samuelvictor

@wizzgamer Funny story, when I was young, my parents wouldn't let me buy Mortal Kombat for my Master System because of all the news stories about it. However, they suggested perhaps I could have it on GameBoy because the screen being small and it not being in colour would somehow make the violence less impactful to my childhood brain?

Thing is, I didn't own a GameBoy and I've no idea where they got that idea from. But that Birthday I got a GameBoy, specifically so I could play Mortal Kombat, perhaps the stupidest reason anyone has ever bought one. It wasn't very good. In fact it was awful. But it was all I had so I made do. A year or so later I got Mortal Kombat II not expecting much and it was SO much better! I genuinely rave to this day about how good Gameboy MK II is. Its genuinely amazing how much of an improvement it is over the first.

Jack Bros is a very cool game, it was one of the titles that came with the 2nd hand Virtual Boy I picked up for peanuts in the late 90s and I had a lot of fun with it.

Of course, Wario Land is the real gem on the system, and a game that arguably never needed to be in 3d. Even back then, putting on a "virtual reality" style helmet to play anything sidescrolling rather than first person felt very counterintuitive.

I'm still confused that Nintendo didn't port it to the 3DS where it would have been much more at home and people could appreciate it for the great title it is. I actually have a 3d monitor still knocking around, one day I should try and find an emulator that supports them and replay it properly without getting eye strain / headache.

This is really impressive, shall be keeping an eye on progress for this!

@845H I don't know, I'm a huge Master System apologist and I love the MS ports of I & II, which clearly have bigger and in some ways more accurate sprites. But this framerate and number of animation frames is vastly larger and there's features and and details missing from the MS stuff. Its clearly unfinished but a very promising start.

I'll argue til the cows come home that the SMS is superior base hardware to the NES, however the MMC3 chip they are using significantly upgrades the capabililty of the console and allowed for many of the most impressive NES titles including Mario 3, Kirby's Adventure, and Mega Man 3-6.

Proof for how much of a SMS nut can be seen in my current passion project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUTkCp485BA I'm usually first to shout from the hilltops when the system does something better than the NES could. But that footage is running better than any 1v1 fighter officially released on the SMS - Masters of Combat being perhaps the closest. The only thing I can think that beats it is Jang Pung 3, an unlicensed South Korean game which is an incredible title that pulls off some witchcraft I don't fully understand! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYiNdRpELps

@RadioHedgeFund Thanks so much! 😀

I love the Asterix Master System games, especially the first one. Those and the 8bit Mickey Mouse Illusion games are near the top of my wishlist of games I'd like to make modern remakes of in the same way in the same engine... though I feel with both I'm a lot more likely to get a C&D. Sega are very leniant and even supportive over Sonic & SAGE games compared to other IP holders.

I've already got the characters' movesets working as I am employing similar mechanics from the Asterix and Mickey titles like punching and butt-bashing blocks/enemies, throwing potions to create different world results, picking up and dropping blocks, keys & items for puzzles etc into my own unique game, which I built the engine for in the first place. (Hazel Witch, the little girl in my avatar). So when the Sonic fan project is finished, I might "try my luck" and at least put out demos with Asterix and Mickey for a future SAGE and see if they get taken down 😂

I'm British but moved to France in 2019 (right near Disneyland, by the enormous Val D'Europe mall). I had no idea Asterix was still such a big deal over there. They are still releasing new books and when they do its practically a national holiday. People were queuing up outside the mall and McDonalds ran the biggest promotion I've ever seen them do with hundreds of happy meal toys to collect of all the different characters from the extended universe, most of which I didn't recognise. It was pretty cool, ngl.

As someone who was very much around and fully into gaming culture, magazines, tv shows etc at the time, I can definitely ocnfirm that duing its actual hey-fey, the NES was an absolute non-entity and Master System and Megadrive were the place to be (along with Spectrum then Amiga for many).

But even as a fully dedicated Sega fanboy, the Gameboy and SNES both won me over and I ended up adding them to birthday and Christmas list and then I was dual Sega and Nintendo all the way through. Took me a very long time to get on the sony train but I had both a Saturn and launch day N64 by the next gen. I read pretty much all the dedicated Sega and Nintendo mags (of which there were MANY) and the multi formats too.

Something about the early days of the SNES (and specifically the import scene, both before hand and for early access to games) was uniquely exciting and Super Play and Total! covered this period brilliantly. There was a vibrance, passion and excitement about them both. Also what taught me about anime, manga and started my interest in the import and modding scenes.

There were SO many incredible gamign magazines in teh UK at the time, absolute golden age, and I don't think its nostalgia to say that looking at the offerings from other countries, we really were very lucky with what we had - most mags were tiny teams of genuine enthusiasts just having fun with it and it shows. Even the official mags didn't have a corporate whiff about them and took a lot of risks. Perhaps its because the American and Japanese overlords of the companies saw the UK as a tiny quirky market they were more free with what they let us do over here? Only a guess.

Genius! I often thought this game would have been released with a spinner/rotating arcade control had it been a dedicated arcade cab rather than an MVS title. The way the wheels and gears turn the arrow just shouts out for it!

I've always been a "Master System is better" purist, as I think many Europeans are. But there was always a small number of NES games that I really loved, and were the reason I eventually caved and bought one cheaply around 1995... those titles are all in this list. I still remember the first time I saw a demo kiosk for Kirby's Adventure in 94. I was blown away that it was running on the NES and I loved the character and the ideas in the game. But atfer a handful of titles, I used to quickly run out of NES titles I enjoyed whereas Master System I can rave about for hours... America was truly, truly gyped that Sonic 1 was the last game released, that's when they started to get really good! We European 8bit owners were eating good from 91-94.

For Nintendo, other than that handful of NES titles, I was always far more impressed with the Gameboy and SNES libraries. That said, in recent years I've realised that part of my "meh" feeling towards the NES as a whole is that I really don't gel with many of the "most famous" games... but through YouTubers I've started to discover hidden gems that I really like and I've a lot more appreciation for the system, especially games from later on in its library which had multiple mappers/enhancement chips in there to bring the specs up a little, and devs were really in tune with what worked and how they could push the system.

As a retro-style indie dev, I've been tinkering with the idea of creating spin offs for my character Hazel (my avatar) on retro systems, starting with the GameBoy, which I love working on. I looked into making a Master System game but to my surprise I have actually so far found that I prefer working on the NES, mostly because of the higher base resolution - sprite art is really important to me and while many Master System games blow average NES game away visually, that extra resolution is really useful for adding detail and animations to the characters - now that we are in a modern age where ROM size restrictions are far less of an issue, that can make an enormous difference.

@RadioHedgeFund As a fellow Master System enthusiast, you may appreciate this 8bit gameplay reveal for my Sonic collection SAGE title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUTkCp485BA Mods, if this is too blatant a plug, feel free to remove. 😅

@KGRAMR @somnambulance Sorry I went so long without replying to you guys - I went on a very needed mental health break from social media, I was becoming obsessive about checking reponses and replying to the point of not getting any work done! lol.

Absolutely 100% agree on the Hasbro thing, the modern homebrew Jaguar scene is really cool! If the Jagaur is trult public domin it would be amazing if we start to see actual hardware becoming manufactured by some enterprising person so more people get a chance to play them - as a game dev myself I'd be quite interested to try out development (and I used to make ST games for fun in the 90s... well, Amiga games tbh, but them later tried porting them) so I think I could get something up and running... but for the amount of work it would take, I feel more inclined to make games for systems more people will be able to play as I don't exclusively have nostalgia for teh Jag, more that whole time period of transition and innovation in the gaming world with things switching from 16bit to 32/64 and 2d to 3d.

Yes it pains me how much SEGA in America was mostly "Genesis only"... In Europe, every Sega system was at least moderately successful, even the 32X and Mega CD.

