KingMike

@Tasuki @AndyVGR Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing when they released the NES game on Wii U VC in October 2015. They couldn't say it but we know the significance of that date.

Tomb Raider did get at least one official side-scroller, on GBC, I think.

@Damo "former EGM writer David Siller". From what I read, he was the same person who previously worked at Sunsoft and created the Aero the Acrobat franchise.
I actually enjoyed the first Aero game on the SNES as a kid, as frustratingly difficult as it was. I think I only rented Aero 2 once and never got around to playing Zero.

Koei's simulation games are inscrutable even when you can understand the language.
Still, it's great they made it available, though you will regardless need good luck playing it.

The other cool discovery from VGHF on the Temgen lot was Relief Pitcher, an 80s arcade baseball game.
More for completion but I like that Power Wing was found. I believe it was just the lost international version of Slap Fight MD but is nice to see. I do wonder how well that game was received in Japan as it doesn’t sound like it was well-known the west so a 1993 port of a 1986 game that may not have been familiar sounds like a decision to release. Though I know it did add a remix mode with Yuzo Koshiro tunes, so that was something that could be pushed.

@metaphysician It had some oddities. It does have RAM locking (which I think is part of the reason for emulation glitching when not supported but is not an unusual feature) but the unusual thing is that it also has 512 nibbles of RAM (it is an odd thing to say as that is equivalent to 256 bytes. However, it does use a 512 address space where only half of the data read from each is valid. I get a feeling handling this incorrectly is where things could go wrong.)
It probably shouldn't affect emulation of commercially-sold software but it also has an oddity where mapper writes are only valid when A8 is 1 (that is, the hundreds digit of the address is odd. So writing to address $2000 is invalid on real hardware but $2100 is good). Inaccurate emulation of allowing everything in the relevant address range would ideally only affect ROM hacks and homebrew.

@naoki-horii The Video Game History Foundation somewhat recently had acquired an assortment of unlabeled Tengen-related EEPROMs.

The Xybots demo was among them.
The NES version of Magical Puzzle Popils was found but unfortunately incomplete, missing one EEPROM. It was reportedly possible to utilize the recovered data to construct a game that was playable but missing sound.

I do recall when the GBA first launched, someone soon after began development of a GB emulator called Goomba, and people were like "Why except piracy? A GBA can already play GB carts!"

Then I recall some years later, an April Fools hoax about some hardware hacking trickery to "restore" GB/GBC compatibility on the DS/DSL, and Goomba was likely part of the trick.
(For those that don't know, it's because GB(C) used a completely different CPU (GB-Z80) than the GBA (ARM) and compatible systems included both CPUs, with a physical switch inside the console to swap the active CPU when necessary. When 8-bit compatibility was deemed obsolete, the GB-Z80 was left out of the hardware completely.)

@Pally356 It'd imagine that. Some of those Tiger games tried to push the game mechanics too far.

@Razieluigi The Tiger LCD versions of Sonic 1 and 2 were the only ones I owned as a kid.
I didn't finish Sonic 1 because I got tripped up by the Labyrinth Zone because I always drowned.
That's the thing about the Tiger games, they tried to put in game mechanics too complex for what the screen was capable of conveying to the player. (Given its incredible graphics limitations of being able to display images physically burned into the screen.) You'd only know about them if you read and saved the instruction sheets they came with.

It wasn't until I had seen the Game & Watch port series to realize those games can be good when they adhere to their limited visual capabilities.

@OorWullie I don't know if it's good or bad news to inform you that Japan got a completely different port, from Tengen/Atari Games themselves and it's said to be one of the best pre-emulation ports.
Klax was another Atari Games game that for some reason also got two separately-developed ports on the Genesis. (and also two different ports on the Game Boy as well. I didn't know there was until Jeremy Parish reviewed both versions and was continually bashing Hudson's Japanese version for its graphical inferiority against Tengen's international version... before revealing he found Hudson's version more playable.)

@slider1983 Recently uncovered is an alpha version of a Xybots port (I think it was).
It looks like it got about as far as a demo of the first-person scrolling engine (being able to handle split-screen two players moving in different directions).

I recall the oddity of Marble Madness ports on the Game Boy line is that I read the progressively better hardware got progressively more content cuts.

@ihaveallthecoins It wouldn't matter, since a Wii with homebrew installed is about the only reasonable way to get a legally-obtained ROM anyways.

