BulkSlash

I had a brief go with it this morning on my SD2SNES, but I can’t work out how to save. I seem to recall it’s start + select but it’s not working for me.

I wouldn't necessarily rely on something like the Super Nt for long term preservation, it may be just as prone to failure when it's 20+ years old. Given that it's made with modern components it might even have a shorter shelf life than a real SNES! 😩

If I had the money I'd actually approach some of the chip fabs out there to find out how feasible it is to reproduce old chips like these (especially the custom chips on a lot of '90s arcade hardware). Obviously you'd need to either get the original specs or reverse engineer from the die, but can anyone even make 45nm transistors these days?

I’ve often heard that E.T. isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be. I suspect it’s another victim of the AVGN (who I do enjoy), but on a few occasions now he’s picked games that don’t really deserve the treatment. I suspect he’s run out of games that legitimately were terrible and now has to magnify the failings of merely average games to fill out a video.

I loved Sonic 2sday, the hype and excitement for that was unreal. I had so much Sonic 2 merchandise from that event, the baseball jacket, the pin badges, the cuddly toys, etc.

I wonder, was that the first worldwide release of a game? I remember back then being permanently cheesed off about how long it would take for a game to release in the UK when it had been out in Japan over a year before.

Definitely A Link Between Worlds for me, it’s basically perfect. Linking all the weapons to the self-recharging magic meter was a brilliant idea. The only problem with ALBW is I’m replaying A Link to the Past at the moment and I keep getting confused about which game certain things are in! 😅

@Damo Unfortunately I don't think that would work very well for me. While I keep everything on the MicroSD I've got quite a few custom emulator builds outside of EmuDeck, plus the non-cloud save Steam games seem to keep all their saves on the SSD even though they're installed to the MicroSD! 😅 All the games I've got installed from GoG and installed via Heroic would likely have to be reinstalled too.

The last time I did something similar to this was replacing the 64GB SSD with a 512GB one and I had issues with all of the above. I wonder if it's possible to rsync the user directories over from one Steam Deck to another? That might move everything across.

UPDATE- Now I’ve got some time off work I’ve tried using Clonezilla to image my old Steam Deck drive to the new one and it has worked perfectly. Everything is there, all the games, all the saves, etc. The OS even recognises it’s got the 90Hz screen and offers that as a refresh rate option. It doesn’t seem like it needs a special version of SteamOS installed, it even shows the more colourful OLED version of the wake movie in the options.

I’ve got the OLED but it has hardly come out of its case because there doesn’t seem to be a good way to migrate from the old Steam Deck. 😞

Obviously most (all?) recent Steam games support cloud saving so they’re no problem, but all the emulators, non-Steam games and older Steam games with no cloud saves would all be wiped out. I’ve heard you can just swap the SSD but I’m hoping a better solution presents itself.

@Jamie64326 Oh right, I saw people reacting to it on Twitter a when the game released as if it was some new revelation. 😅

@KingMike I think it’s a recent thing. One of the loading screens in Mario Wonder says that they’re twins but Mario is the older one.

@Blofse Yeah ProtonTricks works with this, IIRC you just need to install dotnetdesktop6 and it will work.

The only problem I’ve found with the game so far is I can’t make the jump over a pit three spaces long in the third dungeon using the boots and feather. I remember it being fairly easy in the original so I think something is off with the speed of the boots or the height of the jump.

I’ll definitely be giving this a try, Noah’s Triple Trouble 16-bit was so good I like it more than Sonic Mania, so this could be something really special too.

That explains so much about early THQ games. Perhaps even more than LJN, I remember THQ games all tended to be badly made movie tie-ins like Home Alone. So the fact that the CEO was just out chasing any licence he could get to slap a game on makes a lot of sense.

That’s a shame. You’d think making something that heavily references the Saturn controller they’d ensure it could run those games well.

With better hardware and an analogue stick and having six face buttons it could be perfect for N64 games too.

As it turns out, Sega’s biggest problem wasn’t the excellent controller or lack of EA games it was running out of money that did for the Dreamcast.

Still, it does make sense for Microsoft to curry favour with EA considering how few well known IPs they had when the Xbox first launched. They needed as many big titles as they could get (and were lucky Sega had many great Dreamcast games that were in development that could be shifted over to the Xbox).

Very cool! I’m still using a PowerPak with my AV Famicom, flash carts are expensive these days. Krikkz does have a Black Friday sale coming up though….

Given that storage/cartridge size is no longer an issue, I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to replicate super scaler games like OutRun by pre-calculating the scaled sprites and storing them in the ROM. It would then just be a case of selecting the correctly scaled sprite for each frame (assuming there’s enough cartridge bandwidth to handle it!)

@Azuris Yeah I did think about its value for DS games. The trouble is the lower screen is a long way from the top screen and doesn’t seem to be scaled well to fit with it. Something like Contra 4 where you’re jumping between the two screens or trying to shoot things on the top screen might not work very well with that layout.

You’re right about 3DS pricing, it’s kind of crazy how expensive they are. Back in the day people would be practically giving away old systems once the next generation was out!

Bring back the Daiei Hawks special editions! 😅 The clear orange and smoke N64 and GameBoy Color looked fantastic in that colour scheme. An OLED Switch special edition would be cool.

I’ve never known a company to have such a bad case of hardware diarrhoea. How many different devices can they release in one year? I can only assume they’re trying to throw as many things out there as possible to see if they land on a winner.

I replayed Sands of Time recently and it’s still a wonderful story with excellent gameplay. Ubi have kind of missed the boat with the reboot given how long they’ve taken. They’d have been better off releasing an HD version of the original rather than trying to recreate it from scratch.

As everyone has already commented, it’s a shame the two sequels decided to try and be edgy and cool. The 2008 reboot was pretty decent, I’m still annoyed they ended it on a cliffhanger (that was a bad habit of Ubi in that era).

The aptly titled Forgotten Sands is actually very good too I think. The story is weak, but it has superb gameplay, the final climb at the end where you’re rapidly freezing and unfreezing water to make or dismiss platforms and obstacles is brilliant. With a better story it could have been an all-time classic.

Cool, it’s a shame the special edition is US-only, I’d be tempted to upgrade for that. I think I’ll probably stick with my current Steam Deck and wait for a more powerful model.

While I haven't been keeping it up to date for a while now, I've got 1,286 remixes I downloaded over the years from OC Remix on my hard drive.

There's so many great remixes from so many great games, but the Castlevania and Megaman ones in particular are ones I listen to a lot. There's so much variety with so many different genres of music represented.

Long live OC Remix!

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! 😆