try refreshing, it was wonky earlier too.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 19:47

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

al-azad posted:

言葉

I just wanted to say I greatly appreciate your series of Japanese posts despite (so far) knowing everything that's in them, it's nonetheless an excellent refresher.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 00:21

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Drone posted:

I'm not sure how long ago you set up your RetroPie, but I just re-imaged my SD card and started with the newest installation (last time was a few years ago), and the image works pretty much right out of the box now, aside from configuring a controller (dead simple from within EmulationStation) and loading ROMs onto the device. You'll only really need more advanced knowledge if you need to troubleshoot problems, but even then there is enough documentation and support out there via Youtube or the official RetroPie forums (or here) that you can work through most problems really easily.

Especially if you're only looking to emulate NES/SNES/Genesis, it's super easy.

There is a possibility, I guess based on your TV, that audio out via HDMI might not work out-of-the-box because lol if you think something Linux-based will work with sound reliably. This requires going into the terminal and loving with boot config files. On the plus side, other than this it is essentially turnkey and a kit is definitely the way to go. Canadians have a well-priced bundle from canadakit for what that's worth, they sell on Amazon. If you want something with a specific case look (e.g. building your own NES mini like that guy did) that's a way, way more involved project and generally speaking will require decent soldering skills and/or access to a 3D printer or the ability to have something printed on demand. You are also best off dedicating specific controllers to the device. Also, at this stage unless you absolutely need composite out out-of-the-box, get a Pi 3 as it has both built-in WiFi and built-in Bluetooth, not to mention having a fast enough processor to handle pretty much anything not N64.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 13:24

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Nate RFB posted:

I didn't even consider this possibility but anyone have any experience with something like the Retrode to backup saves? I could probably live with losing most of my SNES saves but it might be nice if I could hang onto Chrono Trigger at least, since that has like 20 NG+ runs on it.

Yes these work, as does a RetroFreak. That said if you just need it done as a one-off, people in this thread should help you out; I can do it from within Canada if you can wait like a month before sending it.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 16:55

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Wamdoodle posted:

Lol, if you aren't already planning on retrogaming on your death bed.

Who in this thread will be the first to go senile and rant in the nursing home to their visiting adult children and grandchildren that "they're coming out with a Super Nintendo this year, that's what I want for Christmas"?

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 17:08

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Wamdoodle posted:

Maybe if dementia happens instead.

"*mumble* *mumble* do the math *mumble"" you say.

"I am" says the nurse while fine-tuning the amount of sedative in the syringe.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 17:41

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

al-azad posted:

Play Doom on your Life Alert wrist device.

Knee-Deep in the Dead of Natural Causes

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 18:19

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Paper Triangle posted:

is there a specific burner/media combo i should be looking at for psx and ps2 backups? if i want to add dreamcast to the mix somewhere down the road? i remember philips being the go-to back in the day but i haven't done this in ages.

Software-wise ImgBurn is definitely the way to go, although burner/media is a bit more difficult to answer reliably. Generally burner shouldn't matter outside of some extreme "overburn" edge cases perhaps, media just find something that works and hang onto your ISO's or whatever in case you have to make a fresh copy later on down the road.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 20:22

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Tobaccrow posted:

Yeah, they were inserts in Nintendo Power. Maybe only about one to a few pages were like a newspaper though.

This reminds me of this loving thing I got when I saw The Wizard theatrically.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2016 18:54

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Patter Song posted:

I've asked this before and not gotten a straight answer, but how much of the limitation on the SNES' audio was file size vs what the SNES' sound chip could actually output? If games were 500 MB rather than like 3 MB, you obviously can stick on much larger audio tracks, but could the SNES output audio that does justice to those file sizes?

Pretty much 100% a filesize thing, also bearing in mind that the SNES was nowhere near powerful enough for decent audio compression algorithms (when MP3 took off in the mid-to-late 90's it was extremely resource-intensive to play them back on a Pentium and really low-end systems basically couldn't do anything else while an MP3 was playing). Most digital sound on the SNES would add up to a few seconds at most and have large compromises in terms of quality to fit at all. Like, 3 seconds of ripped CD audio (16-bit, 44kHz, Stereo PCM) is bigger than the entire ROM of Super Mario World.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 02:17

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

fishmech posted:

This further had the issue that most of the early systems only had a single or double speed drive, meaning you could only transfer at most 150 or 300 kilobytes per second, which meant you could only go so far in increasing the video file sizes to get good looking video. Too much and you'd need to spend more time loading in the new video then you did playing it!