@ihaveallthecoins From the video, he states that only the first four boxers, I believe the same fought in the final game appear in normal gameplay.

@NatiaAdamo All NES prototypes have CICs. I have never heard of NES developers using hardware any different than retail hardware.
I know with SNES/SFC as well that even developer boards had CICs on them.

Is Piston Hurricane the same character who appeared in the SNES game?

Odd that the NeoGeo CD console and games have become very expensive because as I understand, its main purpose was to create a far more affordable home version of the console than the notoriously expensive cartridge system (AES).

The first Game Boy game is a weird one. When you level-up, HP is the only thing that continually increases in an upward direction.
Enemies change as you level-up.
Also, the game requires fairly accurate emulation of the MBC2 mapper (a very common mapper used by many early GB games with RAM save functionality, but also commonly inaccurately emulated, especially by the quite widespread emulator VBA). Bad emulation will cause the game to break VERY badly upon attempting to save progress.

The Aquanaut isn't the only one on holiday, apparently.

@ruiner9 Well when the alternate sounds like upgrading to a steaming pile of dung, it's hard to not to feel a little upset.

Where was Danjaq 36 years ago?

Doesn't it seem a little late to complain now?

Well, the Genesis didn't get a huge amount of options for RPGs back in the day.

@JackGYarwood To my understanding, the Konami SCC its own cartridge, requiring the use of hardware with two cartridge ports. (you need both the game cartridge and the SCC inserted in both slots so they can work together)

I know that second port was sometimes used for cartridges with other purposes, such as a memory card cartridge (I think they were called "PACs" in MSX terminology) which some game cartridges would require you to have in order to save game data.

These are ports of decades-old console games. DRM on such is unnecessary as the people who were going to steal them would've surely already done the other means to get them. There weren't going to go on Steam and today pay $5 in the first place if stealing was their desire.

@Guru_Larry According to GameFAQs, the first "Super Goal!" was released as that in Europe (though they lack a box image) but was simply called "Goal!" (the same as the NES predecessor) in North America.

I guess the Japanese version of Super Goal! 2 could be left out because it seems to have a real player's name attached to it.

@GekkouKitsune Even the Battle Tower is one of the features locked by the mobile functionality in Japan.
Of course they just left it unlocked for the west.
There's even one Crystal-exclusive trainer on Route 45 (the complete opposite side of Johto) who won't fight while the Battle Tower is locked.

I wonder if they unlocked it on the 3DS release like they did with Celebi.

@JackGYarwood As I recall reading, the build leaked online was dated the exact day of the tragedy.

@Sketcz Sounds about par with GamePro who gave Tecmo Secret of the Stars "good" ratings a page after giving EarthBound bad ratings (the EB review gives a strong impression the reviewer didn't even finish the Onett segment before rating it. You can't rate an RPG before it's even really gotten started.)

I enjoy Secret of the Stars for some reason but even I wouldn't rate it better than a firmly average game (it would've been passable for a 1991 16-bit game, but it came out in 1993 in Japan and the same month as Chrono Trigger in North America) and absolutely no way does it deserve better rating than EB.

@Babybahamut I mean, the console ports were released in North America where we've never heard of the actual candy it was promoting.

I've only learned recently that one of the more infamous Wii shovelware games (Ninjabread Man), or at least one more loudly criticized by certain journalists while it was still new, was not only made by a company that churned out a staggering number of shovelware games on the Wii and the PS2, but was one of a few games that were linked together as what started as a Zool remake but was broken up into several games by the end.

@RupeeClock I recall the Retrode (at least the firmware I've been using) is also unable to automatically detect the correct size of GBA games, and defaults to 8MB unless you edit its settings file to tell it the device is a GBA game and what the right size is.

How does the GB Operator tell if it's authentic? Is it just dumping the ROM and checking if it matches the known dumps.
Game Boy doesn't have copy-protection, so that's not really much to go by for "authenticating" a game.
If that label didn't give it away as a fake, you'd have to open the cart to further check it matches the real thing. (and of course, know what "the real thing" looks like)

Relying on an untrusted person or machine's work is a sign that, while they might care enough to get it done, they likely don't really care enough to invest the time and effort to get the job done completely (however many weeks, months, years that takes) by trusted sources.

@TonyHoro Oh, I was there for the Langfand00d translation of Der Langrisser in 2002 or 2003 or whichever. I know how machine translation (we didn't call it "AI" in those days) was.
I've seen what happens when tools (which we didn't have bots to write our programs for us in those days, so we could be sure at least that part was human-made) are written and spread to the masses to finish up. At least Langfand00d was a very obvious joke so we got all got a laugh about it then.

