BulkSlash

Jeff Bezos was really keeping the dream alive there! I’m still waiting for ‘90s Arcade Racer… 😫

I must insert my obligatory recommendation of Mighty Gunvolt Burst which is like an 8-bit demake of Mighty No 9 but is actually really good. It’s also made by IntiCreates, I think they struggled with doing a 3D game as their 2D stuff is usually good. Or maybe Mighty No 9 was just taken off them before they could really polish it?

@GravyThief I’ve got 9 CRTs and I can’t see scanlines on any of them. The shadow mask/aperture grille is very evident when looking closely but I can’t see scanlines. I often wondered if it’s a PAL/NTSC thing where the slightly lower line resolution of NTSC meant the scanlines were easier to see?

Grabbing this now before Rockstar’s lawyers get it shut down. I’m hoping I’ll be able to use my original GTA3 release with it as I never bought the broken Trilogy version.

Gave the demo a try last night, it’s just the first section of the first level but it’s pretty impressive, especially as I think I counted 6 enemies on screen at once (albeit with some flicker caused by too many on a single scanline). It’s missing the big skull clowns on motorbikes but the rest of the enemies are there and you can smash enemies against the windows like the SNES version.

I wonder if the SNES could have displayed more enemies if they’d used a FastROM cart? I know there’s a mod for Final Fight 2 that ups the number of simultaneous enemies from 3 to 5 also with some sprite flicker.

That’s got to be the most fake sounding letter from a legal department I’ve ever read.

@Razieluigi Music rights really are insane. For example, Alexander Courage wrote the theme to Star Trek, but Gene Roddenberry went and wrote some lyrics to the tune; this meant Roddenberry always got 50% of the royalties whenever the Star Trek theme was used, even though the lyrics aren’t being sung with it!

Awesome, I still use my 7th gen iPod Classic daily. There is already quite a large modding ecosystem out there with most of these things like replacement case parts, larger batteries, Bluetooth back cases and PCBs to replace the hard drive with Micro SD cards. The majority of it is pretty plug and play too, with only things like USB-C requiring soldering.

That said, IPS screens could be pretty cool, if they can just be dropped in.

@Deuteros I loved all those crazy concept images and the rumours about what the hardware would do. I was genuinely quite surprised when the actual SNES CD prototype turned up and it was just a simple CD-ROM drive with no additional capabilities compared to what the Mega-CD had.

@GravyThief I do that too, Nintendo mapping the buttons to A/B just sucks. I use that remapping for Mario Kart 8 too as I can't get on with A/B as accelerate/brake.

@LuigiBlood The trouble with that toggle is it disables the A button and you also need that for the mini-game. So you've got to remember to release that toggle in time to press the A button. It's just a poor implementation all around sadly.

The lag definitely catches me out when I go from playing Mario World on real hardware to the Switch. I always die on the first enemy because my timing for the jump is off. 😂 After a minute or so I normally acclimate and it's OK, but I could definitely see lag being a problem in Axelay (if we ever get it).

I've moaned about this before, but my big problem with NSO are the controls for N64 games. Some are worse than others, but games like Ocarina of Time are just horrid where the right analogue stick is used to simulate the c-buttons. It's OK in some cases, but things like the frog mini game is virtually impossible.

Not only do the control positions no longer match the layout of the frogs on screen, but even slightly pushing the right stick too close to another axis can result in the game thinking you pushed the wrong c-button thus failing the mini-game. It really is quite horrid and probably makes the N64 look a lot worse to people than it really is.

@KingMike “still finished enough to meet TecToy's quality standards”

🤣 I really need try that version myself to investigate the quality on offer now.

If we could just get a sequel to Devastation... Platinum doing a G1 Transformers game was basically my dream game!

Even though 3D polygons are objectively better, I still love the look of Super Scaler games. They still feel like some sort of exotic future tech, probably because the home consoles never really got any Super Scaler games (outside of a few on the 32X and Saturn) so it has always felt like a technology of the arcade that never made it into the home.

Ooh nice, I wish they'd made the transparent special edition that they made last year available worldwide. Still, I have a black OLED model now so I probably won't be upgrading (I do need more storage though, my 512GB SSD is full and so is my 1TB Micro SD! 😆)

This is quite encouraging, it sounds like it basically is an overclocked SuperFX with access to more ROM space. I was concerned they might go the route of Doom on the Mega EverDrive and just have the FPGA run the game with the SNES just being a dumb passthrough.

It will be cool to see if things like StarFox and Stunt Race can be upgraded to be smoother, I’ve played them with an overclocked SuperFX and the problem is they also run faster, which isn’t ideal.

@-wc- You're welcome! 😉 I have plenty of regrets myself about things I gave away years ago that I wish I'd kept!

