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

[Magnum Magazine]

I used lego yoda death on loop to get my dog out from under the couch. It was effective. YEEEORGGOOH

How did the dog react to the noise so that it left the couch? Fear? Annoyance? Bloodlust to finish the kill of the dying Yoda?

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Question. What version of the DS is considered the best? I’ve been looking at the DS lite for a while, but I’ve heard the New 2DS and 3DS are also really good. It just a shame they cost $200. Regardless, any answer is appreciated.

New 2DS XL is the best option for DS and 3DS games.

 

[Never Scored]

You need a wood paneled TV to really experience how old games look.
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Look at how smooth and clean it is plus you can pretend you're playing Mario on a microwave.
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We had a 20" wood grain RCA that was very similar. Every now and then the colors would go all wonky like there was a magnet on the TV, and you'd have to smack the side to fix it. Eventually the side got cracked and I discovered if you jammed a butterknife down there and wiggled it, the TV would stop acting up. It's a miracle I'm alive. You used to learn to deal with this stuff, because a big color TV like that was half a month's salary in the late 80s/early 90s.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

This is my shader stack that gives me the sensation of gaming in the dark on a CRT, the glowing bars, the analog inter-channel aliasing, the weird blend of horizontal and vertical anisotropies.

CRT filters are universally shit. Developers did not want their work to be smeary garbage, they worked on pro-grade monitors when they designed the graphics and I can tell you first-hand that a high-end pro monitor from back then looked closer to the image without a filter than any of the shit filters I have seen.

Anyone who adds a curvature filter to anything should also be skullfucked in their useless eye sockets, as pro monitors were as close to flat as they could get.

 

[CEO of Autism]

Depends on the case. Sometimes they designed the games around "smeary garbage".



Even in the case of PC and arcade games designed with clear displays in mind, the CRT masks and scanlines (depending on TVL and game resolution) transform the image quite a bit, in addition to adding natural pixel scaling, so no, those sharp CRTs over RGB are nothing like the equivalent of emulating old games in modern displays without nothing else going on. Btw, with a CRT shader you can emulate both types of displays, the low budget consumer set with an RF/composite connection, or the expensive PVM + RGB, scanline heavy, sharp look.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Depends on the case. Sometimes they designed the games around "smeary garbage".

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Even in the case of PC and arcade games designed with clear displays in mind, the CRT masks and scanlines (depending on TVL and game resolution) transform the image quite a bit, in addition to adding natural pixel scaling, so no, those sharp CRTs over RGB are nothing like the equivalent of emulating old games in modern displays without nothing else going on. Btw, with a CRT shader you can emulate both types of displays, the low budget consumer set with an RF/composite connection, or the expensive PVM + RGB, scanline heavy, sharp look.

I have yet to see a shader that can even come close to replicating an NES over composite. It's llike shader devs think everyone was using a 1971 Zenith with spade terminals for an antenna hookup connected to an RF modulator via an adaptor.

Back in the day, I was composite for NES and Genesis, S-Video for SNES, PS1, Saturn and Dreamcast when it wasn't on a 21-inch pro VGA monitor. I always went for the best possible picture, so seeing this nostalgia for games looking like shit, I just do not relate, nor do I wish to.

 

[Enig]

I have yet to see a shader that can even come close to replicating an NES over composite. It's llike shader devs think everyone was using a 1971 Zenith with spade terminals for an antenna hookup connected to an RF modulator via an adaptor.

Back in the day, I was composite for NES and Genesis, S-Video for SNES, PS1, Saturn and Dreamcast when it wasn't on a 21-inch pro VGA monitor. I always went for the best possible picture, so seeing this nostalgia for games looking like shit, I just do not relate, nor do I wish to.

What you’re admitting to here is being an autistic exception, not the target majority. Most people couldn’t be fucked to hook up anything more than the RF adapter even into the the PS1 gen, so when that’s the majority of the audience you’re drawing the game’s art for why not work its flaws into advantages instead of worrying about how sharp the edges are?

