GhaleonUnlimited

@Deuteros I mean I personally play on a hi-end '90s Photoshop VGA monitor w XRGB2+ and Irken A1 scaler, so I see these on a few nice display types. I use them on consumer CRTs and Trinitrons w/ AV and Svideo both too sometimes.

I also hook these up to OSSCs and GBS-Cs for convenience at gigs, and seeing a system upscaled to 1080p I think gives you a different look at them.

I mean I can def see a difference when I used to hook these up on my bar consumer CRTs but maybe not everyone does or even cares. I have like 20 SNESes and i think 5 are 1CHIPs. It's true 1CHIPs vary widely in quality too though.

This is all moot now cos you can put a board in your 2CHIP to improve the video quality. I haven't done one myself but I'd believe it's worth it!

SNESes overall seem to vary wildly in video quality period, so I think a wide sample size is needed

The 1CHIP(-3 I think) I personally play on is actually worse than my others but the serial matches the board and I kind of like that lol

I'm honestly not a videophile, I like an old-school, consumer y look, I just have seen a lot of these lol

I'm really only giving this info because I think Voultar is being kind of facitious, and I just wanted to share some of my experiences since it's kind of out of the ordinary.

Voultar told me the ebay seller who sold me my refurbed RGN PCE does a terrible job and this and that, but it looks clean inside and has been running great for like 8 years now. I like his contributions to the scene but he is the kind of guy who thinks his own word is gospel I guess. He's also got some out-there opinions and seems like he can't deal if people have a different-but-good way of things sometimes. Just my observations.

IMO he's being contrary to be contrary. Voultar has some really weird takes.

I do videogame entertainment and gaming is also my love and life (prob like everyone who reads this site).

2CHIPs are ass. Very blurry picture, although you really can't tell unless you're playing via RGB, maybe a good Svideo TV.

1CHIPs also run the gamut and there's no guarantee HOW overall "great" it will be, but it'll certainly be better.

The best non-1CHIPs I've ever seen are the original SNESes, with the sound card plugin. Downside is the sound cards are another thing that can die on you lol.

I think as usual the real answer is "play what looks good to you" tho!

@RetroGames I read your comments. Read above as well, I guess?

Also I do run my own company and I take care of my people, because it's better for my business but also it's a good feeling to treat people well.

I'm not sure if you run a business but businesses have all the latitude and resources in the world to pay and treat people properly, most just choose not to.

If you're amoral, you're allowed to be, but you will get nowhere defending known shitbags or telling other people not to have their opinion in it.

@WileyDragonfly it's illegal and also supporting crap people. I know "no one cares" but some people care. Telling people "just pirate" isn't very helpful IMO, it's pretty obvious.

Why not also throw in "just buy an everdrive"?

I enjoy making my own carts as well but I usually take the JP cart and put the EN ver or a fan hack on it.

I hate LRG and these companies that are just straight in it to rip people off, but retro-bit does a nice job.

It's good in any case if the actual creators in any way can make some money off these amazing games made decades ago.

You can't save Aerith in PSX FFVII because there is no character named that lol.

@RetroGames Yeah, but he's also a lying dick who rips people off and treats people like tools for him to use.

You can be successful (in both life and business) without treating other people like crap. It's weird when people think you can't be both. In fact it's a much harder and stressful road to be a pick because you're constantly burning bridges and seeking new people to con.

I'm saying this as a huge fan of VGL who still keeps an autographed flyer of his and the main conductor on his wall.

I tried to bring VGL to Cleveland a couple times and I'm glad I didn't go forward with it in the end though.

Old games are worth a good amount now because not many people thought they would be worth anything.

Everyone spending ass loads of money of LRG, you really have no idea what these forced-scarcity products like LRG will be worth in the future. Just something to consider if you're a speculator.

These guys aren't trying to sell us good products, they're relying on FOMO to sell products. No good business does that.

@Sketcz Yeah man it's the worst

There are bunches of JP ebay auctions when people seem to esnipe you for a max amount of $5 cheaper than what the other ebay copies are.

There are lots of auctions where it's literally 1 person on the internet was bidding against me and it's always 50 cents over my bid lol. So it's one ***** max bidding up to BARELY a deal.

