old and retro video games and how you play them (emulation, fpga, vintage hardware, remasters, analogue, whatever)

Bought and built one of these with a pi:

https://monsterjoysticks.com/all-in-one-joysticks

Bit overpriced maybe but a joyful thing to have and muck around with.

Runs retropie and I mostly just have some basic mame and snes stuff on it - that keeps me happy.

more playing than configuring you're ahead of the, er, game!

I did an expensive and convoluted thing for N64 play. N64 systems were wired to transmit RGB video, but in the US, we only got S-Video out (a single video channel instead of three). In EU, the 90s-era SCART output contained all three channels of video; I got the cabling so my N64 outputs SCART.

I had purchased some budget x-to-HDMI converters over the years for gaming but was always appalled at how weird and bad the results were. After shopping around online I decided to "fuck it" and I got a Framemaster, which converts many kinds of input into HDMI and allows a number of scaling and colouring options, as well as emulation of tube TVs with scanlines and so forth. I run SCART into it and It looks fantastic.

I sold all my N64 cartridges (except one, which I kept for dumb sentimental reasons), and got an Everdrive (a N64 cartridge loaded up with an SD card containing every game ever made for the system in every region and lots of home-brews and hacks).

Aside from that I have a SNES that I hacked myself, I've hacked SNESes for the children of friends three times now, I have a folder of age-appropriate ROMs on hand in case I'm asked to do it again

consider changing the name of your product to avoid any legal trouble

fgti that’s incredible!!!

someone else reading might also appreciate that this exists. 23 variations of Magical Sound Shower.

― maf you one two (maffew12), Saturday, March 26, 2022 10:05 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

haha ive got this on the ol hard drive :) im more of a splash wave guy, but the arranged version of passing breeze on disc 9 is all time

just bought a 3ds to install custom firmware on and become my goto all generation handheld device. keen to try some gba titles I never got round to. Apparently it emulates a fair proportion of psx games too, very keen to play silent hill while getting my tan on at the local beach this weekend

I generally just use whatever emulators exist on pc for retro gaming. DosBox for old pc games, Project 64 for N64 stuff, Vice for C64, WinUAE for Amiga, Spectaculator for Spectrum, also a souped up Spectrum app which the name escapes me right now (not at my home pc)

and Mame for arcade games of course, generally only ever play 1942 really though.

I like retro games that have been re-developed for modern hardware as well. Cannonball for Outrun is a great example.

I still own actual hardware like an Amiga, Spectrum +2 (a few of these) but setting up to use is barely worth it when I can play everything on my desktop.

As much as i love the older games from my childhood, playing them is becoming less and less these days.

ugh i wish i still had my old amiga! i think i sold it for 50 bucks to buy a single game boy game in 1997

they stuck a spectrum emulator on a raspberry pi zero into a cassette shell...

https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/zx-spectrum-raspberry-pi-cassette

top picture not the best - it's the back side and mostly heatsink. but lol at the choice of cassette - a boots c15 - cheap and useful for only one thing.

5000-series "fat" PS2 (thus also a ps1) w modified network adapter + HDD for roms: SCART video out to open source scan converter, for flawless upscaling of 240/480p and smeary-but-instant passthru of 480i; optical audio out to DAC+amp

nintendo wii (thus also a gamecube) w basic library of n64 downloads actually purchased from the now discontinued and service-ized "virtual console": component video out to OSSC; rca audio out also to OSSC, to hitch ride on HDMI to TV and then back out again to DAC+amp, this is p dumb but mostly about where things are on the shelf

pc (snes9x, fusion, scummvm, dosbox etc) w wireless 8bitdo snes replica / wired hyperkin genesis replica controllers

still maintaining constant vigilance against geckos seeking to lay eggs in the warm innards of these apparata-- something early-gibson about the texture of this problem

wow i ahven't posted in this thread for a while eh. i have lots of updates with pretty pictures

march 2022:
https://i.imgur.com/pDmvuum.jpeg

FPGA mister, digital IO, hdmi to composite on a very aged hitachi tube. it has a weird digital rgb input on the back (i forget the name of it, but it was common with msx computers?) but i couldn't find a way to use it so i was stuck using composite.

august 2022 i think:
https://i.imgur.com/kdPGtMZ.jpeg

i was putting out my garbage and look what i found on my damn street... a dell ultrascan p991? so i lugged it home (and maybe dropped it on the stairs oops) just in case it worked, because free is a pretty unheard of price for these bad boys.

