BulkSlash

I wish more companies doing retro devices would include six face buttons. I don't know if the CPU is up to it, but N64 emulation greatly benefits from six face buttons instead of mapping the c-buttons to an analogue stick. 🤢

Having done a bit of Assembly coding on both, I actually prefer the SNES' CPU. I think also many SNES games were hobbled by publishers being cheap and opting to use SlowROM carts, which shaves about 33% off the CPU clock speed.

All that said, I love both consoles so I'm happy playing on either of them!

@DexTepa Duckstation has a full debugger so you can see the disassembly as well as view and alter the RAM. There’s also a memory search to help find values.

I missed having Star Force so I bought a knackered one off eBay recently and fixed it up. The biggest problem was battery acid had destroyed the contacts, but after replacing all of those and cleaning everything inside and out it looks very good.

Especially for this sort of device it has quite catchy tunes that play before each wave of enemies. It's very loud though so I've added a volume pot! 😅

I’ve said this before, but we need to start calling these CEX window shots Cexies. 😉

@KayFiOS I would guess it will be native N64 resolution upscaled to 4K. Analogue are usually quite good with accuracy and trying to add options to render games at 4K would likely cause problems with things like frame buffer effects.

I think the 4K output will be used to make the aperture grille on their CRT filters look as accurate as possible.

I had to pre-order it. It's nothing like the game, but looking past that I find it an enjoyable '90s adventure movie with a lot of fun ideas and performances. Alan Silvestri's score is great too.

It feels a bit wrong commenting on such an old article, but I tried the N64 version recently after really enjoying the Nightdive port. Unfortunately I found it unplayable for one key reason- the game constantly tries to auto-centre the camera!

It’s really weird to try to look to the right only for the camera to return back to the left as soon as you release the stick. Hopefully one day someone can figure out a rom hack to remove it!

@Lup They really are! They all sound like something from the NES era, and why are they all acronyms? It's like they couldn't come up with any name that wasn't an abbreviation.

"TSO (Three, Six, Zero)" is interesting considering what they called their follow-up console...

@TeamBigRig Yeah it's a shame that we seem to get the same old games from both Namco and Sega, anything more recent than the 16-bit era just gets ignored.

I guess it's the complexity of the emulation (or porting the source code), but there are a lot of emulators capable of running those games now, you'd think a collaboration with some emulator authors could result in something really good.

I’m sure I’ve seen these on eBay in the past, I should have snapped them up! That said, I’m too much of a hoarder to sell things, so it wouldn’t be much of an investment! 😂

I really wish Namco would do some sort of Time Crisis HD collection and a new GunCon for all modern platforms. I wish they’d do it for Ridge Racer and Ace Combat too… 😅

Excellent. I want to upgrade my Pi 3 JAMMA setup as it’s just not fast enough for many games, if this is twice as fast it should really do the trick.

@YANDMAN Definitely. I still use my trusty Hori Super Commander because of its great auto-fire options.

I’ve given up on Analogue and their “extremely limited quantities” nonsense. I’d really like one of these (I was keen on the glow in the dark one too) but with the tiny amounts they make it’s not worth the angst of trying to get one.

Just how many devices can AyaNeo release in one year? 😅

That said, I’m on holiday at the moment and spent some of the afternoon hacking the SF2 Turbo ROM on my Steam Deck and the lack of keyboard made it so much fiddlier, especially as the on-screen keyboard covers half the screen! 😩🤣

I think AyaNeo must be beating Sega now for being able to release so many new hardware variants in such a short time!

I was just playing a cheeky level of this while waiting for a process to finish. It's really good fun and feels very much like an old NES game in the way it plays. I like the permanent power-ups hidden in each level too as it gives you a good reason to explore. I'd love to see this actually ported to the NES!

What’s the betting it’s identical to retail? It doesn’t look like a dev cart so chances are it’s just final retail code.

