Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

[Sergeant Politeness]

Although I'd like the NES controller to plug into the Wiimote for nostalgia, I have zero interest in the Mini because any games I'd want I already got a long time ago on Virtual Console.

The Classic Edition wasn't meant for your average gamer, I think. I think it was meant for people who had an NES as a kid, lost interest in gaming, and now want something easy like that for nostalgia. Somehow though, I'm astonished that Nintendo had an HDMI plug-n-play that printed money and still managed to fuck it up. Apparently they're coming out with an SNES Classic Edition, which will likely have the same sort of issues and limited shelf life. I have a Classic Controller, SNES emulator, I'll pass on that too.

On another note, anyone here into homebrew games? I love them. You see lots on the Atari, and I think the Dreamcast still has games coming out for it too. I was gearing up to learn Assembly at some point to code my own homebrew, but it's all still a bit Greek to me.

 

[XYZpdq]

I had an NES back in the day and all that follows, but for actually "retro gaming" I had a long stretch at a job where I had fuckall to actually do so I'd sit out in front with IMBnes, my modded PSX, and the TV that everybody used to play video games on when they were fucking around. I was lucky to get cheap one of those tough as fuck Hori sticks that were sold as "Tekken Arcade Stick" or whatever at the dawn of the PSX. So it was loafing around, smoking, playing old games for a while.

Good times.

 

[TrippinKahlua]

One thing about Retro gaming that isn't talked about anymore and seems to be entirely forgotten is how corrupted your NES games appeared sometimes, yet still worked. The most common form of this phenomena involved Vertical Lines going down your entire screen. Other times the graphics would be entirely scrambled.

Its too bad nobody has documented any of this shit.

Sometimes beta elements appeared in the scrambled graphics. I once stumbled onto a World 0 in SMB3 unlike what we have documentation on, and even entered a level! Freaking wished I recorded that night so I can prove this.

 

[Wraith]

My best friend and I are running toasters right now, but we have a slough of old games we have been nipping at. We just pick one for the night and goof around with it. I've pretty much been showing her these various games.
Wizardry 8
Postal 2
Portal 2 (It's been pretty much this and Wizardry 8 for the last few days.)
Mechwarrior 3 (My fav.)
Diablo II (Stupidly upgraded to 1.13 and can't get into Hell difficulty much because of how ass it became. I beat this with 1.09 on Hell playing single player years ago and wanted to show her how to play. She likes it.)
Morrowind
Bookworm
Bejeweled 3 (It's all her, don't judge me! )
and Plants vs. Zombies, but I pretty much just went through it a few days ago.

I've been trying to get her into emulation because of Genesis / SNES JRPGs (she loves them,) but we only have so much spare time and yeah. I did get her to play older Pokemon via emulators though.

 

[Leo Bonhart]

I finished Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake today in the Ultimate Edition (or whatever it's called) for the PS3.
It was actually an amazing game. The first Metal Gear for the MSX had some extremely retarded moments (stand on this exact square and call in a request for a rocket launcher which will appear in the sealed room you just explored ,amongst others.), but this one was an amazingly well-paced, intelligent (if a bit Hollywoodish) military yarn and completely beatable without resorting to a walkthrough.

I tried - for shits and giggles - to play the Kojima-less North America / European sequel to Metal Gear, Snakes Revenge, but I gave up an hour into it. Life is too short for mediocre NES games.

Full disclosure, I've only played the Gamecube version of Metal Gear Solid 1 and now the first two in the series. I'm looking forward to getting all caught up.

 

[DumbDosh]

The Classic Edition wasn't meant for your average gamer, I think. I think it was meant for people who had an NES as a kid, lost interest in gaming, and now want something easy like that for nostalgia. Somehow though, I'm astonished that Nintendo had an HDMI plug-n-play that printed money and still managed to fuck it up. Apparently they're coming out with an SNES Classic Edition, which will likely have the same sort of issues and limited shelf life. I have a Classic Controller, SNES emulator, I'll pass on that too.

On another note, anyone here into homebrew games? I love them. You see lots on the Atari, and I think the Dreamcast still has games coming out for it too. I was gearing up to learn Assembly at some point to code my own homebrew, but it's all still a bit Greek to me.

Homebrew games are the shit, and really bulk up the libraries on some obscure systems.

Weird dreamcast homebrew and odd ports from pc games was all I burned for the first few months I owned my Dreamcast. It's also cool when prototypes get leaked out in a playable and burnable format, it was really neat to be able to check out something like Sonic Xtreme as unfinished as it was.

The furthest I went out of my way to get homebrew stuff was paying this one guy who lives in europe that makes Virtual Boy flashcarts, now it's not a multicart, it's just a regular virtual boy cartridge painted white with a micro usb input and you have to use pc software to flash either a homebrew or official game to it every time you want to put something new on it. There is a lot of interesting Virtual Boy homebrew, there's even a game boy emulator for the virtual boy where you have to choose the 1 or 2 games you want to put on the emulator, then create a rom of that emulator with those games on it, then flash that to the cart. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to play Pokemon Red or Super Mario Land on a Virtual Boy, but it's an interesting novelty.

I pretty much mod any system I have that can be easily softmodded to run emulators, homebrew or just run everything off a hard drive so I don't have to thumb through my disc binders. I've been looking into buying a few everdrives since it seems like the n64 one is perfect, and being able to emulate snes and genesis games on a gba sp or micro sounds incredible. But so far from what I've experienced the PSP Go is the ultimate emulation machine, you get ps1 classics, standard arcade, snes, genesis, nes, gba emulators with a semi working n64 emulator too, but not only is it portable but if you have a PS3 you can sync a dualshock 3 to a PSPgo so you can actually use a normal controller on it, and it easily hooks up to av cables so you have like a little emulation station.

