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When I was a kid, out of nowhere I got a year's subscription to Computer Gaming World. None of my relatives ever said they did it, and by parents definitely didn't do it. At the same time I got a year's subscription to the Software of the Month Club, a CD release that had shareware utilities as well as games - and again, no explanation of why I was getting it. Unfortunately I lost the SOMC CDs at some point over the past decades, but they were pretty neat.
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Nov 17, 2015 00:01
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wa27 posted:"Acceptable" basically just means it works. Pretty much all grading systems are dumb like that. Go look at some "good" coins some time: The good rating is more acceptable for things like 500 year old coins and such though. And when you're buying any sort of recent coin, "good" tends to be a good way to only get a few bucks over face value".
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Nov 18, 2015 04:13
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univbee posted:Huh, I don't remember sound being that wonky, but then again stuff in the early days was super weird. I still remember vividly playing Super Castlevania IV on a Pentium 166 in late 1996, using SNES96 as an emulator in DOS, at a time when the fastest machine you could buy was a Pentium Pro 200, and getting something like 4 or 5 frames per second with no sound and no functional Mode 7 effects, so the drawbridge going up didn't visually move and various other wonkiness. You could get NES emulators which ran OK but they didn't have sound unless you purchased a license for them for like 30 or 40 bucks. Well, that particular video is the very first ZSNES release to support sound at all - prior to that it only did graphics. They improved the sound quite a bit by the end of 1997.
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Nov 19, 2015 16:45
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flyboi posted:The most amazing emulator back then has to be Bleem! Because of how it worked. Whomever developed it had to have been a total nerd beyond comprehension because it actually exploits the win9x kernel to function by basically kicking the kernel out of the emulator. It was never ported to the win2000+ kernel because it was completely impossible. I'm pretty sure the main reason it never got ported was the whole being sued out of business/bought out thing. A rework had been planned for the new consumer level NT based OSes, and I think there was also a planned Mac release. But the legal heat ruined any chance.
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Nov 20, 2015 04:35
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Nesticle still ruled for the live tile editing feature
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Nov 20, 2015 14:47
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Harlock posted:Downloading ZSNES and SNES roms over 56k was the cool thing for cool kids to do. When we got cable internet in late 1998 it was like having more power than god
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Nov 20, 2015 16:14
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univbee posted:I'm not sure how I pulled it off, but I once downloaded a 650 meg Dreamcast game over 56k. Fortunately I got DSL in 2000 with all its 0.8 megabit download speed glory. Hey now, that only woulda required a continuous connection for 27 hours on the 56k. 
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Nov 20, 2015 17:11
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Luigi Thirty posted:I need to buy one of those Atari flash cartridges so I can play my homebrew GET OUT program on a real console. Supposedly the Harmony cart that will support both 2600 and 7800 games will be out for wide release soon. So you might want to wait for that. Otherwise the existing Harmony cart is excellent for the 2600 and 2600 games on a 7800. Also I really suggest using a very small capacity SD/miniSD/microSD with it. The entire library is storable in under 4 megabytes, and on large devices that can balloon to 32 MB or more due to large clusters. fishmech fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Nov 21, 2015 |
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Nov 20, 2015 23:59
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The Kins posted:You could probably write a whole lot of words about the pre-Xbox online console service attempts... Dreamcast online was successful. 
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Nov 22, 2015 16:36
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univbee posted:If you wanted a Raspberry Pi (or a shitload of them) but $20+ was too much to swallow, they have a new $5 model (most of cost savings are due to a lot of the connectors being headerless, i.e. you have to solder on your own), although I don't believe it's network capable at all. It's also smaller than the previous models. It's also included free with a U.K. magazine, attached to the front cover. It's also worth pointing out its faster than the original rpi but slower than the 2, so more suited for emulation than the original.
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Nov 26, 2015 18:13
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falz posted:Ah, I assumed it was temp written to some faster type of EEPROM, then the system would read from that. Does it not retain the game in some NVRAM after system turnoff like the older slower flash carts? EEPROM isn't very suitable for that task. What will often be used is SRAM for cases where the rom data is ok to lose at power off, NOR flash for especially older flashcart designs (it writes a good deal slower than NAND flash, but especially in the past could be read faster and was cheaper), or simply using seperate NAND flash like the card you put in, but wired up so as to be suitable to have the console read. Especially on the GBA flash carts meant primarily to use in conunction with a DS slot 1 card to load games on, they'd be packed with a large amount of NOR flash that could hold any game and continue holding it indefinitely, and then a half-size of that SRAM bank that could hold nearly all games, but would be erased at power off (however save data associated with it was in a, usually battery backed, seperate bit of storage so the cart handling homebrew could store it back to SD.
