N64-ROX

@HoyeBoye more like Atari wants the internet to pull a Morshu.

I really hope that anyone rebuilding an N64 game from source code these days is paying attention to Kaze Emanuar on YouTube. That guy bends Mario 64 over his knee and really makes it clear what 25 years of coding techniques (as opposed to technology) can do for performance and quality.

Every time a review comes out, I wonder about the market for these handheld emulation devices. It feels as though, ever since the release of the Switch, about 20 of these have been released each year. From a practical perspective they all do exactly the same thing: emulate retro games up to around the PS1 / N64 / DC level. The only difference is varying levels of tech specs and physical layout.
So what I want to know is: are retro-heads buying and re-buying and re-buying these things? Does the typical consumer own a cupboard full of these things as if they were a professional tech reviewer? I'd think that having just one would be enough, if it did the job properly. And if it didn't do the job properly then surely it would sour people's enthusiasm to throw more money at the next moderately-tweaked spec version. Unless version 2 could all of a sudden solidly run all PS2 and Gamecube games, any upgrade would surely be almost pointless.
Unless of course the draw with these things is in the initial setup and experimentation, with few people actually sinking hours into them long term to actually play them...

I haven't watched the video, but I'd have thought that half of the challenge would be to get the game to crash in the first place. Do you need to come up with a custom solution for that for each individual game? Or is there some well known hardware-level trick which works for everything?

In my opinion you can't ignore popularity in a judgement like this. I grew up in a medium-sized city in Australia and I never saw Outrun 2 at all, but 4x or even 8x Daytona setups were all over the place. Sega Rally Championship was great but at most you'd see two of them side by side and right next to a great big flashy Daytona setup which dominated attention at the arcade. Years past their technical heyday people would still gravitate to Daytona whenever they saw it because that's obviously where the action was happening.
And add to that the fact that it wasn't just flashy marketing but a genuinely super fun and easy game... I'd definitely agree that Daytona USA was the best it ever got in arcades, in the last and most technically advanced period before arcades in general slid into irrelevance.

What you really need is an MRI machine or whatever they use to peek behind ancient paintings. The investment will be totally worth it!

What a bitter, miserable SOB.

You guys don't get it at all! You put it on your desk or lap like a laptop. Then you put on the 10x custom pointy thimble accessories (Thimblonger TM patent pending) and go full 10-fingered typing at 170 words per minute.

I'll throw up some more praise for Prince of Persia 2008. Puzzle platforming without combat, in that eye-wateringly gorgeous cell shaded world, was pure bliss. Unfortunately when the combat did rear its head (about 4 or 5 times in the entire game, I believe) it was completely incomprehensible and I'd spend an hour knocking the enemy over just for it to get up again with no clue how I was not doing what the developer wanted me to do.
I actually played that one before Sands of Time, and when I did go back to SOT I discovered a much longer, deeper, and more adventurous game. But man those cell shaded graphics...

@romany8806 Did we really get Secret of Mana? All I remember is my best friend had it as a US import so I assumed that it was never released in Australia.
Every cloud has a silver lining though - once the next generation dropped (and I had more money of my own) FF7 and Ocarina of Time absolutely blew me away. I had no idea that games could be anything like that. Looking back now, they are true products of iteration (although fantastic ones). But for me at the time it was like the whole world had been blown wide open.

As a tyke, I got into the Sega ecosystem purely because of their edgy branding. I never even bought any games for my Master System aside from the built-in Alex Kidd (too poor myself, and my parents didn't think highly of videogames) but I was a proud owner of Gunstar Heroes and Street Fighter 2 on my Mega Drive.
The thing is, in Australia they never released any of those SNES RPGs here for some reason, so I didn't feel that I was missing out on much. I was "too cool" to care about Mario (it was the 90s, man) and had no idea what Zelda even was. But it was when they dropped Donkey Kong Country that my jaw hit the floor and I started questioning all of my life choices.

These XXL games are terrible, clunky 3D-ified monstrosities which never should have existed. But they keep making them, so someone must be buying them.
Now Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All is a gorgeous 2D work of art which really does the comics justice.

Back in the day I'd read about the 64DD in magazines, and the idea of essentially paying the price of the N64 again just to be able to then buy weird editing software that would be more at home on a computer, or games that surely would run fine on the console itself (as they ended up indeed doing) was grossly unappealing.
Over time the retrospectives and "what ifs" have given it a mysterious air... It sounds like Nintendo had wild ideas in their heads about what they could do with the machine, even if they never ended up actually doing any of the really interesting stuff. But in the end it was surely the right move to kill it when they did.

