N64-ROX

Those screenshots look like an early 2000s PC game, my mind is blown that people are able to do something like this on a console from the 80s with 64KB RAM. I'd have thought that just being able to keep track of all the individual harvested crops would be impossible!

@RZ-Atom yeah a little research and I'm starting to regret that comment of mine...

The interviewees not wanting to voice an opinion but then calling out "online toxicity" speaks volumes. Ah yes online toxicity exists, that's something that everyone can agree on, right? But what you're calling "toxicity" is conscientious people objecting to the fact that your publisher is owned by an arms dealer and general horrible human (let's call them, for simplicity's sake, the Left). The war hawks and bigots and celebrity apologists (let's call them the Right) aren't the ones calling to boycott your project. So it's pretty obvious whom you're calling "toxic" and where your loyalties lie. At least that one guy Lockwood seems to understand the issue.

I can't imagine what it would be like to work in the field of emulation.
"How about you pay me a full living wage for X months to develop something that you can already get now for free. It will have better performance, I promise!"

I want to see the Austin Powers "Random Task" shoe. I mean who throws a shoe? Honestly!

Engagement bait at its finest.

Man, Palmer Luckey was divisive when he released that game boy machine a year ago. Now I see not a single disparaging comment here and indeed a bunch of dog-whistling brown-nosers. What could possibly have happened in the intervening period I wonder...

Man the most powerful feature phone I ever had (before biting the bullet on an iPhone 4) could play "java games", and no that doesn't mean Minecraft.
It's always wild to think about how people in Japan were carrying polygon-pushers like these around in their pockets for so many years; they really were living in an alternate dimension.

That radish was coming right for us!

I was going to buy one of these back in the day, but I was afraid it was haunted. Every time I looked at it, the most ghoulish face I've ever seen stared straight back at me!

It would almost have been worth it to lose money on this thing just to have been involved in the drama, instead of only watching it from the sidelines. Almost.

@Ristar24 I never had a Saturn but the hauntingly beautiful screenshots and evocative name of Panzer Dragoon lived strongly in my consciousness for a long time. I picked up the Switch remake and ugh those graphics - it was like a shiny plastic toy version; a default-Unity-materials version.
I tend to write lots of comments like this, but the wobbly, low-poly-count aesthetic with crisp unfiltered textures and no antialiasing was what gave PS1 and Saturn games their charm and nostalgia value. When the console is working its hardest just to slap 200 polygons on the screen, that's when stunning art direction and clever texture tricks make you go "whoa". Taking something like that and rebuilding it with bland modern 3D models of bugs and dragons that we've all seen 1000 times before, only serves to rob it of its visual identity.

Very intriguing! But this line confuses me a little:
the full version of the title later being ported over to other Japanese feature phones, including Softbank and EZWeb handsets in 2007
Does "full version" mean that there are versions out there which aren't disparate single-episode server-dependent snippets of the full game?

If I were the developer of an emulator I'd be loathe to even consider issuing a DMCA for any reason. It's one of the worst legal inventions of our age, a scourge on our culture, and it's surely a hypocritical move to use such a thing which any other day you'd be rallying against.

And that first figure wouldn't include those people who play retro games through other means (e.g. emulation / retro re-releases and paid services such as NSO) but don't own an actual console. Retro is truly thriving right now - obviously driven mostly by the older crowd but it's a heartwarming story to think that it's not only us.

Looks fantastic, and going by this review it sounds fantastic. Personally I'm relieved that the branching paths are mostly insubstantial. I don't have time to finish the same game over and over again (it's a happy day when I find myself actually finishing a game at all) and it's a bitter pill to have to decide what content I'm going to turn my back on forever. Give me one good story, with maybe a couple of opportunities for minor self expression along the way, and I'm a happy gamer.

@Sketcz ha ha, what I meant was: I've not played this game so I wouldn't know what specific content is in either version. But someone out there had to be incredibly attached to something about the PS3 Japanese version which isn't in the PS4 English version, in order to put so much time and effort into this project. And usually when people are complaining about this kind of thing it's usually because the newer localised version covered up some skin somewhere or cut some risqué or problematic scenes.

So... What's so special about the original content of this game, compared to the readily-available 2023 version, that it would cause someone to go to such lengths?
My first guess would be titillation, to be honest.

4.7 inch screen? Man I wish this was an actual phone.

This sleazeball is just making things up now, for the sound bites. There's no way that ever happened.

Looks great, I'll be all over this. Hypnagogia was a fantastic experience: a longer, more interesting, and more creative game than the half-hour vibefest I was expecting (and would have been happy enough with already to be honest). Surely can't expect as much meat on the bones of a 48-hour game jam thing such as this one, but I'm confident that it will be a good time.