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Nov 27, 2015 04:19
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Waltzing Along posted:Didn't realize Cure could be used offensively. That would have helped tremendously. Oh well. Thanks for the input. Really loving the game, actually. I've been giving my gf updates every so often because telling the story is just so out there. "And then my best friend, who I thought was dead, shows up and nearly kills me. Then his boss steals my girlfriend!" Yeah it's a thing in at least all the 2d final Fantasy games that heal the party/a party member spells deal damage to undead and some just plain evil enemies.
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Nov 30, 2015 19:42
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Mogomra posted:How good is a raspberry pi for running retro arch? Is it alright or just a bad experience? The original Raspberry Pi is like running RetroArch on a phone from about 2006. Quite slow for a lot of things, powerful enough for like NES/Game Boy Color and earlier.(Heck, you can get full speed original Game Boy emulation on a Palm Pilot III PDA from 1998) The Raspberry Pi 2 is like running RetroArch on a midrange phone from about 2012. Significantly better, still not great for things Saturn/PSX/N64 and up, but a lot of those are at least playable. fishmech fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Dec 2, 2015 |
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Dec 2, 2015 02:11
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RodShaft posted:How's the ras pi zero fit in? It's a slightly faster r pi 1. The rpi 1 is literally a smartphone chipset from 2006, the zero is like one from early 2007. Sure it's great for 5 bucks, but it still won't be good for much more than NES and non-addon type SNES games.
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Dec 2, 2015 04:36
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Ptarmigans posted:I was under the impression that a PAL SNES uses an AC power supply rather than the DC ones for an NTSC SNES, seems like it would cause problems. It does, but what they mean is to purchase a third party power supply that outputs the correct power for the US or Japan SNES/SFC, while still supporting the wall power for your country.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:01
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Elliotw2 posted:I don't know about the Jaguar, but they bought the Lynx from Epyx, the guys who made California Games. Thankfully they changed the name from the Epyx Handy to the Atari Lynx. Incidentally, the Atari Lynx still loads the whole game cartridge into memory on startup instead of just reading most of the game straight from the ROM as gameplay went on, because the system was originally designed around using small cassette tapes as the media, which would necessitate a "load it all to RAM" setup.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:44
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Quidnose posted:It's really interesting for me to look back at how expensive Genesis & SNES games were back in the day because as a 10 year old I wasn't buying them for myself and had no clue; I mostly got new games as gifts or rented them from Blockbuster. Seeing Game Gear games for 35 dollars a pop makes me cringe considering that's the going price for 3DS games now PS1 and Saturn games were $40 for a while, as were many Dreamcast games. The return to the $50 price point took place with the PS2/GC/Xbox generation. And of course the various shovelware games have been $40 and cheaper, especially on the Wii, but since the PS2 era.
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Dec 4, 2015 00:26
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Bel Monte posted:I fully believe the reason why they've been able to support such a flat rate cost over the years despite ballooning budgets for AAA (and indie now too) is the expanding market. More people buy games today than there was back in the 80s. Back in the day, breaking above a million was a success. Now you need ten or twenty million minimum to do okay. There are also simply lower fixed costs for optical discs over cartridges, and then for producing said optical discs over time. And a lot of the tools for developing and publishing games mean you need to spend less developer time too. That's why, for instance, a $60 game of today is the equivalent sale price to a $27 game back when the NES was released. poo poo in the old days a company might have to assemble multiple dev kits on their own, and forget using commodity cheap computers for most of your work. Turbinosamente posted:He has a good voice but his odd cadence throws me off every time. Still a shame that he's shutting Classic Game Room down at the end of the year, or at least that's what I last heard. Dunno where I'm gonna get semi decent reviews of weird rear end old games and peripherals now. It's going from a regular schedule to a thing he'll do when he has free time. The Undertow side channel with the other guys on it is the one that's going to be shuttered for good.
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Dec 4, 2015 02:49
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Shlomo Palestein posted:I stand corrected. In looking at similar flyers for the Genesis, it looks like they were $50-65 (sportstalk baseball of all things), so the average for those was higher MSRP than I had thought as well. Yeah it was the CD consoles that dropped prices for a bit because of no more cartridge building eating into the costs (of course, then you had to also buy memory cards, often multiple, so that clawed away at the money saved!)