When Near/byuu released their serious translation for the game five years later, I've fairly certain they had remade their own tools anyways. I would imagine many experienced ROM hackers would rather work off their own stuff and a certain frame of reference (the original game code) than to try to figure out what another fan had already done to the game. I don't think I'd even want to reuse my own old work for that reason.

But if someone proves that wrong and is able to put a quality work through someone else's work, well then that's good for them.

It had the idea, but maybe not the execution.
The latter being held back by the fact that game console was made by a company with huge involvement in the film and music industries. They had to convince you that you didn't just want to watch movies on the device, but wanted to watch them on discs that cost $20 a pop and only worked on the device.

I've read the same thing is what allowed Apple to become dominant on the digital music player and distribution market. I've read Sony could've come up with a device but was too afraid people would stop buying music CDs such as from them.

I feel like I'm the only one to notice that the music in the Famicom port of Terra Cresta was messed up in the NES version. It's not just me that hears the NES music as a bit more "depressed".
Though I'm not sure how much the NES version got played, given that it didn't reach North America until 1990, which feels rather late. @JackGYarwood

@slider1983 I "What's worse is since history is written mostly by Americans the importance of the NES is overrated." sounds just as dismissive of an attitude.
Different regions will have different opinions on consoles and which are important.
Saying the NES wasn't important I am feeling like is an opinion based on its European market performance. I know the Master System had at least one factor in its favor in the UK that Mastertronic/Virgin/Sega put effort into its marketing and distribution there, including actually releasing games in a timely manner, and Nintendo put real dogs**t efforts outside Japan and North America, its primary marketing targets. When its games were regularly released three or four years after the US if ever at all, of course its going to look like a worse console.
Not to mention needing to split its territorial control with Mattel resulting in (a regional sub-lockout) that goofy-ass "PAL-B" "This Game Pak cannot be used with the NES or Mattel versions of the Nintendo Entertainment System." disclaimer on the box. (so you couldn't take a NES game bought in Mattel-claimed France and play it on a console in Nintendo-claimed UK, whereas with SMS you could)

Would the SMS have done better if it had fairer third-party support? Probably. It could have been interesting what the world would have been.
But while I know it is very fondly remembered among European and especially Brazilian gamers, its IPs haven't been as fondly revisited on modern hardware as NES IPs have.

I read an article last year about the Mark III's 40th anniversary and while it was written by a UK site, I had a laugh when how they described the NES as a far technically worse console. I respect their opinion but as an American I can laugh at it being just as UK-centric of an opinion as mine would be criticized for being American. I have considered the reasons stated previously for how those writers' opinions were likely formed.
But it's a really apples-to-oranges comparison between the hardware, and I've heard SMS fans who will say that any random NES game could be converted to SMS and would always be done better. Architectural differences. They've shown up when I've seen attempts to homebrew port games.

@TonyHoro We've waited decades for Tokimeki Memorial and many Super Robot Wars games because of "too much text" and the human race has still lived on.
People need to have patience.
And if they really, really, felt their life would be incomplete without playing Segagaga on the Sega Dreamcast, they could've learned Japanese in the many years it's been out and play it and many other games.

@jesse_dylan Yes, "J2E" was a fan translation group. They made a fan translation of the original FF4 (before Square(-Enix) themselves had ported the game to any other platforms).
Particularly because at the time, the only available version of the game was the official SNES localization which notably made unavailable ("dummied out") a number of items, character skills and magic to simplify the gameplay (including inventory management, as I believe FF5 was the first to include a modern inventory that makes management nonessential).
They claimed they were going to deliver an uncensored and such translation, but while the original pass of the J2E translation might've been fairly decent, it went through some editors who inserted a whole lot of jokes and over dramatized writing (those editors were likely teenagers at the time, who probably felt it needed a bunch of "punching up").

They released a few other translations but the FF4 patch was their real big one to get finished.
I know a couple other biggies they announced were FE4 and another Square RPG Treasure of the Rudras, but the FE4 patch got taken over by other community members and Rudra was left to being canceled by a lack of willing translators (even Gideon Zhi, who cracked the formatting of the game's unique "Mantra" magic system which required localization, had to resort to borrowing a Japanese-French fan script as a base because that French group was the fan group successful at finding someone able to translate from Japanese to any of the well-known European languages.)

