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A.o.D.
Jan 15, 2006

The Suffering of the Succotash.

univbee posted:

lol if you think you're getting any of these things. The weird slowdown in Zelda 2 is definitely sticking around.
LoL if you think I actually think we'd get such a thing.

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Obsurveyor
Jan 10, 2003

Phenotype posted:

Are we? I've heard that before, but I was born in '83 and don't consider myself part of the millennial generation. There's a world of difference in outlook between the guys in their early 20s at my job and us stodgy old 30-somethings.

Late 70s to early 80s is either Generation X or Millennial, depending on who you ask. No sources on the Internet seems to agree which.

Nail Rat
Dec 29, 2000

You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!!
It's almost as though generations are arbitrary and don't make sense because people are constantly loving and being born, not doing it in waves.

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

univbee posted:

lol if you think you're getting any of these things. The weird slowdown in Zelda 2 is definitely sticking around.

One of the Virtual Console's greatest strengths was that it emulated the architecture so well it would preserve slowdown, sprite-flickering, and sound distortion from (at the time) hardware limitation.

raditts
Feb 21, 2001

The Kwanzaa Bot is here to protect me.


Mayor McCheese posted:

Oh man, I wouldn't mind playing Fester's Quest now that I might understand what the hell is going on (probably not). What a poo poo game.

Shame there's no Marble Madness, Milon's Secret Castle, Goonies, or Castlequest. Still pretty loving solid list, though.

Milon's was the first game my parents ever let us rent in 198X, and I played it again a while back since I hadn't played it in like 25 years.

Let me tell you, that is one game that's not worth revisiting.

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

univbee posted:

OK a few things have been confirmed for the system.

- It will not have network connectivity or external storage support of any kind, and as an extension to that there will be no ability to officially get games beyond those 30.
- HDMI out only.
- Although it supports Classic Controller and Classic Controller Pro, at least one of the connected controllers must be the NES controller, because gently caress you that's why.

Never change Nintendo, as always hate your customers.

Nail Rat
Dec 29, 2000

You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!!
I remember getting Fester's Quest at Target or some poo poo as a little kid because it was super cheap and I could buy it with my allowance.

Turns out there was a reason for it being so cheap.

PS1 Hagrid
Sep 17, 2007

I'm gonna buy one and an extra controller and play through Zelda once and then forget about the device for about five years.

univbee
Jun 3, 2004




SettingSun posted:

One of the Virtual Console's greatest strengths was that it emulated the architecture so well it would preserve slowdown, sprite-flickering, and sound distortion from (at the time) hardware limitation.

It's not uncommon for these to be baked into the code somehow, or otherwise required for the game to work right. Remember the games are all designed to work on a very specific, fixed type of hardware, and things can get very broken very quickly if you overclock or otherwise circumvent the normal game's operations. Like, the "slowdown" could also be the time when something important needs to be loaded, and speeding things up could mean you reach a specific point before something important is loaded. Which could mean, for example, no level boss gets loaded, and your game softlocks.

Instant Sunrise
Apr 12, 2007


The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

univbee posted:

Apparently this system is locked-in with those 30 games officially, and it's fairly likely it's going to be designed in such a way that it's not easy for hackers to play around with it.

Castlevania 3 is a Mapper 5 game, which is trickier to emulate; they got it working on the Wii VC but it seems they opted for a simpler solution here. Also Konami being essentially dead probably has weird repercussions.

The best version of Castlevania III is VRC6 though :colbert:

Armagnac
Jun 24, 2005
Le feu de la vie.
Castlevania 2, but not Ninja Gaiden 2 or Megaman 3? Castlevania 2 was so overrated.

Super C over Contra?

Some wiiieeeerd choices. But definitely some deep cuts that are awesome like Star Tropics.

univbee
Jun 3, 2004




Instant Sunrise posted:

The best version of Castlevania III is VRC6 though :colbert:

No argument there, but Nintendo refuses to acknowledge it in the West. :argh:

EVIL Gibson
Mar 23, 2001

Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!
:vapes:
Switchblade Switcharoo

univbee posted:

It's not uncommon for these to be baked into the code somehow, or otherwise required for the game to work right. Remember the games are all designed to work on a very specific, fixed type of hardware, and things can get very broken very quickly if you overclock or otherwise circumvent the normal game's operations. Like, the "slowdown" could also be the time when something important needs to be loaded, and speeding things up could mean you reach a specific point before something important is loaded. Which could mean, for example, no level boss gets loaded, and your game softlocks.

This is really true. A good example would be details of the Sega Saturn.

