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

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Treatlerite said:
Don't really know if this constitutes as "retro" but I wanted to share somewhere that I came into possession of a New 3DS XL and promptly installed CFW and Tomadachi Life. I've also been using that fanmade worldwide Streetpass thing and getting lots of hits. My family was too poor / incompetent to answer my wishes for a 3DS as a child so I feel like I'm living the childhood I was denied.
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That fan made streetpass app has me wanting to learn coding so that I can un-poz it and tear down their stupid flags and maybe put more interesting ones in their place.
 
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One thing I'll always love about emulators is how I can go and download a ROM of a game I wanted to play as a kid, boot it up, and within 5 minutes realise I'd have been crushed to spend money as a kid to play a game that shitty.

It shows just how good we have it nowadays as if a game is completely dogshit I can refund it, whereas good fucking luck taking that PS2 copy of Fight Club to the video game store for a refund as they'll smugly say "Sorry, once the seal is broken you can't return it :) "
 
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Xarpho's Return said:
Mac emulation has you beat, friend.

1. Download emulator
2. Download ROM
3. Download Mac OS ISO
4. Create virtual hard disk
5. Install Mac OS
6. Download StuffIt
7. Install StuffIt on virtual Mac OS
8. Download game
9. Navigate to the virtual hard disk in the emulation environment
10. Copy to virtual hard disk
11. Unpack
12. NOW you can play

Obviously, only start at 8 if you want a new game, and various builds can speed you through 1-7, but it's a hardcore experience. Honestly, between various source ports and other fun stuff, the reason why you would want to screw around with this continually shrinks.
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Emulating Windows 3.11/95 in 86Box is even more convoluted, since you have to find and install the correct drivers for the hardware you're emulating, and you also have to deal with potential IRQ/DMA resource conflicts. For now it's the only way to play 3D games that made use of vendor specific API's like S3D for the S3 ViRGE, or the Matrox Mystique.
 
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There used to be a popular myth where ROM sites would have some disclaimer like "if you don't own this game, you must delete it within 72 hours" or something along those lines. Obviously it's wrong--the Big N always adopted a "must own physical game on original system, get fucked" policy even before ROMs got big, so it's unlikely that would've saved them from lawyers, and the idea of constantly re-downloading Super Mario World (or whatever) would put a strain on their servers. Was it just to promote ads and link clicks?
 
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ForkyMeetsPorky said:
Emulating Windows 3.11/95 in 86Box is even more convoluted, since you have to find and install the correct drivers for the hardware you're emulating, and you also have to deal with potential IRQ/DMA resource conflicts. For now it's the only way to play 3D games that made use of vendor specific API's like S3D for the S3 ViRGE, or the Matrox Mystique.
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I haven't made the switch to 86box yet, but this is a pain with dosbox and its various forks. Launchers like DBGL make keeping multiple instances with different configurations a lot easier, but its still a minor pain in the ass to set them all up, even using templates.

86box work-y good-y? Worth switching for nostalgia gaming?
 
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Xarpho's Return said:
There used to be a popular myth where ROM sites would have some disclaimer like "if you don't own this game, you must delete it within 72 hours" or something along those lines. Obviously it's wrong--the Big N always adopted a "must own physical game on original system, get fucked" policy even before ROMs got big, so it's unlikely that would've saved them from lawyers, and the idea of constantly re-downloading Super Mario World (or whatever) would put a strain on their servers. Was it just to promote ads and link clicks?
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A lot of that was from the pre monetized Internet. It was usually "You have to own the game or delete it in 24-hours." I think it was just people trying to avoid any legal/moral liability.
 
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Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
One thing I'll always love about emulators is how I can go and download a ROM of a game I wanted to play as a kid, boot it up, and within 5 minutes realise I'd have been crushed to spend money as a kid to play a game that shitty.
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GBA roms in the mid 2000s were the perfect blend of “still new-ish, take up basically zero disk space, and are stupidly easy to play”. I downloaded stuff like some M&Ms-themed puzzle game because even as a kid I knew it was shovelware but would still be fun for about an hour.
 
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Some old office the company was scoping out had an abandoned Sony Trinitron KV-20VS40 in it. Anyone know if that's a good CRT or just pretty generic?
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
One thing I'll always love about emulators is how I can go and download a ROM of a game I wanted to play as a kid, boot it up, and within 5 minutes realise I'd have been crushed to spend money as a kid to play a game that shitty.

It shows just how good we have it nowadays as if a game is completely dogshit I can refund it, whereas good fucking luck taking that PS2 copy of Fight Club to the video game store for a refund as they'll smugly say "Sorry, once the seal is broken you can't return it :) "
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Did they not have video rental stores where you live?
 
