A decompilation of Panzer Dragoon Saga would be incredible, as the source code has been lost. The game still plays wonderfully, but man, the Saturn really struggles in the heavier 3D scenes and the FMV is pretty goofy looking these days. Clean up the graphics and I think you still have a winner because there's really nothing else like it.
1 - Define enormous amounts. By far, Mexico, China, and India are responsible for the USA's supply of both finished fentanyl and precursors. The DEA's 2024 report doesn't even list Canada as a trafficking threat. It's doubtful that Canada managed to step up its trafficking game enough to warrant blanket tariffs in such a short time. The fentanyl is merely an excuse so that Trump can exploit a loophole to use executive actions to bypass Congress in the implementation of tariffs. They don't care about the fentanyl. They never did, and again, the world sees that even if you don't. 2 - Some manufacturing jobs all for the low low price of the dissolution of American soft power. You're paying far more for those manufacturing jobs than you'll get out of them, and retaliatory tariffs as well as the price increases resulting from higher labour costs and higher input costs as tariffs get applied to raw materials will shrink demand for American-made products. Are those manufacturing jobs going to offset the damage done to sectors like agriculture? I hope for the people affected that they do. 3 - Appreciation for the economy in Trump's last term very much depends on who you ask and how you measure success. As far as caving goes, it was the US that blinked and paused the tariffs for a month most recently. I don't know of an instance where the US has managed to anger so much of the world so quickly, so how trade relationships between other countries banding together against the US will affect things isn't known. A lot of it's going to depend on how the EU chooses to tackle things and how Mexico and Canada's more targeted responses shake out with voters. Canada's single-payer system is underfunded, the degree to which it is depends on the province. When you underfund things, they don't work properly. You should tell that story about the HSAs to some politicians in Canada and maybe they'll start investing in the system properly. It's fantastic when it works. The single biggest driver of the opioid crisis has been reckless prescriptions for painkillers to treat symptoms in lieu of treating causes because it's cheaper. The prescriptions run out, but people are addicted to the opioids. So they get their fix from heroin or other opioids which is where the fentanyl hits. Breaking that cycle by making proper medical care available to everyone, regardless of economic status, will do far more than a 25% tariff on maple syrup ever will. If it was really about the opioid crisis, that's what would be happening. It isn't and it's not.
@zazou703 1 - Canada has absolutely put a lot of money and effort into combating fentanyl and is seeing results, not to mention that the amount of fentanyl coming in from Canada was incredibly small. The point still stands. The US is not acting in good faith and the rest of the world sees it. They're not going to put the effort into doing anything more than they already do as a result. 2 - The TSMC investment is highly political, and TSMC's investment into the US was already well underway thanks to the CHIPS Act. The investment is because Taiwan is facing increased pressure from the PRC and they're buying allies and spreading out their facilities in case Taiwan is invaded. They broke ground on new facilities in Japan and Germany as well, even though those countries aren't hurling tariffs around willy-nilly. Honda has decided not to move Civic production to Mexico, instead building them... in the factory they're already made in. So, nothing returning there. 3 - Poverty drives demand of cheap drugs like fentanyl. Increasing prices while inducing a depression/recession as retaliatory tariffs cause layoffs will harm the most vulnerable people in society the most, which will in turn drive more people toward addiction. If anything, I would expect fentanyl consumption to increase dramatically with this policy. To actually combat fentanyl, the biggest thing that could be done would be to move to single-payer healthcare so that people who are sick can be treated properly instead of being recklessly prescribed painkillers to manage symptoms because they can't afford the proper treatment.
@zazou703 1 - Tariffs won't do that, especially after Canada was able to vastly decrease the amount of fentanyl moving through its borders (which was already a tiny part of the problem) and still got slapped with tariffs. It's not about the fentanyl, don't kid yourself. The US has already demonstrated that they don't care about that. Why would anyone else bother doing anything or spending any extra money to help the US after seeing how their closest ally was treated for complying? 2 - Manufacturing will not move back to the states. It'll move to other countries that haven't been hit with these tariffs with vastly lower labour costs than the US and far cheaper setup costs due to lower land value, existing manufacturing infrastructure, looser regulation, and already-trained manufacturing workforce. China's loss will be countries like Vietnam's gain, not the USA's. 3 - Great, good for you. Lots of people who are already struggling will be really hurt by this, and lots of jobs will be lost no matter which side you look at.
I had kind of thought that VR would be the thing to bring arcades back. Expensive hardware that requires a decent amount of space that not everyone has and gameplay that's best suited to short bursts, it seems kinda perfect for an arcade, but it just hasn't happened.
@CLDM If this is somebody's hobby project, who cares? Most peoples' hobbies contribute nothing to anything, professional or otherwise. If the developer were building model trains instead of doing this, would you be this angry?
Anyway, this is progressing a lot. They've really cut the texture swim down a lot compared to the really early version. It's still a lot, but it's a lot better.
My takeaway is that it's not that the N64 can't be emulated, it's that we don't have the kind of cycle-accurate emulation that things like BSNES brought to the table combined with mainstream hardware that's fast enough to run it. It's still in that weird ZSNES state where things run but it's a bit hacky, but it's fast. The requirements for Parallel are pretty steep compared to a lot of other systems, so it won't work for stuff like the switch or those little emulation boxes and handhelds. It just needs time, I reckon.
Might have to finally pull the trigger on an Everdrive for my N64. There's some very impressive stuff happening on that machine, and Kaze's at the forefront of it.
@N64-ROX Probably not much, if you're going by what the SuperDisc prototype was. In a lot of ways, you'd actually be better off with a large cartridge. The SuperDisc cart had 256k of RAM to load your assets to from the disc, putting it in line with the PC-Engine's System Card 3. That's it, that's all it does besides pass CD audio along. That can still be pretty good, the Super CD-ROM games are fantastic, but a big cart is easier to plan for, has no load times, and allows access to any game asset at any time. Releasing on a cart means anyone with an SNES can play on real hardware, too.
Just like the PCE, though, the plan may have been to launch more advanced cartridges to boost the CD games further, things like more RAM or co-processors. That's what I think the SA-1 was actually designed for.
So, if you're staying authentic to what we know actually existed, it's probably nothing to write home about. If you were to create a homebrew SuperDisc² for FPGAs that has an SA-1 or Super FX with 2MB, like the Arcade Card on PCE, well, then it's pretty nifty. Something at least similar likely would have happened has this thing released and not bombed, too. Depends on if the dev is a stickler for authenticity, really.