Many Sierra games like Phantasmagoria for all intents and purposes required a quad-speed drive for some of the most motion-y cutscenes because they hit 350+ kilobytes/sec transfer rates. Those videos were like 160x120ish resolution with terrible dithering and artifacting, and spanned 7 CD's. Ironically if they were to reissue the game now, modern codecs could hit 1080p resolution with far lower bitrates and it's quite likely the game would fit on a single CD if they had a set mind around that as a target.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 03:11

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Base Wars. :colbert:

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 16:48

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

I think the weird conundrum with licensed sports games is their roster is only accurate as of when it was released, and maybe a little later for internet-enabled titles. But then maybe living in the past is a good thing if your team was awesome but then went to poo poo or even no longer exists (I think World Series 2K3 is the last baseball game which featured the Montreal Expos), I half-expect some people bitter about the most recent hockey trades are going to stick with NHL 16 forever. And then, of course, there are hacks of older games to update their rosters, most popular being various American Football games (especially Tecmo Super Bowl hacks on NES) as well as hacks of NHL 93 and 94.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 17:15

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

fishmech posted:

Take Sewer Shark and Night Trap for instance: they were originally shot in 1987 for the never-hit-shelves "Control-Vision" VHS-based console: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Vision

The concept of that system was that on a standard VHS tape, they'd have encoded multiple simultaneous audio/video streams that could be switched between, as well as computer data that went alongside. It ended up being impractically expensive, so the footage mostly just sat around for 5 years until Sega came around talking up their new console, and it got re-transferred to the CD system.

Huh, neat, it reminds me back in 2000 I visited my uncle who was a TV sound mixer, and his main workstation used a sort of hacked VHS standard (wasn't Betacam but true VHS) which included timecode data that he could scrub with, while the sound was all digital in his machine, because digital video was way too difficult for editing where it wasn't strictly required and since his job only needed the visuals as a rough guide the lower visual quality and degradation of VHS was a non-issue.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 20:29

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Nail Rat posted:

Kids born 3 years after this post was made can now drink legally.

You mean 6 years. :smug:

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 17:38

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Uncle at Nintendo posted:

I think Play-Asia will have them for sale tomorrow morning. Though I am willing to play inflated prices if the drat thing is matte.

I know it's region locked and the language can't even be changed but I am like 85% sure that the system can be hacked to get around all of that, though who knows what firmware it ships with.

Also report back as to whether or not it's a TN or IPS panel!

Received mine today, Firmware 11.0 out-of-the-box. How do I check the panel shenanigans again?

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 18:45

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Shadow Hog posted:

Ah, this must be from that book series-gone-TV show I've heard so much about, A Throne of Games.

(Even though that was only the first book, and the series is actually called A Song of Fire 'n Ice)

This is a pretty good dad joke.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 18:52

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Caitlin posted:

for the thread so that it isn't skimmed over from the goldmine that is the HG101 archive of that ...

"real" is a very relative term

Where did you learn to fly? :lsd:

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 21:07

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

I AM THE TOILET posted:

Hey, kind of a weird tangent, I guess, but if there's anyone who would know the answer to this question, I'd assume you guys would.

I just got the PS4 port of the PS2 game The Warriors - and it's been a long time since I've played it. I was watching the intro FMV, and one of the characters says "Are you going human being?"

It really surprised me - I don't recall hearing that at all when I played it, and I'm surprised that they kept the phrase in the game. I haven't seen the film - shame on me - so I'm assuming that it's drawn verbatim from it?

But it got me thinking - what other games have ever prominently used the word 'human being?' Because your garden variety swears of 'gently caress' and 'drat' and 'poo poo' et al have certainly become commonplace - but thankfully human being hasn't, and it's certainly fallen out of use in recent years.

I can remember, back in 2005 (when this game was released) and certainly before it, that I would utilize the epithet, casually even, in conversation and on the internet, but since then I've come to blanch and react negatively to it as strongly as I would incredibly strong racial epithets, which now brings me to a better inquiry - how many notable games in history have utilized what are certainly now nearly forbidden epithets/insults?

Turn on voice chat in any competitive online game. :v:

There is actually something to this, because I think a few early online games like Ultima Online got M ratings specifically because of this and not due to anything actually in the game itself, before the ESRB figured out they could just say that they don't rate online shitheads.

It's actually interesting since the use of slurs like "human being" and "friend of the family" are pretty rare in media, relatively speaking, even in books and film, I can't think of many movies where those words are used as a slur if you exclude movies where "racism" or whatever is the main central theme of the movie (I'm not counting white people antagonizing Jackie Robinson with the word friend of the family in a movie about him).

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 13:21

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

al-azad posted:

That's what I'm saying. People buying old computer games want the contents. The disks are volatile, I wonder how many people overwrote their original media which is why the manuals would tell you to make backups.

Nah, original media was always write-protected and you needed a set mind to get around that. Disks were always stupidly-fragile and I had a few games which specifically included a mail-in coupon you could send in with like :10bux:

or something for a 2nd set of legit disks because they were extremely failure-prone.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 14:22

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

al-azad posted:

Maybe 3 1/2" games but I'm pretty sure you could overwrite 5 1/4".

5.25" floppies had a notch on the side.

To write protect them you had to tape over that notch (when you bought blank 5.25" disks they usually came with a sheet of little tape rectangles for this purpose along with labels to put on the disks themselves), and generally speaking retail software media straight-up had that entire thing as solid plastic with no notch, so to overwrite them you would literally need scissors and at that point we're well past things being accidental.