Not to plug myself, but you may like the Sega hardware and Sonic history references in the intro sequence I made for my SAGE entry this year? 😇 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvTiAmOH8MM

@ArcadianLegend99 Yup. I wasn't sure how well known that fact is or how much Don likes to talk about it publicly, its definitely a sore point and also something he probebaly doesn't like to publicly moan about for professional reasons or to protect/respect the artists that worked on thse films. But yeah he's always wanted to make a full film tackling the last days of the dinosaurs, since watching Fantastia as a kid. Ice Age started off as a 2d animated movie, with a lot more serious tone, literally about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Heck that was basically what Land Before Time was before Speilberg pushed the slightly reduced violence and neutered ending which lets you believe the dinos survived if you want them to. But the intention was that the "Great valley" is dinosaur heaven. So you can see why the many "sequels" that followed, with far worse quality animation for the most part too, would feel insulting to him - same with Ice Age becoming a seemingly never ending series of sequels with fart jokes and slapstick.

Gary Goldman is also a great man. I only got to speak to him a handful of times but he was always willing to answer questions via email, give feedback/ecouragement as well. Very fond memories of those times.

I love the 90s style "Xtreme!" presentation and colour palettes. Great to see a lost project brought back from the dead. Hopefully this gets put on an Evercade Piko collection in the future!

@-wc- Haha whadya know! We were listened to. Awesome 😀

I agree that this is a great site, I only started commenting recently (I have to be careful as I type too much and get sucked into wasting too much time in places online!) but I've been reading since the start. I read all their other sites too though so far I've only commented on Nintendolife.

Over the years (even before Nintendolife started) I've spoken to Damo a few times about my varied career path and our shared interests in 90s import gaming and UK games magazines, and he's a great guy. I've spoken to various other staff writers and the video creators as well, I expect/hope when the time is right, you'll see some or all of my gaming projects get featured/previewd/reviewed. I really like how passionate they all are about true indies and retro-flavoured projects - all my current games are going to be on all current consoles, and I'm also tentatively getting into NES and Gameboy development as well as a side-side hobby so I'm sure we'll have lots to talk about in the coming years.

Also, thanks, I enjoy talking to you too, and I hope you'll like my games! 😅

@sdelfin Yeah CCE was really frustrating as the graphics engine was obviously much better than the original port, framerate, draw distance and stability far closer to Sega Rally and ManxTT, but they changed / removed enough elements to make it "not Daytona", and the handling just didn't feel right. The handling was good in the original, it was just everything else that was off! lol. So CCE was probably the "better game" if you had to recomend one to a newcomer, but it was almost nothing like the Arcade game.

The fact many other Sega arcade ports were so good made the lack of a "proper" Daytona even more annoying - and again made this Dreamcast version frustrating as once again it wasn't an arcade port. As you said though, once you are used to it, its a good game in its own right.

A decade or so ago I studied traditional animation with Don Bluth for 2 years. Incredible man, absolute hero. All of us in his class had grown up with his movies. Newcomers would always make the same mistake of saying something like "I really loved the Land Before Time movies" or "Fievel goes West was my favourite" or asking him a plot detail about Secret of NIMH 2 or whatever. He had absolutely nothing to do with any of the sequels and was clearly unhappy they'd been made without his involvement or blessing - even though he knew he had no legal say in the situation, it was obviously painful to have characters and projects you were so close to get continued without you. The only sequel/followup he was asked to have anything to do with was the Bartok spinoff from Anastasia and he was always happy to talk about that one and seemed delighted to have been invovled despite it being a low budget straight to VHS title.

There were even Disney, and later Fox projects that he was initially invovled in developing but then asked to have his name removed from them (or just quit before things were finanlised) because he disagreed with the artistic direction they were taking, but clearly still felt personally attached to them and if we accidentally mentioned them (often not knowing he'd even been involved as some of them aren't public record) you could tell it still stung many years later, especially a pet 2d project of his that got evolved into a CG / 3D animated film much to his dismay. This is actually something I can now relate to in my own personal life, there's been quite a few fairly big/presitgious "Hollywood" movies that I've walked off set in protest and asked to not be credited on and even refused to be paid for (usually on moral/ethical grounds rather than artistic, but that's the Hollywood studio system for you) and I feel somewhat of a sense of indignation whenever I see those projects being praised, and it makes me want to go on long NDA breaking career ending rants! lol.

For me, I'd never consider doing a remake or working on an existing franchise without seeking to make sure the original director or creator was ok with it... I can back that up as I actually worked on a NOTLD project and spoke to Romero briefly about it to state my intentions and get his blessing even though there was no legal reason to do so.

I'm not criticising the LRG Clocktower team in any way, they all seem super passonate and respectful of the property and i'm looking forward to it. I think I remember hearding MVG saying he was invovled too and I have a lot of respect for him. But as this article says, it seems extremely strange they wouldn't reach out to Kouno even if not to ask for permission, just to let him know it was happening and to reassure him they are big fans of the original and are striving to do it justice.

@somnambulance Yeah back then, games were expensive and rare to come by, maybe only one new game for Xmas, one for birthday... saving up pocket money for months at a time. That meant that whatever games you did have had to last and you'd play them over and over - maybe if there was a game that was "bad" you would gaslight yourself into enjoying it. Thats possibly what happened to me with Road Runner on the SNES - whilst the graphics and level designs are really good, the controls are awful and most newcomers to the game nowadays write it off as unplayable. However, I persisted with it, mastered the controls, and loved the game. Nowadays if I just tried a rom of it without previous experience i would have given up before that point. But I'll go to bat for that game anyday! lol

You were lucky to have rentals be so common! I'd have loved to be able to use my pocket money to rent a new game to try on a weekend or something. That simply wasn't a thing when I was little, sadly - perhaps in bigger towns.

Sorry to hear you didn't have many friends growing up but honestly the fact that you played with your sisters and mom sounds really lovely. My parents had no interest in games (or time to play them with me) and I was an only child. I only ever got to play multiplayer videogames on 7 occasions growing up... and I remember each one of those times really clearly as I had so much fun!

Yeah in the UK I never knew anyone with a Jaguar... Saturn was a 3rd place behind PS1 and N64 but it certainly sold enough so that it wasn't uncommon, and Dreamcast was very popular, while it lasted. As a rule though Sega consoles sold far better than Nintendo consoles in general - people have a stereotype of "the UK hates Nintendo". Thats not true, they just didn't market the NES very well, and the Master System was very popular, so Sega had a headstart and kept that lead, building up a loyal fanbase. Even though they are thought of as rare, I speak to far more British kids that had Mega CD and 32X than Americans (and I work in America a lot and attend a lot of conventions etc so I think I get a fairly good cross section).

By the way, I wasn't saying there's anything wrong with being patriotic. I spend a lot of time in America and like it a lot. When I go to the American Pavillion in Epcot it does an incredible job at making me feel teary eyed and proud to be American, until I remember Im not! lol Its just that from an outside perspective the way American media, schooling, etc pushes national pride it and reverence of flag etc can be seems like its quite extreme, but also misused to manipulate poor people and sell them stuff... hense the insistance Xbox is "American" when I don't think even the plastic shell of the console is made in America. Maybe the box and manual is printed there? I saw a fantastic wooden door sign, which was an American flag with "Not made in China" written on it... the sign was made in China. Made me chuckle when I saw that.

I totally agree the Jaguar controller was pretty rough. The system as a whole was a disaster but there are some genuinely good games on the system if you hunt through the rough, most notably Tempest 2000 and Alien Vs Predator... unfortunately for the system nowadays many of the actually fun games are available and just as good or better on other systems, meaning there's little reason to collect for it. However at the time, if you'd been an early adopter, there were at least 10 games that would have made you feel your purchase was worthwhile... as long as you avoided the stinkers - some of the games are embarassingly bad and should never have been released as they made the system look weak and burnt customers trust.

@-wc- Yeah I totally agree with you, I feel the same way. But I won't at all be surprised or offended when my own games are called "16bit style" because of course they will - they are pixelated 240p with parallax scrolling and more colours than NES... that MUST mean they could run on the Genesis/SNES!

