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

[KingofNothing]

Xbox emulation is, to put it nicely, shit, but it's loads better than it was 5 years ago.

Oh, and archive.org has all the roms you want.

That's a shame, I would figure a Microsoft product would make it easier to figure out the emulation game for PC, but I guess not. Time to mess with MAME again then. Got a few arcades games to nostalgia over like Spider-Man. Loved that shit

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

But seriously what is the best Lightgun game?

I feel like you have to divide by horror and not horror because there's almost an equal amount of Lightgun titles dedicated to horror. There was Aliens: Armageddon that I never played. Was never ported either. It will probably take another 20 years for MAME to emulate that. Then there's Alien 3 The Gun that was pretty fun and had replica Pulse Rifles.

For Horror I would go with either House of the Dead 1 (for nostalgia), CarnEvil or Area 51.

For non-horror easily the Virtua Cop and Time Crisis games.

House of the Dead 3 stands out because of the pump-action shotgun, that changed things up a bit. Time Crisis is my favorite, the cover system made it so a game over felt like your own fault. You could've have ducked into cover vs you shouldn't have spent so much time in cover. Rarely did I blame the game itself and as a consequence of that I feed the machine money like it was a hungry horse without even thinking about it. Virtua Cop and many other light gun games usually ended on a "THIS IS BULLSHIT!" and walking away.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

But seriously what is the best Lightgun game?

Silent Scope

That full rifle with the secondary screen in the scope was pure awesome.

 

[Martys_not_smarty]

I just remembered a special kind of person. A mix of the pro emulation and 'emulation is piracy' guy which you can only call a hypocrite.

I have no joke seen these posts un-ironically on gaming forums - a person opposed to emulation unless it suits their needs which usually boil down to x game has no official localisation or x game is too expensive to get.

The mental gymnastics they have to apply to justify their emulation but at the same time shit on the person who just wants to play Sonic 2 on their PC are mind boggling.

I saw something similar too but it was about repro cartridges for games never released and it was a doozy of a pissing contest in the youtube comments. It was one some video from Pat the NES Punk and the guy who started it was some sperg called Krist the 30 Year Old Boomer as if the name didn't give that away, basically it boiled down to him going on the platform of if ebay doesn't bother to do it's job than it's ok to sell them. (I might be able to find the chain if it's still on the video but that Kris guy is d-list lolcow material if there ever was any that's why I bring up the name).

 

[Pissmaster]

I saw something similar too but it was about repro cartridges for games never released and it was a doozy of a pissing contest in the youtube comments. It was one some video from Pat the NES Punk and the guy who started it was some sperg called Krist the 30 Year Old Boomer as if the name didn't give that away, basically it boiled down to him going on the platform of if ebay doesn't bother to do it's job than it's ok to sell them. (I might be able to find the chain if it's still on the video but that Kris guy is d-list lolcow material if there ever was any that's why I bring up the name).

Hahahahaha, Lord almighty who gives a shit if unreleased games get repros?

Pat the NES Punk

Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Nope, everyone should get an Everdrive if they can afford it, or one of those 143-in-1 carts from Wish if they can't. You'd be dumb not to. Collecting games is a fun hobby, but shit goes off the rails when it comes to the crazy rarest games, considering nothing but the ultra-rare promo ones like Campus Challenge are really worth all that much in the grand scheme of things. The very cheapest Tesla starts at $35,000, and the extremely rare Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak goes for around $1,000, so I guess if you had 34 copies of the rarest NES game, you'd still need 20 copies of Mega Man 1 to buy a base model Tesla Model 3.

Oh man the Gamecube was many people's first taste of Nintendo's incompetence. People were fucking hyped for the N64 and the energy was kept going for the system for years due to Rare.

But when Nintendo sold Rare and launched the gamecube, people were not happy. There's a reason why it rotted on shelves for years and was put under heavy discount, and even then it didn't move. Outside of smash, metroid, and thousand year door very few titles garnered attention like their n64 counterparts did. It also sold significantly less than the n64. Nintendo pulling an artstyle switcharoo with Zelda didn't help things either(especially since Windwaker was the weakest console zelda at the time and the later sequels on the DS were pretty bad).