3.5" disks had a little black plastic square which slid to expose a hole to indicate write protection, and likewise retail software just straight-up didn't have the square to slide around so overwriting them required tape.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 14:31

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Yeah, 5.25" disks were pretty robust as long as you never folded them severely. 3.5" disks were wonky, though, and it took way too long for them to finally be replaced properly with burnable CD's; I had way too many games in like ZIP or RAR archives across like 17 disks, constantly hoping disk #16 hadn't gone bad.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 18:44

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

fishmech posted:

They only started to get very unreliable at the tail end of their use period, when factory standards dropped.

I remember that, that was a horrible time.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 18:57

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Captain Rufus posted:

Not always. Not even remotely. Lots of games didn't have separate save disks or play disks and expected you to save to the original disk. This could lead to problems though so eventually most publishers made systems to create play disks. A year or two ago a power issue caused my Atari 8 bit version of Autoduel to fart up because of such things.

Fair enough, may well have varied between companies, I remember early Sierra games would check that your Disk 1 was legit and then give you a chance to swap it for a play disk instead (i.e. a backup copy you made), with the "original" Disk 1 having hidden files or some poo poo that wouldn't carry over with a straight file copy.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 19:43

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Tyson Tomko posted:

I remember watching some forensic show a few years back about where some dude cut up a 5 1/4" with a pair of scissors to avoid being caught with whatever evidence. They tried recovering the data using various methods but were unsuccessful. Some tech eventually thought what the hell, scotch taped the pieces back together, put it back into the disk housing, and most of the data showed up! Cool as poo poo how durable those suckers are.

Given the bit density I'm not terribly surprised this is possible (especially if this was pre-high or even double density), but it's super-neat nonetheless.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2016 20:36

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

d0s posted:

Sturnt Race FX is historically cool and saccing legit games to make bootleg games is lovely

It's OK, people only gut defective ones, which are identifiable because they run at a single-digit framerate.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 17:48

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

TheRedEye posted:

I've been dumping NES prototypes for literally 18 years now, I know what I'm doing!

Now I'm wondering if you're the guy I sent Magic Jewelry II to (as well as a weirdly-hosed Super Mario 3 cart) many many years ago.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 18:31

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

gently caress, 25 years ago today is when the SNES was released in North America.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 18:08

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

You gotta play the pack-in Super Mario World, accept no substitutes. :colbert:

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 19:39

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

d0s posted:

It might even be they redesigned it only to prevent importing (or reverse importing, as it's way harder to play a US cart in a SFC)

It's most likely something related to this, Nintendo has always been super-serious about region segregation.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 19:41

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Willo567 posted:

I'm considering getting the Retro Freak after hearing all the buzz about it, but I have one question: do I need the original cartridge to download and play the games, or can I play them off the SD card through "other" means?

I own one and can confirm you can just copy ROMs to the microSD card as long as they go in the right folder.

Actual Japanese games will included additional information like release date and company behind the game, but games from any region will work.

univbee fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Aug 24, 2016

# ¿ Aug 24, 2016 13:04

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

# ¿ Aug 24, 2016 15:39

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

King Vidiot posted:

Yes, but what does it 8-bit do?

If you hold it up to your ear it sounds like the ocean waves sound effect from Final Fantasy 1.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2016 16:02

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

xamphear posted:

Good news! Krikzz has returned from vacation and put out a new ED GBA update that "Improve[s] SD cards compatibility".

http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=5509.0

Just pop the update file on your SD card and... oh.

Reminds me of my motherboard. Released a BIOS update to support 3rd gen Intel Core processors...but you need a 2nd gen processor to actually install the update initially. My brother built a system and had to "borrow" a friend's processor for like 20 minutes to do the update.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2016 16:34

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Probably missed this earlier in the thread, but there's a microSD Neo Geo flash cart?

https://www.neosdstore.com/shop/index.php

Wowzers at the 380 euro price tag.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 16:19

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Huh, for once a drama situation I actually dodged.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2016 00:15

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Uncle at Nintendo posted:

I couldn't believe people were not more pissed about that. I had a friend buy an 80gb PS3 fat and a bunch of PS2 games only to find out it was the 80GB fat without BC.

At least when Nintendo took GameCube compatibility out of the Wii they waited literally years (Sony waited a couple months) and they put blatant warnings on the box.

The boxes definitely had warnings, albeit maybe not sufficiently prominent.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2016 22:12

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 10:30

univbee: Jun 3, 2004

Phantasium posted:

It... it still happens guys don't give up on your search.

Are you supposed to pair it with the composite cables?

drat, son. I avoided paying an arm and a leg for mine because I actually got one when the Gamecube was current. But yeah, you pair it with your AV Multi Out cable of choice for RCA L and R audio, leaving the yellow composite or whatever dangling.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2016 01:33

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