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

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