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Literally The Worst posted:what's a relatively cheap usb controller that would be good for retro-ing If you're not going to be playing systems that need analog sticks, those Logitech USB PS2 controller knockoff work pretty well and can be had super cheap used.
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Aug 1, 2016 17:08
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Rirse posted:I was going to see about buying another CRT, as while I like the one I have...it only has RF so it won't ever have that amazing picture. But all the Goodwills and Savation Army's near my house got rid of all their CRTs. That blows since I rather avoid Craiglist at all cost. Drive around town around garbage day, you're bound to find someone putting an old CRT at the curb.
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Aug 1, 2016 19:34
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univbee posted:Lest we forget, the Sony PS1 Memory Cards held 128 kilobytes and cost like $20+US. There haven't been many storage media formats with a higher per-kilobyte price in the entire history of computing. ...The 3DO save memory expansion unit only held 256 KB and cost way more, prices are difficult to find but it seems to have cost at least the equivalent of $60. And N64 Controller Paks held only 32 kilobytes while costing at least $10! And that's to say nothing of how expensive and low storage floppy disks often were for 80s computers, or any of the storage media before 1980. Or all the various strange formats of non-floppy disk removable storage in the late 80s and 90s for portable devices. You could easily pay over $100 to add 16 KB of storage to one of those things at times.
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Aug 1, 2016 21:53
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Doc Morbid posted:The N64 memory cards would've been okay-ish if most games requiring them didn't take up the entire goddamn card or at least so many "pages" that you couldn't fit another save file on there. I suppose you could've bought one of the third party ones that had more space, but those weren't the most reliable things in the world. That's because N64 Controller Paks were 1/4 the size of the standard Playstation 1 memory card. Because Nintendo was money grubbing as hell.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:35
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d0s posted:I added the CDi and 3DO to the OP, but I'm a little unclear about some things re those systems, any info that would go in a one paragraph buyer's guide for each would be great, and some greats/cult classics for CD-i as I know absolutely nothing about it's library. "For the love of all that is holy, make sure you get a proper gamepad for the CD-i instead of trying to get by with the IR remote controller"
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Aug 2, 2016 22:21
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Rollersnake posted:I've never owned one of those remotes, and I feel like I've missed out on an essential part of the cd-i experience. The only thing they're appropriate for is the sort of CD-i software that in modern times would just be a DVD with some menu selections.
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Aug 2, 2016 22:47
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I'd say the OP should definitely recommend that if you're going to get into the really old systems like the 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision - just buy a flashcart when they're available. Their libraries are so much more enjoyable when you can just switch right to a new game when the current one gets boring after like 15 minutes tops, as pretty much all of them do, without having to dig through a bunch of cartridges. The Harmony cartridge is great for the 2600 - and you only need a 4 megabyte SD card in it to hold all the games. It'll work on a 7800 of course, but only for 2600 games. The Atarimax Ultimate SD Multi-Cart for Atari 5200 is the only real option for the 5200, though you might prefer to just get an Atari 8 bit computer system and a drive/tape emulator for one of them instead. The "Harmony 2"/Concerto is soon going to be in wide availability for the 7800 and is your only other option other than the long discontinued Cuttle Cart 2 - some people already have early units. The Atarimax Colecovision Ultimate is the best Colecovision one available. There are other older ones out there but they're not as nice Intellivision is a bit more tricky. There's been various ones produced int he past but no longer built, like the Cuttle Cart 3. There's also a number of projects that are in the works to create new flashcarts, but it doesn't seem like any are actually in production quite yet? For other weirder/less popular systems, see the list here, it's kept fairly updated: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/127752-flashcart-and-multicart-list-all-systems/
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Aug 3, 2016 14:05
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TheRedEye posted:YMMV but I thought I should mention that I got an early Concerto and a 7800 and spent a weekend playing the entire library, and...there's basically nothing there for me. The only good games are arcade ports that you should really just play on MAME instead, and the small handful of original games is occasionally interesting but never good, and mostly feel like halfhearted attempts to make games that are like NES games. I ended up selling the cartridge to an excited guy in Canada, and I *never* sell flash carts. But the library was so devoid of anything I wanted to actually play that I felt like I was wasting space having that stuff in my house. Oh yeah the 7800 library is dire, but I figured I might as well mention it since I'd already bothered to mention one for the 5200 (which didn't really have a great library either). What's really interesting is that two different people are working on making Atari Lynx flashcarts, which is quite the feat considering the weird way it loads games and the thinness of official cartridges.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:55
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Drone posted:Edit: don't bother trying to get N64, Saturn, or Dreamcast working until you've got some more experience with the Pi under your belt. All three require overclocking and even then they generally don't work well. In the N64's case I'm not sure if the problem is the hardware so much as it is that N64 emulation itself generally kinda sucks, but maybe it'll be better whenever we get a Raspberry Pi Model 4. It's because all models of the Pi use the same slow GPU from ~2006 or so smartphones with a hardware decoding block for common video formats bolted on. As a result, it has to put a ton of rendering 3D work on the CPU which even on the Pi 3 isn't all that powerful. That N64 emulation is still a mess doesn't help, but really good N64 emulators would still have issues running well on the hardware available there. Hopefully the Pi 4 will finally move on from the ancient-rear end GPU they've been using, and that'll make PSX/Saturn/N64/Dreamcast stuff run a lot better.
