BulkSlash

@sdelfin I don’t think I’ve had that glitch, but I’ve been caught more than once with a glitch in Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts where taking a shortcut on level 4 doesn’t load the rest of the level. 💀

I think I know the Strider patch you’re taking about, I downloaded it but it was for an older version of the game not supported in MAME anymore. I wonder if it’s possible to port it…

@sdelfin I love a bit of Strider as well, I finally managed to 1cc it a month back! It wouldn’t surprise me if there are glitches, I tend to play the Japanese release and you can occasionally see small garbage pixels at the edge of Hiryuu’s sprite where it overlaps with another sprite in the ROM. Some versions re-use level 1’s music on other stages instead of having their own unique tracks too.

@Sketcz I haven’t uploaded any of them, as I wasn’t sure anyone would want them. In some cases they could probably just be made into Game Genie codes as they don’t change much. The Contra Spirits one is a bit bigger though as I needed to jump to the end of the ROM to add some extra instructions. 😅 Also I tend to mod the Japanese releases as those are the ones I imported back in the day, so I’d need to also do the US ROM before releasing. I probably should do it at some point!

@sdelfin Yeah Super SFII Turbo’s difficulty is broken, it always starts on hardest. For the rest of them, when you set the difficulty dip switches it reads that into another part of the memory when starting a new game and increments it after each fight you win, I find it eventually becomes impossible to win. I think it’s supposed to drop the difficulty when you lose, but I’ve never noticed it get much easier.

Many of the Capcom games from that era increase the difficulty the longer you play for, Strider is one of them. When you see those little robots flying in from the top or bottom of the screen you know the game wants to kill you and make you put more money in! 😂 Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts and Final Fight have it too IIRC.

I’ve done quite a few hacks like these lately, mostly on SNES games to get the full ending on all difficulties. I’ve done Area 88, Contra III, Gradius III, Salamander II (arcade) and Street Fighter II Turbo (I’ve also hacked the arcade ROM to disable the difficulty scaling).

I’ve been working on doing this for F-Zero but I’m trying to get it to show both endings rather only one of the endings but it’s hard to find where it’s branching after the end sequence.

I’ve modded Axelay to offer the hidden final difficulty setting called Monkey on the options screen and finally I’ve also changed ActRaiser to speed up the egg timer. It still needs some work though as it’s not possible to max out your population levels with the monster lairs being destroyed more quickly.

I wonder, if it had been released in a format like the Sonic & Knuckles lock-on cart, would we have got ports of Virtua Fighter and Star Wars Arcade? Would Sega have skipped the 32X if they'd had this as a stop-gap?

Was the two button mode a setting on the STV cart or was it just because some arcade operators put the three button game into a two button cab?

I think the two screenshots are back to front. I don't really know KoF but I was confused why a statue of Guile was controversial when it's right next to Guile himself, then I realised that was from CvS2. 😂

I would love a sequel to Axelay, although after all this time, I don't know if it would have the same impact it had on me the as the original did back in '92. Those rolling planet graphics and the giant lava boss were amazing to me back then.

Would they renew the trademark if they were putting it on NSO for the Switch?

I love this idea of trying to create demand. It reminds me of Theme Park where you could make the chips cheap but really salty to make everyone thirsty and then make the drinks really expensive to turn a huge profit!

I had a lot of fun playing this game with my brother. I can’t remember what levels we used to play, but I think we found certain swear words generated very good levels.

Even the name of the game was fun, as my puerile response to being asked if I wanted to play was to ask if he had worms and that he should get that looked at. 😂

@gojiguy Definitely, one of these in black with RGB out would be perfection.

@-wc- Definitely, controllers are pretty boring these days, there's no wild innovation, just minor tweaks to make them a bit more ergonomic. I do like the idea of the impulse triggers on the PS5 (I've not personally tried them yet) but other than that, we seem to be ossified into a standard now.

Even Nintendo doesn't seem to have an appetite for trying to innovate on the controller front, which is a bit surprising considering they could have released all sorts of whacky controller concepts to slide onto the Switch.

I'm not too surprised by this. I tried GoldenEye with the NSO controller and it just feels all wrong, the analogue stick just doesn't have the sensitivity and accuracy of a real stick. The N64 experience, more than any other console I think, just can't be accurately replicated without an original controller.

That's really impressive, but I'm very curious as to how they'd handle the Mode 7 rooms in that game!

@KitsuneNight Totally, it’s why I’ve never attempted to get very far in it. Plus if you die, you restart the level with nothing but the handgun. 😩 I’d be very happy to try and beat it if there was some way of saving my progress.

I wonder if they could port the Doom 64 levels to the SNES…? 😆

@kjra92 I haven't seen that movie, but I definitely agree someone who knows and loves the franchise is what is needed here. Just swapping in any old random director for hire will likely result in a load of deviations from the source material. Hollywood can't seem to help themselves when it comes to licensing a well known IP and then changing absolutely everything about it except the name. 😩

I'd forgotten they'd reprinted Issue 0 in a later issue of Mean Machines. I remember back then you were considered to be in possession of some sort of precious heirloom having the first issues of certain mags, with Mean Machines Issue 0 being the most desirable of all.