No joke, Gamestop was getting rid of gamecube games for pennies because they couldn't move them, of course this is why I have a huge Gamecube collection. Literally nothing was held back from discount. Outside of Gatchaforce I have all the noteworthy titles.

You probably shouldn't collect games you don't even like just because they're cheap, that's basically the definition of hoarding

Gamecube's got a great reputation online today because it was really great for kids who grew up with it, and they didn't need rare because they had a bunch of games older audiences overlooked, like Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom and The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Plus, isn't Wind Waker often widely considered the best 21st century Zelda game? It's definitely up there with Minish Cap and Breath of the Wild.

Gamestop wasn't getting rid of them for pennies, they did have a 75% off sale at one point, though when that happened, everything had been picked over at a lesser discount but I guess I could have gotten like Madden '06 for a dollar. And of course, all the Wavebirds and orange controllers were long gone, and I wanted to buy up a bunch but I missed the boat

 

[Sigma]

Has anyone here soft modded a PS2 to run games off a HDD?

Any advice? How easy is the process these days?

Thinking of buying a fat PS2 to do that. I use PCSX2 but a lot of games are pretty sketchy or just dont work properly. Plus want to play on my TV and sofa rather than at the PC for a more comfy experience.

I've done it. It takes a decent amount of work, really. I first used an HDD application to install freemcboot, then I installed OPL from there and I used an HDD with some special PC software in order to load games onto it. Almost all games work just fine fortunately.

 

[Trashfire Garbagefuck]

Has anyone here soft modded a PS2 to run games off a HDD?

Any advice? How easy is the process these days?

Thinking of buying a fat PS2 to do that. I use PCSX2 but a lot of games are pretty sketchy or just dont work properly. Plus want to play on my TV and sofa rather than at the PC for a more comfy experience.

I've done it. It takes a decent amount of work, really. I first used an HDD application to install freemcboot, then I installed OPL from there and I used an HDD with some special PC software in order to load games onto it. Almost all games work just fine fortunately.

you can buy a converter for SD cards as well, they load even faster than the drives the ps2 supports and you dont need to buy a special cable to hook it up to your computer like the drives do. the process is pretty much the same but there's dedicated guides to the sd card set up too. In any case once it's set up properly it should all work flawlessly except CD based ps2 games need to be converted from bin/cue to iso, which is a bit of a process, but it can be done. I'm not sure how to get multi-disk games running this way yet but you can convert them to single disk games in some weird format. I haven't tried any of that yet but apparently it all works if converted properly. Some places have the games pre-converted, but normal rom sites will have the original files.

if you're feeling lazy you can just buy a memory card preinstalled with freemcboot and all the good programs off ebay, then buy a spindle of good quality blank DVD-Rs. there's also the option of streaming games from your PC via ethernet but that's a whole nother can of worms.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Gamestop wasn't getting rid of them for pennies, they did have a 75% off sale at one point, though when that happened, everything had been picked over at a lesser discount but I guess I could have gotten like Madden '06 for a dollar. And of course, all the Wavebirds and orange controllers were long gone, and I wanted to buy up a bunch but I missed the boat

I dunno I seemed to hit it right because when the huge discounts hit like buy 2 get the 5 games free deal they still had decent games for it. I got Four Swords that way. Like I dunno how they distributed their used games back then but the stores around me had everything. I got the gamecube resident evils for real cheap and Twin Snakes.

Twilight Princess for the gamecube was well below 20 bucks and I remember picking up jedi outcast for like 2 dollars and change.

The Jirachi demo disc ran me 50 cents that's another one I remember. I bought the resident evil 4 demo with it and the Star Wars demo disc that had the atari games on it didn't cost me anythign after the discounts.

They also had gradual discount deals like the more used games you bought the bigger the % they would take off(it was up to 90% IIRC).

Gamestop used to have good deals but they suck now.

 

[Kenobi]

If wasn't for discovering Roms and Emulators back in the late 90's I probably wouldn't be much of a Retro Gamer today

What could people even emulate in the 90´s tetris?

So what are you guys feelings about playing on real hardware vs emulated?
Personally i like playing on real stuff except for ps2 for some reason no matter what i do with it it looks awful on hd tvs.