@obijuankanoobie I got a 32X a few years back because my brother had one back in the day and I enjoyed Virtua Racing and Star Wars Arcade. It was quite impressive when StarFox was the best 3D I'd seen! 😅

It's not an essential bit of kit at all but it's unbelievable how the prices for them have skyrocketed lately. I remember when you couldn't give them away on eBay but nowadays you'd be lucky to get one for under £250.

I'm sure we've all been there. You load up a Dreamcast game and then have to keep swapping VMUs into slot 1 because that game only checks slot 1 and you can't remember which VMU has your save game on. 😅

I've no idea where my old PSPs are in the garage, I use a PSP Go as my daily driver and so far, the battery seems OK. Hopefully it doesn't expand as there's no easy hatch on the back like on the larger models!

😂 If you’d asked me to guess, I’d have assumed the Space Invaders cab in Fools and Horses was the most seen game!

That’s a six button cab in the caff too, so it probably had some version of SFII in it at some point.

No lies detected! The Dreamcast really was my favourite console of that generation by far.

I recently retired my HDMI modded N64 and went back to an RGB modded one to use on a CRT. It looks so much better over a CRT, there really is no comparison.

I’d consider one of these as a spare if my N64 ever dies but knowing Analogue they won’t make enough and then they’ll dole out limited amounts of new colours which will also sell out immediately. When they stop doing that I’ll buy from them again.

I’d love to see those missing enemies back-ported into Doom 64 itself on the N64!

https://imgur.com/Oj9Thtm

It doesn't look like that for me when using composite, but I have cheated slightly as I don't have composite cables for the Megadrive. 😉

It's a good idea, definitely better than carting around those bulky controllers that fit round the ends of your phone. I think if it was made from stronger plastics and not 3D printed it would be better.

I would also prefer something that just has all the controls on-screen at once, rather than needing to swap to different layouts for different consoles.

I love Tekken 3, Namco managed to squeeze a huge amount into the regular PS1 compared to the upgraded PS1 hardware they used in the arcade version. I still enjoy playing it today.

The one weak spot of Tekken 3 was the Tekken Force mode, it just wasn’t very good. So Michael Murray citing that as the thing he’d want to play from Tekken 3 doesn’t inspire much confidence in his ideas of what makes a good Tekken game.

It sort of reminds me of Jim Ryan’s infamous “why would anybody play this?” quote.

There's some cool scaling effects in that footage. I'm guessing it's not real scaling but the sprites have been pre-rendered at each scale size and stored on the cart because space won't be an issue like it would have been back in the day.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about Freakzone Games’ pixel art that makes them instantly recognisable. You can tell it’s the same people who did Manos and AVGN. I’ve never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show but I’m definitely interested in playing this.

@avcrypt lol, that's going to blow up old consoles with tired capacitors. 😆 Are there any bandwidth issues with multiple enhancement chips?

@Poodlestargenerica Dominator is actually my favourite I think. While it does tend towards the brown/bloom look of the era, I really enjoyed the way you could recharge your nitrous bar while using it. It was possible (but not very easy) to boost for an entire race as long as you kept taking risks to recharge the nitrous.

I think it tends to get overlooked because it doesn't have a crash mode and it was released after the 360 launched so people had moved on by then.

@HoyeBoye I think Drainus falls under the narrative non-bullet-hell shmup category too. It's definitely worth a go if you haven't seen it already.

From watching the trailer, Visegunne looks really good. I'll definitely be adding it to my wishlist.

That's weird, doing SuperFX AND MSU-1 at the same time? I always thought you could only have one enhancement chip per game, and I think on the SD2SNES it's actually a memory limitation that you can't do both. Maybe it will be an FXPAK Pro only feature? If you can use as many enhancements chips as you like, why not throw an SA-1 in there too to speed up processing! 😂

I own the arcade machine so technically I don’t need this, but the gun does intrigue me. The OG light gun worked by drawing a fully white frame when the trigger is pulled and because it’s scanning the screen at such a high rate it can tell where it’s pointing.

This AI gun could look for a 16:9 rectangle with a bright white 4:3 square, but there’s the issue of input lag, the gun would see the white frame several frames after the game has processed the collision. So maybe the AI just recognises TVs and infers where you’re aiming based on that?

@HoyeBoye Could be! 😂 I do agree that adding Pi to the name definitely implies a much more affordable solution compared to other FPGAs so there's definitely a benefit there.

I'm confused by the name. It says "Pi" which suggests it's using a Raspberry Pi but as far as I can tell it's entirely FPGA based. It seems odd to pick a name that suggests it's yet another Pi based emulation system and not an FPGA when that's the key selling point. 😵‍💫

I guess it's fair to say he has the right to be critical of someone updating his work, but he also worked on the rather terrible Double Dragon IV, so he's not exactly blameless for bad Double Dragon games.

