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

[Samuel Fuller]

I foolishly asked for a Menacer for Christmas '92. At the time a grand total of two games supported it: the bundled game and Terminator 2. I recall the Menacer working reasonably well but it saw little use and quickly ended up in a closet. Only one other game was released with Menacer support: Body Count in 1994. Far too little, far too late.

A bunch of MegaCD conversions of arcade Laserdisc games had support for it but who cares about them frankly.

The best situation would have been for SEGA to negotiate with Konami for the Justifier to be the offically-supported lightgun for Genesis, but the Menacer dropped at the peak of SEGA USA channel-stuffing under the "leadership" of Tom Kalinske, who never met a peripheral he wouldn't ship to retailers whether they had software support, or even functioned (See Activator). It was largely all the shit SEGA put out that ended up not selling due to lack of games to use it on that led retailers to already be pissed off at SEGA even before the Saturn premature ejaculation and sealed the doom of Dreamcast long before the whole fiasco of Japan and US arms of the company designing competing platforms and nearly bankrupting the company before it could even launch.

 

[Calandrino]

Just a little observation, Link's Crossbow Training was released in 2007, while the Wii Motion Plus wasn't released until 2009. So the game doesn't require nor supports the peripheral.

Here I was thinking that it made absolutely no sense for that game to need one; welp guess that explains it

Yet, the SNES, while it technically had a light gun, it was basically a complete nonstarter as a product.

Granted, that may have had something to do with being a fucking stupid design.

Its shittiness must be why Lethal Enforcers had its own nonretarded lightgun packed in... dunno if they were even cross compatible. That game where you shoot at the mechs is pretty fun tho: when emulated on a Wii.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Here I was thinking that it made absolutely no sense for that game to need one; welp guess that explains it


Its shittiness must be why Lethal Enforcers had its own nonretarded lightgun packed in... dunno if they were even cross compatible. That game where you shoot at the mechs is pretty fun tho: when emulated on a Wii.

The Konami Justifier guns were not cross-compatible with either platform's first-party guns. They were much higher-quality than anything before the GunCon for PS1, but Konami were too scared to license after the senate hearings, so the only games they worked for in North America were the two Lethal Enforcers games and the SEGA-CD Snatcher port.

 

[Haftag]

It's not just "leaping around the room like a spastic", any peripheral-based game has a lifespan and then it's never really talked about again. DDR and Guitar Hero were huge hits at their time, but their bulky peripherals meant that they were doomed as far as post-sales go, and are never brought up ever again. (The Wii tended to be an exception given what a cultural phenomenon it was, but not in the context of game series). Light gun games, too, even before CRTs stopped being made, had long fallen out of fashion by the late 1990s (sorry @Calandrino).

You just made me think of Lifeline, a PS2 game wherein you control the PC with voice commands. Could've been some silly arcade romp, but it's an M-rated survival horror, completely wrong genere and audience, not to mention its speech recognition issues. Didn't do so well even in back then.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

You just made me think of Lifeline, a PS2 game wherein you control the PC with voice commands. Could've been some silly arcade romp, but it's an M-rated survival horror, completely wrong genere and audience, not to mention its speech recognition issues. Didn't do so well even in back then.

I remember when i saw that at EB games when it was new. Passed on it because it requires a mic. Would love to play it if you can emulate without a mic

 

[Samuel Fuller]

I remember when i saw that at EB games when it was new. Passed on it because it requires a mic. Would love to play it if you can emulate without a mic

How the fuck would you play a VOICE-CONTROLLED game without a mic, Einstein?

 

[JustSomeDong]

Yeah, update on the CIPON generic PS2 controller from Amazon. I no longer recommend it. I unplugged and moved some stuff while dusting, and it broke the fucking controller port. It felt a bit snug, but damn.

Made with Chinesium! If it don't break itself, it will break what its attached to. And I was gonna play some Dynasty Warriors 6 tonight...

 

[Xarpho's Return]

How the fuck would you play a VOICE-CONTROLLED game without a mic, Einstein?

In theory you could apply button presses to the microphone, but that only works on very simple ones like the NES with just receiving sound and not being able to translate it. NES emulators have a button for "Mic" that could be assigned but it's used very rarely, a notable being the original The Legend of Zelda where you could defeat the rabbit-type enemies with noise.

In other news I started fooling around with PlayStation emulation via DuckStation and I am kind of disappointed, because it was right during the "multimedia CD-ROM" era and everyone thought they were making some sort of Hollywood movie masterpiece, resulting in janky controls and overuse of FMV. On the other hand, some of them seem halfway between SNES and N64 which is nice and playable.

Good examples: Crash Bandicoot, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Bad examples: D, Heart of Darkness
Dino Crisis is kind of a mid-way example, Metal Gear Solid leans on the good side, and it hits a little different with the references to it in Super Smash Bros. Brawl (a bit of a weird choice due to generally being a no-show when it came to Nintendo games).

Ape Escape didn't work, demanded an analog controller for some reason(?!)

The 3D models tend to be a tiny bit jittery and I don't know how to fix it. When you start a new emulator it's a whole new adventure in making sure everything goes smoothly.

