KingMike

@Ristar24 Some earlier games actually used the region identification to provide localized game content based on the console rather the cartridge.
But of course, a few years in and it became more frequently used for lockout.
Though the most bizarre case is my Japanese copy of the 1991 game Rolling Thunder 2 (which has to be one of the earliest). So I read the "APPLICABLE TO JAPAN ONLY!!" region check is... applicable to Japan only. I've read the western releases are not region-locked.

@Zeebor15 So I read, Infogrames (aka modern Atari) had already bought out Ocean by the time Mission: Impossible for the N64 was finished (that game was famous back in the day for having a multi-year development) but they let them still put their name on it, as I think the last game they put out before the name was retired.

@WaveBoy I've been told that Johnny Turbo's emulator was fairly inaccurate, with one example being the lack of copy-protection emulation in Sly Spy (was that the name? The "not James Bond" game.) making the game easier than it's supposed to be (the idea with anti-piracy on console games was to make them harder, but in arcade games to make them easier, I guess to punish the arcade owners).

I do remember LordBBH getting a 1CC on the arcade version. Then naturally looking at both the Genesis and TurboGrafx versions, and I recall one of them was kind of BS difficult, somehow made even more difficult than the arcade game.

One must ask how much they are willing to go Megadriving down the Inter State Kaneko.

I had assumed the SNES game was a port of the DOS game since the same developer made it, but I know the NES game was a different game published by a different publisher (Bandai) than the SNES (the defunct Japanese IGS, though it surprises me the probably-unrelated Taiwanese IGS seems to be as known as it is).

This time the action in New York will not include actual New Yorker Sigourney Weaver, will it?
(I'm not surprised they took the player names out when they released the Wii VC version.)

I do find this amusing as one of my old translation scene pals (that I know wouldn't appreciate being named) had cited this game as a bottom of the barrel SNES RPG for which they wish the scene of those days would've started covering other platforms with as much enthusiasm.
That's certainly a valid point. I myself had wanted to but couldn't move off the NES and SNES since the tools and docs weren't as robust. Then I found myself not as able to commit to sitting down with another platform to learn it. I still won't accept GenAI translations as "necessary" alternatives to hard manual work.

@metaphysician I know that AG does have a separate site he runs a business for formally licensed jobs (that is, completely legitimizing his skills), so he's not unapproachable if someone wanted to.
Though in that game's case, I think he would need to be able to reach out to the person who originally translated the text.

@Damo The Game Boy port of Battle of Olympus was only released in Europe.
I don't know if there was anything particularly wrong with it, but in the past few years I recall VGHF releasing a document of Activision's license prospects for North America and Battle of Olympus was among them but someone thought it was boring or dull or something.
Especially with Link's Awakening coming out that same year, you'd think they'd want something in that direction.

@Arcadia_Official How is the Amiga controller "a SNES controller for grown-ups"?
The SNES controller looks like a fine controller for everyone. The Amiga controller looks like an awfully uncomfortable variant.
When I played Super Metroid on my Japanese New 3DS, the extra bulk of the device was enough to throw off my playing (though obviously unavoidable since of course the 3DS needs a touchscreen in the middle). I was just feeling glad I wasn't playing a domestic unit, which would mean I'd have to be playing the even larger XL system (since standard-size USA consoles were limited to a couple special editions).

@Fallingshadow The SNES version is actually a unique game. From what I've seen, the arcade version is closer to a brawler (combat focus) while the SNES version takes the set designs and remixes them with levels much more focused on platforming.
I think the other ports (NES, GB, Genesis and maybe some home computers) are more direct adaptations.

@Moroboshi876 It wouldn't stop WB. They shot down an unrelated PSP game for making ever so slightly less blatant reference, putting it away until the publisher rereleased with the title reduced (which honestly was too long of a title anyways). The title was something like "Holy (something or other), Bad Man! What Have I Done to Deserve This, My Lord?". It was reissued with just the last half of the title. The publisher said it was due to a rights issue with "an unnamed party" but it's really obvious who that party was.

In my day most games were "trapped" on certain consoles. If you wanted to play the game that much, you bought the console. We didn't have ideas such as whining about games being "trapped" on a specific console.

He tried to strange a child to death about two seconds into Home Alone 2: Lost in New York on the Super Nintendo.

Thankfully he will be remembered for far better roles in video games...

@-wc- Then when they say "NES", I wonder if this will be the FDS (Japan) or "NES" (international). I haven't played enough to know whether this used the FDS sound channel or if there is more difference than that the FDS version allowed saving progress to disk while the NES used passwords.
Another difference from the arcade is, I understand the NES had more levels... incase 100 wasn't enough already.

Though the question is to how accurate the Arcade Archives version is to the actual arcade machine. I know Bubble Bobble is one of those games that wasn't emulated properly in MAME for many years because, like countless other games, used mysterious proprietary chips that were undocumented and I think in BB may have been tied to many obscure secrets probably almost nobody was going to find on their own.

