Comments 20

Re: Review: MiSTer Pi - A $99 Gateway To FPGA Retro Gaming

Kushan

There's some irony in a lot of these comments, complaining about elitism within the FPGA scene while decrying that software Emulators are just as good and much cheaper. I hope the irony isn't lost on those folks.

I managed to pick up a Mister Pi in the first batch and have been playing with it for a few days now. I am definitely a "casual" when it comes to playing games, I'm not super sensitive to any latency added via emulation and I'm not precious about authenticity and junk like that - though I appreciate some folks are and I can understand why.

I wasn't going to fork out $400+ on a MiSTER setup but I was curious about the difference, having used software emulators quite happily for decades now so this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

And you know what? I like it. I like it a lot. It could well just be that out of the box, given the MiSTER ecosystem is very focussed on emulating games in a particular way that the mostly default settings and filters are just very well curated and I'm sure you could achieve similar results with various software emulators but I really liked how things "felt", I really enjoyed how they looked (especially with some of the built in filters) and it certainly was more pleasing to the eyes than I've ever managed to make RetroArch or similar look. Maybe that's enough to justify these devices, I don't know.

I'm still going to be using software emulation a lot, I love having my favourite games on my Steam Deck and I'm certainly not lugging an FPGA on holiday with me any time soon, but I'm definitely much more understanding of why people like these FPGA devices and appreciate everything that has gone into making them a possibility, the software and now the drive to get the price down.

Re: Egads, There's More Drama In The FPGA Retro Gaming Community

Kushan

I have no horse in this race, but as a software engineer myself I am a big believer in "release early, release often". I can understand the mentality of not wanting to release something until it's "perfect", especially given the goals of the FPGA work, but perfect is the enemy of good and the faster you get feedback on something, the faster you'll be able to get it to that "perfect" state. I know it gets a bad rep, but it's what "agile" software development is meant to be about; moving quickly, getting fast feedback and iterating lots.

Re: Peter Molyneux Reunites With Ex-Lionhead Staff To Create 'Masters Of Albion'

Kushan

I completely get why Molyneux gets a lot of hate due to how he overhypes his games, but I don't think it's fair to claim that all of his games are terrible or bad. They often didn't live up to expectations because he put far too high an expectation on them but if you hadn't seen all the hype and just played the games, they were more often than not really good and worth playing.

Black & White, Syndicate, Theme Park, Populous, Fable, Dungeon Keeper - nobody can honestly say these weren't great games, they were all a joy in their own way and did a lot of unique and creative things.

Re: "Revolutionary" Xbox 360 Mod "Will Change the Entire Scene"

Kushan

Err....I'm no expert, but what I'm reading on the linked twitter post and what I'm seeing speculated in the article are quite a jump away from each other.

The Xbox 360 wouldn't let you plug any ol' hard drive into it,
even if you opened the HDD shell and put a different drive into it - it has to have a signed security sector. We can rip those security sectors from official drives and copy them onto 3rd party hard drives to make cheaper (than official) 360 drives easily enough, but only in sizes that match the officially available drives. I did this myself years ago, turning my 20gb HDD into a cheap 120GB model by putting a cheapo 120gb laptop HDD into the shell and doing some copying/formatting with an adapter.

What I am gathering from this post is that someone has managed to get an SSD to report to the Xbox 360 with one of those security sectors, so it can be used like it's an official drive. Which is pretty cool as this previously only worked for Hard Drives.

However, aside from being able to use an SSD instead of an HDD, I don't believe this bypasses any security on the 360 that wasn't already bypassed. It doesn't get anyone any closer to being able to run homebrew on an unmodified 360 because even back in the day you could stick plug your 360 Hard Drive into your PC (with an adapter as mentioned) and read/write the contents to it all you wanted.

All this is, which is not to understate or undervalue the work as it's still very cool, is a way of using SSDs on an Xbox 360 instead of a HDD.

Re: Gallery: Retro-Bit's Assault Suits Valken Looks (And Sounds) Great

Kushan

@Damo I definitely remember the anime pictures being in the game, I played it a lot and their absence later has always been something that has bothered me. I remember staring at the back of the box as well as I was sure it contained hidden secrets (Or maybe they just spelled Napalm wrong!).

The game I bought was used, as we couldn't afford new games so it's entirely possible I had a rogue review copy (I don't remember there being anything special about the cartridge that would suggest such a thing).

Re: Gallery: Retro-Bit's Assault Suits Valken Looks (And Sounds) Great

Kushan

So I made an account just to post this comment because I'm very confused about something.

I had a SNES as a kid and owned a copy of Cybernator, it was a great little game and I was a huge fan of it. It's only relatively recently did I learn that it was known as Assault Suit Valken in Japan and only recently that I've learned about the censorship of the western versions.

But here's the weird thing, one of the censorships is the removal of the anime profile pictures in-mission - but the version I had as a kid, which was definitely Cybernator and definitely in English, also definitely had the anime profile pictures.

I distinctly remember this because years later as I got into emulation I tried out the game and was disappointed that the pictures were missing - I thought it was an emulator bug (fairly common in the early 2000's) and didn't think much of it but now years later people are discussing this game and it seems like I may have inadvertently had some special copy.

I couldn't tell you if the other censored elements had been changed, I would have been fairly young at the time. I definitely don't remember ever seeing the president or "that" scene but I'd love to know if there was a known English release of the game with the anime pictures because I swear I had it.