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

[Friendly Primarina]

Beloved and not mentally ill emulator dev stenzek is chimping out and is actively deleting Duckstation builds on Arch linux (link here). The quote here:

I said this the last time stenzek chimped out: there is nothing worse in FOSS than the "beleaguered volunteer." If you don't like your role in the community or feel underappreciated, fucking leave. Unlike the wagie working a 10-hour shift you have no excuse for a pissy attitude.

For anyone interested, v0.1.7371 (commit hash: b2577ef8bdaae99840874b6dae8146f0316357b4) is the last tagged release licensed under the GPL (Version 3). IANAL but it is my understanding that you can freely fork this version and there's nothing stenzek can do but seethe.

 

[analrapist]

There's shit like this which would leave the headphone jack but it looks pretty clunky, shitty and breakable.

I bought the 8bitdo Pro 2 with the first-party version of this kind of mount for it. That pair in particular works great. Nothing clunky or trashy about it. There are two tension screws that hold both points of articulation and they work very well. I'm sure there are some lousy versions, but the 8bitdo one isn't.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

The Master System is cool until you realize you can’t rotate sprites, have worse default audio capabilities, have to have significantly larger cart sizes to store even basic games, have nothing on the same level of mappers and expansion chips, have to reach over to the console to pause, have a middle saturated color gamut at the expense of bright tones, have a weird sqround thing instead of a d-pad and the “muh arcade” appeal falls apart by late 1988 due to arcade hardware advancing that quickly

The simple solution to the SMS controller is to use a Genesis pad instead.

 

[analrapist]

The simple solution to the SMS controller is to use a Genesis pad instead.

There are specific games (Wonder Boy in Monster Land) where Genesis pads explicitly do not work. I am not sure about the why here. Just something I know from trying.

The SMS d-pad looks unorthodox, but my experience was that it was quite functional.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

There are specific games (Wonder Boy in Monster Land) where Genesis pads explicitly do not work. I am not sure about the why here. Just something I know from trying.

The SMS d-pad looks unorthodox, but my experience was that it was quite functional.

I didn't have an SMS pad with my first SMS. It was a gift from a cousin and he couldn't find the pad, so I only got the joystick, which was ok, but not great for some games. A friend gave me a spare Genesis pad, and none of the games I had had a problem with it. My second SMS had two pads with it, and I found it to be a bit too squishy and a little sluggish compared to a Genesis or NES pad.

 

[Baraka Obama]

I said this the last time stenzek chimped out: there is nothing worse in FOSS than the "beleaguered volunteer." If you don't like your role in the community or feel underappreciated, fucking leave. Unlike the wagie working a 10-hour shift you have no excuse for a pissy attitude.

For anyone interested, v0.1.7371 (commit hash: b2577ef8bdaae99840874b6dae8146f0316357b4) is the last tagged release licensed under the GPL (Version 3). IANAL but it is my understanding that you can freely fork this version and there's nothing stenzek can do but seethe.

Yeah I mean he can seethe or he can be even more incentivized to not work on this.

I have personally in the past convinced a developer of a popular emulator to just stop working on it because he was tired of the kind of complaints he got. It got worse when a guy started making a dumb "uo" version of his software off a fork, not contributing back in any way, and leading to even more complaints from users. Why put up with any of that?

There are specific games (Wonder Boy in Monster Land) where Genesis pads explicitly do not work. I am not sure about the why here. Just something I know from trying.

The SMS d-pad looks unorthodox, but my experience was that it was quite functional.

Pause isn't mapped in most games too but the nice thing if you have an Everdrive is that you can really easily patch these games.

 

[analrapist]

A friend gave me a spare Genesis pad, and none of the games I had had a problem with it.

I'm not implying it was a common thing, MBiML is the only game of the dozen or two I owned and tried back in the day that had troubles. Just that there were some weird caveats.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

I'm not implying it was a common thing, MBiML is the only game of the dozen or two I owned and tried back in the day that had troubles. Just that there were some weird caveats.

That is a common thing with systems that used 9-pin Atari-style control ports, in my experience. The C64, TI 99-4/A and even the Atari 2600 all had some games where anything but the default OEM joysticks wouldn't behave correctly or outright don't work.

 

[Never Scored]

I'm amazed at how much power my shitty little Android phone has in emulating Gamecube, PS2 and even fucking Wii U. But non-tactile touch screen controls make me feel like a fucking third worlder.
I'm aware controller shells exist but I wouldn't be able to use wired headphones, and with Bluetooth headphones the audio is way delayed (it's not like this on video playback, the BT audio must be delaying the video slightly to make it sync, which obviously doesn't work for gaming)
Is there such a thing as a controller shell with headphone jack pass through or something? Probably not since phones with headphone jacks at all seem to be rarer than hens teeth.

View attachment 7716515

There's shit like this which would leave the headphone jack but it looks pretty clunky, shitty and breakable. And not really properly portable at all. has anyone used something like this with success? Maybe I should just get one of those chink linux/android portables.

Honestly, a device like a Retroid Pocket is the way to go if you don't mind dropping the money on one. They're fucking great and can do Gamecube/PS2 and some Wii U(You can get BOTW running at 30 most of the time with some tinkering, but there are drops into the mid-20s).

There tons of nice devices that emulate up to PS1/GBA flawlessly for under $100, made by Powkiddy and Anbernic, but you're not getting Gamecube, PS2 and Wii U on those devices.

 

[Two Dollars]

I'm amazed at how much power my shitty little Android phone has in emulating Gamecube, PS2 and even fucking Wii U. But non-tactile touch screen controls make me feel like a fucking third worlder.
I'm aware controller shells exist but I wouldn't be able to use wired headphones, and with Bluetooth headphones the audio is way delayed (it's not like this on video playback, the BT audio must be delaying the video slightly to make it sync, which obviously doesn't work for gaming)
Is there such a thing as a controller shell with headphone jack pass through or something? Probably not since phones with headphone jacks at all seem to be rarer than hens teeth.