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Aug 4, 2016 18:05
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If anyone is looking for a Trinitron in the Boston area, someone in my building dragged a Sony Wega KV-27FS120 out to our lobby. It's a 27 inch SD-only set from 2004, 2 sets of composite input, 1 component input, 1 S-video input. Also it weighs about 100 pounds.
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Aug 4, 2016 20:56
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Elliotw2 posted:I'll actually warn about the HDG models, the VA1 of them is very rough sounding, because the PSG channels run way too hot. Rings in Sonic and drums in games will sound very scratchy and loud compared to a VA2-6 or the VA3/4 model 2's. The CDX in general is very good if you can get a hold of one. Even when you plop a 32X onto it it's still very compact, you're only using two power adapters (because the CD and Genesis only need the one power supply in the CDX), and with a 32X in you have almost the best quality sound and video of any Genesis setup before modding gets into things.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:40
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FireMrshlBill posted:On another note. I thought I had Phantasy Star IV on Genesis, but looked at my shelf and noticed it was PS3 instead. So looking to get PS4 for when I do a FF3(FF6)/PS4 back-to-back play through and comparison. All the Genesis era games on the Steam site are the exact console ROMs in a very nice emulator package. If you don't like how that emulator works, you can pull the ROM out of your steam folder and use another emulator you prefer, but it's pretty accurate as is.
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Aug 6, 2016 19:08
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Mercury Crusader posted:
You forgot to mention that there is a save memory expansion/backup device for certain units: the Japan-release-only FZ-EM256 unit plugs into models with the expansion bay and in conjunction with the disc that came with it you can use its 256 kilobytes of storage - the 3DO internal storage is 32 kilobytes so you can have 8 different whole save areas backed up at once. This works on most of the American console models as well as most Japan console models. Pricey as hell these days, of course, and probably was back then too: 
fishmech fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Aug 6, 2016 |
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Aug 6, 2016 20:02
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:Probably a dumb question, but is it safe to run third-party RCA cables through a SNES, or should I spend the extra $5 on an original / official Nintendo one? I have no idea if there's any difference or potential QA issues that could damage the console, but if they are functionally identical then I'll probably just pick up a cheap one. The worst that can happen is that you get ugly video output, no serious power is passing through them.
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Aug 6, 2016 22:27
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mike12345 posted:How is the 3D gamepad for Saturn? I'm really impressed by the standard Saturn gamepads, they're my favourite, so I'm thinking about buying one of those as well. They look goofy & cool. It's basically the Dreamcast controller, so if you like those you'll like the 3D pad.
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Aug 8, 2016 18:13
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MrLonghair posted:Digging through old amiga magazine scans on archive.org and Jeez, was that 999 pounds with a monitor included? You could get big-brand 486DX2 66 MHz systems in the states in 1994 for about $1800 all in with a 1280x1024 capable monitor, speakers, modem, and a bunch of software, or about $1000 without the monitor or any software beyond the OS. (or if you were crazy, a comparable performance mac for $4500.  )
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Aug 8, 2016 23:02
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Wamdoodle posted:Daaaaaayum, I thought SNES yellowing was bad Famicom yellowing is often compounded by people chain smoking indoors around the things.