Having a look on eBay, you can get issue 1 for £30, which is a lot for an old games mag, but not quite the nest egg we thought it would be back then. 😂

@Kushan I hadn't considered them just dumping a PS1 ROM onto Steam like that, I hope that's not the case!

I wonder if this time it truly will be the uncensored version? I still love the original version of RE, so I'm definitely getting this if it's a good port.

@mjparker77 I was really impressed with them at the time, actually leaving ruts in the track and having that affect the grip and handling of the cars really felt special. The mud splattering on the cars and being washed off by puddles looked amazing too.

I tried replaying it recently on the Steam Deck and while it still looks and plays well, on a couple of tracks the AI car in first place is basically impossible to catch, which kind of spoils it. 😢 When practicing on single race mode the AI is easy to catch up, so maybe it’s a bug?

This looks pretty cool, it’s a combination of game type and setting I don’t think I’ve seen before.

I notice no Xbox version. Xbox is starting to feel like the Wii U now, I’m seeing more and more games skipping it this gen. Luckily I’ve got the other platforms but it must suck for people with just Xbox.

I haven't played this yet, but I'm hoping it's more like Curse of the Moon and Blaster Master Zero than a full-on MetroidVania. It's not the lack of 8-bit aesthetics that puts me off the MetroidVanias, it's exploring for ages and then dying before finding a save room which annoys me. At least keep the areas I've revealed on the map when I die!

Wandering around for ages not knowing where to go next doesn't help either. I always liked how Metroid Zero Mission handled hinting at where to go, it put a dot in an unexplored area of the map and then it's up to you to find your way to it.

They should release it on Switch with a special trackball joy-con. That would allow it to be controlled properly and finally make good use of the Switch's ability to change controls.

I wonder if it's another one would benefit from JIT support? The last time I tried iNDS a few years back it would run DS games but the performance was always iffy even on an M1 iPad Pro because of the lack of JIT.

I'm not surprised 3DS struggles, even the Steam Deck struggles to keep it full speed all the time.

I’m afraid I don’t remember any of these other than Go! 😅 It was always a good read though, I bought so many GB and GG games back then as they were much cheaper than console games. I do seem to remember that the screenshots for Sonic on the GameGear looked like the SMS version…

My personal forgotten gem from back then is Games X (which has been covered on here). Being a fortnightly magazine meant it often got reviews and news out faster than any of their competitors. I’m pretty sure they were the first to show a picture of the US SNES in the UK.

It's a shame some of the CPS1 library is locked behind licences like Willow and Area 88. They're both a lot of fun and both have RPG-esque progression to level up your plane/character, which is not something you saw very often in the arcades (except on the CPS1! 😅)

@gingerbeardman I would hazard a guess that it would be done roughly the same way, but it's not perfect on the SD2SNES, save states usually mess up the sound because there's no way to read the status of the SPC chip, so they're best used with the game paused (which usually stops the music so the game can restart it when you unpause).

I know Ikari had to use an oscilloscope to read the status lines on the SNES to help work out why certain in-game hooks would break certain games. So I can see why even on an FPGA where there's possibly more control it would be hard to implement.

This is one of those things that perhaps doesn’t get mentioned much amidst all the hype of FPGA systems. One of the reasons I stopped using my SuperNT was the lack of save states support, I didn’t really see the point of using a modern recreation of a system if it doesn’t offer any interesting modern features like being able to turn the console on and off from the controller or suspend the game so I can continue later.

These days I just use a regular Super Famicom and the save states the SD2SNES provides. If I really want to play something away from home, I usually just emulate it on the Steam Deck.

Even if you aren't intending to make a sequel, surely keeping the brand awareness alive isn't a bad thing? It could even sell a few consoles if people decided they liked the look of the game and wanted to play it. If the game gets popular enough in tournaments it could end up justifying a sequel actually being made!

I bet the reality is there was some nonsense office politics going on.

And 25 years later WB sabotaged another Superman game when they insisted Kill the Justice League be a live service looter shooter. Plus ça change! 😩

They had me at "transforming mech shmup". 😂

This looks awesome, I can't wait to play it.

Cue Sega hardware collectors offering these places silly money for their urinals...

Two things I'll always give Sony credit for with controllers is making handles popular and using the symbols for the face buttons, which mean I could do a QTE on a Sony controller on sheer reflex, but you ask me to do a QTE on a DC/Nintendo or MS controller and I have to stop and think about which way round all the letters are. 💀

Only £90? That's nothing, the DreamPort is £160! 😅

https://www.dreammods.net/dreamport.html

Seriously though, I do need to get a replacement PSU for my DC as the one I've got must be a dodgy knock-off one as my multi-meter shows power still going through the SCART cable even when the console is off.