@Daggot I think in general we have a long way to go before games made mostlly by AI are the standard. Between indie passion projects and AAA tentpole fare, human authorship and creativity are still undeniably important.

But for stuff like this though, retro remaster #278? I would not be at all surprised if the people in charge truly are working their hardest to find a way to funnel the whole workflow through AI. Even Rockstar Games did it with the GTA trilogy: it was one thing for the character models to look weird and the modernised tech to ruin the carefully-crafted atmosphere, but when the new shop sign textures became gibberish it was clear that we were playing the result of of a clumsy machine job as opposed to the content-filled work of art that was the originals.

What a bunch of champions. I'd wager the rare and highly sought-after original was barely played, if at all. Now it's freely available for the people who'll probably enjoy it the most. A bit of good news in my week.

Dear god, it's hideous! Fast floaty movement in a confined space, with a camera so close that it needs to bob up and down with every vertical movement and enemies that you'd crash into well before ever seeing. I mean, I'm glad that these guys' work is getting surfaced after all these years, but it really does scream "artless and misguided use of tech" in a quintessentially Jaguar way.

@chefgon yeah that would have been infuriating!

Only really half joking here, but I always kind of assumed that there would be like zero market interest in the expansion pak since they gave it away for free with Donkey Kong 64.

I know I could probably just google it, but what technical benefit would it bring to develop homebrew for a SNES Playstation emulator rather than just regular SNES emulation, given that storage space is functionally infinite either way? I mean other than just street cred.

I played a VR mod of GTA V once. It was a very impressive undertaking for an unofficial hack of the regular, non-optimised-for-VR game. I think my framerate hovered around 45ish on an RTX 2070 super (essentially 90fps divided by 2 for each eye).
GTA in VR was my dream. It was what I'd spent over €1000 on an Index in the hope of one day experiencing. And, well... It was an "experience". Not too dissimilar to the other "experiences" on VR. I walked around a bit until I felt sick; then spent another evening driving around which lasted a bit longer. In no way was I going to engage in any high-octane shootouts or police chases. Of course it would have been better if it were running at a higher Hz. But honestly it played a big part in that headset getting packed away into storage before long. The dream of VR just isn't real. It's not worth it. We can have simplified experiences, or weird Myst-like workarounds where you warp from spot to spot, but full immersive open-world freedom just doesn't have legs. It's pretty cool for car racing (and probably other cockpit style games) but even then if you can stomach to stay in there for more than 45 minutes at a time then my hat goes off to you.

@RetroGames I think the sensible dream is an either-or situation. If I could (temporarily!) swap out my right joycon for one which has an N64 6-button layout (also useful for fighting games) then that would be really cool for emulation; there's no need for both the controller to be detachable and the modules within it to be detachable. It would also mean that they have more real estate on the thing to shuffle the bits around. And let's be honest, if we're really talking about Nintendo then they would never make a console whose core controller experience is an admission that big N doesn't always know best. A buyable, specific option for specific enthusiasts would work though, similarly to the full-sized retro controllers that they released for the Switch.

@pomegran oh that's interesting, thanks for the info. I thought it was a necessary component in order to use the Mister at all. Always good to learn the full story.

@hste I have to agree - the guy would need a kickstarter just to buy the rights; he'd definitely need to go begging again somehow to actually make something with them. It reminds me of the peak/trough of personality-driven crowdfunders, before people in general started to wise up.
On the other hand, there is a high probability that the guy is simply tweeting out idle thoughts, without any intention of following up on them.

I have to admit, after getting hyped up over the $100 USD price, I was a bit miffed that that doesn't include everything you need to actually use it (e.g. no RAM). $150 won't break the bank, but it just kind of felt like selling a car without any wheels.
In the end I talked myself out of it. I own a dozen devices which can do software emulation just fine, and I don't even use that anymore really. My backlog of non-retro games on Switch and PC is daunting enough, and most of the absolute classics are available natively now too. The day that FF7 was announced for the Switch was a game changer for me as I had long planned to hack that thing.
I'm really happy that FPGA products like this exist for the devoted fans, but in the end, though I love the classics, I'm just not connoisseur enough for it to matter to me.

"Furthermore, after learning that you actually owned that Lamborghini, it is now our official legal position that you're a super cool dude and probably a massive hit with the ladies. Please write us back if you want to be friends."

Yeah this is the final straw; I thought it was a bunch of clueless clowns, but it's clearly just been an attention seeking project from the start.