@RejectedAng3L What on earth are you talking about? The Jag has a 68k, sure, but Tom and Jerry are 32-bit, the Saturn is almost all 32-bit CPUs excluding the sound coprocessor, and the Neo-Geo is 16-bit with an 8-bit co-processor. Nintendo absolutely cared about tech at that point as well, the N64 is very powerful for its time, and the GameCube was one of the best-engineered consoles they ever put together. The SNES CD would have failed for the same reason the Sega CD did, it would be too expensive and still held back by the machine it's attached to. Better to go with a clean design.
NEC never could figure out how to follow up the PC Engine. The Supergrafx might have been something if they built compatibility into the Duo consoles, but the PC-FX never stood a chance in 1994 with those specs. Unironically one of my favourite console shell designs, though.
I've never had an SN30 Pro last any reasonable length of time. I've had a couple, too. Tons of false diagonals on the D-pad, and the button membranes break down, leading to double presses and slow returns. I'll never buy another 8bitdo gamepad again, although the Arcade Stick is pretty nice. I've had great luck with Gulikit's KK3 and Retrobit's Saturn pads.
I think that even back in the day, it was known that even the best N64 games were leaving a bit on the table, but between Kaze's stuff and the F3DEX3 demos, I would never have imagined just how much potential the hardware had. Normal mapping, ambient occlusion, cel shading, it's pretty crazy to see it running on hardware from that era and running well.
@HammerGalladeBro Shadow Squadron is pretty fun, actually! Definitely my favorite 32X game, although that's a pretty low bar, admittedly. Definitely well worth a play, but not a system seller by any means.
The Saturn is a lot of hardware put together poorly, becoming less than the sum of its parts. The PS1 is a small amount of decent hardware put together very cleverly, becoming more than the sum of its parts. There's more to hardware design than clock speeds and MIPS.
@beltmenot I'm talking about the headline specifically. "Aria of Sorrow on Genesis." It's not that, they took some art from AoS to use while they get other art ready. This happens a lot, especially with Castlevania, oddly, like that Bloodlines thing on the SNES a while back. If the headline were something like, "Pigsy Updates SotN Genesis/MD Demake" that's great. That's accurate, and it's a project that does deserve discussion.
Can we stop sensationalizing these things? They took tiles from one game and put them into their project as placeholders. That's not a port, that's standard practice in game development.
Anyway, most of Aria's impressive visuals come from the GBA's sprite manipulation, so it's not too surprising to see them jump over to the 4th gen like this. Both machines use 4bpp tiles, but the GBA has a lot more palettes to play with and a massive (comparitively) global palette. Given that that's not an insurmountable obstacle, the GBA is likely a fantastic place to grab more modern placeholder graphics from for 4th gen projects on any of the machines.
@Carck EVERY translation involves localization. You can't have one without the other, even if you're trying to stay as true to the original text as possible. At some point you're going to have to choose a word when the precision of one language doesn't match the other or cultural practices regarding language don't have an equivalent. Japanese, for example, has a system of honourifics that English doesn't have. It makes sense to leave those in a Persona game because those are set in Japan, but it would be pretty detrimental to a game like Earthbound. Also, poor writing can occur in any language. I don't think there's anything wrong with a translator recognizing that and punching it up. It's when you go too far, like a lot of Working Designs efforts did, that you have a problem.
I think translation and localization get used interchangeably, and it's unfortunate, because both are necessary for foreign releases but they're very different. Translation is about accuracy and functionality, localization is about the spirit and intent. The thing about the spirit of a written work is that everyone is going to bring their own perspective to it. If a character is brash and impulsive, having them use coarse language is very effective shorthand to convey that to Western audiences, even if they didn't swear in the original. Swearing doesn't bother me if it's in service of the character, although without censorship we'd never have gotten "Son of a submariner," which I think actually works better than the original text's swearing in Kefka's case. So it can cut both ways, it all depends on the tone of the game and the overall localization as a whole.
@KitsuneNight I think you're absolutely right. The Saturn has some great games in its library, but those games are of their time or even before, which is probably why we as retro gamers like the machine so much. As someone who was around at the time of its relevance, though, we wanted 3D and the PS1 and N64 were a lot better for that.
I'm really excited about this. Night Striker S on Saturn is one of my favourites for the system. And that soundtrack! I'd love it on Switch for portability, it would be a perfect way to kill some time at the airport or waiting for a train.
What myth? It's a nice arrangement, but it still sounds like a Genesis game. It's inescapable, the machine just has a certain sound. I don't mean that as a good thing or a bad thing, I just don't think it's going to make anyone change their minds about the machine. I really like a lot of Genesis stuff, Gauntlet 4 and Verytex are particular favourites (and a hell of a lot older than this myth-busting tune), but the SNES does have more advanced sound hardware. Samples are a lot more versatile as a building block, it has much finer stereo imaging, surround sound for some reason, finer volume control, the echo effects are nice when they're done tastefully and the buffer for it is very abusable in software. A lot of people are wrong for criticizing the Genesis as only sounding like farts and zippers, and a lot of people are wrong for criticizing the SNES as being muffled slap bass and reverb. They can both do more, but the SNES can do the most.
Anyway, what I really take issue with is them ***** on devs who worked on Genesis titles back in the day. Making the Genesis sound decent nowadays with modern tools, no deadlines, and over thirty years of hindsight is not the same task as it was when the machine was on the market. At all. It takes a real lack of class to be that much of a dick to the people who were working on these things back then with dubious tools and translated manuals while you're in possession of tools and knowledge that those people probably couldn't even imagine having at the time.
The SNES presents some interesting questions with additional hardware inside the carts, especially when you consider the time it was on the market. I think period-appropriate enhancement chips make sense, but once it goes too far, you're basically just using the SNES as a video out and then you'd have to wonder why they'd even bother making it an SNES cart. However, the period that the SNES and especially the Super Famicom covered means that there's a pretty wild array of hardware that could be considered period, to the point where doing exactly that could have been done and be period correct. In the US and Europe, the SNES was pretty much entirely succeeded by the N64, but in Japan it did receive longer term support, to the point where the SFC crossed over and was still receiving some support at the same time as the Dreamcast. An enhancement chip released in '99 for the same price as a Super FX2 was in 94 would be considerably more capable given how much technology changed between the FX2 and then. I doubt anyone would have spent the money to manufacture such a thing when you could just make a PS1 game if you wanted better graphics and a large install base, however. It's feasible, though.
Anyway, Voodoo2-in-an-SNES-cart theorycrafting/justification out of the way, what this FX3 sounds like is an update to the FX2 that irons out some inefficiencies and allows access to more ROM. That doesn't seem out of line, really, unless they've juiced it to like, 200MHz or something. If the N64 had seen any more delays, I could see them doing an FX3 or "SA-2" to tide themselves over, not unlike this and maybe even faster.