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Aug 9, 2016 16:04
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liquid courage posted:i've been watching some dreamcast videos lately and i'm thinking about grabbing a system and a gdemu board at some point. i started looking around for the retrobit vga box only to find that it's no longer in production. the only benefit to these is being able to switch between s-video, vga and composite without having to unplug the dreamcast, yeah? i think i might just grab a vga cable instead. alternately, are there any other vga boxes people recommend in lieu of retrobit's? The only thing a VGA box needs to do is successfully send the signal to enable VGA into the Dreamcast and then not gently caress up the wiring from the Dreamcast to the VGA port. Any VGA box out there that has a switch to go to S-Video for games that don't play nice with VGA should do you fine (not really sure why retro-bit would have bothered to explicitly support composite out)
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Aug 10, 2016 23:57
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Does the GCVIDEO require you to own an older GameCube with the specific digital out port, or is it also compatible with the later ones without the port using a case/internal mod?
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Aug 12, 2016 20:50
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Instant Sunrise posted:Personally, I think that if the SNES-CD got released, without the soured business relationship between Sony and Nintendo, that might have pushed Nintendo to use CD's for the N64 instead of cartridges. The Sega Saturn was capable of running games solely off the cartridge, even though that never really got used (since Sony was already hyping up all that great CD-audio, video etc stuff), so probably that alternate timeline's N64 does the same thing: both a cartridge slot that barely gets used and CDs for most games.
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Aug 14, 2016 00:12
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:Nope. Nintendo had a contract with Philips. To weasel out of it, they let them make a Mario and three Zelda games for the CDi. That's the only reason those garbage games exist. That was in the contract from the beginning, that Philips would get to use Mario and other Nintendo properties on anything they wanted for a certain time period. Even if the SNES CD project had succeeded, Philips would still be putting out Nintendo-licensed games on the already in progress CD-i. Elliotw2 posted:If Sony didn't break into the console game back in 1994, I think the bigger question is who would really push 3D games. Neither the Saturn nor the N64 were particularly good at 3D, and there's good evidence that both were going to be considerably more 2D focused before Sony started throwing around their 3D claims. Uh, no. The N64 was very good at 3D, the only problem was Nintendo skimped on the texture cache for no reason so it couldn't apply high quality textures to the high quality and fast 3D rendering, unless you were a very good developer. The PlayStation and Saturn both were really quite terrible at 3D rendering in different ways. Sony just forced it anyway. It's why way more PlayStation 3D games, proportionately, are just completely unbearable to look at these days compared to among the N64 library.
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Aug 14, 2016 01:37
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Elliotw2 posted:Was the N64 really good at fast rendering? They farmed it out to a render farm company and even ignoring the texture issues, the N64 seems to have trouble rendering anything quickly. Even the games where Rare and Factor 5 did their own microcode and used every ounce of power they could wring out of the N64 kinda run like loving trash. The N64 was as good at fast rendering as the PlayStation or Saturn was - as in most developers weren't skilled enough for it, especially early on in its life and for low-budget companies. Most PlayStation games ran like trash, most Saturn games ran like trash. More N64 developers did seek to try to impress by higher resolution rendering, resulting in necessarily lower frame rates on otherwise identical scenes (it kinda helped to make up for terrible textures if the shapes themselves still looked nicer). That wasn't a tradeoff they weren't forced to do though, it was a stylistic choice.