https://i.imgur.com/zCvmQ84.jpeg

unfortunately it had this awful red image which i learned eventaully was fixable with an option in the service menu that "refreshes" the power supply or something? i would look it up but the dell has since stopped giving me an image. i think i found a place that'll service it though, so i am planning to bring it in at some point.

https://i.imgur.com/0G10eZI.jpeg

once i got the picture working nice with that fix, good lord it looked nice (at this point i have a hdmi to vga adapter situation)

https://i.imgur.com/AgOdBR9.jpeg

close up on that beautiful menu

september 2022 i think:
https://i.imgur.com/1rILi3d.jpeg

not long later i find this 27" panasonic tube w/ component and s-video at the same address on garbage day. needless to say i walk past this house every week on garbage day now.

time to get yet another HDMI->something adapter, this time component! but it doesn't work because i am stupid and did not get an adapter capable of 480i -- they all only go to 480p. so i got another one, hdmi->s-video. for those keeping score at home i now have 4 hdmi to other thing adapters (spoiler this will go to 5 when i eventually find a component one that does 480i)

https://i.imgur.com/fKRquP3.jpeg

lookin cute, panasonic

december 2022:
https://i.imgur.com/J4VJp2W.jpg

i now have a reputation amnong my friends as that guy, which becomes worth it in december when someone sends me this

https://i.imgur.com/eFh9Iul.jpeg

i could not find gloves so i braved it. idiot mistake. took me a half hour to get it home about 500m because i had to keep putting it down to warm up my hands. never have they felt simultaneously so painful and numb. i was vividly imagining a finger breaking off. also this 20" fucker was way heavier than the 27"

https://i.imgur.com/5qkqVHn.jpeg

you can't really tell because pictures don't have sound but my god. i don't know if sony was just putting an entire boombox in these things. but. best sounding tv i have maybe ever heard.

i did eventually find that hdmi component i wanted. it looks good. real good. it's 480i, i eventually want to get a 240p signal to this thing but i think i need ot give my brain and wallet a break for a bit. tiem to just play some shit

ANYWAY MEANWHILE, my friend orders an alaogue pocket, raves about it, turns out he bought 2. he offers it to the group chat at cost, nobody bites for a month until i give in. this thing is a nice piece of kit

i wasn't gonna bother because fpga for game boy/gba/snes/etc... why? i have a phone that emulates them fine. and a razer kishi that is satisfactory for game input. but that pretty 4:3 led screen + the buttons under the screen profile, i was like that bilbo meme, why shouldn't i ahve more stuff

AND THERE IS MORE. did you know how easy it is to crack a 3ds now. it takes like 45 mins and all you need is the ability to put an SD into your computer (and format it to fat32). you don't even need any programs, as the heavy lifting is done by a website. crazy. so i had to do that too with the 3ds store coming to a permanent end in march.

so the stuff i can run now without software emulation (either real hardware or fpga) is like...

on a tv: anything under the stun, up to the PS1, and eventually the saturn as well
on a game boy type thing: anything up to snes or so. vitally, GBA so i can finally play mother 3
on the 3ds: nds and 3ds (i haven't fucked w/ nds yet, it is extra steps but it is very doable)
i also ended up picking up an Xbox series X in the meantime, which i have recently learned can EMULATE GAMECUBE lol. how the fuck did they get away with this

oh i somehow didn't post the last 3 pics

https://i.imgur.com/gumqufQ.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/PUHZHZf.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/WvybwKY.jpg

they're not as exciting but i made a whole album and i am gonna use it

next things on my list to figure out:

1. can i crack the ps vita and play psp/vita to my hearts content
2. dreamcast w the hard drive mod if i can stomach the price
3. i might try to pick up a wii? i feel like everyone's still trying to get rid of these things and i THINK the mod is fairly easy for this

then i will basically have the game library of alexandria

nice

wii is pretty easy to mod, most might consider a wii-u cuz of hdmi output but looks like you're good with analog output. as for the dreamcast, personally i'm against any mods that gut the CD drive. just buy a stack of taiyo-yuden CDRs and burn to your heart's content

as for me, i'm waiting to see if the birthday fairy brings me an OG xbox to mod

Will this blog is fire! I love it!

haha i haven't even had a cd burner in years! but good to know, i also do like the idea of keeping the cd drive intact. anyway it's not something i am really planning on doing soon, i gotta do some research that i can't be arsed to do right now. i have PLENTY to play in the meantime, not the least of which is about 6 smt games on the 3ds and like 20 nintendo games. plus mother 3. plus a bunch of ps1 one stuff i wanted to get around to! and maybe by then the saturn core will be good and i can decide what i wanna do with that

Ok I decided to answer question 1 from above tonight and the answer is yes, it is extremely easy to the vita
Maybe evne easier than the 3ds and that was easy as long as u can read

I remember the old days of getting a guy to install a literal chip in your ps1. Vita I didn't even need to eject the memcard you do all the heavy lifting in the vitas own web browser!