I too could rattle off a tonne of 2d 32bit games this Mighty Thor game looks like. But you hit the nail on the head with saying most people "flatten history" by thinking of 32bit as chunky polygons.

I think perhaps Sonic Mania is a good way to look at it. To enthusiasts very familiar with playing retro games to this day, its very obviously a case of "what would 2d Sonic have looked like if it were on the Saturn and used the extra power to increase the colours, frames of animation, details and music?" but to most people who used to love Sonic but haven't played it recent, they say "Wow, it looks JUST like the Genesis games!" when infact its FAR beyond what Genesis could do. I don't think the devs should take this as an insult, and really, its not even that the people who think it looks 16bit are wrong - because what they are actually imagining is that it looks like the Genesis games looked in their memory. They don't remember the lower number of animation frames, or the fact that Sonic only rotates in 8 angles rather than 360 when he goes round a loop. They just remember it was fast and fun and colourful and the new game has the same "feel" as they remember back then. People are always going to see "2d platformer" and think "16bit" until someone more technically minded, like you or I comes along and says "well actually..." and loses them with technobabble.

Again, I agree with you, 100%. I just don't think its a battle we should be fighting really as I don't see us winning. Its not like its a bad thing to associate a game with the Genesis/SNES era, those are some of the greatest games of all time. People don't use "16bit" as an insult, if anything its a complement 😀 (even if they are wrong 😋 )

To get around this, I usually pitch my own games as "its like a 16bit game but with the extra colours, memory and speed of more modern hardware". Then if someone says "like a Saturn game?" I know I'm among friends and say "yes EXACTLY". lol

@electrolite77 "I’d pay good money for the likes of PD Zwei, PD Saga, Nights and Fighters Megamix on my Switch."
You and me both! 😍 It pains me how little Sega utilise their back catalogue - and Nights is especially weird to be missed out considering the modern remake/port is available on darn near everything except Switch. I'd kill to have that portably.

@smoreon Yeah, I get that now, thank you for explaining. This was what I was thinking when I said "High level" emulation, literally thinkign about how most N64 emulators work. I'm sure that's a loooong way off with Saturn but may eventually be possible. That will be awesome

@KingMike Ah, you are a prime candidate for appreciating the games I'm developing then! I created an engine that uses a true 240p native resolution (using the same widescreen res as Sonic Mania) and then perfectly integer scales to 720p for Switch and 4k for Xbox/PS5/PC, meaning everything properly aligns to the grid like a real retro game would (sadly a rarity in pixel art games) and looks 100% crisp and clean. For screen resolutions where perfect integer scaling isn't possible, you have the option of having it scale at the correct aspect ratio but with half pixels to fully fit the screen (giving slightly soft edges) or having a perfect integer scale with a black border.

But then I spent about a month making my own propriatary CRT shader with a tonne of presets to emulate different tvs and monitors, and also completely tunable to recreate the exact look people might want - scanlines, rgb separation, warping to emulate screen glass curvature, roundness of corners, edge rolloff of light distribution, gamma correction, and analogue/RF interferance (noise/grain) with each setting able to be turned on and off and cycled through different levels.

Even though its for modern retro-style indie games, I was inspired by the many options and settings we retro enthusaists go through with both modding our retro consoles, and tweaking our emulators, to try and get the picture looking exactly how we like it. You can have everything from crystal clear crispy 4k pixels on a flatscreen all the way down to a poorly tuned 14" portable TV from the 80s that looks like a fishbowl

As an avid fan, this is the only Sonic game I've never played... even though I think I own it and its stored away somewhere. I just hate motion controls so much I didn't even bother. I'm very happy that this patch exists and one day I might be able to go through properly and try it out

@-wc- I agree with you that this is more remeniscent of 2d platformers on Saturn and Playstation and I totally understand your sentiment. However it could equally be compared to a high end NeoGeo or other arcade title, perhaps CPS2, and how you label those as far as "bits" is highly debatable (the "24bit" claim of the NeoGeo is absolute nonsense marketing jargon).

As far as the Amigas, it depends really. The 1200 is 32bit, for sure. The 500 and 600 had some 32bit registers limited by a 16bit databus... but if you're going to argue that counts then the Megadrive / Genesis is also 32bit, as is the Neo Geo, the Sega System 16 arcade boards, even Atari ST, all of which used the same 16/32bit hybrid CPU.

In reality, there was never really a 100% cut off between 8/16/32/64bit that could show a definite jump in quality. There were extremely primitive 16bit systems in the 1970s, like the TI 99/4a... the PC Engine was "8bit" but outperformed the SNES and Genesis in several areas... lets not get into the arguements around the Jaguar! 😅

The fact that "bits" have never really been the thing that most affects the graphics performance or speed of a system means that its mostly a meaningless marketing term used by Sega as shorthand for "Genesis can wipe the floor with NES". We've had consoles refered to as 128bit or even 256bit when in reality they are 32/64bit... it was just shorthand for "this is the next generation up".

The most powerful PCs are still using 64bit processors, graphics cards and operating systems. To say a 4090 is in the same league as an N64, or that a TA99/4A is equivalent to a SNES shows how silly it is. Infact while we're at it, the SNES has an 8bit CPU 😂 its all just nonsense really.

The problem then for retro-style indies is that people will look at your pixel art game, and call it 8bit if it looks simple, and 16bit if it looks fancy. To most people, "32bit" makes them think of low poly 3d. Of course, you and I know that a game like Tiny Thor would never have been possible on any of the famous "16bit" systems, but I can see why people will think that its going for a modern version of that style.

If we're being actually technical and nitpicky, this game wouldn't have been possbile on any 32bit system either - pause the video any time any sprite object is rotated and you'll see that the "pixels" rotate at angles rather than the computer redrawing each frame to realign to the grid. Even ignoring this, the base resolution of the sprite appears higher than any of the "32bit" consoles.

Personally this is not a choice I'm fond of and in my own games I've worked extremely hard to make sure my games are truly "32bit" in style. I followed Sonic Mania's example of recreating the "16bit" style but with the extra colours, speed, memory etc of a 32bit system, and avoiding the pitfalls of modern indie games that just use pixel art in a 4k modern rendering style. The only change I allowed was to move the 4:3 aspect ratio to 16x9 - same as Mania. I think this makes sense for a modern game targeting the current gen platforms.

None of that is to insult Little Thor though, I think it looks really good. Its just not truly 16bit OR 32bit. Its a modern game with very pretty pixel art, and people are going to (incorrectly) label it as whatever "feels" right to them when they look at it.

@somnambulance As far as the Jaguar, the fact you remember so much hype around it and people really excited is because you were in America at the time Of course you are aware of the "rivalry" (to put it nicely) between America and Japan throughout history and that was still very fresh in the 80s-90s with a constant fear that Japan was about to become the "next world superpower" because of their technical proficiency - similar fearmongering to what you hear about China / South Korea / India at the moment. Seeing the reality of where Japan is right now, they needn't have worried.

Probably because of this bias / fear there was a real narrative in American media in the late 80s to early 90s that America had invented videogames (mostly true) and Atari (an American company) had perfected the console market (also mostly true) and then Nintendo and Sega had come along from Japan and put Atari out of business and stolen a great American art form (not even remotely true... in fact Sega started off as an American company and Atari bankrupted itself through greed, incompetance and having zero quality control...). But therefore the news story that Atari was making a comeback and with a "64 bit" system that would destroy the 32bit Japanese consoles, and it was both designed and even manufactured in America? That was a news story people wanted to run with. Jaguar was the choice for patriots! The choice for freedom!

Unfortunately it was kindof underpowered, not really 64bit by any real measure, and the games that came out weren't very impressive, mostly looking a generation behind because people couldn't get their head round programming for its complex architecture and just used the 68000 in it to make ports of 16bit Genesis and Amiga titles. As soon as journalists saw the games, it was fairly obvious it was going to die on its butt. In the UK, we certainly got news of the hype, and before the games started to appear we saw previews and excited talk of tech specs in the magazines... but the actual wall to wall and televised advertising "do the math!" etc never materialised like it did in America.