 

[Never Scored]

I have yet to see a shader that can even come close to replicating an NES over composite. It's llike shader devs think everyone was using a 1971 Zenith with spade terminals for an antenna hookup connected to an RF modulator via an adaptor.

Back in the day, I was composite for NES and Genesis, S-Video for SNES, PS1, Saturn and Dreamcast when it wasn't on a 21-inch pro VGA monitor. I always went for the best possible picture, so seeing this nostalgia for games looking like shit, I just do not relate, nor do I wish to.

My brother in Christ, 99% of people were not playing SNES or PSX with S-Video. lol

I'd say in the SNES era it was 75-80% RF. In the PSX era it was maybe a 60/40 split between composite & rf adaptors, with more people using composite toward the late 90s.

Most consumer level TVs didn't have composite until the mid 90s, and even then S-Video was rare until the early 2000s.

Shit, I remember some people having their SNES hooked up with an RF modulator, that little black cylinder with a coaxil hookup on one end and the two little forks that you screwed onto the back of TV on the other.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

My brother in Christ, 99% of people were not playing SNES or PSX with S-Video. lol

I'd say in the SNES era it was 75-80% RF and in the PSX era it was maybe a 60/40 split between composite & rf adaptors, with more people using composite toward the late 90s.

Most consumer level TVs didn't have composite until the mid 90s, and even then S-Video was rare until the early 2000s.

Shit, I remember some people having their SNES hooked up with an RF modulator, that little black cylinder with a coaxil hookup on one end, and the two little forks that you screwed onto the back of TV on the other.

It doesn't matter what most were using, or that a lot of arcade cabs in North America were shitty low-cost bootlegs with shit displays, what matters is what the devs wanted the games to look like.

Most Japanese home users from the Mega Drive onward were using Japanese D-port RGB for games and that's what the devs targeted.

 

[Never Scored]

Most Japanese home users from the Mega Drive onward were using Japanese D-port RGB for games and that's what the devs targeted.

Bullshit.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Bullshit.

Japanese market TVs had S-Video and D-Port from about 1987 onward, even on the small sets, like 12-inch sizes, so they were very commonly used.

 

[analrapist]

D-Port from about 1987 onward

To give the rest of you non-autists an idea of how insane this person is, JEITA didn't even specify D-Port until the latter half of 1999. https://www.jeita.or.jp/japanese/standard/book/RC-5237/

 

[CEO of Autism]

In the end, image output wasn't standard during the retro days, you had so many options to get different images, even color palettes varied from display to display, rf, composite, RGB, component at the very end, slot masks, shadow masks, aperture grille, anything ranging from 150 TVL displays to 1000+ TVL. The beauty of shaders is that you can mimick specific aspects that you like, combine them any way you can, nothing stops you. You want accuracy? you purchase actual hardware. You want choice? you spend a ton in having all the cables and different CRTs (even console revisions altered image quality sometimes), or you just mess around with your shader of choice —some of them so configurable and deep that I can't understand the distaste against them, so I'm gonna go with skill issue. You see a screenshot you don't like and think all shaders are shit because you don't even try tweaking them for fun to suit your tastes, and you believe there's only one good true solution to display retro games. If you can't get your desired image with something as customizable and adaptable as Guest Advanced, I call it skill issue. And no, asking me to reproduce your specific CRT over composite without me knowing what it looks like, is useless. You can decide to be open minded or not, and angrily claim everything that isn't what you have in front of you is shit, even going to autismal degrees such as claiming that different glow levels are wrong. Even on the subject of shaders, the specs and look of your actual monitor will heavily affect the look of them. Using a shader with heavy mask settings on an OLED is not the same as using a more general shader for common displays. Even monitor resolution matters when emulating a CRT mask, and what looks good on one guy's monitor, might look bad on another dude's monitor.


(Shader vs crt. By an actual open minded guy who doesn't shit on the concept of shaders by default)

What is more likely, that 100% of retro games were intended for ONE very specific type of image output (that always matches up the criteria of that guy being critical on the internet, curiously), or that it was a more complex affair that varied case by case, and therefore one should be less dogmatic about the whole issue? Fucking hell, even in the NES/SNES days you had games accounting for different aspect ratios. You can't simply claim your specific setup happens to be the correct one for 100% of cases. What is the truth here?