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Dec 4, 2015 15:58
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What's the name of Kevtris's upcoming multi-console clone? Because that's going to wipe the floor with any of the existing ones when it's out in a few years, because it has cycle-accurate cores in the FPGA system, so pretty much the best you can get beyond ridiculously audio/video modded original consoles.
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Dec 8, 2015 03:07
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Kea posted:I thought this was that kickstarter where he left? Or did he have his own thing coming out? He's basically the current king of making cycle-accurate FPGA cores for old systems, which is why the failed kickstarter people hired him. And then when he told them "you guys don't have a clue what you're doing" they fired him. He's currently building a multisystem with multiple cartridge slots and controller ports, which will use his own FPGA cores. Not supposed to be out for years, however. falz posted:
His proofs of concept are his various single system setups he's made over the years, but the multiple system one is going to happen and be sold to people int he future. He's not currently seeking any sort of advance funding a la kickstarter for it, it's just a thing he's doing anyway since he loves making the FPGA stuff. Jim Silly-Balls posted:
What I'd add to this is that even though cartridges are still pretty durable, a lot of the older ones out there aren't, and you probably wouldn't actually want your kid messing around with them. We ended up breaking a cartridge or two on our N64 and SNES when my siblings and I were kids, and they were a lot newer then!
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Dec 8, 2015 03:49
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flyboi posted:The console he's making won't read cartridges just sd cards The last thing I saw from him was that he'd have Cart slots for the big systems (NES, SNES, Genesis), and use SD cards for both the major systems and all the Wacky small time systems he had cores for like the Arcadia 2001 and it's European clones. That was months ago though. Also that he wasn't sure if he'd bother with cores for CD systems yet, or whether those would be strictly images Vs an actual cd drive as well.
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Dec 8, 2015 05:08
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Seriously though don't try to introduce your kid to games through cartridges old enough to drive in the Bush Administration. Those cartridges ain't so able to stand up to kid abuse anymore, and it's never going to mean as much to them as they clearly mean to you. While great games last forever in emulation, they don't in their physical media.
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Dec 8, 2015 05:36
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Bel Monte posted:I may have bought a CDI without thinking. While I haven't had one in years, I'm pretty sure the video/audio out was standard cables and the power cord was too? Also, while I got no clue if the remotes work, you're going to really want to buy either the official mouse or the official wired gamepad, or both, because both are WAYYYY better to use than the remote thing. And the connector for the wired controller is standard across all the CD-i systems. I can't stress enough how much suck is involved with the CD-i remotes.
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Dec 8, 2015 15:28
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Because it comes with no cables, but it was so cheap!
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Bel Monte posted:
MAME/MESS actually has really good cd-i support these days, and "cd-i emulator" (definitely the most creative emulator name) is supposed to be good as well, but costs like 30 bucks so I've never used it.
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Dec 9, 2015 05:46
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I think I'll just hold out for one with all the components and use that one as a backup. All those ports and things are so weird I doubt I'd be able to get a power adapter for cheap.
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Bel Monte posted:I've checked out the "cd-i emulator" one before, but the website says it hangs on Hotel Mario, and it hasn't been updated in years. The MESS project has since been fully folded into MAME since the summer, so now the drivers for consoles are treated the same as drivers for arcade systems. Currently MAME will run Laser Lords which is pretty niche and unique for the system great so long as you disable the CD-i mouse support.
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Dec 9, 2015 16:18
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Elliotw2 posted:Nah, they still have debates on what games are too modern for MAME, though the uncracked encryption keys and windows XP based arcade systems are neatly ending those discussions usually. I thought the main thing that ended it is that the modern MAME emulation style is way too slow for recent arcade hardware based games to run on contemporary home computers, instead of the old emulation style they sued where it was "do whatever you want so long as it runs fast enough"? Like yeah MAME might "support" the latest arcade game that came out last month but it'll run at 2 FPS on a top of the line home computer because they're doing cycle accurate emulation of a 3 ghz x86-64 processor and a video card.
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Dec 10, 2015 00:20
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Elliotw2 posted:That's part of it too, the MAME guys said they aren't writing drivers to emulate an entire pentium 4 based PC so that you can play Afterburner Climax. Well, people are working on it, but it's going to take a fuckload of time to be good enough to use, let alone good enough to be marked "working" by the MAME people. The eventual goal is to support any software on any computer ever made, after all.