In the end, it sold less than 150k units worldwide. For all the hype, thats an unbelievably small amount. Considering I've owned 3 of them and I regularly see them in retro stores for sale, I would find that figure hard to believe, but its from the literal SEC filing by Atari themselves. Other "failed" consoles of the time sold waaaaay more than that - 3dO, 32X & Virtual Boy all sold about 750k, CDi 500k, TurboDuo 2 million, NeoGeo 1 million, Sega CD 6 million... the only well advertised system of the time I can think that sold less is the CD32, but that's because the company literally went bust during the release window and the American release was cancelled.

Its never been reported how many Jaguar CD units were sold, or even manufactured, I'd hazard a guess of 10k max as I imagine most Jaguar owners felt burned and were savign for a Playstation, not about to drop another $150+ on an upgrade for their dying system that only ever had 11 games. A shame, as I actually was quite excited for the Jaguar when it was first anounced, and wanted it to do well. A handful of the games are good, and there's a bustling homebrew community trying to show what it was actually capable of.

Interestingly, the same "American console, designed by Americans, built in America" marketing was used again in the launch of the original Xbox. Theres still a decent chunk of Xbox fans who are insitent the reason its the "best" brand is because its American. You only need to unscrew your console and look at all the components to realise how little sense that makes, but hey, marketing is marketing.

@somnambulance Dude that sucks about the Charizard! Could have been your retirement plan, damnit!

Being older than you, as you can imagine, I had the same probelm times 10 as far as just being at the mercy of whatever was available in the shops, ordering online wasn't a thing and my parents didn't trust mail order companies. When I had cash to spend I had to beg them to driev me to the nearest Toys R Us which also had a Curries & Comet near by (British electronics retailers) or if I was on holiday in a small town I would look for games in shops with a smaller selection like Woolworths, Smiths or Boots and just hope that they had something that I wanted and didnt' already have. As I said I was pretty up to date on magazines and shows so I mostly knew if a game was good or if it was a stinker - but every now and again I'd be there with money burnign a hole in my pocket and my only options were games I had no idea if they were any good or not... thankfully on those occasions I got lucky - I remember picking up Master System Jurassic Park and Batman Returns, Gameboy Yogi Bear and SNES Road Runner without having any clue if they were good or licensed trash... thankfully all of them are great

Often, the reviews would really help my choices - I was not really a fan of Donkey Kong in the arcades or on NES, but the reviews for the Gameboy conversion were so glowing that I picked it up on holiday despite having reservations - its now in my top 5 favourite games of all time. I only remember one time when I bought a game because the reviews had been extremely positive and I just couldn't get into it, that was The Fidgetts for Gameboy - to this day, I can't play it. The graphics are excellent and it seems like a nicely designed puzzle platformer similar to Lost Vikings but I find the time limit so strict I can barely get off the first level.

Sometimes, reviews were bad, but the games just looked like something I'd really enjoy... in cases like this I'd wait and buy them cheaply second hand. Sadly near me there weren't really stores where you could rent games so there was no way for me to try stuff out first.

As I was an only child (and didnt' particularly have many friends - I'm autistic and didn't learn how to "fit in" until I was an older teenager) it was extremely rare that I'd get to play multiplayer games, so the 4 player and party game nature of the N64 mostly passed me by, except for the rare occasions we'd go to my cousins' houses. I can imagine if you had siblings or regularly had friends over, teh N64 was an amazing consoel for that reason. When I was 18 and had a place of my own I rebought N64 to play Pokemon Stadium (I wanted to play Pokemon Blue on my TV, and see my Pokemon rendered in 3d) and had lots of fun with friends over playing the minigames in that title, as well as Mario Kart 64, which remains one of my favourite games in the series.

I agree the N64 version of Glover is the best, probably lots of the other multiplat titles I mentioned... if only I could turn off the darned "fuzz filter". I agree Ape Escape is really good too!

@Andee Thanks, and no worries!

Yes, the Megadrive was originally intended to be as close to Sega's arcade hardware as possible. Its essentially half of a "Super Scaler" board, which had 2x68000 processors, but the Megadrive only had 1.

However the Megadrive is extremely similar hardware to Sega's more common System 16 / 18 arcade board, which had 1x68000 and 1xZ80, exactly the same as the Megadrive, though the arcade board has more memory and can push more sprites simultaneously. This board was extremely popular and powered about 40 arcade titles, including Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Shinobi, Fantasy Zone, Alien Syndrome etc, so this is why the ports to Megadrive are so close, with minor cutbacks here and there.

Earlier arcade titles from the 80s (Flicky, Choplifter, Wonderboy, Monster Land etc) were on System 1 & System 2 boards - the Megadrive was significantly more powerful tan them, and had their Z80 cpu as its backup/support processor, so could easily do arcade perfect versions - in fact the Master System was initially designed to be a home version of the System 2, and the Megadrive included its Z80 to allow Master System backwards compatibility.

Later arcade boards including the System 14 (used for Columns), System C, and of course Mega Tech and Megaplay were essentially repurposed Megadrive boards in arcade cabinets and were functionally identical - thus slightly weaker than the System 16 but cheaper to manufacture and literal perfect ports were possible.

There were small upgrades along the way for specific games (like the X/Y boards and System 24) but it was only really the System 32 arcade boards (Rad Mobile, Death Adder, Jurassic Park, SegaSonic etc) that abandoned the 68000 based architecture altogether and blew the Megadrive out the water, completely impossible for it to begin to compete with... before Sega switched to Polygon based hardware like Model 1 (Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Star Wars Arcade, etc)

Essentially, for most 2d Sega arcade titles of the 80s and 90s, the Megadrive could reproduce them at anywhere from 75%-100% accuracy... if you ignore the super scaler titles. Adding the Mega CD made the hardware about equivalent to the Hang On board, the 32x was actually more powerful on paper than the early super scaler boards (and got near arcade perfect Space Harrier and After Burner ports... I still mourn that they canceled Outrun!), though it was not on par with System 32. Saturn was leagues ahead of System 32 but not directly compatible with the source code as its chips were very different, so ports had to be more or less retooled from the ground up, with varying degrees of success.

Of course, several Sega consoles and arcade systems moving forward were purposefully designed to be extremely similar so that arcade perfect ports could exist, and arcade titles could be developed cheaper - The Titan / ST-V was a Saturn, the Naomi was a Dreamcast, the Triforce was a Gamecube, the Chihiro was an Xbox. The latest Sega Arcade titles are just PCs running a version Windows, with NVidia hardware, Direct X and Unreal Engine.

This is an amazing achievment - I remember being absolutely flawed by the C64 version when that realesed around 93. At the time I was very used to programing games for the old Commodore systems (even back to the PET!) and I was very aware of their limitations - Lemmings seemed near impossible but it was an amazingly accurate conversion.

The fact they've managed to get this close on the Plus/4 is astounding! (For those who don't know, the Plus/4 is very much weaker than the c64, its basically a retooled c16 but for business use with word prcessor and spreadsheet built in)

@smoreon Yes, that does make sense, thank you!

So what I'm taking from that is there is no perfect way to get the full picture without combing because the 2 images don't match for whatever reason (maybe because its 60fps and everything's moved a bit making because in reality the "A" frames are running at 30 fps and the "B" frames are running at a different 30 frames, one frame apart?).

So bob deinterlacing sounds like the best solution for modern screens even though this reduces the "resolution" from what we would have originally percieved on teh crt screen. Hopefully mednefen supports this nowadays. I wonder if it would be possible in the future for an emulator to use some kind of high level injection code to force the game to just output at 480p instead of alternating the frames. Again though Saturn emulation is taxing enough anyway without that overhead!

@smoreon Yup. I'd never personally choose an interlaced picture! I just want the old interlaced stuff to look "right" in progressive.

