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

[Jaimas]

Some happier news.

Recently, I've been on a bit of an oldschool CV kick because I've played basically every Castlevania game at some point or another and I figured "fuck it, we ball" with the Advance collection, which has a bunch of titles I was a fan of but seemingly can't find amidst my dozens of backups now, strangely enough. All in all, a great time, especially if you want to play these games on a modern platform with some nice extras bundled in for spice.

However, whilst fucking around wtih them, I realized that the new system the games run in is basically a fancy way of getting the ROMs to work, and that gave me an idea:

Could I do what I did in FF1 and fuck around with the game knowing this, when I changed the character sprites and text to the classic versions from FF Origins?

In short, pretty much. The actual practical way of doing this took a lot more work, because the actual ROM files (and there's twelve of the fucking things) are hidden away, compressed within the game files, so you have to decompile them in order to run a proper ROM patch on each one individually, but to my delight, I was able to get the visual overhaul mod for Harmony of Dissonance working.



All it really does is swap the palettes around to be more muted and remove the blue border on Juste, but the actual results in-game make the game look substantially better, and it's nice to see this particularly undersung title get some love.



In theory, you could get damn near any Romhack to work with the collections, and that's kind of amazing.

Spoiler: CV Sperging

For those who aren't as familiar, Dissonance is a bit of an odd duck because of its development, which left it with a number of oddities that aren't really present in other Castlevania games at the time. The Game Boy Advance was ostensibly a 32-bit system, but its architecture wasn't like the PS1 or Saturn, and it had significantly less storage space. Because of this, developers worked very hard at milking every last drop of performance out of the hardware at the time. It entered development during the end-point of Circle of the Moon's development a and had a completely different team working on it.

Circle had one constantly complained-about problem: While a good game, the console it was on was not backlit, and as a result, it was fucking notoriously hard-to-see. Circle also cheated a bit to save space - constant asset re-use, very limited animation sets (very few things in the game have more than three frames total), and a lack of major effects the series was fond of at this point (like rotational effects or scrolling skylines) kept down storage space, which Circle used to provide samples for the audio, giving it particularly high-quality music for the time. When you play it on a handheld, you mostly won't notice the various tricks it pulled to save space, but you absolutely will on a big screen of any kind.

Dissonance wanted to first address the problems of circle: Bigger sprites, better animation, clearer visuals on GBA, and all sorts of visual tricks and such that they had in other CV games at the time. And it has all of these. However, it came at two costs: saturated colors and file size, and the methods that would be use to allow better file compression and better storage by the time Aria of Sorrow came out didn't exist just yet. To get around this, they used FM with very limited range, resulting in Dissonance having a distinctly crunchy soundtrack that called to mind more NES titles than the full-fledged scores of Circle.

A lot of its problems are solely products of the time it was released in and the development cycle behind it, and it's considered something of an anomaly, since it's situated right between its more successful siblings (Circle and Aria), but there is a lot to enjoy here if you give it a chance.

 

[DavidS877]

Most stuff capacitors are fine. I have a midi sound module with bad caps I need to fix and I have an Xbox I repaired with a handful of leaky caps but everything else has been like a rock. Issue is overblown.

Tell that to my garage full of smoke.
Luckily just smoke when the power supply of a BBC Acorn let go. Luckily modern 3 output supplies are still made and with a little 3d printing for a bracket we're back in business.

Also had another one(not BBC) where a polystyrene cap let go and as part of the CPU reset circuit didn't properly delay the CPU coming out of reset on power up so it worked 3% of the time. That was a serious adventure in troubleshooting. And one $0.02 disc cap.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I have a patch from this very site. It says "Archive Everything"
It's referring to LOLCOWs, of course, but it always applies.

I originally copied everything I could from the Internet, text and tiny JPGs/GIFs, because I couldn't stay on the Internet for very long (it tied up the phone line) so having an offline connection was very important. At some point I stopped doing that but now with unlimited hard disk space and increasing paranoia, I archive everything.