Magnum Magazine said:
Some old office the company was scoping out had an abandoned Sony Trinitron KV-20VS40 in it. Anyone know if that's a good CRT or just pretty generic?
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I'll echo that Trinitrons are really good (and heavy). You can't go wrong with them for retro gaming, specially if you can get one for cheap.

If you want, come here to the CRT Enjoyer thread, we have very few posts, but we love our crts.
 
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There used to be a god-tier DOSBox emulator called Boxer, which would do the grunt work of installing DOS stuff and creating nice pre-packaged game bundles to click and play, but got killed when Apple decided that 32-bit applications were "obsolete". On Windows, I can't find a good DOSBox alternative at all, trying to fuck around with DOSBox-X results in stuff that runs like ass, so I have to stick with GOG's outdated configurations.
 
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Never Scored said:
Did they not have video rental stores where you live?
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I feel like we're living in a weird zone where people straight up do not remember how shitty it was 20+ years ago. Yes Blockbuster did game rentals, but they were obviously split by console so you're left with like 30 games to select from with a good 10 of them being the latest sports game. Wanna play GTA Vice City? Sorry pal, our last copy is being rented out at the moment but there's State of Emergency in stock, why not play that?

It's like emulator enthusiasts see that a console had 45 great games so go "Huh, looks like that console had a great library" ignoring that those games were spread out across the entire lifetime of that console, many only gained notoriety as hidden gems years after the consoles last games hit, and there was just so much fucking FILLER with every games console around. Rental places were full of shitty games you'd manage to get buyers remorse for and the games are so shitty that we generally forget they even existed. Mary Kate and Ashley's Sweet 16? Starsky and Hutch the game? Rocky Legends? 50 Cent: Bulletproof? All here for when you want them!
 
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Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
I feel like we're living in a weird zone where people straight up do not remember how shitty it was 20+ years ago. Yes Blockbuster did game rentals, but they were obviously split by console so you're left with like 30 games to select from with a good 10 of them being the latest sports game. Wanna play GTA Vice City? Sorry pal, our last copy is being rented out at the moment but there's State of Emergency in stock, why not play that?
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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.
 
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One place I lived growing up had a rental place nearby (not Blockbuster, some other chain that wasn't as known or widespread) that had a game store built into it (not GameStop, some other lesser chain that also dealt with new and used games). Like you walk into the rental place and there were movies in front of you and to the left, and to the right was the game section, and at the end of that was an entrance way into the game store, which also had its own front door to the parking lot.

Super convenient. I bought (well y'know, my parents bought for me since I was like 10) almost all my games from there while I lived around there. I would often rent a game that turned out to be really good and then buy my own copy from the game store when I went to take the rented copy back. Or I would go to buy a game and pick up some rented game while I was there. That said, one thing about the rental place is it didn't have any handheld games. Maybe they were worried about them being too easy to lose or something.
 
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Never Scored said:
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 l 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.
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In any city but the smallest shittiest ones, there would probably be at least 2-3 Blockbuster stores, a few independent or regional chains, and then the selection at every major supermarket, then multiply that for big cities. At one point, even places like Circle K did video rental.

@Retarded Weeb Pretty sure you're talking about Hollywood Video and Game Crazy.

Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
It's like emulator enthusiasts see that a console had 45 great games so go "Huh, looks like that console had a great library" ignoring that those games were spread out across the entire lifetime of that console, many only gained notoriety as hidden gems years after the consoles last games hit, and there was just so much fucking FILLER with every games console around. Rental places were full of shitty games you'd manage to get buyers remorse for and the games are so shitty that we generally forget they even existed. Mary Kate and Ashley's Sweet 16? Starsky and Hutch the game? Rocky Legends? 50 Cent: Bulletproof? All here for when you want them!
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Declaring a console has only x "good" games is kind of stupid because each game has a certain "value" that works in with the console as a whole. Otherwise you'd end up with meaningless opinions that the N64 is a better console than the PS2 because a higher percentage of its games are considered good and memorable and what have you.

The NES Classic Edition has 30 of what are generally considered to be "good" games for the NES, whereas the Super NES Classic Edition has 21 games, but I would consider it to have a much stronger library despite fewer games.

This is where the debate for the N64 and the original PlayStation come in, no PlayStation game really came close to knocking it out of the park like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and a few others did, but makes up for it in sheer A-quality or B-quality games. Meanwhile consoles like the Dreamcast don't really have much going for them since their "best" games collectively don't hold a candle to its competition.
 
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