 

[GreenTips]

Ape Escape didn't work, demanded an analog controller for some reason(?!)

It was literally the first game on PS1 to use the DualShock controller. It was developed around the analog stick.

 

[HexFag]

Does anybody here use CRT filters for retro games? I've been using CRT Royale and it honestly looks great on my 1440p monitor. If anybody else has any recommendations please let me know as well.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

It was literally the first game on PS1 to use the DualShock controller. It was developed around the analog stick.

I was using a SN30 Pro controller which had sticks. There was probably some setting I could've messed with (or even on the controller itself) but I wasn't feeling up to it.

edit: fixed, but it still required some fiddling

 

[Finder of Games]

Does anybody here use CRT filters for retro games? I've been using CRT Royale and it honestly looks great on my 1440p monitor. If anybody else has any recommendations please let me know as well.

crt-royale-ntsc-svideo is my personal favorite for nostalgia, it hits blending right, and can be customized to offer a good amount of bleed. You can use ntsc-composite for older systems as well. If you're so inclined, there also exists a PAL-SCART variant as well, it's basically just clearer with similar blend, curvature, and more.
crt-royale is designed for 4k screens, though. 1440p is the bare minimum for really getting any meaningful benefit out of it over stuff like a blargg-bleed filter.

What systems are you playing on, and what do you want out of it?

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The best situation would have been for SEGA to negotiate with Konami for the Justifier to be the offically-supported lightgun for Genesis, but the Menacer dropped at the peak of SEGA USA channel-stuffing under the "leadership" of Tom Kalinske, who never met a peripheral he wouldn't ship to retailers whether they had software support, or even functioned (See Activator). It was largely all the shit SEGA put out that ended up not selling due to lack of games to use it on that led retailers to already be pissed off at SEGA even before the Saturn premature ejaculation and sealed the doom of Dreamcast long before the whole fiasco of Japan and US arms of the company designing competing platforms and nearly bankrupting the company before it could even launch.

A decade ago or so I read Console Wars (a book written about Sega in the 1990s) that seemed to be from mostly Kalinske's interviews. While there was a bit in the back about how the opposing view of Kalinske being a "Ken doll" (he spent time with Mattel, particularly the Barbie brand) and just in the right place at the right time, the book paints him the leader of a team who saved the Genesis in America and made it a success that for a brief, ephemeral moment, was beating Nintendo at its own game.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

The best situation would have been for SEGA to negotiate with Konami for the Justifier to be the offically-supported lightgun for Genesis, but the Menacer dropped at the peak of SEGA USA channel-stuffing under the "leadership" of Tom Kalinske

Yeah, I was about to say when I read the first part of that sentence... "That would require SEGA to make a good decision", something that the SEGA of that era was manifestly incapable of doing.

As much as I consider the Dreamcast one of the best consoles ever made, I can't deny even it suffered mightily from SEGA's collective "head in rectum" problem.

 

[HexFag]

What systems are you playing on, and what do you want out of it?

Primarily PSX and Sega Saturn at the moment, but something for the SNES would be nice too. You have to do some weird fuckery with PCSX2 and I have an actual PS2 anyway so I'll just stick to just playing the games regularly on there.

I play a good amount of 2D Saturn and PSX games so something to help with blending would work wonders. Could you get crt-royale-ntsc-svideo on Duckstation? That sounds exactly like what I would need.

 

[Two Dollars]

I play a good amount of 2D Saturn and PSX games so something to help with blending would work wonders. Could you get crt-royale-ntsc-svideo on Duckstation? That sounds exactly like what I would need.

I don’t know, but you definitely can on RetroArch’s Duckstation core.

I like crt-geom-advanced. It has plenty of options and allow you to do whatever screen curvature you want (or none).

 

[TaimuRadiu]

I foolishly asked for a Menacer for Christmas '92. At the time a grand total of two games supported it: the bundled game and Terminator 2. I recall the Menacer working reasonably well but it saw little use and quickly ended up in a closet. Only one other game was released with Menacer support: Body Count in 1994. Far too little, far too late.

A bunch of MegaCD conversions of arcade Laserdisc games had support for it but who cares about them frankly.

If you have a Wii Genesis Plus GX has total compatibility with any and all light gun games on the MD. And as well as any other emulator will work well as a light gun game; it's literally why I bought a Wii Zapper.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

How the fuck would you play a VOICE-CONTROLLED game without a mic, Einstein?

Typing, Watson.

 

[Pepe Cortisona]

Typing, Watson.

Speaking of typing, The Typing of the Dead is a game so dear and close to my heart. It's fun, doesn't take itself very seriously and expects that you improve your skill at typing.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Sometimes I wonder what are truly are good retro games if you don't have familiarity with them. I'm not sure if my lukewarm opinion on PlayStation games is because it just wasn't a console I grew up (Nintendo + computers for me) or if the console's games have aged really poorly. Case in point, they started making Atari game compilations back in the late 1990s (Activision did it for their own games) but they just don't hold a lot of appeal of people outside of that generation. Some games sucked less, but none of them are things you'd fool around with for more than five minutes.