As someone in the film & tv industry I'm very glad people are no longer filming on interlaced cameras, I've never understood the appeal, it always looks bad. While I understand emulators wanting to be cycle accurate, the combing effect always looks like the picture isn't being correctly put together.

It must be possible to just shift the edgesof every other line by 1 pixel to match, or something - or at worst, if this isn't possible, just ignore every other line and render the 480i stuff at 240. Seeing everything have wobbly jagged edges is just so distracting to me on a modern clear flatscreen. If I'm honest I'm not even sure what is happening or why interlaced content looks that way - in video editing its just a single click fix and it just aligns everything properly so I've neevr thought to hard about it and always thought of it as an error rather than the true intended look - I don't remember even noticing it on my crts back in the day.

@somnambulance Yeah I agree there was a HUGE amount of shovelware rubbish on both the PS2 and Wii - I guess that's the price you pay for those systems being so mind bendingly popular. If you think about it, the Switch has that problem too, but its disguised somewhat by most of the actual rubbish being eshop only - cartridges being so expensive to produce and having a minimum order size meanign you have to risk tens of thousands of dollars to release a physical game means most of the low effort asset flips are just put to the eshop and most gaming sites and youtubers completely ignore them, so we don't even hear that they exist. The Wii and PS2 existed before digital storefronts were common, but as they were just standard DVD discs they cost literal cents to manufacture, so we ended up with retail libraries where 50% are unplayable crud... maybe 75% in the case of the Wii. I think its why I don't really like collecting for either system, even though theres a few standout titles that I love.

I totally get what you're saying about your parents just buying you games and therefore you having little choice or even knowledge of them. I'm probably a few years older than you by the sound of it (I was born in 1981) and while we didn't have the internet I was obsessed with buying gaming magazines and watching all the game related TV shows to keep up on the latest news. I was originally a Sega fanboy then got into Nintendo as well so started buying all the multiformat magazines as well as the format specific ones... but then after seeing so many platforms be hyped up and then instantly die (Jaguar, CDi, 3dO, CD32, NGCD etc etc) and then somewhat losing faith in Sega after the Saturn launch, I just went full "Nintendo fanboy" for nearly 2 years whilst waiting for the N64 launch (coincidentally that was around the time the tv shows I watched stopped making new episodes too, so I really went dark on non-Nintendo news for a short while).

I certainly agree that the N64 was the system to own at the time for 3d platformers. Thats the whole reason I was so excited to own one and immediately put down a pre-order in 95 after seeing a preview of Mario 64 on TV. My favourite genre was the mascot platformer, so seeing that translated into 3d was incredible and I was HYPED. Mario 64 did not disapoint of course, but my disullusion with the N64 started to kick in when the other staple genres that I loved, 2d platformers, shmups, 1v1 fighting games, arcade racers, lightgun games, all never really materialised... whereas the Saturn and Playstation excelled in all of these areas.

I mused recently that the absolute best 3d platformers were exclusive to the N64, but perhaps the Playstation has more of them that are worth playing, even if they don't quite reach the same heights. The Crash trilogy, Spyro trilogy, Croc 1&2, Tomb Raider 1-5, Ape Escape, Bugs Lost in Time, Bugs & Taz Timebusters, Sheep, Dog n Wolf, Pacman World - these are all good games that aren't on N64. But then the N64 has less exclusives but the quality is even higher? Of course many decent games were released on both, Gex, Toy Story 2, Rayman 2, Going Quackers, etc.

@smoreon Thanks for the info. Obviously I'm not a fan of interlacing either! I wasn't trying to upscale or anything like that, infact its important to me when emulating that its at the original native resolution or integer scaled so it looks the same as on original hardware.

What I meant was that many Saturn games use a "high res" mode for some or all of the graphics, which on original hardware double the vertical resolution by interlacing 240p to 480i (for example Virtua Fighter 2's 3d layer does this) - others just use it for static screens like title screens and menu / maps so the text is more readable... but back when I last used Mednefen, these graphics ended up with a really awful interlace combing effects and I couldn't find any settings to adequately create a non-combed progressive picture.

Again, this might be fixed nowadays, considering how many games use this "hi-res" mode, I expect it was/is high on the list of things to fix. I should give it another try and see if things have improved.

@smoreon Yeah agreed about Sega basically ignoring everything thats not Genesis. Its very frustrating especially when outside of Saturn, all their systems and boards are easy to emulate.

As for Saturn, yeah its Mednafen that I had the most success with when I last properly tried a couple of years ago. Some of the games were absolutely perfect and I was impressed how far things had come. But many of the games I wanted to play had graphic glitches at the very least, and some were unplayable - admitedly I have a bias for many of the later titles that really push the system to its limits as far as grahpical effects etc. Also, at the time I couldn't find a solution where the interlaced graphics modes looked passable (for example Virtua Fighter 2). Perhaps its improved since then - at the time I just gave up and modded my Saturn to have a HDMI output and read games from a memory card. Thats been my goto solution for playing teh games for the last couple of years. Perhaps I should go back and try Mednefen again when I have time to copy across all the isos etc to my gaming pc

@somnambulance Well the earliest games on Saturn were pretty awful as the launch was so rushed and the hardware was difficult to program for, so it definitely seemed clunky out the gate... also for all of its life most multiplatform 3d games were by far the worst on Saturn, to the point of sometimes being unplayable, again because it was difficult to program for. However, once you dive into the library fully (especially if you take into account the Japanese only games and all the ones that use the RAM cart expansions) for me, its the best library of all 3 systems... but I do have a pretty severe bias towards arcade style experiences like shmups, 2d fighters, 3d fighters, light gun games, arcade racers, puzzle games, and 2d platformers - and almost none of those genres are well represented on N64, sadly. Playstation is clearly the best system for RPGs, N64 probably the best for 3D platformers (Mario and Banjo trump everything else despite strong competition on Playstation), and very strong for FPS and multiplayer family titles like Mario Kart, Party, Smash etc. Saturn also has the distinct advantage of havign my #1 favourite game ever - Nights into Dreams (& Xmas Nights) - the only game I personally rate higher than Mario 64 (and teh only Sega game Miyamoto said he wished he made ) so that definitely biases me too.

At the end of the day, it was an amazing console generation and all 3 of the main systems have titles that I go back to regularly. But as you said, sadly the N64 comparitively aged like milk so nowadays I mostly play those games through emulators or source ports - I really should get a properly modded console to make it more paletable to my modern, more fussy eyes!

PS2 probably has the best overall library vs Dreamcast / Gamecube / Xbox but again the hardware itself looks AWFUL on modern tvs and te loading times are rough so again its emulator only for me until I get round to buyign a fully modded and upgraded system, whereas the other 3 consoles hold up well. Its also noticably weaker when it comes to most multiplatform titles similar to how the Saturn was. Funny, as the best of the best PS2 games are very impressive and possibly the most impressive of the generation... Again though, all 4 of those consoles have incredible games, it was yet another fantastic generation with no duds.

Interesting you didn't know FFVII and MGS were Playstation titles, they were key in making me want the system and eventually cave and buy one in 1998 after resisting for 4 years! lol. FFVII is my second favourite RPG of all time - but my #1 is Panzer Dragoon Saga on Saturn - an incredible technical showcase achievement for any game of that generation, the areas in teh later discs must be sucking every last drop of power from the poor Saturn.

"There's even a crunchy 320x240 mode if you want it."
YES. YES I DO. That one feature alone sells me. I wish more modern 3d games, ports, and emulators would consider including 240p or native original resolutions.

@BulkSlash Ooh, that's fun, and a clever way around it. Real shame it doesn't work with the PAL disc though, that soundtrack is so much cooler. And ideally we could put in 2097 too, I mostly just want to race around to the Prodigy! That was my biggest annoyance with the (otherwise quite decent) Saturn version of 2097 / XL.

I love when things like this happen. As someone who is a big retro player and likes to go back and revist my favourite games, part of the reason I don't play games online is I hate thought of the servers going down and never being able to experience that again.

