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

Xarpho's Return said:
On the other hand, what I probably need to do is invest in a flash cart or something for the 3DS because taking apart the 3DS to add new games to the microSD isn't fun and I've wiped out my entire 3DS' memory while it was plugged into my computer once (including StreetPass Miis and purchased Virtual Console games).
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You can do everything right from the 3DS now and should never have to remove the card. Just use the h-shop app.
 
Xarpho's Return said:
This may be a dumb question but what about just putting stickers on SD cards? There are probably enough floating around that you could get a good deal on even 16MB cards that were for cameras twenty years ago and do just fine for your favorite SNES/NES games.



I'm still on the fence about getting a Steam Deck but one of the things that the Deck (because it's a miniature PC) has is the ability to hook up a USB Game Boy cartridge reader to play physical Game Boy games. I realize that's impractical when it's easy to load and unload games these days including far more games than I ever had growing up. I do wish there was some sort of similar device for the Nintendo 3DS to play physical cartridges (other than DS/3DS cartridges, of course) on the 3DS itself.

On the other hand, what I probably need to do is invest in a flash cart or something for the 3DS because taking apart the 3DS to add new games to the microSD isn't fun and I've wiped out my entire 3DS' memory while it was plugged into my computer once (including StreetPass Miis and purchased Virtual Console games).
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I had a steam deck for a while, and eventually upgraded to the legion go (and installed steamos on it) both devices have the same problem as the switch 2, they only get 2hrs battery running graphically demanding games, otherwise they're fantastic. You can install hshop on the 3ds to install 3ds and virtual console games remotely, and use an ftp server for everything else, and most 3ds homebrew can be installed via a QR code with the FBI app
 
I'm starting to look further into maintaining my older consoles. I haven't touched my DS consoles for a while, and I am wondering what's the best way to go about their batteries so they don't bloat and leak. As far as I know, if they are inside the consoles(and why wouldn't they be?) they should be fine if they are sitting in a safe place unless they are overcharged(100% charged without me playing them for a longer time) or completely dead. They are usually still good for me even if I don't play for months, but they are on red, meaning I have to charge them before use.

What's the happy medium here? I don't think I should really be doing anything other than what I am already doing. Should I bother buying new batteries after a certain point? Some of these are getting up there in years.
 
30+GameOvers said:
Should I bother buying new batteries after a certain point? Some of these are getting up there in years.
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I don't think batteries are worth replacing unless their bloated or have severely degraded capacity. With the DS you can just pop off the back and look.
Honestly it's so messed up that companies stopped making batteries replaceable knowing all batteries will all eventually degrade and be unusable. I bought a new PSP battery and it's simple to replace but I have no idea what I'll do about all my other devices. This sucks.


Upgraded my old PSP from 5.00 M33 to 6.61 Ark-4. It's so satisfying to have every decent game sitting on a console (even if I'll never play them).
psp.webp
 
Two Dollars said:
Too bad the games menu takes like ten seconds to load if you have more than what they assumed you’d be able to fit on a 4GB memory stick.
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Tell me about it. The game's menu has been a thorn in my side for the last week. On 5.00 M33 if I had more than 20 games the menu would just be empty. No games at all.
The Ark Custom Launcher is a decent workaround and I'm going to see if a Categories Plugin might make the regular games menu a bit faster.
 
MongolianMongoose said:
I don't think batteries are worth replacing unless their bloated or have severely degraded capacity. With the DS you can just pop off the back and look.
Honestly it's so messed up that companies stopped making batteries replaceable knowing all batteries will all eventually degrade and be unusable. I bought a new PSP battery and it's simple to replace but I have no idea what I'll do about all my other devices. This sucks.


Upgraded my old PSP from 5.00 M33 to 6.61 Ark-4. It's so satisfying to have every decent game sitting on a console (even if I'll never play them).
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What I mean is, how will I know when the battery will go bad? My consoles worked for over 10 years now just fine, I don't think I have even seen a decrease in their battery life much. I just down't want a leak, a new battery I can buy but if the acid damages the hardware itself, then it's game over.
 
GeorgeFloydFentanylStash said:
How is the battery drain when your Legion Go is in sleep mode? Usually i get a good 10% if i charge the night before and turn in my SD in the afternoon.
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It was horrible when it had windows installed, but after installing bazzite (basically steamos) it can last well over a day at least, I've never did a proper stress test though, I would just forget it was in sleep mode alot, it's basically the same as the deck
 
30+GameOvers said:
I'm starting to look further into maintaining my older consoles. I haven't touched my DS consoles for a while, and I am wondering what's the best way to go about their batteries so they don't bloat and leak. As far as I know, if they are inside the consoles(and why wouldn't they be?) they should be fine if they are sitting in a safe place unless they are overcharged(100% charged without me playing them for a longer time) or completely dead. They are usually still good for me even if I don't play for months, but they are on red, meaning I have to charge them before use.

What's the happy medium here? I don't think I should really be doing anything other than what I am already doing. Should I bother buying new batteries after a certain point? Some of these are getting up there in years.
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I have as a rule charged my DSes and PSP batteries every 6 months to a year. They slowly self-discharge so getting them to 100% is fine, the problem is letting them completely drain and leaving them like that for extended periods.