It's a better experience using the real thing, IMO. Specifically things like N64 just hook it up to a CRT and you have a golden result.

The problem with that is two-fold, both the CRT craze and the vintage gaming hobby is getting REALLY expensive now to the point where you can't just pick up a setup like that at a flea market and walk away having paid around $50 between them.

The second thing is emulators introduce a lot of quality of life features. Speed-up, rewinds, save states...some flash carts can do that sort of thing but most can't.

And I don't even know if that'd be enough. I'm good with just running Sheepshaver and hoping whatever I wanna run works in it. Old Mac emulation is not great. It's a shame, too, because there's a plethora of very obscure games and software only on Mac, when the rest of the world was using DOS/Windows/Commodore.

Yeah, and that is a shame. Sometimes the Mac versions of games is the superior version of games, there's a bunch of older stuff from the late 1990s/early 2000s locked out because it's too old for modern macOS software (PPC software, incompatible since the early 2010s by dropping Rosetta) and too late for SheepShaver (there's certain Mac OS 9 features that SS can't do). And even Mac OS 9.2 isn't the be-all end-all, as it was recently determined that the last version of the classic Mac ROM breaks color palettes in some games.

One thing about NES romsets is that, unless the emulator has a database of the CRCs of all commercial roms, 1:1 dumps of NES carts won't work.

Is that related to how NES ROMs are actually two ROMs that basically had to be "stitched" together to work properly, or more of how NES-on-a-chip systems don't have good compatibility?

3 gig of roms is a lot to dig into to find what you want to play. Reddit has complete rom sets and I think I lost my SNES one because it was just annoying to deal with. I loaded it onto my portable emulator and any time I had a specific game I wanted to play I ended up taking forever to scroll through titles and never touched most of them. Arcade games were the one exception since they're all pick up and play so you can find a random game quick and hop in.

Well yeah, if you just dump the entire set directly on a flash drive. On any modern system it's easy to go through. What you want is to select the games you want from your master collection onto the systems you actually want to use, like selecting from a catalog. If you want something different or new, it's already on your system, no need to search for it online again, especially if it gets DMCA'd.

Like Zero Escape on 3DS, Hotel Dusk on DS, Power Stone on Dreamcast, Chibi Robo on Gamecube, Wario Land 4 on GBA, Comix Zone on Genesis, Vagrant Story on PS1, SMT3 on PS2, Odin Sphere on PS3, and Tactics Ogre on SNES... to name a few.

I don't see how anyone who wants to play GBA could miss Wario Land 4. It's absolutely one of the top ten games of the system, even if you count ports.

However, whilst fucking around wtih them, I realized that the new system the games run in is basically a fancy way of getting the ROMs to work, and that gave me an idea:

Even some of the fancier ways that games are "ported" are still based around ROMs. Like for instance the Steam version of Final Fantasy IV is graphically upscaled with some interface changes but it's still just a ROM at heart. Doubly so for everything else.

This has been going on for a while. Back in the mid-to-late 1990s Activision sold a collection of Atari 2600 games on the Mac that were self-contained emulators (double-click the application to run and you'd be off playing Pitfall! or whatever) but it was discovered you could use your own ROMs with the emulator. Of course, you could also get an early version of Stella to rock out with any Atari ROM on the computer but it was a neat novelty to use the proprietary Activision emulator as well.

The Game Boy Advance was ostensibly a 32-bit system, but its architecture wasn't like the PS1 or Saturn, and it had significantly less storage space.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought that having "32 bits" meant the GBA was basically as powerful as the Saturn or PlayStation, and that by 2002 we'd start seeing full polygonal titles on the GBA.

 

[Baraka Obama]

The problem with that is two-fold, both the CRT craze and the vintage gaming hobby is getting REALLY expensive now to the point where you can't just pick up a setup like that at a flea market and walk away having paid around $50 between them.