I think this is something that gets over-thought a lot, and it's good to see someone in the mod community actually address it. I've never understood the obsession with ultra-clean output from these older systems, honestly. A little Composite fuzz and a CRT absolve a lot of sins, and it's more authentic to how I played these machines back in the day, so I tend to stick to that and consider the flaws as being part of the machine's character.
@WileyDragonfly Not really. The vast majority of the SNES library doesn't use coprocessors. Rendering Ranger R2 is one of the most impressive games on the system and doesn't use coprocessors or even FastROM. I think the bigger issue for homebrew is that the SNES isn't very C friendly and the ASM was never as broadly known as 68K dur to the 65816 being relatively unpopular. It's definitely getting better, though.
Anyway, the project looks cool, but obviously early. It's nice to see something that isn't a port, and it'll be interesting to see how they get along as the SNES hardware doesn't lend itself to beat-em-ups as well as the other 4th gen machines.
I always kind of thought NEC missed a trick by not making the Duo consoles SuperGrafx compatible. Even without that, the SGX was pretty badass and definitely deserved better than it got. SGX+CD+Arcade Card = Very spicy meatball, so it would be really cool to see it done.
@Bunkerneath You nailed it. A lot of PS2s got bought as DVD players, it made a lot of sense. Standalone DVD players still cost a decent chunk of change at the time, spend a little more AND you get a new game console? Easy sell for most people. The 6th gen was kind of a repeat of the 4th gen to me, in that you couldn't buy a bad console. PS2, GC, DC, and Xbox all kicked ass, just like how the SNES, Genesis, and TG16 were all great machines. I do feel like the Dreamcast tends to get overhyped a little, but that's a pretty natural response to how it got cut down in its prime, I think. I would have liked to have seen how it fared trying to keep pace with the big three over the full generation, but the stuff we did get is good enough that it deserves a spot in anyone's collection.
I really appreciate and respect developers bringing new content to these old machines, but this looks pretty bad, honestly. The basics aren't even right, you can tell just by looking that the controls and physics are completely off. The graphics have taken a pretty big hit, and I don't think the 2612 is really suited to the atmosphere that SCV4 conveys on SNES. I'm sure the physics and timing will get better, but then what? You've got a version of SCV4 that looks and sounds worse. The only thing I think I could say the Genesis might do better is alleviate slowdown, but the FastROM patch for the SNES version already mostly did that, and further optimization (and there's probably plenty to do; it was a launch-window game for the SNES) would likely get rid of the rest. I hope that what the developer is doing is making something original that's SCV4-inspired and using this as a test-bed, kind of like Pigsy did with the SotN stuff, because I just don't see the point of a lesser version of a very accessible 33-year-old SNES game.
While I suppose it's interesting on one hand to see stuff like this, I'm always of two minds about it. I'm into art, specifically photography, as a hobby (because I guess retro gaming isn't an expensive enough hobby already) and there are cases of photographers who have passed away having their slides and negatives released posthumously, which absolutely mortifies me. A person or company's portfolio is only as good as the worst piece in it, and so keeping things out of it is as important to a body of work as adding to it, if not more so. Taking away a creator's ability to curate their own portfolio is maybe helpful for pure preservation but could be incredibly violating if we're respecting game makers as artists.
If you're still finding 20 dollar Japanese Saturns, then there are loads of them still kicking around. This isn't affecting the market for original hardware in any meaningful way, and again, in such small quantities, the use of faulty units is entirely plausible. Even if your margin is only a couple bucks more by using faulty units, you're going to use them; the goal of a business is to make the most money possible, not "enough" money. And seeing as you can sell one of those functional 20 dollar Saturns for nearly or as much as these Slims are going for, while a parts unit goes for about 30-60 bucks, why would anyone put the work into modifying a fully functional Saturn when they could just flip it with virtually no labour, time, or material cost?
@knight0fdragon Even assuming that they are taking fully functional Saturns, how many of these things are being made? They could make thousands of these and not deplete the overall supply meaningfully. Going through AliExpress, they tell you how many have been sold. It's 135 units currently across all the SKUs a search brought up for me. That's not a number that's going to impact the supply or price of unmodified Saturns in any way. It's also pretty plausible, in those quantities, that they were machines with bad drives. They're selling for about $200-300 CAD right now, seemingly depending on if they come with a monitor. Unmodified Saturns with working drives are going for similar prices, if not more, so it wouldn't make any sense to use those. Even if they were getting a good price, they'd get a much better price on faulty machines and higher margins as a result, so that's what they'd use to do this.
The Saturn isn't unobtanium, some of them getting turned into these isn't the end of the world. I think there are plenty of people out there who want to play Saturn games on real hardware, but don't want to pay $500 for a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga. This is a decent solution for those people. Even better if these are parts machines, although who knows on that front. Anyway, if it's removing barriers to getting folks into the hobby and specifically the Saturn, I don't see it as being all that bad. My Saturn, and I'm guessing most people's Saturns, aren't exactly museum-grade pieces anyway.
This is pretty cool so far. I tend to enjoy machines with idiosyncratic hardware, like the SNES or Saturn, and the 7800 is definitely in that club. I think it's a stretch to call it R-Type shown running, though. It's a parallax effect and a ship sprite using graphics from R-Type and music ported from Mega Man X. It's a cool demo, and definitely well done, but it's not R-Type. Not yet, anyway.
I think we can scrutinize the dev a bit on this one, as he's got a bunch of other really impressive stuff going on, and I'm not sure this is up to par with his other work. The scaling is nice, I suppose, but I'm not really seeing much else to get fired up about. Maybe there's a gameplay hook we don't know about yet, but right now it just looks like Top Gear, and there are already a lot of games that look and play like Top Gear on the 4th gen machines.
I've seen early versions of this, I think. TurboXRay was doing something like this with the PCE, so good to see the shout out in the article. SNES fans should be excited about what's being done with these. If the technique could be ported to SNES, you could have more flexibility in using transparencies on the system, or use multiple types at the same time. Just because the other machines can do it doesn't mean that the SNES isn't still better at it. At any rate, Shannon Birt's a maniac, so I'm really looking forward to seeing their game released. My Genesis might not be, though, hopefully it doesn't melt doing all of this!
@RejectedAng3L The N64 was already heavily delayed as it was. The RDRAM latency issues were the main stumbling block, I believe. As bad as it was in the released hardware, it was apparently much worse early on. The machine is also, for its time, very powerful in the right hands. There's some crazy homebrew happening on the machine these days! The SNES did a pretty admirable job of holding down the fort for a lot longer than it was really meant to against vastly more powerful hardware than it was designed to compete with. I don't think it would have held on until 1997, though, and the CD unit wouldn't have really changed that. It might have actually hurt it, as by focusing on the CD, you're only addressing a fraction of your machine's install base, sometimes a pretty small one. Pulling out all the stops to make competitive games that were available to everyone who bought the machine since its launch was probably a better move. That's a big part of why companies stopped doing add-ons.
