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

Not sure which thread this would be most appropriate for, but the PC version of Cave Story+ recently got an update that finally, finally, adds the mountain of improvements from the nine year old Switch remaster including widescreen, multiplayer, optional enhanced visual effects, new modes, new soundtracks, QoL improvements, and a ton more. There are also improvements related to extensive official mod support, bug fixes, a debug mode, and a bunch of other stuff.
 
I have came back and i made a blueprint for a qbert jamma arcade machine.
Qbert caberat cab prodotype blueprint.png
 
Samuel Fuller said:
All buttons on the DualShock 2 were analog, and the L2/R2 triggers weren't dogshit, so it is automatically better than either the SIXAXIS or the DualShock 3.
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Every game that made use of the analog triggers except MGS2 and 3 were made worse by it. In Ace Combat 5 and Zero you need to really smash the trigger or your plane doesn't move fast enough. Sure you can feather the throttle but the room to do that is tiny and how often does that even benefit you?

Worst thing about the PS2 controller is how the dpad feels, and I'm pretty sure it's also because of analog buttons. You don't have a clear defined point that means "pressed" for digital presses, and it seems to vary per-game on what constitutes pressed enough. On top of that the dpad just feels mushy. One thing I will say for the PS3 controllers is that they really fixed that and the dpad feels excellent in comparison, even the DS3 which brought back the analog buttons the dpad is way better.
 
I love emulating games on mobile with Delta but Ive run out things to play. Did mario RPG, paper mario 64 & link to the past. Dont wanna play pokemon & lots of vidya is way too complex to play with touch screen.
 
Altarfrog11 said:
I love emulating games on mobile with Delta but Ive run out things to play. Did mario RPG, paper mario 64 & link to the past. Dont wanna play pokemon & lots of vidya is way too complex to play with touch screen.
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Try the Puyo Puyo games. The first one on the Genesis has been fan translated and there's several in the series.
 
Altarfrog11 said:
I love emulating games on mobile with Delta but Ive run out things to play. Did mario RPG, paper mario 64 & link to the past. Dont wanna play pokemon & lots of vidya is way too complex to play with touch screen.
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There’s a Japan-only Famicom puzzle game called Egypt that is pretty good with touch controls.

There’s even a fan translation for it, but the only text are the cutscenes between chapters, so you don’t miss much with the raw ROM.
 
Someone posted a link a while ago in a different thread to a guy uploading repacks on archive.org of old PC games.

I finally got around to testing some of them out and out of the dozen or so games I tried on my linux machine the only one I couldn't get running was the original Halo but thats mostly because I didn't want to fuck around with lutris.

As far as I can tell the guy is uploading portable versions with fan patches and QoL improvements added in, alongside original vanilla versions, so its a case of unpacking the zip and playing the game.

Uploads include a lot of popular stuff like most of the NFS games but there are some obscure titles too like LotR Conquest which was made by the same people who made the original Star Wars Battlefront games IIRC. I remember wanting to play it back on the 360 but never getting around to it. Now I can finally check it out.
 
I was thinking about how Myriant was shut down in march. I remember hearing that it was saved, but it seems that no, it isn't. Now the whole thing is spread over discords and reddit.

Kofi Drinka said:
Which PS2 FPS games play better on emulation than native hardware? It's a genre no one ever touches or makes videos on. With full emulation control over sensitivity and better twin sticks there's got to be some good ones right?
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It depends on what you want.

Most of the PS2 FPSs run fine on native hardware. There are a few games in general that benefit from overclocking.

As for which are worth it. Timesplitters (especialy 2 and 3, though I'd argue they're better on gamecube), Ratchet Gladiator (third person but iirc has a first person mode), and Urban Chaos: Riot Responce are all fantastic on native or emulation. I've heard good things about The Punisher, but I never played that one (and is also third person).
 