I love those giant, stylish, imposing background characters made of triangles and squares. I admit I've never played a Spectrum game in my life but I've seen a lot of screenshots and videos, and I've never seen anyone do something like that with it. What a great way to work with the limitations instead of struggling against them.

I was thinking that he'd made something that you actually have to use; furiously cranking just like the little lizard dudes.
Hmmm I wonder if anyone has done this for the Playdate yet...

PS3! Can you even run PS2 games on the Pi?
I played around with a Pi 4 a couple of years ago - with overclocking you could get it to run N64 games but it wasn't too pretty.

@PopetheRev28 in the sense that it's a classic, hilarious thing to witness, where no opportunity to make the viewer laugh is wasted!

@Sketcz I'd recommend you try running Linux in a VM or on an old PC/laptop first, if you have one, rather than jump in with both feet for a big switch from Windows. I've been Linux-curious for about 15 years now; done the VM thing or the old laptop thing about 10 separate times for various reasons. Every time though, I come out of it wanting to write a ragepost like your one above about the emulators! Stuff just doesn't work with Linux and I can't for the life of me understand how it is so popular. Apps and libraries have cyclic dependencies so a lot of time you just can't install stuff at all. Crucial download repos seem to just not exist at the expected URL. I have never ever been able to get Wine working. Wine! Possibly the most popular app on Linux! What in the world am I doing wrong? Why can't I just download an app installer, run it, and then the app is installed and works?
But it must be working for someone though, right? Maybe everyone except for me! So what I mean to say is that you should probably try it out and see if it actually works for your use case. One thing that's great about Linux is that it's easy to spin it up and try it out at least.

Not sure if it's just me not understanding the sentence properly, but in my view history has done the opposite of dirty to the Saturn. In its day it was a complete and utter disaster (from a western perspective at least) - not worth buying for most people and a constant source of angst and frustration for those who did invest in it. Only now, in the age of nostalgic gaming historians, is it so frequently brought up as a lost gem of a platform. Only now, after every man and his dog has spent a million hours playing and written a million words dissecting the PS1 and the N64, is the Saturn's unpopular library now "fresh" and "unique". It is indeed fresh! Because I never played it before! Because barely anyone did! Now that the Saturn is "history", it has become far more interesting and sought-after than it ever was when it was contemporary.

Seems like a pretty safe toy for the youngsters, despite its connected nature. If anyone can figure out how to prey on kids using only Sanrio emojis then they are pretty much a force of nature who can't be stopped.

This guy is a champion.

This is straight gold entertainment.

"WHY THIS PROJECT LOOKS NOT SO WELL AT ALL ?"

And that's after Time Extension fixed their spelling mistakes for them. That quote would have made an unmissable subheadline.

@UK_Kev I agree, I've never seen market saturation as ludicrous as with retro gaming machines over the last 4-5 years. There's literally 10 new ones every month.

That demo looks phenomenal. When the character ran out of the town and smoothly into the forest with enemies, I was in disbelief. Not even the Mega Drive and SNES was doing that.

Even back in the PS3 days, my parents had one (came with their Sony TV) which was essentially just a Blu-Ray player; definitely never online. I came around to show off Final Fantasy 13 and it wouldn't even run at all without updating the OS. It's been a long time since just buying a game and a console and putting one inside of the other was much of a guarantee of anything...

@-wc- I definitely miss the days when games had to be finished properly before they were released, and patching couldn't be used as a default crutch by everyone.
I get the feeling that a lot of "physical forever" purists are going to get a rude awakening when they plug in their Switch cartridges in 20 years' time and most of them run like muck without any patches...

@-wc- are you really saying that you don't like having more diverse options available now? Because with stuff like this it's likely either release it in the original Japanese or don't release it at all outside of Japan.

Very disappointed in this, the stereo dock was always poised to be the secret sauce that would transform the Playdate from a fun-for-a-month novelty destined to spend most of its life out of charge in a drawer, into a proud display piece which simultaneously exuded indie cred and invited actual play.
But the way that it's languished in vapourware territory for so long, this news is not too surprising.

ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney.gif

@KingMike the book industry wishes it could shut down book libraries. In fact that's exactly what they've done with the Internet Archive's ebook library, which is the perfect analogy to this one. Most digital goods are easily copied with essentially zero effort, so that's what people do.
To be clear though, when I said before that the publishers are right, I didn't mean that they are morally right or that I'm on their side in this battle. I meant that they are factually right in their fear that freely lending these things around will result in people making copies of it. Hell I'd be one of those people myself. But luckily there are always other ways and means.