I'd be thrilled if this series got more love or even just compilations. Goemon's Great Adventure is one of my absolute favourite N64 games, and one of my favourite 2D/3D platformers of all time. I own three Super Famicom games, and they're Ganbare Goemon 2, 3, and 4.
We didn't have the rom before, we don't have it now. We haven't lost anything, we just know something that we don't have exists. I'm fine with that. The fan translation is almost certainly better than the official one from that era would be, anyway.
It'll be interesting to see what choices get made here, because it can't be a 1:1 conversion in a lot of senses. The developer is already using some SNES-exclusive tricks, so I'm curious to see what their vision is. Some of the stages might need to have their layouts modified to accommodate the difference in resolution. I think that will be a big point, as well as maybe modifying some of the graphics for the different aspect ratio. But in terms of effects, I don't think the SNES really has much to worry about. It's more about whether the coding is good enough to run those effects at full speed. I'm also really curious to see what they do with the sound. A lot of the music from Bloodlines was remixed for Portrait of Ruin, which might provide a good starting point, and the sound effects on the Genesis original were... not great, so that's probably pretty low-hanging fruit. I also wonder if the developer has a cartridge size in mind. Are they going to try to stay as close to the size of the Genesis game as possible, or are they just going to go hog wild and make it a 64mbit cart? Pretty interesting. As much as I love Rondo, an SNES conversion there wouldn't be all that interesting, you just need a cartridge big enough for it for the most part. This will be fun to see develop and evolve as the tradeoffs are made.
@PopetheRev28 They both have a 68K CPU and a Z80 to control the sound. They're otherwise wildly different. It's pretty unfair to the developers to trivialize how much work doing a conversion like this to the Genesis is.
@SuntannedDuck2 Agreed on PNO3! It's an acquired taste for sure (and the game has some legitimate problems), but it's been stranded on the GameCube for too long. Once you put some time into it and approach it on its terms, it's actually a really cool game. Stellar Blade actually gave me some PNO3 vibes in the rhythm of it and the gunplay in parts.
@WaveBoy I dunno, I have both OG Saturn pads and a wireless 2.4 GHz Retrobit one. The shoulder buttons are pretty different, not better or worse IMO, but in terms of weight and feel, I don't notice much of a difference.
@RetroGames I don't want to pretend the Virtual Boy didn't exist! It's really interesting hardware, both in the display and the chipset. It's pretty badass for 2D graphics, despite being in monochrome. They just kicked it out the door too early.
Hopefully they've fixed the d-pads. Tons of false diagonals on both of mine that just got worse as they aged, to the point I don't use them anymore. Poorly designed and using materials that don't age well. The button membranes also aren't very durable, so I try to stay away from the SNES-styled stuff from 8bitdo. A shame since the SNES controller is one of my favourites, and while it worked, I loved having something in that form factor that could still play modern games. I wound up replacing it with two controllers and have been having a good time with Retrobit's 2.4Ghz Saturn pad for 2D and retro, and the Kingkong 3 for modern stuff.
Love the arcade stick from 8bitdo, they can definitely make good stuff, but I won't buy another SNES-style pad unless I see one torn down to see if they've addressed the issues.
@KitsuneNight It might almost be better if it doesn't work so nobody gunks it up using it. The SNES CD might have been what we've seen, which is fairly unremarkable, or it could have been something else, we'll likely never know. One thing I can live without knowing, though, is how much Cheeto dust the controller can handle. Assuming it's legit, it belongs in a museum, and failing that, I hope it's a shelf queen.
@RetroGames Ok. Your hot take is literally wrong, and you seem unable to provide a good counterargument nor are you capable of actually taking any information on board, so I suppose this is a good place as any to leave it. If ignorance is bliss, I truly envy the state of euphoria you must exist in.
Comments 56
Re: Anniversary: Panzer Dragoon Turns 30 Today
A decompilation of Panzer Dragoon Saga would be incredible, as the source code has been lost. The game still plays wonderfully, but man, the Saturn really struggles in the heavier 3D scenes and the FMV is pretty goofy looking these days. Clean up the graphics and I think you still have a winner because there's really nothing else like it.
Re: SNES Consoles Appear To Be Getting Faster As They Age
Since it's the clock, could the oscillator be replaced with a quartz crystal? That would solve the problem, it seems.
Re: "Might Be Time To Go Back To A Corporate Job" - Trump's Tariffs Come Into Effect
1 - Define enormous amounts. By far, Mexico, China, and India are responsible for the USA's supply of both finished fentanyl and precursors. The DEA's 2024 report doesn't even list Canada as a trafficking threat. It's doubtful that Canada managed to step up its trafficking game enough to warrant blanket tariffs in such a short time. The fentanyl is merely an excuse so that Trump can exploit a loophole to use executive actions to bypass Congress in the implementation of tariffs. They don't care about the fentanyl. They never did, and again, the world sees that even if you don't.
2 - Some manufacturing jobs all for the low low price of the dissolution of American soft power. You're paying far more for those manufacturing jobs than you'll get out of them, and retaliatory tariffs as well as the price increases resulting from higher labour costs and higher input costs as tariffs get applied to raw materials will shrink demand for American-made products. Are those manufacturing jobs going to offset the damage done to sectors like agriculture? I hope for the people affected that they do.
3 - Appreciation for the economy in Trump's last term very much depends on who you ask and how you measure success. As far as caving goes, it was the US that blinked and paused the tariffs for a month most recently. I don't know of an instance where the US has managed to anger so much of the world so quickly, so how trade relationships between other countries banding together against the US will affect things isn't known. A lot of it's going to depend on how the EU chooses to tackle things and how Mexico and Canada's more targeted responses shake out with voters.
Canada's single-payer system is underfunded, the degree to which it is depends on the province. When you underfund things, they don't work properly. You should tell that story about the HSAs to some politicians in Canada and maybe they'll start investing in the system properly. It's fantastic when it works.
The single biggest driver of the opioid crisis has been reckless prescriptions for painkillers to treat symptoms in lieu of treating causes because it's cheaper. The prescriptions run out, but people are addicted to the opioids. So they get their fix from heroin or other opioids which is where the fentanyl hits. Breaking that cycle by making proper medical care available to everyone, regardless of economic status, will do far more than a 25% tariff on maple syrup ever will. If it was really about the opioid crisis, that's what would be happening. It isn't and it's not.