Eh I think you can still do ok with some basic consoles and a cheap retrotink. A PS2 and a Wii will cover 4 of the most popular consoles and a Wii is actually a nice system to emulate on since it supports 240p out. Easy to mod too. Throw in a SNES if you're feeling fancy, or if you're like me a GB Color.

You do you though.

The second thing is emulators introduce a lot of quality of life features. Speed-up, rewinds, save states...some flash carts can do that sort of thing but most can't.

Personally I don't care for any of that stuff. Save states often ruin the fun.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Is that related to how NES ROMs are actually two ROMs that basically had to be "stitched" together to work properly, or more of how NES-on-a-chip systems don't have good compatibility?

Pretty much. The NES CPU can "see" memory addressed from 0 to 65,535 ($0000 to $FFFF in hexadecimal). When you inserted a cartridge, the data on the cart's ROM chip would appear in the upper half of this space, from $8000 to $FFFF. This gave games an upper size limit of 32KiB (because the range $8000 to $FFFF is $8000 bytes large, or 32,768 in decimal).

Even for a console with more controller ports than background layers, 32 KiB quickly became insufficient. So companies developed onboard chips to swap out sections of the ROM while keeping them in the same 32 KiB section of the CPU's memory. Emulator devs called these devices mappers. The problem is, these mappers weren't standardized, and there were dozens of different mappers produced. To cope with all this, emulator devs developed the iNES header format, which tells an emulator how big a ROM is, what mapper it uses, any additional features etc..

Without a header (e.g.. a ROM from a No Intro set), and no CRC hash to identify the ROM, an emulator has no way of knowing how to set up the ROM in the emulated CPU's memory.

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought that having "32 bits" meant the GBA was basically as powerful as the Saturn or PlayStation, and that by 2002 we'd start seeing full polygonal titles on the GBA.

We did

 

[30+GameOvers]

Update on the Vimm's Lair debacle:

They got hit by multiple companies and the ESA in the span of a few hours, and forced to take down most of their back-catalogue. I've been doing some research into what happened, and why there's a sudden interest after about two fucking decades of not giving a shit, and as it turns out, we can once again blame Instagram and Tiktok for this shit:

1. Emulators allowed on IOS. Delta takes off like crazy.
2. Retards seeking clout make fucking dozens of videos discussing where to get ROMs and spam that shit on the aforementioned sites.
3. Every idiot can see these fucktards revealing every fucking existing ROM site they can find.
4. Vimm's gets hit by Sega, Nintendo, Lego, the ESA, and more.
5. Vimm's is like the third or fourth site these clout-chasing tards fucking murdered this way.
6. Have it once again driven home that iPhones were the worst fucking thing to ever happen to the internet.

Words cannot express my disgust. Here is a look as to the type of videos that probably given the site the axe(Taken from 8chan):

Total Phonenigger Death, Total Youtuber Death
The site would have been 30 in a few years. That's older than some of the people on here, definitely older than most of these normalfags openly talking about romsites. It's not like these games will disappear, there is thankfully dozens more sites with backups, but talk about bad luck. To survive this long and only be done in by trend chasers on tik tok is a death I would not wish on any community.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought that having "32 bits" meant the GBA was basically as powerful as the Saturn or PlayStation, and that by 2002 we'd start seeing full polygonal titles on the GBA.

It's possible, probably just not practical or cheap. There's a guy making Mario 64 for it, which is really damn impressive but it's still pretty early on. Someone else ported Tomb Raider, I don't think it was the full game (unsure if he just chose not to do the whole thing or he couldn't do it), but it worked.

There's also a few fully 3D licensed games for it, but they're all trash. I think another reason we didn't see much like that is the limited controls of the GBA not lending themselves too well to 3D.

 

[Pissmaster]

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought that having "32 bits" meant the GBA was basically as powerful as the Saturn or PlayStation, and that by 2002 we'd start seeing full polygonal titles on the GBA.