 

[I can't imagine]

What could people even emulate in the 90´s tetris?

So what are you guys feelings about playing on real hardware vs emulated?
Personally i like playing on real stuff except for ps2 for some reason no matter what i do with it it looks awful on hd tvs.

Several NES and SNES emulators were out by 97/98. They weren't exactly an ideal experience compared to modern emulators, but they did at least kinda work for some games.

Most of the time, I prefer consoles, but emulators are much more convenient so that's what I usually wind up using. For NES, I'm kinda mixed as to preferring console or emu. The console experience is nostalgic, but the carts can be a pain to get working and the original NES controllers were far from ergonomic and my old hands can't handle using them for long periods of time.

 

[Meaty Spaghetti]

What could people even emulate in the 90´s tetris?

So what are you guys feelings about playing on real hardware vs emulated?
Personally i like playing on real stuff except for ps2 for some reason no matter what i do with it it looks awful on hd tvs.

Emulation, NES was decent, sound was horrible well I using the windows version of Nesticle, the Dos version had somewhat better sound, and MMC2 support was terrible meaning Punch Out looked like garbage, but also thats how I discovered there was a Mega Man 5 and 6 for NES even though I think played the Hacks called Mega Crap and Mega Fag instead before I played the real games

 

[MysticMisty]

The console experience is nostalgic, but the carts can be a pain to get working

My ex used to half joke that in order to play NES you had to give the cart and the console a blowjob before it'd finally boot right.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

there's also the option of streaming games from your PC via ethernet but that's a whole nother can of worms.

I did that in 03/04 or whenever it was and it wasn't harder than doing the same thing with an Xbox, or at least I don't get any sudden rage flashbacks thinking about setting it up.

What could people even emulate in the 90´s tetris?

I played through Chrono Trigger with zSnes on a 166mhz computer in 97 and it was janky as shit but it worked, then Playstation emulators arrived and I knew a guy that played through Xenogears that way. Bleem allowed Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid to be played on a Dreamcast. A month after Ocarina of Time was released on N64 it could be played on PC.
A lot of the insane emulation stuff happened in the 90's.

 

[XYZpdq]

Yeah there was a ton of emulation in the 90s that worked fine.

 

[Pissmaster]

Pokemon on SMYGB was a big thing for any kids who didn't have a Game Boy.

A month after Ocarina of Time was released on N64 it could be played on PC.
A lot of the insane emulation stuff happened in the 90's.

That's true, but you had to have a pretty high end machine, which back then meant you bought it within the last 3 months because technology was advancing at a breakneck pace. Most PCs couldn't run anything N64 well at all.

I played through a good chunk of Quest 64 because it was one of the only games that could run reasonably well on my 1998 Pentium 2 shitbox with an impressive-for-the-time 6GB HDD.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Pokemon on SMYGB was a big thing for any kids who didn't have a Game Boy.

That's true, but you had to have a pretty high end machine, which back then meant you bought it within the last 3 months because technology was advancing at a breakneck pace. Most PCs couldn't run anything N64 well at all.

I played through a good chunk of Quest 64 because it was one of the only games that could run reasonably well on my 1998 Pentium 2 shitbox with an impressive-for-the-time 6GB HDD.

True, but Voodoo 2's were cheap at the time(that's why I had two of them) and Intel had accidentally released a processor at ~$170 that was faster than their $650 top of the line one(the P2 450mhz). For the first time ever it was possible to have a monster machine at shitbox pricing.

 

[Vapewizard]

So what are you guys feelings about playing on real hardware vs emulated?
Personally i like playing on real stuff except for ps2 for some reason no matter what i do with it it looks awful on hd tvs.

Depends on the hardware. I have a physical copy of Banjo Kazooie and Majora's mask that I got years ago cause I have an N64 anyway but I never ended up finishing them and at this point I don't feel like going back to them anymore cause the N64 controller feels very uncomfortable compared to my 8bitdo. If I feel like going back to the games again I'll probably look into fanmade HD reskins or something cause Majora's mask 3D sounds inferior aside from the graphics (Actually on that note I did read that there's modders who fixed the zora swimming and stuff so I could get a modded copy on citra) and I don't have an Xbone to get rare replay on.

