Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

[Two Dollars]

Emulation being "delegated" (relegated?) to devices (starting with "cheap chink shit") downplays it, as it's the still the most complete choice if you don't want a physical box to hook up to the TV, or if you already didn't have an existing collection of physical games. Emulation boxes weren't really feasible for stand-alone consoles (except for really old stuff like the Atari Flashback) until the early 2010s with stuff like the Raspberry Pi and the Nintendo Mini consoles, which are emulation boxes. But the Mini consoles have long since been continued, and the Raspberry Pi needs a case and some fucking around to have a GUI.

Before Raspberry Pis, we would just softmod consoles. A Wii and original Xbox could play up through SNES and some N64 just fine, and a DS/PSP could also emulate some stuff.

 

[Give Them Enough Rope]

Before Raspberry Pis, we would just softmod consoles. A Wii and original Xbox could play up through SNES and some N64 just fine, and a DS/PSP could also emulate some stuff.

Chinkshit lead-filled portables just don't have the same appeal to me as hacking an old console. Modding my PS3 and Wii last year made me feel powerful.

 

[Never Scored]

Emulation being "delegated" (relegated?) to devices (starting with "cheap chink shit") downplays it, as it's the still the most complete choice if you don't want a physical box to hook up to the TV, or if you already didn't have an existing collection of physical games. Emulation boxes weren't really feasible for stand-alone consoles (except for really old stuff like the Atari Flashback) until the early 2010s with stuff like the Raspberry Pi and the Nintendo Mini consoles, which are emulation boxes. But the Mini consoles have long since been continued, and the Raspberry Pi needs a case and some fucking around to have a GUI.

I just meant premium retro euthuist projects aren't going to use software emulation going forward, while cheaper options like those Chinese boxes with 2tb worth of games preloaded will use software emulation. I know software emulation itself is not going anywhere, just that, as I said, it's going to be mostly on cheap chink shit, phones, and PCs(Steam Decks are PCs). There was a point where new devices that the community was excited about such as the RetroN 5 relied on emulation. That's not going to happen as much anymore because everyone who cares enough to buy something like that wants FPGAs.

Just to be clear, we're talking about a specific, narrow market here of retro game enthuisits who care enough to buy devices dedicated to retro gaming. There are more people emulating Super Mario World on Switch than will ever buy an FPGA device to play it on, but those people were also never going to buy a Super Console X.

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

I recently bought an Everdrive X5 from Krikzz. It works flawlessly, but the game selection menu looks kind of crusty. I'm amazed he's still churning this stuff out since he apparently lives in Sumy Oblast which is directly across the border from Kursk.

The cartridge is well made and feels basically the same as the originals (without the age realted rattle most of them have now). The only issue with the X5 is that you can't play any SNES game that require special chips to run. So no Mode 7 games, no Megaman X2 and X3, no Super Mario RPG and so on. I think about 70 games don't work on the cartridge but most of them don't sound too interesting anyway or I already have the game on the original cartridge so i just bought this one.

Original for reference:


The cartridge is designed to also fit US spec consoles (Krikzz doesn't sell carts that look like real US carts as far as I know)


It takes micro SD cards and has a red indicator LED besides the slot:


There are SNES Everdrive carts that can play almost all of the games released on the console but those cost almost four times as much (60 bucks for the X5 while the FXPak PRO costs 230) so I'll just emulate the special chip games if I really want to play them.

 

[Never Scored]

I recently bought an Everdrive X5 from Krikzz. It works flawlessly, but the game selection menu looks kind of crusty. I'm amazed he's still churning this stuff out since he apparently lives in Sumy Oblast which is directly across the border from Kursk.

The cartridge is well made and feels basically the same as the originals (without the age realted rattle most of them have now). The only issue with the X5 is that you can't play any SNES game that require special chips to run. So no Mode 7 games, no Megaman X2 and X3, no Super Mario RPG and so on. I think about 70 games don't work on the cartridge but most of them don't sound too interesting anyway or I already have the game on the original cartridge so i just bought this one.