I figured such a thing, but couldn't imagine anything worthwhile that could be PS1-tier but with only two face buttons, two triggers, and a D-pad. It really perplexed me at the time why they didn't just have X and Y buttons.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I figured such a thing, but couldn't imagine anything worthwhile that could be PS1-tier but with only two face buttons, two triggers, and a D-pad. It really perplexed me at the time why they didn't just have X and Y buttons.

It's weird how aside from Game Boy, until Switch, that handhelds were reluctant to include console equivalent inputs. It usually never bothered me until Vita, they were cramming games on there that weren't built with its limited inputs in mind.

 

[Pepe Cortisona]

I figured such a thing, but couldn't imagine anything worthwhile that could be PS1-tier but with only two face buttons, two triggers, and a D-pad. It really perplexed me at the time why they didn't just have X and Y buttons.

The early prototype had them but I am not sure if those became the LR triggers later on, or if they were completely independent.

 

[Calandrino]

I really like AVSP but you cant play AVSP without a MAME.

PC is an ok last resort fallback option in cases when buying plastic crap is not a realistic option

 

[Baraka Obama]

It really perplexed me at the time why they didn't just have X and Y buttons.

It's weird how aside from Game Boy, until Switch, that handhelds were reluctant to include console equivalent inputs. It usually never bothered me until Vita, they were cramming games on there that weren't built with its limited inputs in mind.

Someone prominent at Nintendo seems to have thought adding X & Y was a mistake. My evidence for this are:

1. They were deleted from the N64 altogether. C directions are smaller buttons than A/B.
2. GBA, duh.
3. On GC while added back in they are made much less prominent than A/B and without color.
4. The Wii remote is re-geared towards just using A/B in a different layout or sideways play with just 2 buttons.

Plus I distinctly remember reading at some point that new players found it easier to go with just 2 face buttons.

It's almost more perplexing they went back on it and just gave up with the DS but I have to imagine those ports just became increasingly annoying to account for.

 

[Banana Hammock]

Steam Deck is great. I recently started using my old stationary bike in the mornings, and it's the perfect time to play through my catalog of old games. There's a bunch of older games I've been wanting to play, but there's always been other things I'd rather do. Now I finally have a good time for it.

 

[Pepe Cortisona]

Someone prominent at Nintendo seems to have thought adding X & Y was a mistake. My evidence for this are:

1. They were deleted from the N64 altogether. C directions are smaller buttons than A/B.
2. GBA, duh.
3. On GC while added back in they are made much less prominent than A/B and without color.
4. The Wii remote is re-geared towards just using A/B in a different layout or sideways play with just 2 buttons.

Plus I distinctly remember reading at some point that new players found it easier to go with just 2 face buttons.

It's almost more perplexing they went back on it and just gave up with the DS but I have to imagine those ports just became increasingly annoying to account for.

Found the image of the 4 faced button Gameboy:

The prototype with a DSi for size comparison.

 

[Banana Hammock]

Emuparadise

Funny you should mention them. They actually started hosting roms again recently.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Recently, I've been on a bit of an oldschool CV kick because I've played basically every Castlevania game at some point or another and I figured "fuck it, we ball" with the Advance collection, which has a bunch of titles I was a fan of but seemingly can't find amidst my dozens of backups now, strangely enough. All in all, a great time, especially if you want to play these games on a modern platform with some nice extras bundled in for spice.

I can't help but think that Nintendo would make bank with re-selling ROMs especially as the "Mini" consoles grow farther and farther away. Blows my mind that the only affordable way to play any Nintendo games "legally" is on Nintendo Switch Online, and especially fuck you if you wanted to play import titles.

It's possible, probably just not practical or cheap. There's a guy making Mario 64 for it, which is really damn impressive but it's still pretty early on. Someone else ported Tomb Raider, I don't think it was the full game (unsure if he just chose not to do the whole thing or he couldn't do it), but it worked.