Wii is super easy, great to run gamecube/wii natively.
series s/x is a beast, really the only reason i haven't gone raspberry pi route but still so attractive
vita is easy yet also a bit janky re: getting non-propriety storage to work. I'm normally pretty good at these things but it's the only console I had to go back and try to do something again lol (you basically have to delete the hack you just put on to get storage working or something iirc).

very jealous of your crt pick ups. Can't find them anywhere.

lol didn't read the rest of the post.
My vita hack was different to yours then? But I have the newer non-oled version.
Saturn core was alright on series s when I briefly tried it. Not perfect, but definitely playable.

on the 3ds: nds and 3ds (i haven't fucked w/ nds yet, it is extra steps but it is very doable)

the 3DS can also play GBA games if you have the roms

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3837908&pagenumber=92#post507716653

Nice good to know re 3ds. Since I have the analogue pocket tho I am using the gba on that! I now have... 4 handhelds in active use (if you count the phone)? It's an embarrassment of riches! And a frustration of things plugged in on my nightstand.

Setting up the "other" storage was a little weird and unintuitive but I didn't need to uninstall anything to do so! And then I went overboard and almost filled a 128gb card with all of the weird games I ever thought "hm, I'd look at that if it weren't 40 dollars" or whatever. I have a folder called "landfill tactics" now, which I feel is really a genre on handhelds. If I ever make a trpg I am definitely calling it landfill tactics

Also yeah the vita I have is the old fat vita, maybe that made it easier? But also like... I think they made it even easier to hack this January somehow.

Someone ported Super Mario 64 to be playable on a browser
https://augustberchelmann.com/mario

hm, never played it!

Def do the Wii mod but make sure to get one of the earlier models that supported GC bc the later ones don’t.

anybody got any experience of those anbernic handhelds for retro games?

have narrowed it down, mainly based on prices and availability, to the RG351P or a RG353VS - the former is £95, the better horizontal form factor but 2 years old now, the latter is £115, vertical with a better processor

(the horizontal 353 is £150 and the 2GB version of the VS is similar, but i'm not sure i want to go that high)

it'll be for mame, pico8, ps1, maybe n64 (i think the 351 might struggle with n64), that kind of vintage

(i have nothing newer than a PS2. actually, does a PS2 do emulation? i've seen the FMCB and play-from-sd card mods)

PS2 has always been a bit wonky for emulation with MegaDrive/Genesis working the best, but relatively recently, retroarch was ported to PS2, and after decades there is finally a "just burn a CD/DVD" exploit that can load arbitrary programs on a PS2 without having a haxxor l33t friend copy over the necessary exploit files onto a spare memcard. There used to be a chicken/egg problem where you couldn't get the exploit files onto a memcard without an already exploited memcard. No longer.

Probably you will want to end up just using the DVD once to copy the exploit over to a memcard yourself, so you can save wear and tear on the drive.

Ha

I've spent most of the last twenty years ogling Sega Saturns and wondering when I'll ever buy one just for the purpose of finally playing Radiant Silvergun (the only Treasure game I haven't played to completion)

And just today learned it's been ported to Switch! amazing

Whoa thanks for the tip on Radiant Silvergun.

the saturn is such a fascinating console as a westerner. i'd definitely recommend getting one if you're into that sort of thing but you'll need some sort of way to play burned discs due to the obscene prices of games. a pseudo saturn cart is probably the cheapest and easiest, but the phantom mod chip is very easy to install (just need to solder 1 wire and connect some ribbon cables) and you wouldn't need to "boot" the game from the pseudo saturn launcher. then there's the satiator if you're looking for the luxury option

my rg353vs turned up yesterday and I've been trying things out on it. MAME is hit and miss and seemingly no diagnostics if something just fails to play. i only got robotron working through the megadrive williams games cart (which I'd forgotten i'd owned until i found the box).