This Dreamcast Daytona was disapointing to many as it doesn't handle like the arcade game... Saturn owners had been annoyed that despite multiple attempts Sega never really managed a good port of Daytona - if they'd have just released and Arcade perfect version on DC, everyone would be happy - but instead they remade it and somewhat messed up the handling and changed the classic look. It looks and feels more like Daytona 2, I don't know why they didn't port that instead if they didn't intend to properly recreate the arcade game.

However, once I got over that initial annoyance that once again I'd bought a game called "Daytona USA" that wasn't the arcade game of the same name... I eralised this is a really great game, fun to play, beautiful to look at, and at least we get that amazing music!

@Andee Of course, by the time you add a Mega CD, you now have an additional 12mhz CPU that can handle true scaling and rotation in its sleep, tragically not very many games took advantage of this, instead concentrating on FMV. But the games that actually do use the sprite scaling abilities to their fullest are very impressive.The 32X can very easily replicate full Outrun/Space Harrier/AfterBurner style scaling and rotation with its SH2s.

To be clear, I'm not saying the base Megadrive is more capable than the SNES. The Mode 7 stuff allows for some incredible effects and its also far better suited to transparencies and has waaaaay more colours (albeit at a very slightly smaller resolution). But its hugely handicapped by its CPU - and this is what Megadrive programmers learned to harness. Many of the tricks learned by the demo scene groups on the Amiga were duly used bythe best developers to pull off incredible almost 32bit style effects - for example Red Zone, The Lost World, Batman & Robin, or Jon Burton of Travellers Tails using the combination of using Tilemaps for sprites and shifting through pallettes to make the Megadrive play FMV and store it on a tiny cart size, or fully rotate entire levels ala Super Castlvania on games like Puggsy. Dude's a genius. But these are all using clever tricks from programmers who know the specific strengths and weaknesses of each system - looking at how Konami pushed each system differently with Contra 3 vs Hardcore, and Castlvania IV vs Bloodlines, I don't think it would be possible to say which game is the most impressive, they are equally impressive in different ways, showing the strengths and limits of each hardware platform.

I truly believe if the SNES had a better CPU (rather than essentially making it a suped up NES for the sake of making it "easy" for Famicom developers to switch across) it would have been a night and day difference and all its games would have wiped the floor with the Megadrive on performance. But the Megadrive using a 68000 (which devs were familiar with from most 16bit arcade boards and Amiga/ST) was just as easy, if not easier to use, and infinitely more powerful, meaning it could compensate for the lack of colours, and very specific fancy effects. Sega knew that its single area where it was better than SNES was speed - hense why Sonic was designed to be a fast mascot, and all the marketing talk of "blast processing" and adverts describing the SNES as slow/boring. Similarly to how choosing cartridge as a platform hamstrung the N64, chosing a 6502 based cpu hamstrung the SNES, and neitehr ever really got to fulfil their true potential.

@Andee Yes neither the SNES or Megadrive has any native sprite scaling abilities, though they can both replicate it to varyign degrees of success with different measures.

SNES games used mode 7 and other register tricks to manipulate, scale, rotate and linescroll a single background layer. As you said, this often means you can make it look like Sprite scaling but only in very specific cirumstances when the screen is very empty.

The SNES games where there was true rotation or scaling and/or rotation on the sprites themselves, like Yoshi's Island, usually used extra chips in the cartridge. Other games where it appears there is sprite scaling, (EG: Turtles in Time where you can throw the footsoldiers towards the screen) just use several frames of animation on a sprite. Its technically possible for the SNES to calulate sprite scaling, but the CPU isn't anywhere near fast enough to pull it off without tankign teh framerate.

Similarly, Megadrive/Genesis has no sprite scaling capabilities, and it of coruse doesn't support Mode 7 style dedicated scalign or rotation on a background layer. Almost all "Sprite scaling" effects on the console are done with just redrawing the sprite as multiple frames at different sizes. However, the CPU of the Megadrive is far more capable than the SNES for doing calulations for linescrolling (which can emulate certain Mode 7 style effects in very specific circumstances - for example Red Zone is essentially Mode 7 using CPU techniques) and even native sprite scaling and even polygon rendering with no extra help... whenever it does this though it usually tanks the framerate and causes sprite flickering so its very rarely done, and instead they just draw multiple frames and switch between them.

The main technical restriction for this is how much memory there is on the cart, and how much is stored in the ram at any one time... but when used in a comparitively simple game like Windjammers, theres absolutely no problem whatsoever. The reason early Megadrive conversions of sprite scalers like Thunderblade or Space Harrier look bad is tehy were on very small cartridges and didn't have enough frames of animation for the "scaling" so it looked like stuff was bobbing up and down, or jumping around teh screen. Later games with "smoother scaling" were infact just larger capacity carts with more individually drawn frames.

The other minor restriction is that sprites can only be a maximum size, so large spites like those for the character art here, and also for the most "zoomed in" versions in a sprite scaling racer / shooter need to be broken up into multiple parts, and there are restrictions as to how many spritres you can have on screen before stuff starts to flicker. Most games get around this by actually drawing the "sprites" with 16x16 background tiles instead, which is much faster and has almost no restrictions in comparisson.

Another thing the Megadrive could do better than the SNES to improve framerates when trying to emulate sprite scaling is by using cleverly designed sprites or tiles that can show multiple frames of animation in one image by palette swapping. If you keep the amount of colours low, and design the image a certain way, you can swap the pallete and the same sprite/tile will show multiple images per frame, similar to how red/blue 3d glasses work. Again, the Megadrive's hardware is more suited to this than the SNES.

@KingMike Oh, absolutely. The neutering of Mortal Kombat, and the "Night Trap and Lethal enforcers will never appear on a Nintendo system" debacle beign so public massively, massively damaged Nintendo's "coolness" factor in ways that still haut them to this day and they've never been able to escape from.

I personally love Nintendo systems, since Sega's demise they have always been my primary system of each generation, but I love cartoony and family friendly games. Even back in teh SNES days Nintendo realised their mistake, and backtracked with a "full fat" version of Mortal Kombat II, even freakin Doom... but it was too late. And since then, each subsequent Nintendo systrem has tried to have more "adult", "scary" and "hardcore" games but they never sell particularly well, because their primary market seems to be kid friendly cartoony titles. I may be wrong but my feeling has always been that this impression started with Mortal Kombat and that reputation followed down the lines with each new generation through the opinion of kids on the playground, those kids eventually growing and becoming parents and still harbouring those same feelings.

@somnambulance Yeah there was a period circa 95-97 where I had zero interest in Sega and thought Sony would be a flash in the pan, and was fully onboard the N64 hype train thinking it would blow everything else out of the water. I spent nearly 2 years just savign my money for the eventual N64 release and did onthing but read Nintendo magazines reading about these upcoming games and how they would be completely impossible on Saturn or Playstation...

I really loved the N64 on launch, but for me at least, reality sank in after owning the N64 for a while and seeing how much the lack of texture memory hurt it, meaning most texture maps were very low detail and the filtering that I believed would eliminante visible pixels actually turned everything into a blurry mess... and the fog that was going to eliminate popup actually just made things feel claustrophobic and meant I couldnb't see where I was going.

Of course, certain games, especially those from Rare and Nintendo themselves, looked briulliant and made teh best of teh system. But even then, when compared with the best looking Playstation and Saturn games, N64 actually often looks pretty weak, and ran at half the framerate.

That doesn't mean there aren't standout games on N64 though, I'd argue some of the absolute best of its generation. But the fact it wasn't as all powerful as I thought, combined with the fact cartridges were so expensive, meant that by late 97 I bought a secondhand Saturn, and in 98 picked up a Playstation, and the games for both were so much more affordable, and many were absolutely mind blowing and seemed like the N64 couldn't dream of running them - which was shocking to me havign spent 2 years reading how the N64 would be so powerful. It was - but only in very specific ways, and was sadly very hamstrung in others.