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Dec 10, 2015 00:38
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Jumpingmanjim posted:I think they the MAME developers had some kind of agreement not to emulate any of the newer CAVE games. I'm not sure how far back "newer" goes for that, but the general hardware used for most of their 2004 to 2012 games looks like it won't be running full speed in MAME anytime soon (a decently speedy SH3 chip of a strange design, and a complex custom GPU). And their Deathsmiles II game from 2009 uses: "CPU : AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e Brisbane 2.60GHz, 1024KB L2 Cache GPU : Radeon 3200 (built into the motherboard) RAM : 2048MB (2GB) 800MHz DDR " So that's a full on modern-for-the-time PC and those are definitely not going to be playable speed on MAME any time soon So I think that's another example of how you wouldn't be playing them in an arcade-competitive manner regardless.
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Dec 10, 2015 01:14
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al-azad posted:I haven't updated my MAME emulator in like 6 years but one thing that pissed me off was that newer versions made some games worse so so much for documentation. Well that's because the modern MAME way to handle things is all low level all the time, so if you have pokey hardware it won't handle newer games well. Ultimately, it works better because it wasn't uncommon for the old hacky ways to have inconsistent performance between systems.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:42
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JediTalentAgent posted:This makes me want to ask an odd question: Given the sort of boom in retro games and consoles, has there been much growing movement on gamers doing vintage PC hardware builds? I've noticed a few people who seem to have an interest in tracking down older PC parts just to build high-end (for the time) PCs just to have some authentic retro PC gaming experiences, and occasionally I've noticed the asking price on eBay for otherwise old parts has sort of gotten a bit pricey on a few. Yes that's a thing, though bear in mind that old PC parts are also needed for various creaky bits of software and hardware for businesses. Here's my recommendation if you want an older PC to play games on: 1) Buy a laptop. The screen and battery don't even need to work, you just need the stuff inside to work and a working power adapater. The reason is that it takes up a lot less space and power. And these things are really cheap online! 2) Make sure it's at least between say 2 and 5 years after the main timeframe of games you want to play. This is because laptop features generally lagged the desktop features, and the range is because while 1998 games would play fine on a 2000 laptop, 1988 games might not work well until say a 1993 laptop. And if none of the games are overly sensitive to processor speed, then you should just go for an early 2000s laptop, when they were plenty powerful and even had decent 3d accelerators for 90s games, but still had Windows 98 drivers 3) Run Windows 98SE on it. This should be able to handle near anything 4) Replace the original hard drive in the thing because it's going to be garbo slow and very small. If you have money to burn, buy a decent size IDE SSD. But for most cases just buying a 2.5 inch IDE to CompactFlash card adapter will work great, and a nice, fast, and reliable 32 GB CF card like this will only run you $38: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1003355-REG/sandisk_sdcfxs_032g_a46_32gb_extreme_compact_flash.html And the CF-IDE adapters tend to cost between 5 and 10 bucks. The reason for this is that it will greatly speed up boot time, as well as many kinds of games' loading times, but it's not in a way that can gently caress up timing sensitive games. 5) Buy a USB 2.0 supporting PC Card/PCMCIA card to put in the laptop's card slot if it's too old to have native USB 2.0 support. This way you'll be free to use USB flash drives and the like to transfer things. And you might want to get an ethernet PCMCIA card with one of the dongles that extend out to plug the ethernet cable into, since they'll fit well with a USB 2.0 card in a standard 2 card bay - and Windows 98SE will handle file networking to Windows up to Windows 10 quite well. 6) Install the "unofficial service pack" for Windows 98SE from this guy http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/ Among other things it includes a driver package that will ensure any flash drive you use will work, including flash cards in readers 7) Get a cheap monitor stand that can fit over top of the laptop while closed. You'll just be using external keyboard and mouse rather than the laptop's keyboard and pointing device anyway, and any old CRT or 4:3 LCD monitor you have will be better for playing stuff then the laptop's screen is. Ideally the stand will be high enough that your laptop can be elevated on one of those cooling fan pad things - they don't even need to be plugged in and running, it just avoids problems with air circulation. These stands, the one I bought was at like staples and was just a black painted metal thing and it cost like $10 8) Investigate whether the model you got already has the most RAM it can handle. If it doesn't, go look for additional RAM you can install. Typically you'll be able to max out its RAM capacity for less than $40, even if it's from the mid-90s - there's just a lot of extra old RAM out there at great prices. And it always helps. This is what my setup looks like:  It's an old Toshiba laptop, a 335CDS from 1998 or 1999, the hard drive replaced with a 16 GB CF card (which has been running fine since I did it in 2010), the RAM upgraded to 96 MB, a like 266 MHz Pentium MMX mobile CPU, and it has a 20x speed CD drive. Handles all sorts of games really well so long as they don't need intense hardware 3D. It even has a hack installed that allows Windows 3.11 to run on top of Windows 98's DOS mode, just for games that are really finicky.