You’d have to be mad to pay that much for a cart where they don’t show the board or verify the contents of the ROMs are different from the final game.

Of course this is Heritage Auctions, who sold a Star Trek phaser prop as genuine when all the evidence suggested it wasn’t and ignored all the people telling them about it.

I really like the 8BitDo DIY kit for the NES dogbone controller. It still feels like I’m playing on an original controller but with wireless added. It’s particularly handy as the cords on the AV Famicom controller are really short!

I’m hoping Arcade1Up can clarify if it’s the arcade or PS1 version of Time Crisis. The YouTube trailer shows the arcade version but the still photos show the PS1 version. The PS1 port is very good, but the arcade version is much more preferable.

Excellent news, Dark Forces is one of my favourite PC games so it will be great to finally have it easily playable on modern hardware. Plus it's Nightdive so (Blade Runner aside) this is likely to be a really solid remaster.

While most FPS games of the era were all about shooting everything that moved, I liked how DF would throw in the occasional puzzle. In one case I think it the first time a wall texture was used as a clue to the layout of the area. It certainly felt unique to me at the time for the walls to be more than just window dressing.

I they do DF II Jedi Knight next!

@KingMike That's quite ironic considering what Sega got up to in Revenge of Shinobi! 😂

@mjharper If you put that code in on player 1 it disables all special moves. It took me ages to work out why I couldn't pull off any moves when I played SF2 Turbo on the Wii U VC. My muscle memory of the code hadn't faded, but the fact you had to use port 2 had! 😅

This is really impressive, it runs full screen and at a very good frame rate on my 32X and there's loads of great options including different resolutions/detail levels. Even the highest resolution and detail runs very smoothly. Sadly it crashes after I beat level 1 so I think my ancient Everdrive doesn't support the bank switching it needs! 😅

@Babybahamut Yeah there were a lot of exclusives early in its life like Lost Planet, Bullet Witch, Dead Rising, Ace Combat 6, Ridge Racer 7, etc. Not all were classics (and I think some have been ported now) but I really enjoyed them all.

It's a shame how many of the best 360 games are no longer exclusive as without exclusives the uniqueness of each platform gets lost I think.

Will the previous model be getting the AyaSpace 2 update? The thing that worries me about most of these annually refreshed handheld PCs is how long they support them once the new model is out.

With the Steam Deck I never bother messing with the power output I just leave it at default. I think if a game is vsync'd it will just idle until the next frame needs to be started and if it's a heavier modern game then it needs full power anyway, so I try not to worry about the battery too much.

That said, I'm always playing a mixture of old and new stuff and the old stuff doesn't really drain the battery much!

It's kind of hilarious how well that runs in a browser. I think I've re-beaten the recent version about 5 or 6 times on the Steam Deck now, it's really good fun to revisit it. Now if we could just get 2097 too! 😆

@XiaoShao I'm getting GTA trilogy vibes from this too. That was also kept under wraps right until a week or so before release, so I'll be steering well clear of this until it's in players' hands. It didn't take long for people to discover GTA was a rushed mess and report it on forums/social media!

Very interesting, it sounds like this would work like a C64 cassette drive and be audio based rather than loading data digitally. I wonder how slow the loading times would be compared to cassettes and also "proper" CD-ROM drives?

I guess it would come with a RAM cartridge like the FDS and would need a cable coming out of the cartridge port so that the audio could be piped from the disc to the RAM cart.

What's an "approach-a-thon"? I've not heard that one before.

You've got to love the voice acting from that era. Scott McCulloch was Richter Belmont in SOTN but he was also Wild Dog in Time Crisis 1 & 2 and Chris in Resident Evil 1. It's a shame he passed before he could enjoy the fame from playing all those iconic characters.

IIRC there were some graphical glitches with the Switch port. They weren't game breaking or anything (at least not that I remember!) but were they ever fixed?