For me, nowadays the N64 is a machine I use to play maybe 10 games max - and I love them to pieces - Mario 64 is my #2 favourite game of all time for example. But theres SO many more games in Saturn and Playstation library that I replay regularly and I find the "cleaner" graphics so much easier on the eyes on a modern television. I really need to get a modded N64 with the HDMI and ability to turn off the filters, I'm sure I'd enjoy it more.

@smoreon @Uncharted2007 Yeah, frankly a $1000 PC struggles to accurately emulate a Saturn. Admitedly I haven't tried for a couple of years or so, so maybe the emulators have come on further since then but at least back then, there was no emulator that could play all the games I wanted without glitches and problems. Some of them were perfect, otehrs weren't even 75% there.

While its surprising, much more powerful consoles like Dreamcast, PS3 or even Switch are much easier to emulate on cheaper systems, as you don't need to emulate as many non-standard chips all at once.

The really weird architecture of the Saturn's many chips and the way they all interact with each other is what casues the problem - many of teh most impressive and popular games actually achied their graphical effects by essentially using unexpected glitches due to teh hardware and taking advantage of them to squeeze extra emmory holes or force transparencies where they shouldnt' be allowed... therefore the emulation has to be 100% perfect of all chips working in the exact same order, perfectly synced in order for them to work. I don't think anyone's fully managed this yet, not even with fpga cores.

On an affordable device like a mini console, we'll see Dreamcast long before Saturn. However, why they don't put out a system or collection of the most impressive Megad CD and 32X games I don't know... ditto their early arcade boards. A Rasberry Pi equivalent can propbably replicate a Model 1 or even Model 2 board relatively painlessly, let alone their old 2d board like teh superscalers and System 16/32 - which we saw a glimpse of with the Astro City minis and stuff from Arcade 1Up.

@somnambulance Actually yeah I can totally see that. For me, I loved both Sega and Nintendo (at that time had a Master System, Megadrive, Mega CD, 32X, SNES and Gameboy... and a pre-order on an N64!) but I definitely felt Sega was "cooler"... Playstation went after that cool, edgy, more adult marketing HARD.

Sadly, Sega absolutely botched the Saturn launch in every territory. The only thing that saved it in Japan was their obsession with Virtua Fighter. Even as somewhat of a Sega fanboy who even loevd his 32X, I had zero interest in Saturn on launch after seeing the poor performance of the rushed launch lineup combined with a £400 price tag, and that ugly and uncomfortable "western" redesigned joypad, compared to teh super comfortable Playstation one. (ironically, the Japanese Saturn pad / Model S is my favourite controller of all time, but of course I didn't experience that at launch)

It was only 18 months or so later when I bought a cheap second hand Saturn that I realised how awesome a system it actually was, how many amazing games weer on it, and it was just that spectacularly awful launch period that had made it seem underpowered and overpriced. By then, it was too late of course.

@glaemay As someone who started in the music industry and now produces superhero movies... and also makes indie games he's hoping to sell on all consoles... I don't have an official take! But that's certainly a common opinion that I hear from some people.

@UK_Kev Ok fair enough - I remembered reading that during the harware design phase, the original planned pricepoint was $399, with a $100 loss factored in. But then a year or so later when Sega did the surprise launch, they changed the price to $299, so I assumed that meant a $200 loss. It hadn't occured to me that the manufacturing costs may have dropped from when the hardware was originally designed, but that makes sense.

Either way my point was that Sony could afford the losses (and this was quickly recouped through games sales anyway), but the primary motivation factor in the initial creation of the Playstation was not profit, it was teaching Nintendo a lesson, whatever the cost.

Its really interesting to think about how big the early microcomputer and PC markets were in Japan, similar to the Sinclair/Commodre/Amstrad system in the UK, whcih was a big part of why the NES didn't really take off here til pushed as a budget system in the 90s.

Its a really fun "alternative gaming universe" to look into, even though its hard to navigate for those unable to read Japanese. I remember reading about "Super Mario Bros. Special" and the MSX Metal Gear games, and going down a big emulation rabbit hole in the early 2000s. The Sharp X68000 is an especially incredible machine.

As a Sega fan who adores the Master System, and grew up programing for 8bit computers, the fact that the SG-1000 had a variant that was essentially a full computer with keyboard that you could program games for fascinates me. It was released in Australia so even for English lanuage only there's a possibility of importing one and learning to make simple Master System compatible games with it. So cool.

"it would happen a decade later with the PlayStation – another system no one quite expected to be as huge as it was"
I was one of those people who had no faith whatsoever that the Playstation would be successful. Looking back and reading games magazines at the time, many were equally skeptical. There's plenty of "which system will be victorious" articles in big magazines that place Playstation behind Saturn, N64, and even the 3dO and Jaguar in their predictions. How wrong we all were.

Sure, early previews of Playstation made clear that was very powerful, but we'd just recently seen very powerful impressive hardware be released and completely flop, dead within 6 months because the high quality games didn't come fast enough, third parties didn't get onboard, entry price of hardware was too expensive. This happened countless times between 1992 & 1995. and in any case, future systems like M2 and "Project Reality" were going to be infinietly more powerful than Sony's machine, weren't they?

People nowadays look back as if Playstation as always going to be a success because Sony were sucgh a huge company with such deep pockets - but again, we'd seen huge tech companies like Apple, Phillips, Panasonic, Goldstar, NEC, Bandai, Pioneer and more all try and fail to compete with dedicated games companies like Sega and Nintendo - Atari may be about to regain market share, 3dO had the backing on EA...

I truly feel that the main reason for Sony's success is actually the fact Sony were SO furious at Nintendo, that they were determined to take them out of the market for the sake of honour and revenge, even if it nearly bankrupted the company putting all tehir eggs in one basket - first planning on making a $100 loss per system, then boosting that to a $200 loss on a whim to counteract Sega, throwing unprecidented amounts of money to devs to make exclusive games, and paying more to advertise the Playstation than they'd even done for any of their previous movies or music projects, let alone tech releases. It wasn't about making profit, it was about teaching Nintendo a lesson.

Wait, how does a cheap emulator device help advertise Maybelline makeup? I can't fathom there's much crossover between the audiences of makeup influencers and retro gaming?

No shame to fans of either, games are for everybody, make-up is for everybody, but I don't understand this logic of combining them in this way.

Yeah I completely agree with @-wc- there's absolutely no reason to believe the Megadrive isn't suited to Windjammers, nor that its somehow incapable of playing a 90% accurate version of it.

Windjammers is an incredible, fun, timeless game, but hardly a showcase for what the NeoGeo's hardware can do. Its probably using only a tiny fraction of the system's capabilities... and the Megadrive uses the same CPU, albeit at a lower clockspeed. And in reality, the reason most famous NeoGeo games weren't possible on Megadrive was less to do with power, and everything to do with storage space of carts & ram to hold the data read from it. Look at the roms we all have on our hard drives... somthing like Garou Mark of the Wolves is 80mb. Thats around 700 meg cartridge. So to port the game to Megadrive, you'd have to lose 75% of the animation frames. But Windjammers is less than 4mb. Every single bit of the animation, sound and data from the NeoGeo cart could fit onto a 32 meg MD cart. And considering the relatively simple gameplay, not too much going no screen, theres no reason at all to assume the MD can't replicate the gameplay in its sleep.

The minor "sprite scaling" in the original has been cleverly converted here to nicely drawn sprites/tiles for each frame, again, easy to fit on the cart when there isn't many of them needed. The reduced colour palette and number of colours onscreen again is not a factor for this game as long as you pick them well, the original was not using the full palette by any standards - it shows this very clearly in the comparsion part of the video, the arcade version didn't use a fraction of the maximum colours of the hardware, so they are close to the limits of the MD and barely any real notcable cuts need to be made as long as you handle the palette swapping cleverly, which they have. Again, kudos to the devs.