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Dec 10, 2015 16:32
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Random Stranger posted:The problem with the laptop solution is that a lot of the late 90's stuff (and really it starts around 1995) uses hardware features of 3D cards and the software based renderers with the games often are lacking. That doesn't mean that it's not a great idea, though, since it is so cheap to just go for it. What I've found is that most games that really need a 3D card also tend to run ok in recent Windows, or have source port type things going on to do so. That aside, someone gave me a like 2003 or so Toshiba with a 3d accelerator in it that handles 3d acceleration required games of the 90s and early 2000s fine, as long as you don't want to go above 1024x768 or 1280x1024. Djarum posted:I had a 1.3 GHz P3 with 1GB of ram, a Geforce 3 and Dual Voodoo 2s for awhile. It was fun to have but a lot of that hardware is starting to die now for various reasons. In order to make a clone of Win 9x stable, you'd break compatibility with a lot of the software. Shadow Hog posted:
I had to leave my excellent 17 inch NEC MultiSync 700 CRT behind in my last move due to sheer lack of space  It fit perfectly on top of the monitor stand I have with the laptop under it too.
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Dec 10, 2015 20:21
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Anybody have some good advice on cleaning corrosion gunk off of battery contacts?
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Dec 10, 2015 21:27
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Allen Wren posted:So lately when I've been having problems with various games, my friends suggest I throw an emulator up onto a stream and get real-time advice from them. The problem is that my controller (a Logitech knockoff of a 360 controller) is great for things where I use the analog sticks, but the d-pad is wet hot garbage. I was thinking of getting a NES30, but was wondering if the thread had other, better suggestions I might not have heard about. The Xbox One controller is supported by about anything on Windows, and has a Nintendo style d-pad because the patent finally expired on that.
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Dec 12, 2015 15:30
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Kea posted:A guy I know told me I should use the Xbox One Elite controller. So I idly checked how much it was, only £200. I passed. The only reason to specifically get the Elite controller is if you feel the need to constantly change the d-pad and analog stick parts - or if you'll have some use for the "paddle buttons" that go on the grips and which can be an alternate way to trigger either button combos or individual buttons. That's why it comes with the 3 sets of analog sticks, 2 d-pads, and all the rest of the stuff. It's basically like when people buy those arcade sticks with interchangeable parts. However, dang 200 pounds is a hell of a surcharge, considering the US price is only $149 if you really wanted it.
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Dec 13, 2015 04:01
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The controller is so bad
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Dec 17, 2015 17:22
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Lowen SoDium posted:What is it with reusing the Atari Jaguar case molds? They already dumped a wad of cash to buy the molds.
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Dec 17, 2015 20:12
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Bel Monte posted:Was tetrisphere the first time anyone actually bothered to change up the traditional formula for making a tetris game? It's kind of sad that tetris never evolved or changed. It would be fun to try tetris with triangles or polygons, but hardly anyone bothers. You really haven't been looking outside of official big name console releases, apparently. Computers are full of them, as were phones and PDAs in the 90s/00s and smartphones now, and a few of the weird ones even got console releases, including on the 360 XBLIG service. Speaking of PDAs though, I bought a Palm Zire 71 with a bunch of accessories for $40 a few days ago and it came with an MMC (not even a full SD!) with arcade ports:   The card holds a hefty 4 MB, and only 921 KB is taken up by the games! It's like getting another 3 MB of storage for your 14 MB user space device for free!    I feel like PDA games belong here, considering PDAs have been dead for years, Palm OS particularly not having any new devices manufactured since 2009, and even then those had been released in 2005.
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Dec 18, 2015 23:02
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To be honest my 7800 gets used exclusively as a 2600. I'd kinda like to see what sort of console Atari would have had ready if the 7800 had released as planned in like 1984, and then they'd made a follow up for the 1986 actual 7800 release. And for that matter, if the 7800 had launched with the joypads as the default controller instead of the horrid attempt to modernize the 2600 joystick. d0s posted:e: if you're considering a 7800 get a colecovision instead No, don't! There's nothing good to be had there and they break a lot by now. The Colecovision Flashback is a good alternative though, if you want to play most of the good Colecovision games and use a modernized version of the controller that isn't quite as annoying.
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Dec 19, 2015 23:58
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:37 |
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Anidav posted:The 7800 is never worth buying. The games are ugly, the controller sucks and the old soundchip makes it sound like the machine is dying. The 7800 Joypad controller is the best controller on any Atari system though.
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Dec 20, 2015 00:02
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