Whyyyy

@Sketcz Yeah, before the pandemic I leaned that you can desolder the JP ROM and put another on. Each system has a lot of rules, and what boards are compatible with X games, and all that. But it's fun, and I don't really feel emotionally attached to a game unless I own it, and it's all figured out now so you generally do not have to guess at anything.

It's also a small investment - $60 ROM programmer, free software, get EEPROMs on Aliexpress, and you can start with like a $15 soldering iron and desolder iron.

Mousebitelabs for instance makes daughter PCBs where you don't even have to desolder anything from your game, for just a few bucks per! Most handy for NES/SNES. Genesis/MD is much less restrictive on what games can be put on what cart.

Some SNES games have 2 game EEPROMs and are impossible to convert (that I know of) but you can take a ***** sports game that's compatible or get a new blank board even and populate it, then put in my JP cart body.

@Sketcz VB flash carts Def suck! I've been getting a few JP carts CIB since they're so cheap (under $20) but yeah I'm also not paying $150 for Wario Land let alone whatever Jack Bros goes for.

I basically have my PC out the rare times I play VB so I can swap games with a couple clicks ;/

For NGPC my card only holds 4 games active at once, also sucks, lol.

@Sketcz it's such a crap shoot now when I read about a game on HG101. Like this obscure Japanese game could be $17 CIB or $170 lol.

I finished Lufia 1 and 2 and was happy to learn about Energy Breaker being related to that universe.

Lufia 1 and 2 are under $20 CIB (Japanese) and EB is now about $175. When a few years ago on ebay it was way under $100 dammit. I'll still buy something I'd really like to play and put the EN ROM on it, but at $100+ per game you just can't sample stuff you re simply curious about.

@Elitepatriot why not burn your own copies and/or print out materials from archive.org?

@Azuris Repros are just ***** doing something you can do on your own for little-to-no cost. Nobody needs repros, you don't actually own anything of value.

Anyone is free to buy them because they exist, lol, but if you are into retrogames there are much much better and more fun options available to us.

And I really apologize if it seems like I'm telling anyone off - - I m not trying to tell anyone what to do - - but people selling fan translations generally really suck. A person or team translates these games for no money (well maybe a patreon) and is not seeing any money on these, unless it says explicitly that they are. Most fan translations say "don't sell my ***** please".

It's just not a great thing to patronize if you care about the hobby. IMO.

TG16 fans have been dealing with this for..
I don't even know when PCE Works came on the scene.

It sucks. Buy from sources you trust.

@FurgelFrNurgle It's pretty popular, critically and commercially, so the fact it's a very positive representation of CV for almost everyone is prob a good thing. You are welcome to your opinion but I'm just sorry for you if you're a CV fan but haven't connected with it. You didn't say a single thing about why didnt like it haha

@Blast16 Why haven't you seen the show then, out of curiosity? I love CastleVania, and I couldn't imagine a CV show doing better justice to the source material.

@Sketcz Maybe it doesn't have the same loaded meaning in the UK, Idk, but in America "snowflake" is a really coded, trigger, political, mob-mentality word. Whatever camp you are in politically, I know you are great at expressing yourself and that word cheapens the points you're trying to make

People use it here for faux-toughness and it stops intelligent conversation in its tracks.

@UK_Kev no offense but how do you know if Google translate is carrying the message the creators mean or whatever? There is a reason the fan-translation scene stops taking any project seriously when someone says "this was machine translated".

I use auto translation to read stuff sometimes but I also take Japanese, and it's easy to see how stuff can be translated"right" by still not deliver the nuance the speaker/writer was going for, if it's a complicated issue.

I would just always keep that in mind when you're reading anything translated honestly

"I just had something I wanted to tell you."

Emulation will eventually be essential to game preservation, but for now the laws are in the corner of IP holders on something like this. Everyone knows this and it's not a secret. If you're making money off someone else's IP you have to expect this.

ESA does everything they can to uphold the establishment on draconian, antiquated IP law, so I don't know HOW thing will change, but legal changes are essential, otherwise this stuff will continue to happen and Nintendo is in the legal right (the moral right is a diff argument entirely).

In Earthbound Zero, in JP you have a crow smoking and even in the English unreleased beta the US took that out.

Then subsequent versions even in JP also removed that.

Things that were once OK are not always OK.

"Censorship" is banning books because it doesn't fit a political message. "Censorship" is not adding extra clothes to a character.