 

[muh_moobs]

What could people even emulate in the 90´s tetris?

So what are you guys feelings about playing on real hardware vs emulated?
Personally i like playing on real stuff except for ps2 for some reason no matter what i do with it it looks awful on hd tvs.

Games are designed for specific hardware, and emulating changes that part of the experience.

Emulation has it's places, however.

First, any retro games enthusiast ought to emulate a game they aren't familiar with rather than buying the game "blind" just because you think you might like it.

Second, no one, and I mean NO ONE, should be paying $5000 for a copy of Little Samson on NES. Emulate that shit until you can find a bootleg at a reasonable price.

Third, eventually, every machine on the planet will fail and die, meaning that one day the ONLY way to play old games will be via emulation, even if via hardware like the "Nintendo on a Chip"(NOC) clone consoles from China. If the emulation infrastructure isn't "built" while the original hardware still functions, it'll be too late to do it when the equipment fails.

As an example, NOC machines can't play Battletoads or Castlevania 3, along with a list of other games. If the means of emulating those games aren't achieved before those original cartridges fail, those games, as examples, could be lost forever.

the N64 controller feels very uncomfortable compared

Go third party, homie.

 

[Marissa Moira]

A game store near me had a "Corona Virus Special" they were all "100 in 1" game carts for assorted systems and transparent colors for 10 bucks.

I bought one out of novelty and it does have flash memory saves that seem to work.

Also I got the SNES version of Sim Ant because there's no way in hell will that get an official release in a modern media format ever again.

I also heard that there might be an official port of Primal Rage for those scaled down arcade machines. Do you think it will be 100% accurate to the arcade or will it be one of the disastrous home port attempts? Primal rage had a ton of copy protection on the machine that made all previous emulation attempts impossible.

 

[Pissmaster]

So what are you guys feelings about playing on real hardware vs emulated?
Personally i like playing on real stuff except for ps2 for some reason no matter what i do with it it looks awful on hd tvs.

Emulation, usually, but only for older stuff. I don't collect SNES games because I've had enough of my old saves wipe as a kid, and SNES emulation is perfect these days. Not to mention, I can back up my saves and copy them onto whatever I'm using to emulate SNES today.

Though there are a number of games out there that you can't really play right in emulation no matter what. Lightgun games are a big one, and music games need frame-perfect timing that just never works right in emulation. Plus, just about every console 6th generation onwards is hackable in some way, so even if the emulator has problems with your game, it's trivial to sideload it onto your real system and play.

With older systems, you could just download every single game ever made for them and it wouldn't take up that much space, so you could just copy them all onto your emulation machine and go to town. But once discs started rolling in, that stopped being much of an option. I think PS1 alone is just short of a full terabyte, which even today is a healthy chunk of even a big hard drive. Compare that with its contemporary, the N64, which is around 5GB. Warehousing 10 years worth of Madden and FIFA games isn't so bad when we're talking a hundred megabytes, but you start to feel like an idiot when those games you'll never even consider touching are taking up several gigabytes, and you can't delete them because you won't have a complete collection, and that kind of travesty would cause any one of us to start autistically screeching.

A game store near me had a "Corona Virus Special" they were all "100 in 1" game carts for assorted systems and transparent colors for 10 bucks.

I bought one out of novelty and it does have flash memory saves that seem to work.

I'd buy a few of those colorful multicarts. I love 'em. Western NESes aren't too well built and everyone's encountered the problem with bending pins, so the less you have to swap a cartridge, the better. Just buy a multicart and leave it in there.

Also I got the SNES version of Sim Ant because there's no way in hell will that get an official release in a modern media format ever again.

You might as well scoop up every classic Sim game you can find because EA sure as shit isn't doing anything with them. Sim Ant on SNES is the best version of that game, anyway.

I also heard that there might be an official port of Primal Rage for those scaled down arcade machines. Do you think it will be 100% accurate to the arcade or will it be one of the disastrous home port attempts? Primal rage had a ton of copy protection on the machine that made all previous emulation attempts impossible.

You mean like Arcade1Up? Those machines run straight-up MAME on a cheap Allwinner SoC, so however it runs in MAME is how it'd be on those, I'd imagine. Boot it up on your own PC and see how well it works.