 

[Never Scored]

Japanese market TVs had S-Video and D-Port from about 1987 onward, even on the small sets, like 12-inch sizes, so they were very commonly used.

Maybe so, but many games were designed with tricks that used the pixel bleed that happened over composite or RF to their advantage. For example, the waterfall in sonic:


Still looks pretty good over S-Video, but it's too sharp with RGB.

Besides, even if they were targeting higher end displays, most people were not using them. Filters that are made to make people feel nostalgic are going to be created with the typical player at the time in mind, so it's a bit of a moot point.

 

[analrapist]

Filters that are made to make people feel nostalgic are going to be created

This is really all my intent is and was. Square pixels aren't how I played the game*. The Trinitron-aperture-mask approach (plus NTSC emulation, which I exaggerated to make a point previously) I used gives me the feeling I used to get. I'm not saying it's God's gift to gamers or whatever. Play games how they make you happy.

* Ironically, most of the SNES back catalogue that I played, I did play with square pixels under SNES96, 97, 9x, and ZSNES. Still enjoyed em as much. I was all-RF until Saturn, and even so, I didn't enjoy anything any less lacking sharp pixels. (Hell, I think I ended up around 200 practical lines of resolution, my old TV cut off SO MUCH of the top/bottom it's absurd.)

 

[Baraka Obama]

My brother in Christ, 99% of people were not playing SNES or PSX with S-Video. lol

I'd say in the SNES era it was 75-80% RF. In the PSX era it was maybe a 60/40 split between composite & rf adaptors, with more people using composite toward the late 90s.

Most consumer level TVs didn't have composite until the mid 90s, and even then S-Video was rare until the early 2000s.

Shit, I remember some people having their SNES hooked up with an RF modulator, that little black cylinder with a coaxil hookup on one end and the two little forks that you screwed onto the back of TV on the other.

It was a common "trick" to plug a PS1 into a VCR for TVs that didnt have composite, only RF.

Japanese market TVs had S-Video and D-Port from about 1987 onward, even on the small sets, like 12-inch sizes, so they were very commonly used.

I won't claim first hand experience but I have spent an inordinate amount of time digging through hard-off junk bins.

S-Video cables were rare, maybe single digit percent used them at peak. JP-21 RGB cables are fucking unicorns, never saw one in the wild only via auction sites. They weren't common at all, people would just use the yellow composite cable that came with systems or maybe spring for d tanshi (ypbpr) cables for 480p era system.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

To give the rest of you non-autists an idea of how insane this person is, JEITA didn't even specify D-Port until the latter half of 1999. https://www.jeita.or.jp/japanese/standard/book/RC-5237/

Ok, so I am wrong on D-Terminal, but S-Video was out in 1986 in Japan, 1987 in North America.

 

[Never Scored]

Ok, so I am wrong on D-Terminal, but S-Video was out in 1986 in Japan, 1987 in North America.

How are you so retarded that you don't understand something being available =/= mass adoption or everything being designed around it?

It's like arguing movies in the 80s were shot with betamax in mind because it existed and was of higher quality than VHS.

 

[Enig]

How are you so retarded that you don't understand something being available =/= mass adoption or everything being designed around it?

It's like arguing movies in the 80s were shot with betamax in mind because it existed and was of higher quality than VHS.

Everyone in Japan used Laserdisc at all times and everyone in Europe had a Master System, the internet said so and it can never lie to me at all ever

 

[Samuel Fuller]

How are you so retarded that you don't understand something being available =/= mass adoption or everything being designed around it?

It's like arguing movies in the 80s were shot with betamax in mind because it existed and was of higher quality than VHS.

During the bubble, people in Japan replaced their home electronics pretty frequently, so new ports and features hit critical mass a lot faster than in the west.

Keep freaking out about it, though.