Re: "Might Be Time To Go Back To A Corporate Job" - Trump's Tariffs Come Into Effect
@zazou703
1 - Canada has absolutely put a lot of money and effort into combating fentanyl and is seeing results, not to mention that the amount of fentanyl coming in from Canada was incredibly small. The point still stands. The US is not acting in good faith and the rest of the world sees it. They're not going to put the effort into doing anything more than they already do as a result.
2 - The TSMC investment is highly political, and TSMC's investment into the US was already well underway thanks to the CHIPS Act. The investment is because Taiwan is facing increased pressure from the PRC and they're buying allies and spreading out their facilities in case Taiwan is invaded. They broke ground on new facilities in Japan and Germany as well, even though those countries aren't hurling tariffs around willy-nilly.
Honda has decided not to move Civic production to Mexico, instead building them... in the factory they're already made in. So, nothing returning there.
3 - Poverty drives demand of cheap drugs like fentanyl. Increasing prices while inducing a depression/recession as retaliatory tariffs cause layoffs will harm the most vulnerable people in society the most, which will in turn drive more people toward addiction. If anything, I would expect fentanyl consumption to increase dramatically with this policy. To actually combat fentanyl, the biggest thing that could be done would be to move to single-payer healthcare so that people who are sick can be treated properly instead of being recklessly prescribed painkillers to manage symptoms because they can't afford the proper treatment.
Re: "Might Be Time To Go Back To A Corporate Job" - Trump's Tariffs Come Into Effect
@zazou703
1 - Tariffs won't do that, especially after Canada was able to vastly decrease the amount of fentanyl moving through its borders (which was already a tiny part of the problem) and still got slapped with tariffs. It's not about the fentanyl, don't kid yourself. The US has already demonstrated that they don't care about that. Why would anyone else bother doing anything or spending any extra money to help the US after seeing how their closest ally was treated for complying?
2 - Manufacturing will not move back to the states. It'll move to other countries that haven't been hit with these tariffs with vastly lower labour costs than the US and far cheaper setup costs due to lower land value, existing manufacturing infrastructure, looser regulation, and already-trained manufacturing workforce. China's loss will be countries like Vietnam's gain, not the USA's.
3 - Great, good for you. Lots of people who are already struggling will be really hurt by this, and lots of jobs will be lost no matter which side you look at.
Re: Popular Tokyo Arcade Offers Update On How It's Doing Post-COVID-19
I had kind of thought that VR would be the thing to bring arcades back. Expensive hardware that requires a decent amount of space that not everyone has and gameplay that's best suited to short bursts, it seems kinda perfect for an arcade, but it just hasn't happened.
Re: Someone Is Trying To Bring Super Mario 64 To The GBA
@CLDM If this is somebody's hobby project, who cares? Most peoples' hobbies contribute nothing to anything, professional or otherwise. If the developer were building model trains instead of doing this, would you be this angry?
Anyway, this is progressing a lot. They've really cut the texture swim down a lot compared to the really early version. It's still a lot, but it's a lot better.
Re: Why Is N64 So Hard To Emulate In 2025? Modern Vintage Gamer Investigates
My takeaway is that it's not that the N64 can't be emulated, it's that we don't have the kind of cycle-accurate emulation that things like BSNES brought to the table combined with mainstream hardware that's fast enough to run it. It's still in that weird ZSNES state where things run but it's a bit hacky, but it's fast. The requirements for Parallel are pretty steep compared to a lot of other systems, so it won't work for stuff like the switch or those little emulation boxes and handhelds.
It just needs time, I reckon.
Re: 'Return To Yoshi's Island' Super Mario 64 ROM Hack Gets Stunning New Demo
Might have to finally pull the trigger on an Everdrive for my N64. There's some very impressive stuff happening on that machine, and Kaze's at the forefront of it.
Re: Classic SNES RPG Illusion Of Gaia's Retranslation Is Now Available
As much as I'd love for Terranigma to get this treatment, Illusion of Gaia needs it more. The original translation doesn't even make sense in spots.
Re: Modder Behind The Custom Sega Neptune Might Make The SNES PlayStation A Reality
@N64-ROX Probably not much, if you're going by what the SuperDisc prototype was. In a lot of ways, you'd actually be better off with a large cartridge. The SuperDisc cart had 256k of RAM to load your assets to from the disc, putting it in line with the PC-Engine's System Card 3. That's it, that's all it does besides pass CD audio along. That can still be pretty good, the Super CD-ROM games are fantastic, but a big cart is easier to plan for, has no load times, and allows access to any game asset at any time. Releasing on a cart means anyone with an SNES can play on real hardware, too.
Just like the PCE, though, the plan may have been to launch more advanced cartridges to boost the CD games further, things like more RAM or co-processors. That's what I think the SA-1 was actually designed for.
So, if you're staying authentic to what we know actually existed, it's probably nothing to write home about. If you were to create a homebrew SuperDisc² for FPGAs that has an SA-1 or Super FX with 2MB, like the Arcade Card on PCE, well, then it's pretty nifty. Something at least similar likely would have happened has this thing released and not bombed, too. Depends on if the dev is a stickler for authenticity, really.
Re: "Star Fox CD" To Take Advantage Of Super FX 3 Chip, Will Feature Rumble Support
@RejectedAng3L What on earth are you talking about? The Jag has a 68k, sure, but Tom and Jerry are 32-bit, the Saturn is almost all 32-bit CPUs excluding the sound coprocessor, and the Neo-Geo is 16-bit with an 8-bit co-processor. Nintendo absolutely cared about tech at that point as well, the N64 is very powerful for its time, and the GameCube was one of the best-engineered consoles they ever put together.
The SNES CD would have failed for the same reason the Sega CD did, it would be too expensive and still held back by the machine it's attached to. Better to go with a clean design.
Re: Anniversary: 30 Years Ago, NEC Rolled The Dice With PC-FX And Lost
NEC never could figure out how to follow up the PC Engine. The Supergrafx might have been something if they built compatibility into the Duo consoles, but the PC-FX never stood a chance in 1994 with those specs.
Unironically one of my favourite console shell designs, though.
Re: Hands On: Genki And 8BitDo's PocketPro Collaboration Is Neat, If A Little Pointless
I've never had an SN30 Pro last any reasonable length of time. I've had a couple, too. Tons of false diagonals on the D-pad, and the button membranes break down, leading to double presses and slow returns. I'll never buy another 8bitdo gamepad again, although the Arcade Stick is pretty nice. I've had great luck with Gulikit's KK3 and Retrobit's Saturn pads.