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Aug 14, 2016 02:02
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Ofecks posted:I don't think this is true. If it were, wouldn't there be Saturn flashcarts? You can't just copy the CD games straight to a cartridge and put it in the slot, they're programmed to specifically check for stuff on the CD drive and thus you need your solution to be able to simulate that stuff properly. As the others mentioned, there's some guys who are working on solutions but it involves much more intense stuff than copying data over to make it all work right. It's kinda like how you couldn't just slap any old cartridge Genesis game onto a CD and have it run correctly (although in that case, many small games can be placed onto a burned CD and run fine), just in reverse. Plus for quite a while the amount of storage you'd need to make a meaningful flashcart for the Saturn was extremely expensive. There are a few dozen titles that use under 128 MB or so on their disk, most of the big titles you need a lot more space. So it'd be ludicrously expensive to do that back when the system was still on the shelves, and even still pretty expensive for a while. (who else remembers when the early DS flashcarts impressed us by being able to hold a whole 2 GB of games if you really splurged?) Improbable Lobster posted:Oh wow, I thought that mod was as dead as the Perfect Dark source mod Oh it was dead for quite a while, it just got better. fishmech fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Aug 14, 2016 |
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Aug 14, 2016 18:31
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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 down to file size. The Sony audio chipset on there could do a ton more than was practical in less than 8 megabytes, especially when you consider how you still needed a lot of the cartridge to hold the game proper.
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Aug 15, 2016 00:10
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Those processing and space requirements were also why early FMV was so bad - the kind of video compression that ran fast enough to be ok to use on the hardware of the times meant huge file sizes for good quality output. So even with a whole 700 MB of space to store video you couldn't store all that much. 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!
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Aug 15, 2016 02:35
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Elliotw2 posted:The SegaCD FMV was particularly bad as well, because they still had to fight the Genesis's low palette count, and it's real loving hard to fit actual footage into 64 colors. The real killer there was they apparently used rather bad digitization flow for the original analog video for the big name FMV titles. It had the look of something that was first digitized into one low color format, probably 256 color, with all the extra artifacts that would incur, and then re-converted from that to 64 colors adding even more artifiacting. 64 colors would never look super great, but at the low resolutions they had to use anyway it could have looked a ton better if they'd been less sloppy. You kind of get the feeling that with Sega CD, a lot of the FMV game producers had been expecting Sega to add in something to up the color limits (which was fully possible, as the expansion connector used for the Sega CD was capable of receiving video signal from the main Genesis hardware, mixing in outside video, and then spitting it out to your Genesis again to put on your TV!) so they had all this pre-digitized video from projects for systems like early PC/Mac CD games that could already do 256 colors or even better. Hell, the CD-i came out the same month in the US as the Mega CD launched in Japan, and the CD-i could display 32,768 colors at once.
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Aug 15, 2016 03:27
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d0s posted:in japan the FMV in games were anime that was created specifically for the low color limit of systems like the PCE-CD, etc. I honestly don't think Sega really designed the system around the idea of using real life video at all, in the same way the PCE-CD was totally not made for it. I think sega of america got the idea that what people wanted was multimedia interactive movies and kinda promoted it as that despite it being actually really bad for that, but really pretty good at cartoons and better normal 2D games Well you have to remember that there were a bunch of people like Digital Pictures who had invested money in shooting footage for "interactive movies" back in the 80s, on the presumption that some sort of VHS or Laserdisc based system would become popular and allow the things to actually come to homes. When Sega starts going around talking about how they were going to have a system capable of digital video available, those companies jumped on the chance to finally use all that footage. 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.
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Aug 15, 2016 20:24
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Rirse posted:Minor question, but how do you check what on a N64 memory card? I got a used one today but have no clue how to see what on it. I saw mentions of "holding start when turning on the n64" but doesn't seem to work with a flashcart inserted. Use a game with a built in memory card manager. The "holding start" thing only works with games that have a memory card manager in them that will be activated that way. Perfect Dark is reputed to have the best memory card manager, and you may be able to load that with the hold-start method when you load the game from your flashcart.
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Aug 15, 2016 22:52
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Lime posted:Is it though? I have it and I read the first chapter but I was pretty put off by a bunch of technical inaccuracies and at least one gross fabrication: Uh, dude, the modified 6502 used in the NES/Famicom used the same package to hold both the CPU and audio processing stuff, while the other systems he's comparing to had to put the sort of audio stuff that's inside the NES CPU package in completely separate chips onboard. Removing a small chip from the system board design means saving the space of not just the chip itself, but any extra traces it needed and so on. He seems to be skipping that this is the reason the smaller die for the CPU was helpful, but he's not incorrect that it allowed for a smaller/cheaper board and consequently a smaller overall console than other systems of the time could be done in. Attempts to do the same CPU+sound on the same chip design with most Z80 core designs common at the time would have required a larger physical chip than the DIP40 packages used, which would have increased costs and thus lost much of the advantage of combining them. Rirse posted:That worked. Ironically the only thing this card had was a Perfect Dark save. Good to hear that it worked.