@slider1983 Someone already took the Zool name for a completely unrelated Japanese-exclusive RPG on the N64.
Though I guess technically they didn't call it "Zool 64".
But that was the platform that people have most associated with Anything "64" titles.

@MontyCircus My knowledge of Little Samson in 1992/1993 was only because Nintendo Power covered it.
I didn't have a NES at the time so I couldn't actually play it, I could only look at the magazine article and wonder what I was missing.

@-wc- Oops. I mathed bad. 160x144 is a 10:9 ratio, I believe. I put those numbers together wrong.

From what I remember, what we had of Mega Drive Mr. Nutz 2 online was an incomplete source code.

It does surprise me that this game was one that someone decided needed to be released on every iteration of the Game Boy line.
But they weren't Nutz enough to make DS, 3DS and Switch versions. (though it wouldn't surprise me if someone said there was a DSi version. I mean, someone decided that the Amiga and SNES platformer Oscar needed to be split into a separate game for each level and released on DSiWare.)

@JackGYarwood Would be nice to see the English version that Namco had prepared for a USA release in 1994, renamed Star Quest.
But as you might imagine, the 1990 Mega Drive game was probably suddenly looking a bit dated with the PlayStation half a year from Japanese launch. I imagine that's probably why its release was shelved, even though EGM reviewed a supposedly completed preview copy.

Well, Analogue is the company that got its start selling us a $500 NES.
(I don't know if I can even say clone, I've heard some say that first Analogue unit was basically a really fancy AV Famicom PCB mod at its core.)

Risk damaging a rare and valuable console when picking up a spare could do the job.

Though I can remember I'm not the only one that felt a little upset many years ago when Ben Heck took one apart to turn it into a Sega CD-only machine, as I recall. (I think those were the days he was largely known as the guy who portablizes all the home consoles.)

@-wc- 16:10 is the aspect ratio the GB/GBC and GG used. I don't know what other systems used that.
I haven't kept track of Evercade releases to know which games from those systems, if any, made it to the console.

@Lanmanna Well, the NES version Super Spike V'Ball did get promoted in Nintendo Power when Nintendo launched their 4-player adapters and they made a dual-cart with Nintendo World Cup that I think might have been a pack-in with the adapters or maybe even the console itself so the NES version isn't a very obscure game.

@MarkyVigoroth I feel like it's lesser known they did actually port the first DKC to the GBC in addition to the GBA.

I've seen videos of this game and there's only one thing I can think about: It has flip-screen scrolling. On the PLAYSTATION TWO.
Every version on far less powerful computers has proper scrolling. What the jank, Taito?

@Johnny_Arthur From what I've seen and heard, it wasn't a "bad" game to be "fixed" but it was a British-made game, at least from a time period, where I would get the impression they really liked absurdly difficult games. Seen by watching streamers play ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games, it's a rare sight to see games with fairness in the game design.

Love-de-lic, the people who made Moon: RPG Remix Adventure previously on A 32-Bit Home Console.

LGR Clint remembers POD and thus has made us all aware of it.

I seem to recall that when someone wrote a tool to automatically "colorize" Game Boy games so many years ago it broke games because what do you know, turns out porting even GB to GBC was something needing human effort to deal with.

SML is 64KB. Considering how much of that is probably graphics and sound and level data, that can't leave that much code left to disassemble and rewrite.
Can't be that much more than some of the NES code I've hand disassembled and analyzed for translations.
You might be able to rewrite the graphics and level data and such but I'm fairly certain chip sound is something you can't just expect a robot to rewrite for a different chip and it not sound like ****.

If Game Boy games are "so simple" then you don't need AI to write something "so simple" for you.

Or did the author need AI to write their post for them too because writing a post on the Internet seems like something "so simple" as well, but I don't know, I don't know anymore just how lazy the human race is to see how far down the "simple" rabbithole it goes that people need a robot to do things for them.

Now that I look closer at the Game Boy screens, I wonder how difficult it would be to see those on an actual OG (DMG-001) screen.

@Damo The game actually was originally designed for a battery-backup save feature. There is a pre-Costner prototype ROM online. It is, as mentioned, a pretty rough game (I'm not sure if there's even a way to restore health).
Other odd things about it is that the final game had a password feature which itself was hidden as a cheat code.
The game also had a Sega Master System version that was in development at one point but never finished. I do recall there is at least video footage online, surely from an old promotional video or TV show.

@Guru_Larry "male Samus" Someone got their lore solely from the NES instruction manual where "he" pronouns was their way of keeping it secret Samus was female (which only makes sense in the context of the era the original game out when games didn't often promote female human protagonists).
Though even the Japanese manual apparently called Samus "he" one or more times despite that you could much more easily hide the character gender in Japanese without resorting to very awkward-sounding writing like you would in English.