Re: The Founder of Nihon Falcom Masayuki Kato Has Passed Away, Aged 78
Rest in Peace. The Ys and Dragon Slayer games have given myself and plenty of others a lot of really great hours over the years.
Re: Mario 64 Modder Explains Why N64 Has More RAM Than You Think
I think that even back in the day, it was known that even the best N64 games were leaving a bit on the table, but between Kaze's stuff and the F3DEX3 demos, I would never have imagined just how much potential the hardware had. Normal mapping, ambient occlusion, cel shading, it's pretty crazy to see it running on hardware from that era and running well.
Re: Don't Forget The Sega 32X Turns 30 This Year, Too
@HammerGalladeBro Shadow Squadron is pretty fun, actually! Definitely my favorite 32X game, although that's a pretty low bar, admittedly. Definitely well worth a play, but not a system seller by any means.
Re: Saturn Was "More Powerful Than PlayStation" Claims Argonaut Founder
The Saturn is a lot of hardware put together poorly, becoming less than the sum of its parts. The PS1 is a small amount of decent hardware put together very cleverly, becoming more than the sum of its parts. There's more to hardware design than clock speeds and MIPS.
Re: Homebrew Dev Shows Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow On Genesis / Mega Drive, But Don't Get Too Excited
@beltmenot I'm talking about the headline specifically. "Aria of Sorrow on Genesis." It's not that, they took some art from AoS to use while they get other art ready. This happens a lot, especially with Castlevania, oddly, like that Bloodlines thing on the SNES a while back.
If the headline were something like, "Pigsy Updates SotN Genesis/MD Demake" that's great. That's accurate, and it's a project that does deserve discussion.
Re: Homebrew Dev Shows Castlevania: Aria Of Sorrow On Genesis / Mega Drive, But Don't Get Too Excited
Can we stop sensationalizing these things? They took tiles from one game and put them into their project as placeholders. That's not a port, that's standard practice in game development.
Anyway, most of Aria's impressive visuals come from the GBA's sprite manipulation, so it's not too surprising to see them jump over to the 4th gen like this. Both machines use 4bpp tiles, but the GBA has a lot more palettes to play with and a massive (comparitively) global palette. Given that that's not an insurmountable obstacle, the GBA is likely a fantastic place to grab more modern placeholder graphics from for 4th gen projects on any of the machines.
Re: Saturn Cult Classic Princess Crown Is Getting An Uncensored Translation
@Carck EVERY translation involves localization. You can't have one without the other, even if you're trying to stay as true to the original text as possible. At some point you're going to have to choose a word when the precision of one language doesn't match the other or cultural practices regarding language don't have an equivalent. Japanese, for example, has a system of honourifics that English doesn't have. It makes sense to leave those in a Persona game because those are set in Japan, but it would be pretty detrimental to a game like Earthbound. Also, poor writing can occur in any language. I don't think there's anything wrong with a translator recognizing that and punching it up. It's when you go too far, like a lot of Working Designs efforts did, that you have a problem.
Re: Saturn Cult Classic Princess Crown Is Getting An Uncensored Translation
I think translation and localization get used interchangeably, and it's unfortunate, because both are necessary for foreign releases but they're very different. Translation is about accuracy and functionality, localization is about the spirit and intent. The thing about the spirit of a written work is that everyone is going to bring their own perspective to it. If a character is brash and impulsive, having them use coarse language is very effective shorthand to convey that to Western audiences, even if they didn't swear in the original. Swearing doesn't bother me if it's in service of the character, although without censorship we'd never have gotten "Son of a submariner," which I think actually works better than the original text's swearing in Kefka's case. So it can cut both ways, it all depends on the tone of the game and the overall localization as a whole.
Re: Anniversary: Sega Saturn, The Most Successful Console "Flop" Of All Time, Turns 30 Today
@KitsuneNight I think you're absolutely right. The Saturn has some great games in its library, but those games are of their time or even before, which is probably why we as retro gamers like the machine so much. As someone who was around at the time of its relevance, though, we wanted 3D and the PS1 and N64 were a lot better for that.
Re: We Now Have Our First Images Of M2's New 'Night Striker' Game
I'm really excited about this. Night Striker S on Saturn is one of my favourites for the system. And that soundtrack!
I'd love it on Switch for portability, it would be a perfect way to kill some time at the airport or waiting for a train.
Re: The Genesis Just "Broke Another Myth" With This Amazing Rendition Of A Classic Castlevania Tune
What myth? It's a nice arrangement, but it still sounds like a Genesis game. It's inescapable, the machine just has a certain sound. I don't mean that as a good thing or a bad thing, I just don't think it's going to make anyone change their minds about the machine. I really like a lot of Genesis stuff, Gauntlet 4 and Verytex are particular favourites (and a hell of a lot older than this myth-busting tune), but the SNES does have more advanced sound hardware. Samples are a lot more versatile as a building block, it has much finer stereo imaging, surround sound for some reason, finer volume control, the echo effects are nice when they're done tastefully and the buffer for it is very abusable in software. A lot of people are wrong for criticizing the Genesis as only sounding like farts and zippers, and a lot of people are wrong for criticizing the SNES as being muffled slap bass and reverb. They can both do more, but the SNES can do the most.
Anyway, what I really take issue with is them ***** on devs who worked on Genesis titles back in the day. Making the Genesis sound decent nowadays with modern tools, no deadlines, and over thirty years of hindsight is not the same task as it was when the machine was on the market. At all. It takes a real lack of class to be that much of a dick to the people who were working on these things back then with dubious tools and translated manuals while you're in possession of tools and knowledge that those people probably couldn't even imagine having at the time.
Re: Interview: Meet The Man Who's Upgrading SNES Doom With The "Super FX 3" Chip
The SNES presents some interesting questions with additional hardware inside the carts, especially when you consider the time it was on the market. I think period-appropriate enhancement chips make sense, but once it goes too far, you're basically just using the SNES as a video out and then you'd have to wonder why they'd even bother making it an SNES cart. However, the period that the SNES and especially the Super Famicom covered means that there's a pretty wild array of hardware that could be considered period, to the point where doing exactly that could have been done and be period correct. In the US and Europe, the SNES was pretty much entirely succeeded by the N64, but in Japan it did receive longer term support, to the point where the SFC crossed over and was still receiving some support at the same time as the Dreamcast. An enhancement chip released in '99 for the same price as a Super FX2 was in 94 would be considerably more capable given how much technology changed between the FX2 and then. I doubt anyone would have spent the money to manufacture such a thing when you could just make a PS1 game if you wanted better graphics and a large install base, however. It's feasible, though.