Judge Dredd said:
I was thinking about how Myriant was shut down in march. I remember hearing that it was saved, but it seems that no, it isn't. Now the whole thing is spread over discords and reddit.
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It wasn't saved as in, a perfect copy of the site offering the same DDL was set up. It was saved as in, people have copies of the full contents of the site which are now being distributed through torrents. As to how that is actually going in practice I'm not sure, I got everything I wanted to before the site shut down. It's still the best outcome; nobody is likely to be able to just set up Myrient 2.0 when the original was being crippled by thousands of dollars a month in server costs which I can't imagine many people are in a position to be able to afford long-term. It's a miracle it lasted as long as it did really.
 
Out of curiosity, are their any oldhats here that were around when OoT came out? Outside of journalists and magazine scores, what'd you think of it and was the consensus like in highschool, college or among coworkers for you?
Not to power level too much, but I was pretty young when it came out and only knew of 1 friend who had it and we both really like it. So much so that we'd shout like Link from time to time when playing outside or playing with our action figures together. :story:
We both didn't have cable at the time, so we weren't exposed to any adverts for it or read any Nintendo Power. The first time I ever saw it was at a demo kiosk at Target and was pretty wowed by it while he never heard about it until he got it for his birthday.

I've seen a lot of posts for years claiming it was the GOAT of all GOATs and nothing else compared to it at the time or even today, but to me it comes off like they may be exaggerating a bit? Maybe even a little hint of pretetiousess? Like it's Nintendo bias/faboyism or repeating what others have said because of it's lauded status when it was really just a damn fine as wine game. With how it's been lambasted and torn to shreads for the past 2 decades, especially by turbo autists armchair game devs looking at you Egoraptor -- along with SM64 for that matter -- it's almost like some bitter vedetta history revisionist fuckery at play, as if to downplay it's influence throughout the industry that in hindsight it wasn't THAT good or THAT popular as people made it out to be that it's a shitty attempt at transitioning Zelda into 3D ruined the formula forever ALttP is better etc. etc.

I never had any problems or complaints with the game throughout the years, but I'm willing to admit it's got some shortcomings that haven't held up that well namely the graphics in some areas (like Jesus H. Chirstmas, a lot of the textures look like fucking ugly smeared molasses they look so bad. Thankfully Majora improved on that), among other things.
However I still think it holds up as a halfway decent, solid action adveture game. Also, experiencing Master Quest and how it handled it's puzzles makes me glad Nintendo played it safe with OoT), because for the first 3D game to be that obsute? The game likely would've bombed or shat on reletlessly, I feel.
 
OoT does deserve quite a bit of the praise it still receives even today for some of the innovations it brought. IIRC it was the first 3D game to introduce the lock-on feature most 3D Action titles still use today to work around how wonky the camera was. Shit was mindblowing for younger me and I remember the game being a big deal around school and in the magazines.

While its not my favorite (I'm torn between Link to the Past or Oracle of Seasons/Ages) I can't understand anyone wanting to tear the game down because of its popularity or to fit some sort of weird narrative. Then again we see that all the time with older titles so I shouldn't be surprised.
 
Peguin Sandwich said:
Out of curiosity, are their any oldhats here that were around when OoT came out? Outside of journalists and magazine scores, what'd you think of it and was the consensus like in highschool, college or among coworkers for you?
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I was 14 when OoT dropped. I did not own an N64, but I played OoT at the local Zellars every chance I had. However, UltraHLE supported it very shortly after release, and I wanted to play OoT so much that I bought a Voodoo Banshee to run it in UltraHLE. So that's where I fell in the hype map at the time.

The lock-on system for 3D battle really took a lot of the pain out of early 3D with difficult camera angles, new controls, et cetera. It made it all very accessible to me, who was a 2D platformer lover. And yet, there was plenty of challenge too.

It's hard to evaluate today because it was so influential that everything that followed refined the formula. But yeah, the hype was real, and it was a big upgrade. Mario 64 brought us into the era of fun 3D action, c/w Tomb Raider and Quake released nearby; OoT really refined that action into enjoyable 3D combat and adventure.