There's also a few fully 3D licensed games for it, but they're all trash. I think another reason we didn't see much like that is the limited controls of the GBA not lending themselves too well to 3D.

The answer is pretty obvious now. Lower storage capacity (some of the earliest cartridges were 4MB, later going to 32MB, like the N64 that wasn't much when it came to the 500MB capabilities of CD-ROM), a much weaker CPU (PlayStation ran at 33 MHz, the GBA had a 16 MHz processor, with another hybrid processor running at 4 MHz/8 MHz), a tenth of the memory, and so on. This wasn't a "Blast Processor" type of thing where one single number being better meant that you could rely on that in marketing, it was outclassed in every way.

Unfortunately, 9-10 year old me wasn't really aware of those minutiae and followed the "more bits = better" marketing that was in vogue in time.

Total Phonenigger Death, Total Youtuber Death
The site would have been 30 in a few years. That's older than some of the people on here, definitely older than most of these normalfags openly talking about romsites. It's not like these games will disappear, there is thankfully dozens more sites with backups, but talk about bad luck. To survive this long and only be done in by trend chasers on tik tok is a death I would not wish on any community.

The same thing happened with Z-Library and books.

Someone prominent at Nintendo seems to have thought adding X & Y was a mistake. My evidence for this are:

All the controllers are slightly different. This is common knowledge, of course, but the N64 puts B to the upper left of A, instead of lower left of A, which every Nintendo controller does (the "Dogbone" NES controller, the SNES controller, the GameCube controller, the "Pro" controllers, etc.). The Select button got deleted from the N64 controller but added back to the Wiimote in the form of the "-" button, but the Game Boy line always had it, likewise, the C button set became a second stick for the GameCube and eventually just became a second joystick.

The prototype with a DSi for size comparison.

That thing's a monster that rivals the Switch size (would not be fun to hold). Notice no Start or Select buttons, either.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Words cannot express my disgust. Here is a look as to the type of videos that probably given the site the axe(Taken from 8chan):

Including ETAPrime on there is unfair I think, but I assume the rest are valid.

I'm seeing Wulff Den on there. This is the second time I've seen him come up. The previous time was when I referenced his video in two other threads. Long story short, he tried to do the "retro youtuber flies to Japan for some cheap retro game finds" thing and ended up getting scalped like the clueless gaijin he is. I wonder if he'll have his own thread in future?

 

[Baraka Obama]

Including ETAPrime on there is unfair I think, but I assume the rest are valid.

I'm seeing Wulff Den on there. This is the second time I've seen him come up. The previous time was when I referenced his video in two other threads. Long story short, he tried to do the "retro youtuber flies to Japan for some cheap retro game finds" thing and ended up getting scalped like the clueless gaijin he is. I wonder if he'll have his own thread in future?

This?

I'm trying to watch but I've never liked his style.

I don't know why anyone would go to Akiba for video games. That's a place to buy JAV and Idol crap.

 

[The Cheese Aisle]

I'm seeing Wulff Den on there. This is the second time I've seen him come up.

I tried watching something from him, but it was a while back. I can remember though that it was such a bad take I decided he isn’t a reputable source of information (read: retarded) and that has stuck with me ever since. Maybe I’ll go through my watch history to see what it was.

 

[Gamepads]

Someone prominent at Nintendo seems to have thought adding X & Y was a mistake. My evidence for this are:

1. They were deleted from the N64 altogether. C directions are smaller buttons than A/B.
2. GBA, duh.
3. On GC while added back in they are made much less prominent than A/B and without color.
4. The Wii remote is re-geared towards just using A/B in a different layout or sideways play with just 2 buttons.

Plus I distinctly remember reading at some point that new players found it easier to go with just 2 face buttons.

It's almost more perplexing they went back on it and just gave up with the DS but I have to imagine those ports just became increasingly annoying to account for.

SEGA ended up doing the same thing based on user feedback. The Dreamcast lost two face buttons, and didn't relocate those anywhere else on top of only having a single analog stick.