My experience is more from the 32-64 bit era; I remember a Playstation kiosk where the FF8 demo was literally just the opening FMV, and an N64 kiosk with a DK64 demo which was essentially just a boring-looking tech demo showing off that one boss fight where the terrain deformed out in waves from the boss' impact.
But then there was the Zelda demo kiosk which was chiefly responsible for me deciding to save up for an N64 of my own!

I like the idea of hooking up a full size dance mat but still displaying on the postage stamp sized screen.

Did the writer of this article actually use this device? Please actually tell us about it. How powerful is it? How does it compare to the Raspberry Pi and FPGA alternatives which were mentioned?

@-wc- Fat of the Land was the zeitgeist for about half of the 90s. And you can say that it's not "true punk" but for a 90s teen they were the edgy hard core dangerous embodiment of everything we wanted to be.
My issue is with the line about snowboarding being risky. "Risky" in the 90s would have been to put out a stodgy skiing game. Everyone was boarding; Coolboarders 1 & 2 had already tapped that market on the Playstation. If you weren't Xtreme then you were yesterday's news.

@Azuris thanks, yeah I agree that this is incredible. I will definitely buy an FPGA box for this at some point.
Another thing which surprised me about this news is that, I thought the N64 chips were too much of a black box for hardware emulation. Looks like some real breakthroughs have been made.

@dconstantine thanks, it's like you put my entire comment in there!

The way people always talk about FPGA being like the holy grail of emulation accuracy, I guess I always thought it would be more of an all-or-nothing kind of affair. If it's so possible to have a running FPGA emulator with glitches all over the place, I'm not sure what the benefit is supposed to be. Does FPGA have a similar issue to software emulation where people write code to make some games work properly which then breaks compatibility for other games since it's not real cycle-accurate emulation but just good-enough approximation?
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see this development. Just a little surprised at what I'm seeing. If FPGA isn't about guaranteed accuracy then what is it about?

@KingMike Of course you can trust them, they're Heritage Auctions!
And of course "HA.com/live bidder" is also a real person and not a HA sockpuppet!

I love the way people's imagination worked back then.
"With the power of CDs, you can get TWO 5MB (or was that 5Mb?) games on one (700MB) CD!"

@EarthboundBenjy Even stranger is the fact that they didn't need to rely on all those famous characters when they were perfectly capable of inventing Morshu all by themselves!

I really enjoyed my time with the Funkey S especially for chilled out PS1 JRPGs like Breath of Fire 4 where there's no pressure to mash those tiny controls. The one thing holding it back from greatness (or really, usability at all) was the lack of any ability to use headphones. So, no playing in public on that uber-portable device. This Nano solves that problem so it's actually pretty tempting...

Whenever I read about a herculean task of game preservation such as this or the Satellaview stuff, or accurate emulation of tricky consoles, my mind always wanders to the fact that someone somewhere (e.g. at Nintendo) surely just... has the whole source code sitting around on a hard drive. Rather than being lost to time, this stuff is being withheld to time. In a million years when archaeologists are sifting through the ashes of our civilisation they'll be able to run Pokemon Garden just fine...

I'm a bit disappointed how this review turned out. I clicked this because I was excited about a handheld device that can handle PS2 and Gamecube. Then the review says that technically these are "supported" but don't expect all of your favourites to run flawlessly.
What does that mean, exactly? An emulator technically "running" could mean anything. It could mean 5 fps, no sound, and constant glitches. It could mean FFX and Wind Waker but nothing else. Are any PS2 / Gamecube games worth playing on this thing? How many? That's the difference between a buy and a pass, and in that sense this review didn't help at all...

Also Stardew Valley and Dicey Dungeons I believe have official Irish language options. And why not, I say! If you're not letting the language die then why not let it live!

@neufel I meant, the Funkey S has no headphone functionality. That's a device that I own and absolutely love except for that one issue which effectively turns it into a paperweight. So this RG Nano has that over it.

The Funkey S can play PS1 games, so that's a win for that camp. On the other hand, it doesn't have any kind of headphone functionality at all so unless you're cosy in a completely private and isolated place you'll pretty much never actually be game enough to use it. At least that's how it is for me. So this baby would actually be pretty cool.

@dre8472 plus most games would have been overwritten with another one pretty quickly... Like a VCR where you only have one tape. It's a miracle that much has survived at all!
Unless Nintendo has kept everything in a vault somewhere and we get another gigaleak...

I know it's childish, but I can't help but chuckle whenever I read titles like "Super Mario BS". It looks like something that Mad magazine would come up with as a parody during the DS era.