Original for reference:
View attachment 6914455
View attachment 6914457
The cartridge is designed to also fit US spec consoles (Krikzz doesn't sell carts that look like real US carts as far as I know)
View attachment 6914530

It takes micro SD cards and has a red indicator LED besides the slot:
View attachment 6914472

There are SNES Everdrive carts that can play almost all of the games released on the console but those cost almost four times as much (60 bucks for the X5 while the FXPak PRO costs 230) so I'll just emulate the special chip games if I really want to play them.

On good thing about the SD2SNES project is it is open source, so there are versions on Ali that work just fine. I've found Krikzz's carts much more reliable in terms of not dying or chewing up the SD card, though, so I try to stick to his carts.

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

On good thing about the SD2SNES project is it is open source, so there are versions on Ali that work just fine. I've found Krikzz's carts much more reliable in terms of not dying or chewing up the SD card, though, so I try to stick to his carts.

I'd also rather give him my money than give it to a bunch of chink copy cats. I really don't want to deliberately support the chinese economy.

 

[Never Scored]

Check out this blast from the past. I dug it out because you showed off your new X5. I got this back in 2011. It's almost old enough to be considered retro itself. It took CF cards, didn't alphabitize the roms and you had to manually create empty save files,(just an empty text file called "romname.sav"). Flash carts have come a long way.


Here's my first Kirkzz cart. Got it around 2013. This one takes regular sized SD cards.

 

[Baraka Obama]

I got my first (super) everdrive back in 2012 way back when Krikzz was manually handling the orders himself. The old UA stamps were charming.

Before Raspberry Pis, we would just softmod consoles. A Wii and original Xbox could play up through SNES and some N64 just fine, and a DS/PSP could also emulate some stuff.

Chinkshit lead-filled portables just don't have the same appeal to me as hacking an old console. Modding my PS3 and Wii last year made me feel powerful.

A modded Wii is still fantastic, hook it up to a CRT and you're golden.

Similarly I find a DSi XL to be a fairly good way to play Game Gear games of all things, don't play them too often but the screen has huge pixels.

I'm amazed he's still churning this stuff out since he apparently lives in Sumy Oblast which is directly across the border from Kursk.

He used to live in Sumy but fled in the early days of the war. He's currently living in Spain but most of his team is still in Lviv afaik. Not sure how manufacturing is being handled but they seem to still be produced in Ukraine.

There are SNES Everdrive carts that can play almost all of the games released on the console but those cost almost four times as much (60 bucks for the X5 while the FXPak PRO costs 230) so I'll just emulate the special chip games if I really want to play them.

I ended up replacing every low end Everdrive I ever bought with a more expensive one, lesson learned was to just buy the top end one. Yeah it's pricey but better to buy once.

 

[Two Dollars]

I got my first (super) everdrive back in 2012 way back when Krikzz was manually handling the orders himself. The old UA stamps were charming.

My Everdrive 64 is from around 2010-2011 and has held up extremely well. It didn’t have a custom label, so it looks like an All-Star Baseball cartridge with an SD card slot cut out.

I thought about replacing it with a SummerCart64 (they’re a little under $100, or closer to $50 on AliExpress), but I don’t play my real N64 enough to justify it when my current EverDrive still works great.

 

[Stasi]

Wow what a blast from the past, I remember looking these carts up in like 2012 or 2013 but they were way out of my price range at the time, like well over £100 for a Mega Drive cart.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

That sounds like it could be reversed duty cycles.

That's the one. Generation NEX was a major disappointment because while there was chinkshit circulating around malls and flea markets during the time (often with an N64-style controller), the NEX promised an experience that would bring your NES games to a modern TV (for 2005). Not only did it have a lot of build problems but a few websites reviewing it cracked it open and it was just a NOAC complete with the tell-tale blobs of epoxy, in other words, the same stuff that had sold but without the pirated games (maybe a little better build quality but not what it was selling for)

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

I got my first (super) everdrive back in 2012 way back when Krikzz was manually handling the orders himself. The old UA stamps were charming.



A modded Wii is still fantastic, hook it up to a CRT and you're golden.