Whatever happened to that DLC for the Switch port of Cruis'n Blast they were working on? If this is as fun as Cruis'n Blast then it should be worth a play, although I so rarely encounter arcades these days I'll likely never play it without a home release.

I remember putting a pirated version of Tomb Raider for the N-Gage on my 6600, it ran fairly well and was quite impressive for the time, but I never got very far in it. It would probably have played much better with a proper d-pad instead of the little joystick nub that phone had! 😅

Ironically I think that’s probably a better camera angle than the one in Micro Machines. I was replaying MMV3 the other day and the camera picks really unhelpful angles most of the time. There’s the occasional tantalising moment where it’s just right, but sadly it doesn’t happen often enough!

@IntrepidWombat It was a combination of things. Steve Jobs' had a long standing beef with Adobe which lead to him implementing a "no interpreted code" rule for all apps on the App Store, as a way of preventing Flash from being on the iPhone. This unfortunately meant most emulators were blocked as well for quite a long time.

Later on, Apple did relax this rule, but they wouldn't allow apps that could play anything, they wanted each release to be a specific game so they could give it an age rating (I think possibly this was done to stop things like the Xbox streaming app). So things like Sega's individual Megadrive game releases would be allowed, but a general Megadrive emulator was not.

That said, if you had a Mac, you could build emulators for your iPhone and iPad quite easily. MAME4iOS uses the most recent PC version of MAME and there's also Provenence which does NES, SNES, N64, Master System, Megadrive, Saturn, PS1, GameBoy, GameGear and loads of others I've never used! But now that Apple have been forced by the EU to allow side-loading of apps, they've basically given up on any emulator restrictions as they would just drive people to use the alternate app stores coming.

Yeah I never even noticed you couldn't go back in there! Or if I did, it was years ago. A shame it doesn't lead somewhere interesting like an earlier version of the room, but I'm sure all the unused content in the game has long been found by data mining the ROM.

“Professionally pressed disc” I wonder why they needed to mention that! 😂

I don’t know if The Wizard was ever in cinemas in the UK, but I do remember renting it on VHS and enjoying it a lot. I remember wondering why the footage of TMNT was level 1 yet Beau Bridges claimed to be on level 3. While it’s probably a production mistake, he was on the third sewer of level 1, so maybe he thought it was level 3? 😅

Now if we could just get a soundtrack release for the film…

It’s OK, it wasn’t a real arcade machine. 😉

@Lofoten I think technically there are four known variants now. You're right that pictures 1 and 3 are the same prototype (from what we can tell from the picture anyway!)

But the "red switch" prototype now has three known variants (assuming this auction is legit)- there's the one in the picture above with the controller ports on the right and no EXT port; and then there's another version similar to the one being auctioned but with a yellow volume knob, a more bulging eject switch and different mouldings on the controller ports. This tweet has a close-up of the port differences:
https://twitter.com/covell_chris/status/1788019147659727104

@bobby_steurer 🤣 I could definitely see that happening!

@RetroGames Yeah, if I go to a garage sale the best I'm likely to find is a copy of Just Dance for the Wii and the empty box for Hannah Montana on the DS.

Somehow other people go to these things and find one-of-a-kind PlayStations or Saturns or Super Famicom prototypes! 😩

@smoreon Thanks. I’ll perhaps try to track down a copy of that version! It’s been a long time since I played DOA2.

@LowDefAl Blimey, I didn't know if was that convoluted! 😅 So is the DC version better? I'm sure I'd heard the PS2 version looked better, had more features and had 60fps cut scenes compared to 30fps on the DC. I wonder if this adds in everything the PS2 version had? (Incidentally the only version I've ever played is the EU DC release).

@KingMike You could fit a cart by removing the case and just inserting the PCB, of course whether the slot in the console is the same and has the same wiring is another matter! 😅

I’d still be fascinated to see the insides and know how close to final the hardware is.

Wow, I didn’t think any of these still existed. I’d love to have it but I’d bet it’s going to go for millions (assuming Nintendo don’t stop the auction).

I’d be fascinated to know what’s inside and if it can run any commercially released games.

It’s a shame the 64DD didn’t get more of a chance. Having (relatively) large amounts of storage space, decent access speeds compared to CD and most tantalisingly- the ability to write to the disks and persist changes in the game world could have made it quite special.

Perhaps if it had been the N64’s launch format instead of carts things might have gone differently (although even 64MB was paltry compared to the 700MB of CDs). I wonder if the DD’s capacity could have increased over time?

I really don't see the attraction of US/EU protos of games released in Japan first. They're very unlikely to have any major differences compared to the released game in them.

Protos of games still in development could well yield interesting differences, but aside from the odd game like Probotector, they aren't going to massively change the Western release, so why pay so much for a title screen with a different date?

I think anyone selling a proto should be required to dump it and show a binary comparison with the released version so people know how different the version is (the dump doesn't need to be released, it's just to prove if the ROM is worth anything).