That’s hilarious seeing how many times the Mishimas have thrown each other from a great altitude. You’d think they’d learn by now it doesn’t stop them coming back!

I never really got into any of the Tekken games after the third, although I quite enjoyed the JAMMA version of Tag Tournament. After that the games just felt a bit uninspired and I missed the unique CGI endings you’d get for each character.

I thought this was going to be official at first, I thought Sony were finally going to make amends for the mess they made of their PS1 mini last time. I should have known better! 😅

I am very tempted by that PS1 themed PS5 Pro, but as it’s only limited numbers I’m most likely going to miss out to all the scalpers who will have them on eBay for twice the price.

This is pretty anecdotal but I have messed around hacking the difficulty scaling in SFII on the CPS1 and I’ve noticed both Ryu and E. Honda are often more difficult than the other fighters as if the developers wanted the Japanese characters to be the strongest. Ken noticeably doesn’t exhibit the same behaviour which makes me think it might be deliberate.

@Razieluigi I’m in the same boat, this is the first console generation since I’ve been earning my own money where I’ve not bought at least one system at launch.

I was hoping the Pro would be a bit cheaper, I need to decide if I really want to pay that much. I might wait for some reviews to see how well it performs. I mostly want it for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Stellar Blade. There just aren’t many games this gen that actually excite me. 😢

Now that we’ve had Rent-A-Hero translated, I think this is the last of the DC games that I was really excited to play that never left Japan due to Sega discontinuing the Dreamcast (well, I’m assuming they would have released it in the West).

It's kind of funny how they've ripped most of the 3D models from the PS2 game but then slapped in a bunch of much higher detail palm trees (presumably some off-the-shelf 3D model assets they've bought).

I watched for a few minutes, it managed to get as far as the second corner a couple of times. It seems it's designed to fail and reset as soon as it touches the edges of the road.

I wonder if they could speed things up by disabling the emulator's frame limiter? It seems it will take forever for it to learn and it might just end up learning how to beat one track. Or it might learn that not accelerating at all allows it to avoid the edges of the road forever! 😂

Seems very plausible. House of the Dead 2 in the arcades used an array of infrared emitters around the edge of the screen which the gun could "see" so it would know where it was aiming, which basically is how the Wii pointer works. The fishing rod controller had basic motion control sensors.

I could easily see Sega looking into these technologies, especially when the approach of LCD screens meant alternative methods to the old light guns would be needed.

I’m really looking forward to this one, the expanded moveset like the slide move allows for all sorts of cool actions like kicking an enemy’s projectile back at them.

The funniest thing I saw was a video of Simon beating a boss and pulling off some cool moves to collect the sphere and the game rates you on how cool your finish move is. 😂

@GravyThief @RejectedAng3L Yeah that's it, it's cool from a technical standpoint, but it's not really authentic to the era. Although someone the other day described the MSU1 as being a bit like what we'd have got if the SNES CD-ROM drive had launched! 😂

StarFox, Doom and Stunt Race are the ones I'd most like to see get enhanced frame rates. I'm genuinely curious as to how this FX3 can improve performance. We know you can overclock the SuperFX 1 & 2 which makes the games run faster but until now no-one had cracked getting more frames per second without the game also running too fast.

I kind of hope the new chip isn't doing too much work and is authentic to what would have been possible back in 199X. You can run the full version of Doom on a Megadrive using a Mega Everdrive Pro, but it's basically running the whole game on the cartridge and just using the Megadrive for controller inputs and image output which feels like cheating to me! 😂

@Gs69 Yeah I ordered one of their PS1 memory cards back in May and it still hasn’t shipped, they said it was supposed to ship in June. I’d prefer they sort their back orders before developing yet another product…

@RetroGames I don't know if what I'm referencing is related to the people who were being unpleasant. I remember there was a Mega-Man fan game uploaded which caused concerns about copyright and resulted in the full games section being closed to new submissions.

Someone uploaded one or more patches made by someone else who didn't want them posted on RHDN and there was quite a lot of disagreement over whether they should be kept or taken down. I think there was something to do with a Pokemon patch too. I think the whole moderation process was in upheaval at the time.

In all cases there were people who were adamant that the item in question be kept/deleted, which polarised things quite a bit. Although from the sounds of things there was a whole other thing going on in Discord totally separate from the website, so possibly none of the above is related.

I just saw that earlier, it's a real shame as the site is one of the ones I usually check every day to see what new hacks are out. I noticed something going on last year when there was some sort of controversy over certain hacks submitted to the site, so I suppose this isn't entirely out of the blue. Hopefully romhacks.org will be able to fill the gap they're leaving behind.