SNES games seem to work fine, n64 even. and they are tiny because they were cart based and memory was expensive.

ripped a couple of my ps1 games and they are larger, 100s of mb, but worked fine

thing seems ideally suited for gb and nds games but neither me nor my brother had one so that's a bit of a hole. i might post on the retro recommendations thread.

oh and things I've written for pico-8 which i was keen to try, don't quite work because they are multi-cart - which let's me do the map in something a bit more capable than pico8's map editor. might just be a case of copying the map cart over too, or squashing then together.

for those who are interested, the analogue duo (turbografx/pc engine/etc) machine goes on pre-order tomorrow at 8am pacific. i have a pocket and a mister and i am not a NEC-head so i don't think there's a use case for me, but if you are interested in open FPGA, it's an option! (that is possibly technically cheaper than a mister? but no idea how powerful or supported it'll be. a lot of question marks. and also you're waiting for an analogue to ship. and also it's HDMI out so if you were thinking of combining with a CRT, not ideal, mister's the play.)

fwiw i don't get the impression that ps1/saturn will ever be on the analogue pocket, and i don't see any evidence that the duo will be more powerful than the pocket, but uhh idk maybe someone out there knows better than me? another point for the mister, in that case -- ps1 is perfect on there, and saturn is getting there from what i've tried. can't wait until more stuff is added to the saturn core, namely uhh saving so i can play some saturn rpgs

correction: FPGA, not open FPGA

How do you like the pocket in terms of feel/durability compared to original handhelds?

the screen looks great, i've heard people complain that it's not an OLED but honestly it feels comparable to other OLED screens I've looked at (vita, phones, etc). just beautiful to look at.

not in love with the form -- it's about the size of a game boy color, but maybe a hair deeper, i'd prefer something a little wider like a DMG gameboy but absolutely not a dealbreaker. just gotta get used to that form factor again after decades of the ds/psp wide form factor.

the build quality seems fine but the plastic feels a little... cheap? like it kinda reminds me of that 3d printer plastic. the buttons are squishy in a way i don't love either, like they don't snap back as fast as i'd hope (for a/b/x/y). again not a deal breaker, just a little more... mid than i expected. dpad is very DMG/NES-like (minus the little grippy cut-ins), doesn't feel too wobbly like i'm gonna accidentally press DR when i wanna press D. It's no saturn dpad but what is? i'd still rate the d-pad as "good." and L/R/power/volume/select/start/menu are all good and clicky, as they should be. L/R in particular feel as good as the GBA ones did, and better than the PSP/vita/DS/3DS ones did.

i've mostly been using it for the fpga cores (vs the game slot) as i can only find one GB game in my house (and no GBA games dammit--i have tactics ogre somewhere!!). when you're using a cartridge it's luxurious-- the multiple display modes all look incredible. these are not available yet in the cores (aka with r0mz) though, which is kinda putting me off playing until they allow that. people have said this will be available in the future but who knows when, it doesn't seem like it should be hard to do? like it has the ability there? but i guess there's issues with analogue actually supporting the core scene here. and updates are slooooow (from analogue). the cores, of course, are done by nerds on the internet, so they're updating and popping up all the time.

if you want hardware-accurate playing it's hard not to recommend it because literally what other options are there lol. if you just want something that'll play games and don't care about the fpga aspect though, i dunno if the extra cost really makes it worth it vs like the miyoo mini or whatever (have not played but heard good things) using software emulation. i did expect it to feel a little... fancier. but it does what i want it to do, so i'm happy.

https://i.imgur.com/dxJpFPa.png

apologies for the amateur photography, but here's a side-by-side of a bunch of the visual modes for the pocket, with the core used for roms included. this thing has exactly 10x the resolution of the DMG, which lets them do cool stuff like draw in the lines in between pixels, and someone has done an amazing job recreating the old machines-- dmg looks just like a real dmg but better, pocket looks like a pocket but better, pocket light looks like how i imagined the pocket light looking -- but even without that extra mask, in the default "analogue gb", no-extra-frills mode looks solid here. compare to the last one, and see why it bugs me? look at the color of the shadow under the P - it's not even the same color! it's like some weird hybrid of the DMG and GBPL palettes, but more washed out, it doesn't really commit to anything and you lose the "intent" of those shadings that blurred into something pretty back in the day.

i can't compare the GBC and GBA cores to real carts yet, i might try to get a cheap one of each on ebay just to compare, but i imagine it'll just make me similarly frustrated.

oh and one last minor gripe: the cart slot is completely, like, exposed, which makes it feel very weird to not have a cart in? like it'd be too easy to bump and screw up the slot? so i just permanently keep the only game i could find plugged in, which happens to be pokemon red, which i am self conscious about because i am fine with being seen in public as a nerd who plays game boy but not a nerd who plays pokemon red on game boy

Thanks for the detailed review! I'd always been tempted by the idea of a "luxury" handheld, so less than stellar buttons and dpad would definitely have been a disappointment after a multi-year waitlist.