If this is the hill you really want to die on, if this is the Big Issue in 2024 that warrants online harassment and hate for you though, then go for it. This is about 10,000 items down on my list of concerns about the USA right now lol.

The only real alarming thing is that so few of us now seem able to say "I don't agree but I see the other side of this issue", and if we can't do that about articles of clothing on 30-year-old fictional videogame characters, how are you going to do that on the actual issues that shape our future?

Mods are always fun and mouse byte is really awesome!

That said I got a SGB2 for about $30 shipped a few months ago on ebay.

Not sure what this costs but after your labor the SGB2 is prob your best option :/

@Scollurio most people can't, it's not just you. This is a very niche-within-niche-within-niche problem.

I was at an event last month where another company who does game trucks had Mario All-Stars and Emulators on a 65" HDTV, off of some kind of raspberry pi. The framerate was literally 30 fps and the people playing didn't seem to care lol.

FPGA is a very Emperor's New Clothes issue for most people, even most retrogamers I'd wager.

Personally I just want to always play stuff on hardware closest as what it was designed to be experienced on. Some of it is simply the emotional connection I have to a game when I own it and it's tangible. I'm buying a Neo Geo CD just for SamShoRPG and I have a Mister lol.

But it's just a real rabbit hole to go down for minimal perceivable benefit.

MK1 is great for nostalgia but plays like *****, cmon people! There are so many other things to be angry about lol.

If a Mister is the only way you can think of to play arcade MK1 then idk what to say.

IMO I think when people are taking money (patreon) for working on these cores (or anything hobby-esque), the creator is setting expectations they probably don't want. (Not that people are not demanding of people doing work for free, but it money makes it certainly a different thing).

No one should be sending death threats over 30-year-old videogames or anything, but people are going to kind of demand things when people are taking money to work on anything, let alone piracy.

I'm not saying "all piracy is evil" or "FPGA is bad" or anything, just being realistic about these kind of things.

This game is really cool! Give it a look

It's been in "the works" for I believe more than a decade. The text compression is a huge pain in the ass with this game in particular. You can find a video of some progress made, they can just barely fit any English on a line. The actual translation is easy mode.

Some of the great SEGA romhackers outright refuse to work on it now, and I don't believe it's actively getting worked on.

CVS2 on DC is getting an English hack, and when I see stuff that's IMO kind of unneeded like that, inside I'm like, please work on SEGAGAGA!!!

For me, I found it faster to actually learn Japanese than wait for this in English lol.

It's my dream to see it done someday. As a total amateur hacker it is infinitely beyond my skillset to even experiment with as I can't do ***** without a disassembly

I'm sure it'll get done eventually in English though. I just started playing Energy Breaker, which took a hacker 10 years to finish and he explains on his site why it was like the hardest ***** ever to work on.

It'll happen!

Steve Jobs said something like people will pay 100% more for something 40% better.

With these new retrogaming scalers / peripherals / etc I think it's more like 1000% more for something 25% better lol.

If you ve ever thought about KOFXV now the time. 75% off the game + DLC. I think I got all chars and game for $38 just now?

Also XIII is one of the best fighters ever. I mean all the KOFs are good, but 13 looks and sounds incredible to boot.

I spent some time finally with HC at an arcade last year. Like a lot of readers here I'm sure, videogames have kind of been my life since I was 4, in 1986, and I'm a huge CV fan.

It is a TERRIBLE game, and not because it's "hard". It's just stupid and awfully designed. A lot of Battletoads-style design where "you haven't seen this screen? Whelp the background comes alive and you just die at this part. " And that's the first level lol. It's completely unrelated to everything likable about CV, which is challenging but almost never unfun or unfair.

I'm excited to play this remake and am glad Konami at least has the basic smarts of hiring studios that love their old franchises and will do them justice.

Man, someone needs to being the SATURN analog to every freaking console, starting with the DC.

The plug on the Saturn analog is mysteriously detachable so I wonder if something could be done with that.

@Badboykilla187 There are like 10,000 games for the Saturn in Japan lol. I guess it's easy to quibblr about relative terms like "successful" but it seemed to make SEGA money there, perhaps we can leave it at that.

The Saturn CPU situatipn is an infamous mess that still poses emulation / FPGA challenges today, from what I read. I think saying "it was easy to make the DC BC w/ Saturn" is tinfoil-hat territory my friend haha.