Though I've read the 1993 Mario movie writers called the blond princess "Daisy" because they pulled it out of the NES Open Tournament Golf manual because that was the only "Mario" game they played where, because of palette limits of the NES, "Daisy" (as Luigi's caddy canonically) was a dress-color swap of "Peach/Toadstool" (Mario's caddy).

It seems like the toploader NES was released in 1994 in both Japan and North America.
Japan got The Legend of Zelda cartridge version and the Final Fantasy I+II combo cart as launch games and for North America, we got Mega Man VI and Zoda's Revenge.

@-wc- The date, is the strangest thing. Why was Nintendo still printing SMBDH carts in 1993?

It will be hilarious to see how much the graders think they can get for these copies of a game that, reportedly, you could once buy for a dime apiece at GameStop. (Though by the time I was collecting NES games, my copy was up to 89 cents.)

I recall Doraemon was notable for a demo mode where even the demo player is bored or confused about how to play the game.

Interesting goal, but the effort to port just one stage isn't quite the same as porting an entire game.

I do remember the devs of the unfinished SNES Steven Segal game remarked on another dev working on a Genesis "game" and I do recall saying the Genesis project they've seen wasn't an actual game yet I think it was a still shot or something and were saying its easy to create an image or something that looks great if you're using all the hardware capability to generate it. Reportedly they hadn't yet seen an actual game element in that rival development.

So, will this Final Fight port developer make his "one stage" ported the factory stage that was cut? Looking at the arcade, that surely would've been the trickiest to "faithfully" port.
Nevermind, I see. It's as expected, just the first stage. Not the most demanding one.
I wouldn't want to criticize another's work, but they're the ones calling the original devs and I don't know if the limitations they had were being considered.

@Damo Disabled copy-paste command? I'd have probably screenshotted or even taken a photo, printed it, then OCR'd if I cared enough to demonstrate on them. But that sounds like work, maybe more than them.

Those who just want a device that plays all the games without caring if its AI or human research, you know China is putting out so many other devices that can do that for you, right?

@Atariboy I bought Seasons when it was new. I only picked one because I was expecting some kind of Pokemon thing that would've been disappointed me if I had bought both.
I didn't get Ages until I learned it was worth it to buy both and I had to pick up a used cart.

@MeloMan Strange, I would've thought the Game Boy Player WAS a GBA, as far as GBC compatibility was concerned.
(I'm sure you could tilt 'n tumble your GC to play a certain Kirby game, even though Nintendo probably wouldn't like it.)

@TitanSix There's almost certainly rarer games than Shantae. Just nobody talks about them. I can still feel regrets I didn't buy the game when I could've easily walked into GameStop or EB Games in like 2004 and bought a "new" copy.
But GBC had so many young childrens' licensed games like Dragon Tales or Bob the Builder, how was a young adult gamer to know this wasn't one of them?

@AussieMcBucket That's the sad thing. Nintendo would just need an option to swap a single byte in RAM to support it on digital releases.
The only way for GBC games to even detect if they're running on a GBC or a GBA is to keep a signature byte of data sent to it by the boot ROM within the CPU (which hides itself once its done its job and passes code execution to the cartridge ROM).
Which RAM location that data is stored to is is different per game, but since it's one of the first things done by the game, it shouldn't take more than a few seconds of reading the first few instructions of code executed by the game for a dev to deduce.

As to PS1 "performance stutters", don't games usually load the game data before running the gameplay?
So I would expect as worse longer load times?
I guess maybe it would have to do with games that use the CD audio capabilities rather than chip music, since CD-DA would now need to be emulated rather than run native.

Surely with a Blu-Ray drive in my PC, I can play all my real PS3 discs should my real PS3 go kaput?
I would prefer to ISO my discs for preservation (as I had done up to PS2) but I suppose with the size of BD-ROMs, I think that's not as feasible without getting another HDD. In this economy.

MAME has emulated them for quite some time.
The thing is, I'm told the process to dumping an LCD game is destructive. (as you have not just ROMs or whatever is in the device, but also the screen artwork and such)
So I've been told by a streamer who said they'd love to play the Beavis & Butthead Tiger LCD game but it's an extremely expensive collectable, which would obviously deter preservationists if they have to buy an expensive game in order to carefully break it.

I do remember reading the 1983 Famicoms were reportedly of poor build quality, enough that Nintendo had to recall and replacing them (making those surviving 1983 "square button" consoles a collector's item).
The RROD of 1983?

@romanista I think Arm Wrestling is the last arcade-original game Nintendo made, in 1985. Though they distributed the original R-Type in 1987, so they hadn't completely left the business.
Indeed they did sell the NES-based PlayChoice-10 and VS. machines through the '80s (with PlayChoice-10 still getting "new" games through at least 1990).

DOOM got blamed for the Columbine shooting because it's much easier for the NBC News writers to package that as a story and wring two weeks of ratings (and with it, ad revenue) out of it.