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

[Baraka Obama]

I feel like you're the one who doesn't remember 20 years ago. I don't live in a particularly big town and there was a lot more than Blockbuster. Maybe 10-15 rental spots and they all had their own library. I'm not going to lie and act like popular titles were never rented out, but to act like the only way to try a game was to buy it when both rental stores and magazines with demo discs were common is farcical.

You would go to other people's houses and play games there.

You would borrow their copies and share yours.

Want to try Vice City? Your buddy's brother Mitch bought it so you go play it with them.

 

[YouDoNotHaveTheRight]

You would go to other people's houses and play games there.

This hit me right in the nostalgia. Does anyone else that was generally good at games and not a sore loser miss having your buddies tard rage next to them and chuck controllers if you beat them in a game?

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

It really was a good handheld with a lot of great gems that will probably never see the light of day on another console again.

Looks like I’m going to have to download some rom packs.

You would go to other people's houses and play games there.

That’s how i first played Halo. My best friend that i had before kids borrowed his cousin’s xbox and we had a blast playing it.

I miss the days of THQ wrestling games, Goldeneye, and Halo 1/2. Nothing released in the past 15 years will ever top those experiences.

This hit me right in the nostalgia. Does anyone else that was generally good at games and not a sore loser miss having your buddies tard rage next to them and chuck controllers if you beat them in a game

So many fist fights almost resulted from people picking Odd Job to the point where we banned it.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I feel like you're the one who doesn't remember 20 years ago. I don't live in a particularly big town and there was a lot more than Blockbuster. Maybe 10-15 rental spots and they all had their own library. I'm not going to lie and act like popular titles were never rented out, but to act like the only way to try a game was to buy it when both rental stores and magazines with demo discs were common is farcical.

10-15? We had maybe half a dozen or so, but nobody jumped around between them just to look for something if they were out of what you wanted. Unless they were out of virtually everything then you'd just get something else rather than going to another rental store.

Also, demo discs didn't have every game and some were only available through limited means, like how are you gonna get it from a magazine if that month's magazine is no longer available? I feel like I remember Pizza Hut giving them out sometimes too.

 

[Baraka Obama]

That’s how i first played Halo. My best friend that i had before kids borrowed his cousin’s xbox and we had a blast playing it.

It's how I first played Ocarina of Time. A few years later I borrowed the whole N64 and game to play the whole thing.

Also how I first played Goldeneye, Tony Hawk, Halo, Grand Theft Auto 3, Final Fantasy X, and Soul Calibur 2. Same way my friends first played Dynasty Warriors, Star Ocean 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Shadow of the Colossus, and more.

My kids don't share games with their friends, and I feel like by the time any of them play anything at each other's houses they already know all about it. Very different world.

 

[analrapist]

For a very short period of time, there was a shop in my town that rented PC-CDROM games. It was a wild world back then. I had just purchased a 2x CD burner for $800CAD.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

It's how I first played Ocarina of Time.

I borrowed it from a friend in 99. And i loved it so much that i saved up my allowance to buy my own copy. Still one of my favorite games of all time and need to get the decompiled edition.

 

[Never Scored]

You would go to other people's houses and play games there.

I played a lot like that too. A friend of mine would always buy the wrestling games for Playstation and I'd but the ones for N64 and that way we'd get to play all of them.

10-15? We had maybe half a dozen or so,

Back then, at least in my area, every neighbourhood would have a gas station or a drug store with maybe around 100-150 movies and 20-30 games to rent on a couple racks off in a corner. One of those spots sounds more like what he's describing in his post.

Then you'd have some bigger stores closer to the centre of town, your Blockbusters and whatnot, and they'd have thousands of different movies with 50-100 copies of popular new releases and maybe 200-250 unique games to rent at any time, with 15-20 copies of really popular new releases. Blockbuster would generally have just about every title that would have been available for you to buy locally at department stores and stuff, plus they used to have exclusives you couldn't buy, but could only rent at Blockbuster like Indiana Jones Infernal Machine or Clayfighter Sculptor's Cut for N64. You used to get really good deals on used games and movies at Blockbuster when they were selling off their old stock too.

If you were really lucky, there'd be something like a Microplay close by and they'd have just about every obscure title available for rent and even some imports. They also used to rent PC games. I remember renting Starcraft four or five times before I got my own copy.

but nobody jumped around between them just to look for something if they were out of what you wanted. Unless they were out of virtually everything then you'd just get something else rather than going to another rental store.

If you were looking for a specific game, you wouldn't go into the store with your hands on your dick like a mongoloid. You'd call ahead to see if they had it. If they didn't, you'd call another place. If you couldn't find it anywhere, you could reserve it and they'd put a copy to one side for you when it came back in. Of course they often came back late.

My point was never to argue all this worked perfectly, just that there were 100% ways to try games before you bought them if you really wanted to. I've also no doubt that some people who were not old enough to drive themselves to a video store during peak video rental era and just had to go to whatever store their parents took them to have a different view of video rental stores.

Talking about gaming in the past as if video rental stores didn't exist has become a really weird tell in online discussions about gaming. Especially when people drop the old "games actually costed more in the 90s" in discussions about the cost of Switch 2 games as if people didn't rent most of their games in the 90s. I owned about ten SNES games by the late 1990s, but I had actually played at least 100.