As for the social consensus, everyone loved it. There were some folks filtered from the 3D, but it was widely accepted as "as good as LTTP" or better.
 
I was 13 or 14 when OoT came out and caught up in the hype, but didn't own an N64 and didn't have any friends who did either, so I lived vicariously through others. Finally played it when the Zelda anniversary disc on Gamecube had it and it felt pretty meh. My biggest issue is that after getting the master sword Link felt weaker, purely because I lost access to the kid items. You get replacements quickly, but it always rubbed me wrong that your toolset reduces and makes the world temporarily more closed off.

Replayed it a few years ago for retro achievements and my feelings were much warmer. It's still overrated in my opinion, and I'd consider it the weakest of the 3D Zeldas*. I'd also argue Link to the Past is the best Zelda overall, especially once I tried the randomizer a few times. The entire world feels far more open in a way that the game boy titles never do. Link's Awakening and the Oracle games 100% hold up, but they're far more streamlined.

* I'm convinced Breath of the Wild was a new IP they slapped the Zelda name on since it was so boring, so not counting it as a Zelda here. I haven't played Tears of the Kingdom but since it's more Breath of the Wild, my default position is that it's equally boring. Skwyard Sword seems fine, but the switch controls were terrible.
 
TheTitKoker said:
I honestly feel that earlier PS3 era was and is the ultimate console experience. You had linux and web browsing. You thus had voice chat. L/R2 were finally analog to play perfectly with racing games (even if you kinda wanted to get extension flares to make them into triggers).
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I got my PS3 in 2008. And PS Home was just launched as soon as I pulled my PS3 out of the box. I probably spent hours on Home during my Christmas break from college that year.

And the PlayStation store wasn’t enshittified and hard to find what your looking for like it is now.
 
OoT deserves the praise it gets because it got so many systems right off the bat. It was the first 3D Zelda and everything worked flawlessly: The dungeons, the combat, the open world, everything. Even simple stuff like auto-jumping gaps was a simple and elegant QoL solution to solving 3D environment navigation that other developers at the time would have not though of implementing as a solution. Perhaps the only complaint that could be levied at the title is that the towns and Hyrule field sections feel sparse of content and there isn't much in the way of NPC characterization but that's not the real focus of the game, the puzzle solving and combat is where the game shines.

Think of the context of a 1998 3D game on a console, it had no right to be as good as it was.
 
ModRetro announced a bunch more info on the M64, including a July release date. It all looks good IMO, but here are the highlights they provided:
  • Lowest MSRP by far (even after early bird pricing ends)
  • 5-second boot to game
  • Wireless OTA updates available out of the box
  • 16nm process node AMD ultrascale+ FPGA
  • Fanless (noiseless) thermal design
  • PSRAM architecture allows M64 to unlock significantly higher overclocking
  • Full UI control from console
  • In-house designed controller and games for deep integration
  • Chromatic video passthrough, Chromatic transfer pak (post-ship update)
  • Designed to be taken apart easily with no adhesives
  • FPGA core will be open-sourced upon launch
  • Many more just-for-fun features: cart eject button, LED uplighting, etc.
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I want to emphasize the part about overlocking. For some reason, a certain group of people’s biggest gotcha against THAT TRANSPHOBIC WARMONGERING TRUMP SUPPORTING CHUD PALMER LUCKEY ModRetro is that it won’t support overclocking like the Analogue 3D, even though there’s been absolutely nothing to imply that it won’t*, they all just kind of… assumed it wouldn’t for some reason. But look at that, not only will it support overclocking just fine, it’ll supposedly be even better than what the Analogue 3D can do. What a surprise.

* If anything, all evidence implied that it would have overclocking. The M64 core is made in collaboration with the same guy who made the N64 MiSTer cores including the overclocking core, and the M64’s FPGA is more powerful than a MiSTer, and he said recent N64 MiSTer core updates were backported from the in-progress M64 core, so… why wouldn’t it?
 
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