Everyone should go watch that 30 min video of the dude that broke the Sega Saturn drm and discovered how everything about it was like a controlled explosion. Processes could slightly run out of sync but if it went too far it would poo poo the bed. The data delivery was from a cd and the system needed to handle that constant flow of information with no lag constantly. Emulation is sort of in an odd place because they can now, for example, could deliver the data much faster but they can't because the system was built only for cds speeds, not ssd speeds.


https://youtu.be/jOyfZex7B3E

Really fascinating stuff.

Apparently this guy did this because the audio processing is really insane and you can direct pure digital audio directly from the cart to the audio processors without going through any other bus. Then he showed a program where you can send in audio, send it through a filter to another channel and then do things like add delay, phase it out, and loop it back around. Its in the video

EVIL Gibson fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jul 15, 2016

univbee
Jun 3, 2004




EVIL Gibson posted:

Emulation is sort of in an odd place because they can now, for example, could deliver the data much faster but they can't because the system was built only for cds speeds, not ssd speeds.

This is also why the PS3 caps at 4x for reading PS1 discs, and gives you an option to force the games to use the default (2x) speed because some games would break due to the speed increase.

IcePhoenix
Sep 18, 2005

Take me to your Shida

Armagnac posted:

Castlevania 2 was so overrated.

Counterpoint: Bloody Tears

Nickoten
Oct 16, 2005

Now there'll be some quiet in this town.
Definitely looking forward to this, and I'm super glad they included Castlevania 1, Zelda 2, StarTropics, and Galaga. I seriously wasn't sure those were going to make the cut, other than maybe Zelda 2.

Now I'm sure lots of people will express disappointment at the lack of inclusion of some other stuff (Mega Man 3, Dragon Quest 1-3, etc.), so I'll be the guy to say I legitimately wish they could put Friday the 13th on there. :v:

pick-e
Aug 10, 2014
I want this yet don't need it, and know the little money I have could be better spent on games I haven't played before. Curse you Nintendo. Surprised they didn't throw in Yoshi's Cookie and Wario's Woods. Those would have made it that much closer to being a straight up Smash Bros. box. But over half the games included have representation as of Smash 4, so close enough!

univbee posted:

This is also why the PS3 caps at 4x for reading PS1 discs, and gives you an option to force the games to use the default (2x) speed because some games would break due to the speed increase.
I think that was PS2 only? PS3/PSP had options for smoothing and aspect ratio. They probably realized how many more games it broke rather than improved... or I just never found the disc speed option on those systems!

univbee
Jun 3, 2004




pick-e posted:

I think that was PS2 only? PS3/PSP had options for smoothing and aspect ratio. They probably realized how many more games it broke rather than improved... or I just never found the disc speed option on those systems!

Oh right, it was the PS2. I guess the PS3 either forced everything to a certain speed or maybe had an internal db to tell which games needed the slower speed.

For an extreme example of really slow speeds sticking around, check out the PS1 version of Chrono Trigger. Available digitally but takes bloody ages to load because the ROM is bigger than the RAM in the PS1 and it live-translates the game on-the-fly.

Instant Sunrise
Apr 12, 2007


The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.

univbee posted:

it live-translates the game on-the-fly.

wait what

univbee
Jun 3, 2004





I wish I was kidding, internally the English version is the Japanese version and it live-patches it with an IPS file while you're playing, which eats a ton of time. Why they didn't just permanently apply the patch to be done with it I have no idea.

univbee
Jun 3, 2004




Sold out on Amazon.uk and Amazon.de.

Phenotype
Jul 24, 2007

You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance.



univbee posted:

It's not uncommon for these to be baked into the code somehow, or otherwise required for the game to work right. Remember the games are all designed to work on a very specific, fixed type of hardware, and things can get very broken very quickly if you overclock or otherwise circumvent the normal game's operations. Like, the "slowdown" could also be the time when something important needs to be loaded, and speeding things up could mean you reach a specific point before something important is loaded. Which could mean, for example, no level boss gets loaded, and your game softlocks.

I feel like kind of an idiot here, but why wouldn't the level boss load at the same sped-up rate in your scenario?

Nail Rat
Dec 29, 2000

You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!!
Because ordinarily there are multiple things happening at once, and if they're sped up, the order could get out of whack and odds are an old game written by some guy in the 80s to have the least lines of code possible won't be that fault tolerant.

Ordinarily, it's not so much that it won't load but that the room might be ready before he is, and the game just doesn't know what to do.

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

Phenotype posted:

I feel like kind of an idiot here, but why wouldn't the level boss load at the same sped-up rate in your scenario?

It's important to understand that all code is a mess. Especially low level code written for an 80's computer. The code assumes all sorts of weird peculiarities of the hardware, and likely takes advantage of them as features.

The story of Mel is a great example of this.

Copper Vein
Mar 14, 2007

...and we liked it that way.
Is Mario 3 gonna have the tan sky or the yellow sky?