Of my 6 or 7 PSP batteries all work as well as they did when new. My extended life 2200mah PSP battery still has over 10h of battery life on a PSP 3000.

The only batteries I've seen die are my wife's 3DS which wasn't plugged in for a long time and my daughter's 2DS which she often just left on and ran out to 0% several times.
 
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Baraka Obama said:
I have as a rule charged my DSes and PSP batteries every 6 months to a year. They slowly self-discharge to getting them to 100% is fine, the problem is letting them completely drain and leaving them like that for extended periods.

Of my 6 or 7 PSP batteries all work as well as they did when new. My extended life 2200mah PSP battery still has over 10h of battery life on a PSP 3000.

The only batteries I've seen die are my wife's 3DS which wasn't plugged in for a long time and my daughter's 2DS which she often just left on and ran out to 0% several times.
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I have never had a completely empty battery, aside from that one time it ran out completely while I was playing Heartgold, so this shouldn't be an issue. Any time I turn on one of my consoles, even after months of inactivity, they still seem to have some juice in them.
 
I had no idea that you could convert PS2 ISOs into CHD format and it'd just work. That's basically shaved a good 40% off the size of my games library and all I had to do was chuck a few ISOs into the batch converter every now and again.

Seeing Crazy Taxi go from something like 700MB to 70MB was astounding, and the average game is just straight cut in half bar some exceptions where they REALLY push games to the limits (God of War for example). San Andreas is now 2.5GB as opposed to something like 5 which I assume was the doubling up of data for easier disk access.

It really is a super convenient storage format. I've kept a few ISOs that are hard to find in their original states on a backup drive just in case but honestly it's made me want to grab a few more games now I've plenty of space.
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
I had no idea that you could convert PS2 ISOs into CHD format and it'd just work. That's basically shaved a good 40% off the size of my games library and all I had to do was chuck a few ISOs into the batch converter every now and again.

Seeing Crazy Taxi go from something like 700MB to 70MB was astounding, and the average game is just straight cut in half bar some exceptions where they REALLY push games to the limits (God of War for example). San Andreas is now 2.5GB as opposed to something like 5 which I assume was the doubling up of data for easier disk access.

It really is a super convenient storage format. I've kept a few ISOs that are hard to find in their original states on a backup drive just in case but honestly it's made me want to grab a few more games now I've plenty of space.
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Throw those ISOs away because CHD is lossless. You can convert it back to the original ISO, byte for byte.
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
I had no idea that you could convert PS2 ISOs into CHD format and it'd just work.
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CHD is even a trash tech that could do far better. Individual ISOs become individual CHDs, but in the multi-disc case, it could really be optimized more, because there's a lot of redundancy in the multi-disc case. But yeah, CHD is a straight upgrade for ISO, and even has the bonus that the audio is properly encoded in FLAC.
 
At some point I stopped dicking around with compression and just went for larger hard drives.

My 195 PS2 ISOs take up only 641gb, less than 1% of my NAS and fits comfortably on the 1TB sata SSD in my PS2. Storage costs continue to fall exponentially so by the time the latter stops being the case an upgrade is cheap.
 
I haven't dicked around with CHD at all, never even looked into it in detail, and never realized how good the compression was. After I bought an SSD adapter I don't need to worry about storage, and I only keep games I'll actually play on the PS2, anyways. Are there any improvements besides (vastly) improved file size?
 
Speaking of compression, the Azahar team recently created and added a new lossless compression format for 3DS roms and is currently looking into making those directly installable on a real system. I converted all my roms and forgot to measure the exact disk space savings, but I think it saved about 30% for me, maybe more.
 
I don't think CHD is nearly as effective for PS2 ISOs (I still use it because it shaves a good 33% of space off for like an hour of compressing), but for Saturn or Dreamcast games or anything with a lot of bin/cue files, I can't imagine NOT converting it to CHD. It helps keep everything clean and organized and then if you use an m3u file you have a nice way of multi-disking some games.
 
Two Dollars said:
Throw those ISOs away because CHD is lossless. You can convert it back to the original ISO, byte for byte.
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It's more a data hoarding mindset of fearing that my hard drive will fuck up and I'll lose some fairly rare ISOs. If in 10 years down the line Vimm's Lair goes down then good luck getting that Cowboy Bebop ISO.
HexFag said:
I don't think CHD is nearly as effective for PS2 ISOs (I still use it because it shaves a good 33% of space off for like an hour of compressing), but for Saturn or Dreamcast games or anything with a lot of bin/cue files, I can't imagine NOT converting it to CHD. It helps keep everything clean and organized and then if you use an m3u file you have a nice way of multi-disking some games.
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Fun fact, a decent amount of PS2 games actually came in CD form to save costs on disks and they typically rip with a cue and bin file. I just stick them all in CHD form just sso my directory is unified. In fact I only really thought CHD was meant for CD compression, so discovering it actually works for DVD ISOs is pretty nifty.
 
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