None of this is to take away from the quality of this port. It looks amazing! I'm super impressed and the new content and redesigns/improvements he's making show a true labour of love. Its impressive for the fact they're working so hard and polishing it up so well. I commend them immeasurably, this is brilliant.

But to imply that its some miracle to convert one of the NeoGeo's smallest and simplest games to the Megadrive is to vastly underestimate the MD or not understand why the ports of other NeoGeo titles were so cut down in the first place. Perhaps this was just hyperbolic writing rather than a fundemental misunderstanding. But it read like an insult to the MD hardware capabilities.

@Westlondonmist " I think they had an idea that would get people on board, got those people on board and invested and realised they can make more money deviating from the idea using the existing fanbase."
Yes, sadly thats what it feels like to me, or even that they are now going after the larger but less dedicated mainstream casual audience and retail, having first kickstarted their company with a smaller but more passionate fanbase they now don't care about anymore? Eugh I don't know. I truly hope that's not the case.

I actually like the recent carts and see the future stuff they've anoucned as pretty exciting. Sure, they all could have been better or had more titles or heavier hitters, but for the price per cart I feel like each has more than enough to make it worthwhile. I can understand the overall feeling that there is less value than the early carts though.

I too would love e 16bit Codemasters cart - I think the one I probably play the most is the Oliver Twins one which is all NES/Aladdin Codemasters games of course, but then I'm a Dizzy apologist! Codemasters put out plenty of really high quality 8 and 16bit titles that weren't from the Olivers, in the early to mid 90s they were one of the companies that I felt represented value and quality if I saw the logo on the box. The fact the Bitmap Bros collection Vol 1 was the console ports rather than the Amiga versions was an absolute travesty, to be honest. That should never have happened.

Wow. As someone who used to program limit pushing 8bit Commodore games at the time (when everyone else had moved on to Amiga/PC), and was also a huuuuge fan of the original Theme Park, if you'd have shown me this as an official conversion in the 90s, I would have been absolutely floored. Kudos to the developer for getting this far, and for also making the source availabel for others.

@no_donatello I totally agree. And yeah, they've confirmed these devices won't have wifi nor will you be able to update their firmware... so any features or fixed added to the EXP & VS, or bufixes/patches for carts won't be able to be used on these.

@-wc- Thanks for the kind response. I'm glad that you didn't take my rant as criticism or hostility, I sometimes worry my passion can seem unintentionally agressive.

I totally get that to someone who wasn't already emotionally invested in the Evercade brand (let alone having put probably nearly $1K into it buying all the games so far, and 2 systems, the original handheld and the home console version) this is far less of a big deal and more functionality is of course a good thing, in theory.

The problem is that it potentially damages their flagship brand in the eyes of the large fanbase they've been building up over the years, so seems a strange choice for a cheaper product they are trying to keep as a separate line, especially when the likely biggest market for this new product (impulse purchasers at retail) won't have heard of Evercade and won't be buying more cartridges, as these aren't sold in retail shops, so in reality it doesn't really add much value or become a selling point for its target demographic.

@Amigator I totally agree, personally I don't want a digital shop or anything like that. As far as I've always been concerned, it should be physical versions only, and forget digital only titles.

But the fact you can update the firmware online means, in my opinion, it would be a nice gesture if they gave digital updates for existing carts to bring the (notably superior) Amiga versions to previous compilations. I know several people who bought some carts to play what they thought were Amiga games (because they were titles only really known for being on that system) and were confused when the games weren't how they remembered.

A similar thing happened with the Oliver Twins collection being the NES versions of the Dizzy games, which, while mostly pretty good versions, were not the ones people were expecting as they are by far the least well known versions.

I wouldn't mind if they add a digital store for those that want to use it... but again, I feel its not the strength of the system or the reason most people buy and collect for it. They need to be careful not to confuse or dilute the appeal of the brand.

@Westlondonmist "Even if Taito or Capcom have said no to carts I think this just opens the door for anything non Poko to be released this way at 50 quid a pop."

Thats exactly my concern. Seems like a very slippery slope. I'm certainly considering selling and and getting out.

However, the upcoming carts anounced so far for this year and next are pretty good - Duke Nukem collections (including brand new ground up remakes of the first 2 games), Amiga collections, Sunsoft, Sydney Hunter, more indie heroes etc, and theres still at least 2 more carts this year not been anounced yet. I'll be interested to see what they reveal at the next showcase. Seems they still plan on releasing carts regularly well into next year at least.

@Amigator Thank you! I hope so.

I'm glad we've finally started getting proper Amiga versions on the carts instead of the (often inferior) Megadrive versions they put on some of the early compilations.

If they do go down the road some people are suggesting above on opening a digital store, or at least offer digital updating, it would be nice if we could get updates where you can choose the Amiga version or console for those older carts, now that they seemingly have an Amiga emulator licensed and working

@KingMike Its definitely not a tech-based reason that they haven't gone with Bust-a-move as if it plays all Evercade Carts, that means its capable enough hardware to play 3d PS1 games. NeoGeo would be no issue whatsoever... though from memory I'm not sure if we've had an NeoGeo games so far so I don't know if they have an emulator licensed yet.

I think its likely they were keeping the collection to a rough theme and time period, but for me, not including Rainbow Islands, Parasol Stars, or Bubble Symphony alongside Bubble Bobble and New Zealnd Story is a real shame. Equally the Capcom one only having Hyper Fighting and not other Street Fighters seems stingy.

@Mgalens The fact the FFVII models render at a high res but the backgrounds are at a low res drives me mad to the point I find it almost entirely unplayable as I'm constantly distracted by the fact nothing feels connected. If I ever play an old early 3d game emulated, I mostly prefer to have it playing at its native resolution so everything looks and feels "right". I can only abide upscaling in official "remasters" if all the assets have been updated to match - an onscreen HUD constantly in my line of sight there not matching with the gameplay is the quickest way to make me turn off.

In a similar way, its one of my pet peeves that modern games in a retro style often have assets at different resolutions. Pixel graphics, that when the sprite rotates, you end up with "pixels" that are square at 45 degree angles rather than aligning to the grid!? Text and menus that are super crisp and high res but don't match the ingame graphics?! Sprites and background assets that don't match? Argh it makes my brain itch.

Sometimes, if I really love the game, I can excuse it if I remind myself its a design choice and they are sticking to very strict rules as to when to use each specific style - for example Shantae and the Pirate's Curse having all sprite work in 240p but all character portraits and speech in HD. It makes sense. But honestly, if that game had ALL the art and assets in that beautiful pixel style, it would look infinitely better to my eyes and not be something that annoys me but I can "get over it" and respect that it was a choice rather than laziness.

I'm somewhat of a Sonic obsessive as you may have noticed on Nintendolife, but one of the things that I loved so much about Sonic Mania was that everything, menus included, all perfectly aligned to a 240p grid, and was just integer scaled to perfectly match your 4K tv (9x integer scale) or 720p Switch screen (3x integer) or whatever. Its absolutely beautiful. All the rotations, sacling etc looks exactly as it should do, all aligns to the same grid.

I really like Origins Plus but the HD menu that Sega made for it is just so ugly and plain by comparison and ruins that "retro feel" for me - not to mention that their 3d engine for rendering those menus actually broke the Retro Engine code so the edges of the pixels are no longer perfectly integer scaled so appear fuzzy compared to Mania. Argh.

During the pandemic, I decided to re-start my old hobby of game development (which I quit in the late 90s when 3d tech was progresssing too fast for an indie to keep up, and there was no real market for 2d games) and my first thing that I did was find out the exact screen resolution that Sonic Mania was, and program a rendering engine that would allow me to make games for PC and all consoles which would keep that pixel perfect grid and integer scaling to look perfect on every system and every screen... and then I added emulator style options for things like softening, scanlines, rgb sepaaration, tube-emulation warping etc for those who want to take that perfect picture and mess it up to make it feel more like a CRT. But for me, I didn't want to make retro style games for modern systems unless I could know I could replicate that "perfect" look of Mania.