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Aug 15, 2016 23:04
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Instant Sunrise posted:Yeah? well I've got a Gameshark Pro and an old laptop with a parallel port. There is absolutely no need to keep Windows 98 airgapped. Modern malware will fail to run or install on it because it's expecting a newer operating system with an NT kernel like XP. Of course you'll have a hell of a time browsing as IE6 won't handle modern javascript, and the latest Firefox that'll run without KernelEx is the 2.0 branch, and that'll have problems with a lot of https sites these days. There's K-Meleon, but you'll need to use an older version, which is based on Firefox's engine but was getting updates on a Windows 98 compatible version up to like 2013. What you want is this though: http://fishmech.net/gscc_xp.7z Despite the XP in the name, it does run just fine on 98. It handles basically all the functions of the N64 GameShark with the parallel port, and as well all the functions of that one PlayStation 1 GameShark that had a parallel port connection as well. You can even dump your own ROM files, take screenshots while playing games on the system, all sorts of neat stuff! Also, I highly recommend just getting an ethernet card for the laptop and using Windows file sharing for transferring stuff around. It works just fine with modern Windows.
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Aug 16, 2016 01:24
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Cliff Racer posted:I won a pretty big lot and have gained access to 102 Famicom games (and 11 Super Fami.) Uggh, how am I going to catalogue all this stuff. Is it the Power Games penguin or the Power Games built in an N64 controller? The penguin is much more compatible.
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Aug 16, 2016 04:08
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Ambitious Spider posted:I found something at the thrift store... Those are excellent ones, they really do have 111 different games onboard instead of like 20 copies of the same 6 games.
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Aug 16, 2016 23:18
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d0s posted:it has bird week what else do you need Dig Dug II
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Aug 16, 2016 23:22
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FilthyImp posted:Oddly enough The Warriors for the Xbox one (The First Xbox, the one that is xhuge) is a title that's eluded their vaunted backwards comp forever. Well they stopped adding any new games to the backwards compatibility on the 360 after like 2009 or something. Rumor is that they're going to start doing backwards compatibility for original Xbox titles on the One though, sometime next year. And considering how much more powerful it is than the 360, it should result in better support among more games.
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Aug 17, 2016 14:42
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univbee posted: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. 3.5 inch disks in general of the time are just as reliable. They only started to get very unreliable at the tail end of their use period, when factory standards dropped. Additionally, a lot of people treated them less carefully because they assumed hard case = you don't need to take as good care.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:56
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Usenet was invented by nerdy college students, so you can find video game talk on it from the first year it was around, 1980.
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Aug 18, 2016 15:00
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Note that if you can import a Super Game Boy 2, it has accurate timing for the Game Boy, as well as having the link cable port added.
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Aug 18, 2016 17:57
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Minidust posted:
The easiest way to do this stuff is to use GameShark/CodeBreaker/etc codes when they're available, which they usually are for games that have a patch out. You just burn yourself the cheat disc and they work with any VMU/memory card for code storage. It's what I used to do for bitchy games where I could, because I never had good luck getting the patches done right. And I'm a filthy cheater anyway.
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Aug 18, 2016 22:51
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psymonkey posted:Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't for example N64 roms supposed to play much better/perfectly on an actual N64 compared to the crappy state of N64 emulation? Wouldn't buying a flash cart in this case make sense? Asking because I'm thinking about getting one. Yes, your options for accurate bug-free N64 gameplay right now are either buy a flashcart for like $180, or buy a brand new top end computer to be able to run CEN64 or MAME's N64 driver at decent framerates. CEN64 right now will do like Mario 64 and a couple other early games at full speed on just a 3 or 4 year old Intel CPU, but other games still require much better.
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Aug 19, 2016 19:54
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TheMcD posted:I really hope this Libretro project takes off well. It could end up being a capable enough middle ground to not require a loving Pentagon cluster for good N64 emulation. That's still going to require a beefy computer, just a slightly less beefy one than what you need right now.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:59
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