Is Doom64 well regarded now? At the time I don't remember many publications having much to say about it besides the sprites are a little odd. I played it in college but didn't give it much a chance really.

Thanks for the feature!

This would be awesome to add your own cards into this to be the franchises. An all-SEGA one would be my preference haha

Sorry to be a negative Nancy but you really can't say it's impossible for to be the best way if it can't play SEGA classics yet!

Or ebay, since JP game stores are often dumping their stuff online. I got 2 VB games in box/manual for less than $20 apiece this year. Vertical Force (as pictured here) and Teleroboxer

Social media rewards being a overblown toolbag, and since anyone can make YouTube videos and purport to be an expert, it's the last place I would look for a real history lesson in gaming.

I think we re all products of our environment too, so if you grew up with a 64 as a little kid, you probably think these games are amazing, and not many people are actual historians, meaning you educate yourself on earlier/obscure game systems/computers outside their realm of interest.

HardcoreGaming101 has long been my favorite site on the Internet because it has tons and tons and tons of easily digestible videogame history, with pretty objective writing as well as about the more popular games in history, like the Zeldas and Final Fantasies.

I thought I knew a lot about games because I was lucky enough to be taken to arcades and had a Saturn, lol, but there are waves and waves of games I'd never heard of till this site that are interesting, important, and worth leaning about.

I guess I mean mainly that I think you learn the most by seeking different-but-educated opinions if you really want a breadth of knowledge. If someone is yacking about N64 collectathons or how genius FFVII/KH's stories are, it tells you a lot their critically thinking skills and level of seriousness with the hobby

@Damo Croc was also on Saturn, don't forget

Random: I remember an episode of the Price is Right where this was a prize, and I was just so excited an arcade machine was being given away, let alone Moonwalker.

Cool interview!

@RetroGames I would venture that explaining the concept behind something is not the same as teaching the step-by-step on how to do the thing yourself.

I really enjoyed the Einstein biography "His Life and Universe" because it explained his theories in layman's terms, but that doesn't mean it equipped me to follow up on his theories with my own physics. I would need separate materials to do that and I think it's important to know the difference

If only we got more 2-D games for the 32X. Even just the addition the colors and sprite-scaling of the 32X with the speed of the Genesis processor would have yielded some really cool games?

@RetroGames I think you're getting hung up on labels here. "easy" "hard" whatever.

What matters is the process is possible, and it's documented for those inclined. The "hardest" part of things like this is knowing where to begin.

If you have ideas on how to simply anything, I think that would be really helpful for the author to hear!

Congrats on coming up with the idea and making it happen! I've always wanted to play this but have never made it past the 2nd level.

Also thank you for documenting the process especially. I think it really helps people also start the process when they have an idea like this.

I'll remember this thread if I need it for my presentation at the Strong Musejm's Videogame Hall of Fame next month. They're having a 2-day symposium and accepted my presentation about fans preserving and enhancing games through fanhacking.

I've only hacked with a disassembly so I haven't really thought about what I'm going to do. This might be great for it!

@DestructoDisk I'm not sure what country you're from, but yeah, in the USA I know many a people older than me (I'm 42) who claim to be up on history but don't seem to draw parallels with fascist 20th century leaders and politicians they openly support today. I don't really think it's helpful to call out an age group though because it gives people something to argue about instead of our actual issues and problems, IMO

@DestructoDisk there's not really any reason to attack any age groups here. You probably don't like "young people" saying XYZ about you, and you probably didn't like when the "old" generation complained about you when you were "young". Acting like your generation somehow was the only one to be right about everything both when you were young And old is... A choice you can certainly make.

@profkross This is what I thought of. People are paying out the ass for an emulator PC packaged as the Polymega, when something like this has much more intrinsic value. I hope it's successful.

@GMMXX I don't think most people know facism is these days, much less connect the name of a niche retrogame device to that SS.

Additional fun fact: Sonic! Software Planning purposely tried this multi-books-with-saves-carrying-over thing because they were already planning to do it in what would become Shining Force III! I forget where I read this now but it was from a dev interview. Maybe @sketcz knows?

@euan Thanks for the followup and insight!

I never even thought to check the manual about this and I have the EN and JP vers lol