i would still say -- unless fpga emulation is important to you, the most luxurious handheld one can get is like, a ps vita 1000 (jailbroken, which is dead easy to do at home), or an android phone with a good wraparound controller. i might change my tune a few firmwares (or cores) down the line tho! i mean my dang phone can almost handle dreamcast and it's a pixel 4a. the pocket currently tops out at like snes

I should figure out where I stashed my psp. I lost it for nearly a decade having thought it was gone after I moved, and then found it only to not have the right charger but jury-rigged something that would only get it up to like 10%

It was hackable to play emulators and I have to agree even on the mere PSP, Sony hardware + emulator is kind of amazing

psp is great too! sadly the battery on mine turfed out, and then i bought a replacement online which proceeded to grow very big and scary...

but the vita screen... my god. it's insane that that thing is as old as it is and still looks better than most things on the market. just a gorgeous screen. (the original vita specifically -- as i understand it, they cut the OLED from the slim vita!)

Ok I had had a digital io board on my mister and was running hdmi thru a series of different hdmi converters/scalers for crt... Finally caved and bought an analog io board. If you plan on using this thing on a crt even occasionally, JUST GET THE ANALOG IO BOARD. You can still use hdmi (afaict the only advantage of the Digi board is it lets you slot two ram cards, which is... Unnecessary for all stable core releases?) and the difference between a pure analog signal and an hdmi to converter... My god, THIS IS WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE

Also, the 8bitdo m30 controller is so damn nice

I'd use it for everything if the 6 button layout didn't feel weird for... Anything non-sega. I have an sn30 for everything else, which is... Fine? But not as good

How do you find the latency on bluetooth?
How are the various clone portables in terms of controller feel/responsiveness?

i don't use the BT much, i've just got them plugged by USB. i'm sitting right beside this little 20" trinitron so no need for it. i'll try it later today though

https://rpubs.com/misteraddons/inputlatency

from that list it looks like the worst case is about 30ms lag, which is a frame i think? seems within tolerable limits, much better than the brutal experience i had with trying a 3rd party switch controller on BT with my phone that one time (that was like 3 second lag. brutal)

30ms is closer to 2 frames, a 60hz frame is about 16.7ms

2 frames total lag (from button press to onscreen result) would be very good indeed but game, console, and monitor-specific lag all need to be taken into account and that list has latency figures *only* for the controllers and *only* when used with the mister

ok last spam of the day 6th gen poll (ps2 era)

any of yall use one of the many many handhelds emulator machines?

Think there was talk of this in the "what are you playing now", or some other I love games thread

Yeah, I recently got an RG35XX and I've been playing it tons. Currently working through some of the GBA library that I paid to access on Switch, but which I'd much rather play on this cuter/more portable device. I was worried that the 3.5 inch screen would seem too cramped, but it doesn't bother me at all.

It's also been fun for light tinkering; I installed a custom OS, and took it apart to install improved shoulder buttons/put some electrical tape under the D-pad, which was registering false diagonals. So now it feels really like it's "mine," which is not how I ever expected to feel about a piece of cheap consumer electronics. These things are neat!

looks way more affordable/easier to get than an Analogue... tempting

Yeah if not being FPGA isn't an issue for you, and you don't mind a cheap build quality, I say go for it. You get the added benefit of being able to play older console titles too, not just handhelds. Some of these things can even run up to sixth-generation consoles. As m bison noted, there are many of these things on the market, with a wide range of capabilities. It's quite the rabbit hole.

the steam deck is awesome but obviously much more than just an emulator handheld and much more expensive.
my only gripe is that many of the recommended "emulation launchers" are written by linux newbies who are figuring it out as they go along. not really an issue for most people, but there have been a few times where i thought i'd contribute or fix a bug, took one look at the code, and immediately dropped the idea

i still haven't installed emudeck. i hate steam deck desktop mode.

Chuck Tatum was your sticklebrick thing a "Multiface"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiface

I’ve got a miyoo mini+ loaded with onionOS. it’s great

i still haven't installed emudeck. i hate steam deck desktop mode.

yeah desktop mode is pretty intolerable without a mouse and keyboard, i generally try to do any non-steam thing remotely over ssh. but i'm also a huge linux dork who is over the moon that a best-in-class gaming device runs the OS

also if you're more used to the retropie-style retroarch+emulationstation approach, there's also retrodeck you can try but both will require dropping down to desktop mode :)

i got paid today so i dropped some money on the retroid pocket 4, i like that it'll handle all the n64 games im interested in and some ps2 as well