Anyway, Voodoo2-in-an-SNES-cart theorycrafting/justification out of the way, what this FX3 sounds like is an update to the FX2 that irons out some inefficiencies and allows access to more ROM. That doesn't seem out of line, really, unless they've juiced it to like, 200MHz or something. If the N64 had seen any more delays, I could see them doing an FX3 or "SA-2" to tide themselves over, not unlike this and maybe even faster.
Re: "There Are No Bad Options" - The SNES 2CHIP Vs 1CHIP Debate Just Got Put To Bed
I think this is something that gets over-thought a lot, and it's good to see someone in the mod community actually address it. I've never understood the obsession with ultra-clean output from these older systems, honestly. A little Composite fuzz and a CRT absolve a lot of sins, and it's more authentic to how I played these machines back in the day, so I tend to stick to that and consider the flaws as being part of the machine's character.
Re: Triple Impact Is A Promising New SNES Beat 'Em Up
@WileyDragonfly Not really. The vast majority of the SNES library doesn't use coprocessors. Rendering Ranger R2 is one of the most impressive games on the system and doesn't use coprocessors or even FastROM. I think the bigger issue for homebrew is that the SNES isn't very C friendly and the ASM was never as broadly known as 68K dur to the 65816 being relatively unpopular. It's definitely getting better, though.
Anyway, the project looks cool, but obviously early. It's nice to see something that isn't a port, and it'll be interesting to see how they get along as the SNES hardware doesn't lend itself to beat-em-ups as well as the other 4th gen machines.
Re: Neo Geo Classic Magician Lord Gets Tentative Fan Port To NEC SuperGrafx
I always kind of thought NEC missed a trick by not making the Duo consoles SuperGrafx compatible. Even without that, the SGX was pretty badass and definitely deserved better than it got.
SGX+CD+Arcade Card = Very spicy meatball, so it would be really cool to see it done.
Re: "The Wrong Console Won" - Dreamcast Is Getting Its Own Rave Event "To Correct The Record"
@Bunkerneath You nailed it. A lot of PS2s got bought as DVD players, it made a lot of sense. Standalone DVD players still cost a decent chunk of change at the time, spend a little more AND you get a new game console? Easy sell for most people.
The 6th gen was kind of a repeat of the 4th gen to me, in that you couldn't buy a bad console. PS2, GC, DC, and Xbox all kicked ass, just like how the SNES, Genesis, and TG16 were all great machines. I do feel like the Dreamcast tends to get overhyped a little, but that's a pretty natural response to how it got cut down in its prime, I think. I would have liked to have seen how it fared trying to keep pace with the big three over the full generation, but the stuff we did get is good enough that it deserves a spot in anyone's collection.
Re: Fan-Made 'Mega Castlevania IV' Project Is Alive And Well In This New Footage
I really appreciate and respect developers bringing new content to these old machines, but this looks pretty bad, honestly. The basics aren't even right, you can tell just by looking that the controls and physics are completely off. The graphics have taken a pretty big hit, and I don't think the 2612 is really suited to the atmosphere that SCV4 conveys on SNES.
I'm sure the physics and timing will get better, but then what? You've got a version of SCV4 that looks and sounds worse. The only thing I think I could say the Genesis might do better is alleviate slowdown, but the FastROM patch for the SNES version already mostly did that, and further optimization (and there's probably plenty to do; it was a launch-window game for the SNES) would likely get rid of the rest.
I hope that what the developer is doing is making something original that's SCV4-inspired and using this as a test-bed, kind of like Pigsy did with the SotN stuff, because I just don't see the point of a lesser version of a very accessible 33-year-old SNES game.
Re: Unreleased SNES Remake Of Game Freak's Debut Quinty Leaks Online
While I suppose it's interesting on one hand to see stuff like this, I'm always of two minds about it. I'm into art, specifically photography, as a hobby (because I guess retro gaming isn't an expensive enough hobby already) and there are cases of photographers who have passed away having their slides and negatives released posthumously, which absolutely mortifies me. A person or company's portfolio is only as good as the worst piece in it, and so keeping things out of it is as important to a body of work as adding to it, if not more so. Taking away a creator's ability to curate their own portfolio is maybe helpful for pure preservation but could be incredibly violating if we're respecting game makers as artists.
Re: Protect Your Beloved 3DS And PS Vita With These Premium Cases
I've only just come to grips with my beloved GameCube being retro! I'm not ready for the 3DS to be called retro yet!
Re: Please Stop Buying Unofficial "Saturn Mini" Consoles
Less than 200 sold.
If you're still finding 20 dollar Japanese Saturns, then there are loads of them still kicking around. This isn't affecting the market for original hardware in any meaningful way, and again, in such small quantities, the use of faulty units is entirely plausible. Even if your margin is only a couple bucks more by using faulty units, you're going to use them; the goal of a business is to make the most money possible, not "enough" money. And seeing as you can sell one of those functional 20 dollar Saturns for nearly or as much as these Slims are going for, while a parts unit goes for about 30-60 bucks, why would anyone put the work into modifying a fully functional Saturn when they could just flip it with virtually no labour, time, or material cost?
Re: Please Stop Buying Unofficial "Saturn Mini" Consoles
@knight0fdragon Even assuming that they are taking fully functional Saturns, how many of these things are being made? They could make thousands of these and not deplete the overall supply meaningfully. Going through AliExpress, they tell you how many have been sold. It's 135 units currently across all the SKUs a search brought up for me. That's not a number that's going to impact the supply or price of unmodified Saturns in any way. It's also pretty plausible, in those quantities, that they were machines with bad drives. They're selling for about $200-300 CAD right now, seemingly depending on if they come with a monitor. Unmodified Saturns with working drives are going for similar prices, if not more, so it wouldn't make any sense to use those. Even if they were getting a good price, they'd get a much better price on faulty machines and higher margins as a result, so that's what they'd use to do this.
Re: Please Stop Buying Unofficial "Saturn Mini" Consoles
The Saturn isn't unobtanium, some of them getting turned into these isn't the end of the world. I think there are plenty of people out there who want to play Saturn games on real hardware, but don't want to pay $500 for a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga. This is a decent solution for those people. Even better if these are parts machines, although who knows on that front.
Anyway, if it's removing barriers to getting folks into the hobby and specifically the Saturn, I don't see it as being all that bad. My Saturn, and I'm guessing most people's Saturns, aren't exactly museum-grade pieces anyway.
Re: R-Type Shown Running On The Atari 7800
This is pretty cool so far. I tend to enjoy machines with idiosyncratic hardware, like the SNES or Saturn, and the 7800 is definitely in that club.