@OldManHermit yep, it's been a while but that was the first thing I thought of when reading this too. Time it right and hug the left.
I've finished Ocarina about 8 times but I don't think I've ever used the ice arrows for anything. I have great memories of them in Majora's Mask though; the one room in that one's water temple where you had to freeze a chu and use it as a step blew my mind back then.

Don Mattrick was right on this one. It's a little known fact but most rappers have no interest in guns, it's all just been imagined by the press. "Piece" means piece of cake, "gat" means baseball bat, "steel" means steel pipe, "heater" is obviously referring to a normal space heater, "AK" is slang for "always kidding", "mac 10" is good old McDonald's, "glock" means a glockenspiel (they are musicians after all), "beretta" is hip hop for "better"... It's all just a big misunderstanding.

It's not quite as retro as shown here, but Rare's website circa 2001 was the best of its kind I've ever seen, even to this day. They had this "ask Uncle Tusk" section which pretty much turned their corporate website into a cross between a magazine letters section and a legitimate online community. Rare were at the peak of their powers and popularity, and they were really giving back. I'd check that site every day - how many corporate sites could you say that about?

I love how the standard mode is to make it harder for you if you're already stressed. Such a 90s game design mentality!

I don't understand the point of this controller. So it's a gamecube controller that's missing the sticks? How is this in any way better than using the normal gamecube controller?

This doesn't make me think about Sonic, it makes me think about Sega of America and how crazily resentful and disrespectful they seem to have been to their parent company Sega of Japan.
32X, Mega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast... All these fumbled launches weren't bad luck, they were SoA saying "we don't care what you guys are planning, we'll design our own machine and we'll take yours only when we're ready. The market will be diluted and confusing, hype windows will be missed, developers won't know which platforms to target... But at least we won't be doing things your way, SoJ!"

Why doesn't Nintendo make furniture anymore, they've forgotten their roots

256 Kb should be enough for anyone.

/- Bill Gates

I have to forsake my namesake and go with the PS1 dual shock. Once they added dual analogues and rumble, Sony perfected the controller so completely that they have effectively never needed to change it since. With a split d-pad for precision and beautiful symmetry, the dual shock is literally iconic for gaming in general; it's everything a controller should be.

@Damo I think @MarioBrickLayer was saying: perhaps interview a legal expert for an article, to speculate on why Sega might have an issue with this MD project as opposed to that SMS project...

I wouldn't call this a scam; you have to promise people something good for it to be a scam. This was a sad, misguided mistake from day one. Nobody wanted this silly product, nobody was ever going to want it, and the years that Tommy & Co. spent clinging to such an obviously dead concept makes me believe that this was honest foolishness as opposed to malicious deception.

@Papichulo I have had lots of very good times emulating the N64 on PC. Mario 64, Banjo, the 2 Zeldas, Wave Race, Wayne Gretzky's Hockey, WWF... All of these I've fully completed multiple times on emulator, and loved every minute of it. Even with a playstation style controller where you have to get creative with the mapping of the C buttons (but not completely shuffle everything around like the **** NSO expansion pack) it works fine, and has been fine for about 15-20 years now.
If you can't stand a single pixel being out of place though then there's really not much point thinking about emulation at all.

My "piracy machine" of choice is still the Funkey S.
It's ridiculously tiny but kind of perfect for the novelty factor, which is what handheld retro gaming ends up being for me in practice. It plays everything up to and including PS1 games... If I want to dig deep into Final Fantasy 7, I can do that on my Switch, but if I want to dally around with random old roms then a key chain-sized joke device is almost the perfect way to do it.

@bryce951 nah I'm all about this cup and ball now. You never know which way that crazy ball is gonna go!
(Just kidding, thanks for the heads up! Is it Christmas already?!)

What, don't you people have phones?

@smashboy2000 nice, thanks! I didn't mean to be cynical, I'd love to play PSX and N64 on FPGA.
Haven't been following the scene properly but I always got the impression that the N64 was "too hard"?
As in, emulating behaviour is one thing but once you try to reproduce actual hardware this complicated, you'd need exponentially more power and time?

Wake me up when it can play N64 and PSX games. At this point I can pretty much play SNES and NES games on my toaster.

On a tangent, I picked up a raspberry pi 4 for xmas with the hope of turning it into an N64 box via retropie. All hopes were soon dashed when I discovered that it can only emulate at about half speed and the audio is excruciating.
If a mature system such as retropie can't get N64 running then I wouldn't hold out much hope for random Chinese boxes such as this.
Of course the ideal machine would be the Switch but Nintendo keep holding out on N64 games there...

And then there's Hyperdimension Neptunia of course