Ciaphas
Nov 20, 2005

> BEWARE, COWARD :ovr:


Nail Rat posted:

Because ordinarily there are multiple things happening at once, and if they're sped up, the order could get out of whack and odds are an old game written by some guy in the 80s to have the least lines of code possible won't be that fault tolerant.

Ordinarily, it's not so much that it won't load but that the room might be ready before he is, and the game just doesn't know what to do.

Fault-tolerance and old-game is inherently oxymoronic, yeah

See what can be done to Link's Awakening for example

Nail Rat
Dec 29, 2000

You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!!

Jerk McJerkface posted:

It's important to understand that all code is a mess. Especially low level code written for an 80's computer. The code assumes all sorts of weird peculiarities of the hardware, and likely takes advantage of them as features.

The story of Mel is a great example of this.

Short version of this is this legendary guy intentionally wrote an infinite loop in a blackjack program because he figured out a way to more efficiently find the location of the next instruction by letting the memory overflow increment the address. It's pure madness and brilliance and you're right, a perfect example of why emulation is hard.

PaletteSwappedNinja
Jun 3, 2008

One Nation, Under God.

IcePhoenix posted:

Counterpoint: Bloody Tears

Bloody Tears came from the awful arcade game, so it's not even new to CV2.

univbee posted:

I wish I was kidding, internally the English version is the Japanese version and it live-patches it with an IPS file while you're playing, which eats a ton of time. Why they didn't just permanently apply the patch to be done with it I have no idea.

...or just used the English ROM.

TimWinter
Mar 30, 2015

https://timsthebomb.com
No battletoads. No purchase.

univbee
Jun 3, 2004




PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

...or just used the English ROM.

I think it was like they tested it with the Japanese ROM and wanted to minimize surprises kind of thing.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



I just overheard a strange conversation where a 40yo cliche house wife was hyping up the NES mini as the second coming then her thinks-games-are-wastes-of-time husband jumped in like "OMG I HOPE IT HAS EXCITEBIKE." Yeah, bestselling console of 2016, get this poo poo on Walmart shelves.

PaletteSwappedNinja
Jun 3, 2008

One Nation, Under God.
Speaking of Excitebike, does anyone have fond memories of Excitebike 64? People talk about Pilotwings/Waverace 64 a lot but Excitebike never rates a mention. I did play it back in the day but I remember it as just another motocross game among many, is there anything more to it?

Mulva
Sep 13, 2011
It's about time for my once per decade ban for being a consistently terrible poster.

al-azad posted:

I just overheard a strange conversation where a 40yo cliche house wife was hyping up the NES mini as the second coming then her thinks-games-are-wastes-of-time husband jumped in like "OMG I HOPE IT HAS EXCITEBIKE." Yeah, bestselling console of 2016, get this poo poo on Walmart shelves.

The second I read that I, a person with no intention to buy this and who already has like a zillion ROMs, went "Oh man does it have Excitebike?". Then I looked and it does and I went "That is cool.".

They are going to make a billion dollars off this.

pick-e
Aug 10, 2014

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Speaking of Excitebike, does anyone have fond memories of Excitebike 64? People talk about Pilotwings/Waverace 64 a lot but Excitebike never rates a mention. I did play it back in the day but I remember it as just another motocross game among many, is there anything more to it?
There was an Excitebike 64?

I remember Excitebike for the NES and then what, 20 years later? Hearing about Excitetruck around the Wii's launch.

Instant Sunrise
Apr 12, 2007


The manger babies don't have feelings. You said it yourself.
Excitebike 64 was honestly pretty great from what I remembered.

Kevyn
Mar 5, 2003

I just want to smile. Just once. I'd like to just, one time, go to Disney World and smile like the other boys and girls.
Excitebike 64 was great. And unlike most N64 games it had a lot of really cool bonus modes besides the main game, like Hill Climb and the endless desert, and dirtbike soccer. Also had the original NES game, in ROM form AND a 3D re-creation. All that plus a track creator.

Good soup!
Nov 2, 2010

I enjoyed Excitebike 64, but the announcer screaming names like JIM RIVERS over and over is all I can think about.

Novasol
Jul 27, 2006


PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Bloody Tears came from the awful arcade game, so it's not even new to CV2.

CV2: August 28, 1987
Haunted Castle: February 1988

:confused:

Kevyn
Mar 5, 2003

I just want to smile. Just once. I'd like to just, one time, go to Disney World and smile like the other boys and girls.

Awesome Welles posted:

I enjoyed Excitebike 64, but the announcer screaming names like JIM RIVERS over and over is all I can think about.

Those booming voice announcers from that era of gaming were hilarious. Hydro Thunder had the best one. CHUMDINGER!

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Snow Cone Capone
Jul 31, 2003


Nothing will beat the Waverace64 announcer in my mind

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