I think it's a stretch to call it R-Type shown running, though. It's a parallax effect and a ship sprite using graphics from R-Type and music ported from Mega Man X. It's a cool demo, and definitely well done, but it's not R-Type. Not yet, anyway.
Re: Final Fight MD Dev Working On 'Driftin' Rage', A New 16-Bit Racer For Mega Drive/Genesis
I think we can scrutinize the dev a bit on this one, as he's got a bunch of other really impressive stuff going on, and I'm not sure this is up to par with his other work.
The scaling is nice, I suppose, but I'm not really seeing much else to get fired up about. Maybe there's a gameplay hook we don't know about yet, but right now it just looks like Top Gear, and there are already a lot of games that look and play like Top Gear on the 4th gen machines.
Re: Sega Genesis Is Finally Capable Of SNES-Style Transparency Effects Thanks To Clever Modders
I've seen early versions of this, I think. TurboXRay was doing something like this with the PCE, so good to see the shout out in the article.
SNES fans should be excited about what's being done with these. If the technique could be ported to SNES, you could have more flexibility in using transparencies on the system, or use multiple types at the same time. Just because the other machines can do it doesn't mean that the SNES isn't still better at it.
At any rate, Shannon Birt's a maniac, so I'm really looking forward to seeing their game released. My Genesis might not be, though, hopefully it doesn't melt doing all of this!
Re: Star Fox Will Take Advantage Of The New Super FX 3 Chip, Will Feature Rumble Support
@RejectedAng3L The N64 was already heavily delayed as it was. The RDRAM latency issues were the main stumbling block, I believe. As bad as it was in the released hardware, it was apparently much worse early on. The machine is also, for its time, very powerful in the right hands. There's some crazy homebrew happening on the machine these days!
The SNES did a pretty admirable job of holding down the fort for a lot longer than it was really meant to against vastly more powerful hardware than it was designed to compete with. I don't think it would have held on until 1997, though, and the CD unit wouldn't have really changed that. It might have actually hurt it, as by focusing on the CD, you're only addressing a fraction of your machine's install base, sometimes a pretty small one. Pulling out all the stops to make competitive games that were available to everyone who bought the machine since its launch was probably a better move. That's a big part of why companies stopped doing add-ons.
Re: The Making Of: Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, Konami's Underrated N64 Classic
I'd be thrilled if this series got more love or even just compilations. Goemon's Great Adventure is one of my absolute favourite N64 games, and one of my favourite 2D/3D platformers of all time. I own three Super Famicom games, and they're Ganbare Goemon 2, 3, and 4.
Re: Dragon Quest SNES Prototype Worth $50,000 "Lost For Good"
We didn't have the rom before, we don't have it now. We haven't lost anything, we just know something that we don't have exists. I'm fine with that. The fan translation is almost certainly better than the official one from that era would be, anyway.
Re: Castlevania: Bloodlines Is Being Unofficially Ported To SNES
It'll be interesting to see what choices get made here, because it can't be a 1:1 conversion in a lot of senses. The developer is already using some SNES-exclusive tricks, so I'm curious to see what their vision is.
Some of the stages might need to have their layouts modified to accommodate the difference in resolution. I think that will be a big point, as well as maybe modifying some of the graphics for the different aspect ratio. But in terms of effects, I don't think the SNES really has much to worry about. It's more about whether the coding is good enough to run those effects at full speed.
I'm also really curious to see what they do with the sound. A lot of the music from Bloodlines was remixed for Portrait of Ruin, which might provide a good starting point, and the sound effects on the Genesis original were... not great, so that's probably pretty low-hanging fruit.
I also wonder if the developer has a cartridge size in mind. Are they going to try to stay as close to the size of the Genesis game as possible, or are they just going to go hog wild and make it a 64mbit cart?
Pretty interesting. As much as I love Rondo, an SNES conversion there wouldn't be all that interesting, you just need a cartridge big enough for it for the most part. This will be fun to see develop and evolve as the tradeoffs are made.
Re: This Amazing Sega Genesis Port Of Real Bout Fatal Fury Special Is Available For Free
@PopetheRev28 They both have a 68K CPU and a Z80 to control the sound. They're otherwise wildly different. It's pretty unfair to the developers to trivialize how much work doing a conversion like this to the Genesis is.
Re: Interview: The Company That Brought Resident Evil Back To PC Wants To Resurrect More Capcom Classics
@SuntannedDuck2 Agreed on PNO3! It's an acquired taste for sure (and the game has some legitimate problems), but it's been stranded on the GameCube for too long. Once you put some time into it and approach it on its terms, it's actually a really cool game. Stellar Blade actually gave me some PNO3 vibes in the rhythm of it and the gunplay in parts.
Re: Has Your SNES Pad Seen Better Days? Don't Worry, A Fix Is Coming
@WaveBoy I dunno, I have both OG Saturn pads and a wireless 2.4 GHz Retrobit one. The shoulder buttons are pretty different, not better or worse IMO, but in terms of weight and feel, I don't notice much of a difference.
Re: Super-Rare SNES PlayStation Controller Is Going Up For Auction
@RetroGames I don't want to pretend the Virtual Boy didn't exist! It's really interesting hardware, both in the display and the chipset. It's pretty badass for 2D graphics, despite being in monochrome. They just kicked it out the door too early.
Re: 8BitDo's Anniversary Celebration Includes Gold And Silver Controllers
Hopefully they've fixed the d-pads. Tons of false diagonals on both of mine that just got worse as they aged, to the point I don't use them anymore. Poorly designed and using materials that don't age well. The button membranes also aren't very durable, so I try to stay away from the SNES-styled stuff from 8bitdo. A shame since the SNES controller is one of my favourites, and while it worked, I loved having something in that form factor that could still play modern games.
I wound up replacing it with two controllers and have been having a good time with Retrobit's 2.4Ghz Saturn pad for 2D and retro, and the Kingkong 3 for modern stuff.
Love the arcade stick from 8bitdo, they can definitely make good stuff, but I won't buy another SNES-style pad unless I see one torn down to see if they've addressed the issues.
Re: Super-Rare SNES PlayStation Controller Is Going Up For Auction
@KitsuneNight It might almost be better if it doesn't work so nobody gunks it up using it. The SNES CD might have been what we've seen, which is fairly unremarkable, or it could have been something else, we'll likely never know. One thing I can live without knowing, though, is how much Cheeto dust the controller can handle. Assuming it's legit, it belongs in a museum, and failing that, I hope it's a shelf queen.
Re: Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip
@RetroGames
Ok. Your hot take is literally wrong, and you seem unable to provide a good counterargument nor are you capable of actually taking any information on board, so I suppose this is a good place as any to leave it. If ignorance is bliss, I truly envy the state of euphoria you must exist in.