Similarly I find a DSi XL to be a fairly good way to play Game Gear games of all things, don't play them too often but the screen has huge pixels.

He used to live in Sumy but fled in the early days of the war. He's currently living in Spain but most of his team is still in Lviv afaik. Not sure how manufacturing is being handled but they seem to still be produced in Ukraine.

I ended up replacing every low end Everdrive I ever bought with a more expensive one, lesson learned was to just buy the top end one. Yeah it's pricey but better to buy once.

The package had a Sumy address on it so they might still storing some there. The cart says it was assembled in November 2024.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

A modded Wii is still fantastic, hook it up to a CRT and you're golden.

I do have a modded Wii myself and one of my EarthBound runs was with it. My living situation means I don't have a TV that isn't shared, and my Wii (or at least critical components of it) is in storage anyway. Nor did I have a CRT to use it with and I'm really not sure if CRT has tangible advantages or if it's nostalgia/turbo autism.

That's the problem with retro console-style set-ups, it ends up all becoming extremely autistic these days, arguing over real hardware (even as prices increase and those parts start wearing out), what "feels right" and what doesn't (some of that boils down to CONSOOM nonsense but some of it doesn't), FPGA stuff (expensive!), and others. There are some chink clones that play actual games (useful only if you have games due to the price increases) but those clones often have issues themselves even still.

As far as actual non-ROM games go, I've seen obvious repros floating around ("EarthBound Uncut" being one of them) but stuff like the unique chips I'm not sure on, and I'm not even sure how popular repros are. Apparently some of the newer Everdrive-style cartridges can play them but I'm not sure if that's FPGA or what.

 

[Baraka Obama]

IDK I just think it's nice to use the real thing when I can. You don't need to go all in with it.

CRTs are the real deal, for when I'm playing alone at least, they just feel 1000x better.

 

[biggie bundu]

Been playing some SNES classics recently. Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger etc...

All this "advancement" and nothing can give me chills like any of these old hand-crafted retro titles.

Every single aspect shows care and love went into making these. Modern titles with their times new-roman corporate safe menu screens can't even compare.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Good lord... I'm gonna say something stupid.

I don't know why so many things were changed. You could argue that stuff like "Frog Sage" was closer to the original script but Treehouse doesn't give a shit about original scripts, and there are Woolseyisms like "you spoony bard" that people love.

Mack getting renamed makes sense as the Bobby Darin estate is notoriously litigious (which is why Mac Tonight went away the first time), but is Bruce Lee the same way, or did they just assume zoomers are too dumb to know who Bruce Lee was?

 

[Two Dollars]

Mack getting renamed makes sense as the Bobby Darin estate is notoriously litigious (which is why Mac Tonight went away the first time), but is Bruce Lee the same way, or did they just assume zoomers are too dumb to know who Bruce Lee was?

Obviously it’s because they would now have to address the issue of Bruce Lee being canon in the Mario universe.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Obviously it’s because they would now have to address the issue of Bruce Lee being canon in the Mario universe.

There were cameos of Link and Samus too, which would also make them part of the same universe (excepting Smash, of course) and those stayed in the remake. Besides, Mario RPG was never really part of the "canonized Mario universe" anyway with Mallow, Geno, and the mole people basically being no-shows forever.

 

[Two Dollars]

There were cameos of Link and Samus too, which would also make them part of the same universe (excepting Smash, of course) and those stayed in the remake. Besides, Mario RPG was never really part of the "canonized Mario universe" anyway with Mallow, Geno, and the mole people basically being no-shows forever.

I was half joking (even Nintendo has never cared about Mario continuity), but they probably really do want to avoid referencing real-life people unless it’s either an in-universe equivalent or something that’s explicitly fourth wall-breaking like the Game Freak rooms in Pokemon.

 

[Calandrino]

I was half joking (even Nintendo has never cared about Mario continuity), but they probably really do want to avoid referencing real-life people unless it’s either an in-universe equivalent or something that’s explicitly fourth wall-breaking like the Game Freak rooms in Pokemon.

This raises a lot of questions. I think the line was changed in the remake.