I remember when some fans tried to make "CAPCPOM" a thing (after what was surely neither the first nor last typo the company had made).
We had almost forgot, until I remember on a forum someone was asked why they had an angry signature, what had Capcom done to ire them? I don't recall them doing worse than breaking a few Mega Man fans' hearts.
If only what Peter Moore said was true and upsetting game development choices was enough for an entertainment company to get rated worse than multiple providers of more vitally important goods and services.

@mariteaux EA was buying out developers in the '90s. Bullfrog, Maxis and Origin were some of their earliest victims.
Kind of a shame, from what I read '80s EA was pretty cool and their packaging suggested they cared about their developers. Was it the '90s when they started down their current path?

I'm not familiar with to what extent EA's early Genesis games were affected by the "TMSS" anti-unlicensed boot ROM on Genesis consoles, but it sounds pretty greedy of what they did when they released Populous on the Genesis, EA was aware enough of it to slap a sticker on the box to say it was incompatible with some consoles (their estimate was consoles bundled with Sonic). Not, print a compatible revision (something Sega was able to do when they published the Japanese version). Especially since EA had pulled some stuff to get a favorable license and the right to make their own carts, presumably on the cheaper than buying prints from Sega like most licensed third-parties were expected to. And that was in 1991.

I remember those years.
I don't think Mass Effect was the reason they were ranked that low.

I think microtransactions are a more likely reason. If lootboxes weren't yet a thing, virtual sports trading cards probably were.

@sdelfin Releasing their translation script isn't really that great for an end project. If you get multiple working on the same script, you're going to end up with an inconsistent mess of writing styles. Like the J2E FF4 translation: it seems at one point they had a decent translation but then an editor came along and decided to make it "better" with overdramatic writing that was never there in the first place. Especially when Golbez came into the picture, it looks then is when someone really Working Designsed his text.
If all you care about is having SOMETHING to read, you might as well ask for an AI slop script.
Or just play the game in Japanese with whatever phone translation app.
That's about what I think of with "something released is better than nothing" suggestions.

I think the thing stopping other translations of this during much of that time was that one of the authors of this patch was one of the few that understood the Saturn hardware (they were also a Saturn emulator developer IIRC).

@Sketcz We've seen multiple games with patches from multiple authors.
The fan translations should be worked on as long as the fans working on them enjoy making them.
I commend Near for releasing their Bahamut Lagoon patch (before their passing), even if was like 20 years after the other one.
I have decades worth of patches I still want to finish at some point, even if others have already made their own efforts on some of them. If someone else enjoys mine, it would be nice, but I wouldn't stress myself over it. Tomato's recent FF4 streams have shown that even a popular game with multiple translations can end different in quality, they all slip up in different places.
I have spent a quarter century waiting for someone to translate the script for SD Knight Gundam Story: The Great Prophecy for SNES. Now I will just wait until my Japanese skills improve to finish it myself.
I had a decade ago or so someone email me like "You take too long, tell us how to do it." I sure won't help someone that isn't offering complementary forms of assistance, and certainly not with that attitude. They just get ignored.

@MikeP "but who am I to tell them how to run their business?"
I've heard they even made a game about that.

"there aren't many titles released for arcade boards compatible with the Sega Saturn"
Yes, there's only a few games.
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Titan_Video
True that's there's probably some third-party licenses with some of the more desirable games.

When companies don't "copy" ideas from others, you have to wonder if it's a legal issue.

When the DS and PSP came out and (I know especially the former) was designed to play games in landscape or portrait mode, why didn't they copy the WonderSwan's setup of having two diamond-shaped button clusters on the left? (I know people complain exactly about the Switch not having a proper D-pad but it did allow them to have directions and buttons accessible in either console orientation. Says the person who can remember playing Contra arcade on the DS in the arcade compilation Konami released, in the offered portrait mode.)

Why did none of the Pokemon clones that I tried replicate the Type mechanic? (admittedly only on Game Boy, but as one of its standout mechanics, you know they'd want to try)
At this point, there's not really a doubt that Game Freak or Nintendo probably patented it.
I mean, if Nintendo wants to claim they invented "subcharacters"...

"Everyone's favorite" I'm not aware there even is another PSP emulator.

Still remember a year or two one game convention (MAGFest?) posted they had the game set up to play.

If that troll wanted to stop the game from that event, they'd have to show up in person and be seen in a convention hall or wherever that was. Genius!