View attachment 7716515

There's shit like this which would leave the headphone jack but it looks pretty clunky, shitty and breakable. And not really properly portable at all. has anyone used something like this with success? Maybe I should just get one of those chink linux/android portables.

Just get better bluetooth headphones lol

Some controller shells have headphone and/or USB-C passthrough. The GameSir G8 Galileo is a good controller with both as long as you don’t have a case on your phone, otherwise fuck you I guess.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Looks like the 8bitdo 64 was released, any thoughts?

 

[Two Dollars]

Looks like the 8bitdo 64 was released, any thoughts?

Mine will arrive in a few days, and I have high hopes for it, assuming mapping it to my various emulators and frontends isn’t a nightmare. It would be nice if those four C buttons were comfortable enough to be used as standard ABXY.

 

[Never Scored]

Looks like the 8bitdo 64 was released, any thoughts?

There has yet to be anything that feels like a new N64 stick. It was such a weird device and had much more range of motion than most modern sticks, but that was because of the bizarre apparatus Nintendo concocted. Instead if using potentiometers, it used this system of optical leds and gears. Unfortunately that system breaks down easily and gets less accurate over time, which is the stick's fatal flaw. With a good original joystick in Mario 64, you can actually move in something like 4,000 different directions. The replacement joysticks are good enough for playing the N64 games and enjoying them, but you're not getting the same range of movement you got on the original controller.

 

[Baraka Obama]

There has yet to be anything that feels like a new N64 stick. It was such a weird device and had much more range of motion than most modern sticks, but that was because of the bizarre apparatus Nintendo concocted. Instead if using potentiometers, it used this system of optical leds and gears. Unfortunately that system breaks down easily and gets less accurate over time, which is the stick's fatal flaw. With a good original joystick in Mario 64, you can actually move in something like 4,000 different directions. The replacement joysticks are good enough for playing the N64 games and enjoying them, but you're not getting the same range of movement you got on the original controller.

Don't worry, this one has a magnetic stick so it will feel extra sloppy.

RockerGaming has been working on a very accurate reproduction of the N64 stick made mainly out of metal for durability. If I ever find my original sticks need replacing I'd definitely go for that.

 

[Two Dollars]

There has yet to be anything that feels like a new N64 stick. It was such a weird device and had much more range of motion than most modern sticks, but that was because of the bizarre apparatus Nintendo concocted. Instead if using potentiometers, it used this system of optical leds and gears. Unfortunately that system breaks down easily and gets less accurate over time, which is the stick's fatal flaw. With a good original joystick in Mario 64, you can actually move in something like 4,000 different directions. The replacement joysticks are good enough for playing the N64 games and enjoying them, but you're not getting the same range of movement you got on the original controller.

An original N64 stick goes from about -85 to +85 in both directions, which would be about 29,000 different stick values. Assuming that’s a truncation from the plastic around the stick blocking the full range of motion, that would still be 256 values in both directions, or 65,536 values total. A standard XInput stick has that many possible values per direction, or a little over 4 billion total. The hell are you talking about?

 

[Never Scored]

An original N64 stick goes from about -85 to +85 in both directions, which would be about 29,000 different stick values. Assuming that’s a truncation from the plastic around the stick blocking the full range of motion, that would still be 256 values in both directions, or 65,536 values total. A standard XInput stick has that many possible values per direction, or a little over 4 billion total. The hell are you talking about?

You're right. "Range of motion" was a poor choice of words on my part.

Nintendo's stick is actually a bunch of separate digital inputs that are either on or off as opposed to the resistive potentiometers in more modern designs that estimate position based on voltage flowing through the potentiometers and round to the nearest input, so the N64 inputs register more accurately on a well functioning controller. This is why N64 controllers are not actually prone to drift, even though the mechanism can physically break down creating a dead zone in the middle.

The original N64 stick also provides a lot more physical resistance, feeling like it is pushing back against your thumb, compared to a modern stick and the games were designed around that. In most modern games, the character cannot move in as many directions, and the game's software just rounds the direction to the nearest of anywhere from 16-256 directions. A lot of first party N64 titles were not designed in this way, registering thousands of directions and the physical resistance the stick provides helps facilitate accuracy of movement. Using a stick with little physical resistance on the N64 feels like driving a car where the steering is too loose.

What I'm trying to articulate is a combination of those two things. It's hard to understand without directly using both types of sticks on N64 hardware. Baraka Obama saying other sticks feel sloppy on N64 is a good way of putting it.

 

[Two Dollars]

@Never Scored Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, the resistance from an N64 stick definitely gives it a unique feel. I don’t think I’d want to use it on non-N64 games, but it feels good on the hardware it was made for.

 

[Digital Ayds]

Stenzek has an a-log on /emugen/ (known Github handles sigarettenstank and thelastangryman1907) who's been saying for years that this Matt LaFrance guy is actually him, and claims Connor McLaughlin is an alias. Does this hold water at all? He also maintains an unofficial issue tracker consisting of true problems, bad configuration on his part, willfully ignored workarounds, or chalking up hardware behavior as bugs. I'm talking Creager levels of dedication; he's nearly as worthy of a thread as the Duckman himself. To be fair, this wouldn't be necessary at all if Stenzek wasn't so criticism-averse and kept the public/official issues up on Github.
Ciggy's Unofficial Issue Tracker
Stenzek?

 

[TaimuRadiu]

The simple solution to the SMS controller is to use a Genesis pad instead.

That doesn't work for a lot of games.