I'll probably end up re-buying it anyway, just like all the Ikaruga ports! 😅

@smoreon It's a good question, I'd have thought if a publisher were bankrolling the game they'd want a regular copy of the source and all the assets in case the developer unexpectedly goes bust or the relationship sours for some reason.

Of course once the game has shipped and the sales have run their course a publisher like Activision may well not care about the codebase and just delete it to save some server space.

Mine would be playing Astro Fighter in the arcades some time in the mid '80s.

It's a fairly unique take on the Space Invaders formula where each wave of enemies has a different design and movement pattern, there's also a fuel gauge that only refills if you kill the boss at the end of the waves. Then it loops back around to the start.

I really want a sequel to Devastation!

I would have thought Activision would have a central source code repository for their devs to push code to rather than games just knocking around on the HDD of one of the developers.

That’s a real plot twist at the end there! 😂

Doesn’t the AV Famicom support the Japanese Zapper that connects via the side port? I think it’s just Western Zappers that connect via the front controller port that won’t work.

This has been a useful refresher, at some point I'd conflated the M2 (3DO successor) with the Nuon, when in fact they were separate systems.

That's cool you can get an adapter to use N64 controllers if the alternative is $275 for a controller! And I thought the Dual Sense was expensive! 😅

That's such an incredible find. I makes you wander what other ultra rare stuff is out there in someone's garage or cupboard without them knowing the sentimental value it would have to some people.

Very cool. Is this the first patch for a 360 game? I don’t think I’ve seen one before.

Funnily enough I was just playing this on the Steam Deck. It runs really well, although the modern collision option does make the game too easy (I got first on every track on my first try! 😅) so probably the Wipeout 2097 collision option is the best choice.

@845H It extracts all the music from the PS1 disc image so it technically has all the music. The only downside is it currently only supports the US disc so it’s missing the extra tracks from Orbital/Chemical Brothers/Leftfield that the PAL version had.

I was playing that Mario Celeste mod the other day. It’s an incredible achievement, it’s hard to believe it’s running on a NES it’s so smooth and fast paced.

That said, it’s too hard for me! 😅 I might go back to it but I think it’s beyond me.

I would think Mario Odyssey is in the same sort of genre as Banjo Kazooie and that did really well. I think there's a market for the collect-a-thon, but the game has to be good.

I somewhat enjoyed Yooka Laylee, but it suffered from not having a map screen showing where each quest came from. Not being able to find things just made it a lot more annoying than it needed to be. If they fixed that in a sequel I'd be all over it.

A few years back I realised I barely knew this game. I only ever really played 1-1, 1-2, 4-1, 4-2 and most of world 8 once I’d found the warp zones. Since then I always try to play all of the levels as it’s such a great game, it’s like the most pure and distilled form of Super Mario Bros.

I love light gun games! I tend to like Time Crisis I more than II. While II is bigger and more bombastic, it dropped using time as your measure of success and used scoring instead. This means instead of racing to take down every enemy as quickly as possible, you have to hit each enemy as many times as possible to earn combo points.

This means the final boss fight against the satellite (and Diaz) is spent not shooting Diaz but instead trying to fire as many bullets as possible into the satellite to maximise your score.

Doing that while playing both sides of Time Crisis II at the same time is very hard work! 😂

That special stage is really impressive. It's good to see the GX4000 being stretched a bit, so many Amstrad games from that era were just lazy Speccy ports rather than taking advantage of the hardware.

I've got a lot of nostalgia for Sol Feace, I remember being blown away by the FMV and the music when I saw it on my brother's Mega CD. The soundtrack in particular is still really great. I don't think I'd want the cartridge version though as it's going to be missing all the stuff that made me like the game in the first place! 😅

I remember this and often think about it. The poor woman was just trying to win a Wii for her kids. The fact that someone phoned in to warn them and was ignored is damning, I'm not surprised they were hammered in court.

That basically is the ship sprite from Galaxy Force II, I wonder if it’s a placeholder or if they’re going to be a bit brazen? 😂