Also, demo discs didn't have every game and some were only available through limited means, like how are you gonna get it from a magazine if that month's magazine is no longer available? I feel like I remember Pizza Hut giving them out sometimes too.

They were everywhere in the PSX era. Magazines, cereal boxes, preorder bonuses, restaurants, cases of cola, etc. You'd trade them with friends and stuff too. There are games I never would have tried at the time if I hadn't gotten free demo discs like Unjammer Lammy and Threads of Fate. I kind of miss getting the little disc with 4-5 curated demos for games I never would have played otherwise.

 

[Slav Power]

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

>laughs in Yuropoorean

Commonplace in consumer electronics in the 80's, and in commie bloc countries you even had RGB TV's to hook up your Commodore 64's and ZX Spectrums to. It's still baffling that Americans had to deal with composite until the 90's when they finally got RGB when HDMI started to replace everything. Meanwhile I can still find a CRT TV from the 80's that has SCART, hook it up to a TV decoder, or an adapter and use it in a myriad of ways even though analog TV has been turned off for years now.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

>laughs in Yuropoorean
View attachment 7647256
Commonplace in consumer electronics in the 80's, and in commie bloc countries you even had RGB TV's to hook up your Commodore 64's and ZX Spectrums to. It's still baffling that Americans had to deal with composite until the 90's when they finally got RGB when HDMI started to replace everything. Meanwhile I can still find a CRT TV from the 80's that has SCART, hook it up to a TV decoder, or an adapter and use it in a myriad of ways even though analog TV has been turned off for years now.

Memories of cuddling the TV trying to plug one of these in

 

[DavidS877]

RGB TV's to hook up your Commodore 64

But the 64 never had RGB.

It had standard Composite or "S-Video" aka Luminance/Chrominance or Y/C. Which the SCART connector did have an way to accept.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Especially when people drop the old "games actually costed more in the 90s" in discussions about the cost of Switch 2 games as if people didn't rent most of their games in the 90s. I owned about ten SNES games by the late 1990s, but I had actually played at least 100.

I have found anecdotally that if you owned a lot of video games in the 1980s and 1990s, your home life (family, etc) was sort of shit, if not broken and/or abusive.

 

[Stasi]

rental

Rent? Me and my homies all had modded Playstations and would get burned CDs at the local market on the weekends for literal pennies. Half the time you had no idea what the game was, you just picked it up because it was cheap and sometimes you'd strike gold.

I had more PS1 games than I knew what to do with lol

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Retro reviewer could face up to three years in jail over copyright — Italian authorities investigate creator for 'advertising' Anbernic handheld game consoles (archive)

Italian content creator Francesco Salicini, who owns the YouTube channel Once Were Nerd, says he is currently under investigation by Italian authorities for allegedly promoting piracy by “advertising” Anbernic game consoles.

https://preservetube.com/watch?v=zSEB4if2pJQ

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Boot exploit for software-bricked Wii U consoles discovered by repairing Nintendo factory's destroyed and trashed SD cards — team posts 'paid the beak' exploit to Github

A console hacker named WinCurious obtained some discarded SD cards from a Nintendo factory that the company used for the factory setup process of Wii and Wii U systems. According to DeadlyFoez, the cards contained a boot image that Nintendo used for the factory setup of the Wii U console. They were able to recover data on some of the damaged SD cards, after which another member of their team discovered an exploit that could be used to restore software-bricked Wii U consoles.

This vulnerability was initially discovered during the Wii U's factory setup, allowing the group to run their code when the console boots. They then wrote an exploit to take advantage of this, called “paid the beak”, and uploaded it on GitHub.

Since SDBoot1 runs even on consoles with empty flash memory, it can recover almost any Wii U that has suffered from a software brick. The only devices it cannot save are those that have experienced issues with Seeprom or have suffered actual hardware failure.

GitHub archives: https://archive.ph/https://github.com/Wack0/paid-the-beak*

 

[analrapist]

Boot exploit for software-bricked Wii U consoles discovered by repairing Nintendo factory's destroyed and trashed SD cards — team posts 'paid the beak' exploit to Github

I cannot imagine being this hungry for Nintendo content to repair and dump attempted-destroyed SD cards. This is quite insane work. Props to the guys who did it. But my goodness. Nintendo autism is truly remarkable.

 

[Almighty Space Duck]

I had more PS1 games than I knew what to do with lol

Going from 2-3 games a year to having to get yet another one of these every 6 months was amazing.

 

[Baraka Obama]

Going from 2-3 games a year to having to get yet another one of these every 6 months was amazing.
View attachment 7665254

Weird, my bootleg PS1 shelf looked like this

 

[Two Dollars]

Going from 2-3 games a year to having to get yet another one of these every 6 months was amazing.
View attachment 7665254

As a Gamecube player digging for kiosk discs on eBay, I felt immensely ripped off when I found out how good everyone else had it for the last two generations. Even the Dreamcast had demo discs.

Fun fact, one reason Nintendo almost never did demos was because they didn’t want people’s views of their games to be tainted by incomplete versions. Other publishers had to nag Nintendo to finally let them collaborate on the Preview Disc that had stuff like Sonic Adventure DX and Viewtiful Joe. Nintendo Power with a mix of Gamecube and transferrable GBA demos, maybe an emulated NES game every once in a while, would’ve been kino.