I think the original Wii is without a doubt my favorite console to play emulators on though. Not only does it have the capability of emulating the nintendo arcade games like F Zero AX and Mario Kart GP1 and 2 but the usb inputs are odd in that they will kind of auto recognize a dance pad or some usb controllers, so you can play at least any nes virtual console game (official or customly made by modders) with a DDR dance pad. The custom emulators on the wii also take advantage of the motion controls in options too so you can choose to have tilt or motion controls in quite a few games, I know for a fact the GBA emulator has specific tilt options so you can steer in mario kart and also play the GBA games like warioware twisted that had tilt controls as they were meant to be played, just on a bigger TV. I guess the Wii U would be more preferable though since the virtual wii mode has all of this stuff in it plus a modded wii u has its own emulators and homebrew. Also one of the best wii homebrew that no one mentions is the wii Quake port that uses metroid prime 3ish controls, and it works way better than it has any right to. I also remember a weird custom homebrew version of NES Mike Tyson's Punch Out for the wii that allowed you to use the Donkey Konga bongos as a controller for the punches, which was the biggest reason I sought out to buy those bongos.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

Also one of the best wii homebrew that no one mentions is the wii Quake port that uses metroid prime 3ish controls, and it works way better than it has any right to.

I remember WiiQuake. If I didn't absolutely need mouse and keyboard to get anywhere good in an FPS, I'd still have it downloaded.

I mostly know the Atari homebrew stuff, and there's a lot of vibrant and well done homebrew out there that pushes the Atari to its limits. I remember these super-accurate ports of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong to replace the awful original ports, and aside from ROM limitations, they're dead ringers. People still (or used to) code their own new Atari games, and some of them are actually pretty great. There's one that uses the paddle controllers called SCSIcide, where you're this hard drive reading bits off a disk. It's basically a slightly less monotonous Fast Food, but I enjoyed it. Apparently the guy had to reverse engineer the paddle controllers off official Atari code because it was all undocumented in the late 90s. Go figure.

Another great thing about Atari homebrew is that sometimes, the games would actually get burned on real carts and sold in box with a manual, like SCSIcide did. I know AtariAge either still does or used to have yearly holiday games that were also pretty fun, and they got print runs too. Sometimes weird prototypes from forever ago would get print runs after the fact. Rob Fulop, who programmed the original 2600 port of Missile Command and Demon Attack, had this game called Actionauts where you had to program a robot to navigate a maze using the joystick, and it never got released. Skip ahead to 2007, and a full boxed version of the game was sold at expos and shit.

Out of all things, the Atari should not have been able to do half the stuff people have made it do, and I find it so fascinating. Atari games are their own world of weird when you really start to dig, too. I dunno if people are still programming for it, I've been out of the homebrew scene for awhile, but if anyone's curious about all this, AtariAge and AtariProtos are really great sites for learning more about it.

 

[Flowey The Flower]

I feel like complete hipster garbage for saying this but I really wanna play the first Mother game at some point. I'll probably be waiting all my life for Nintendo to officially release it outside Japan to no avail.

 

[Hodor]

I feel like complete hipster garbage for saying this but I really wanna play the first Mother game at some point. I'll probably be waiting all my life for Nintendo to officially release it outside Japan to no avail.

earthbound beginnings

 

[Laughs_Under_Lucricities]

Still play SNES via emulation.

 

[trueandhonestfan]

earthbound beginnings

Was that released as a virtual console game or just a Wii U download game?

 

[Wallace]

OpenEmu is my jam. I wish they would absorb Dolphin so I could play GameCube on it. And as long as I'm dreaming, a PS2 emulator that isn't shit would be nice too.

 

[Flowey The Flower]

earthbound beginnings

Correction: a release of Mother on a console that people actually own.

 

[Morose_Obesity]

Nerds argue whether Frogger is a platformer: https://www.trueachievements.com/forum/viewthread.aspx?tid=914617

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

I'm halfway through converting an old upright point-of-sale unit into an arcade cabinet running RetroPi. Shit's gonna be cash.

 

[Zero_Sum]

Anyone seen this: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.eu...-new-mega-drive-game-four-years-in-the-making

New game being released for the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, and it looks the shit. Properly gorgeous pixel art, and it looks like it'll play like Streets of Rage.

It's getting a full retail release. 60 bucks is too rich for me though, disappointing they're not releasing a Rom only option for emulators, because I'd happily throw them a bit of cash, if not the full 60.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

Anyone seen this: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.eu...-new-mega-drive-game-four-years-in-the-making

New game being released for the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, and it looks the shit. Properly gorgeous pixel art, and it looks like it'll play like Streets of Rage.

It's getting a full retail release. 60 bucks is too rich for me though, disappointing they're not releasing a Rom only option for emulators, because I'd happily throw them a bit of cash, if not the full 60.

That's actually badass. Comes with a color manual and one of those hard plastic boxes, too? With modern games, even if you get a physical release (looking at you, 3DS), you rarely get a manual at all, much less one in color. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who reads that shit, but it's appreciated nonetheless.

The other thing is, I wonder how they got past the Genesis lockout chip. Everything else is properly documented if you know where to look, but the lockout chips in the NES, SNES, and Genesis escape me. Must be some proper custom chipwork, or maybe they reuse chips from other games. Dunno.

 

[Zero_Sum]

Dunno man, but check out this fight stick you can get with it.

http://paprium.com

That's awesome.

Is it possible they actually licensed it from Sega?

EDIT: The lockout chip, I mean.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

Is it possible they actually licensed it from Sega?

Possibility, I guess. Lockout chips might seem like a minor detail, but it's why the Atari has so much homebrew; there isn't one. There's a bunch of weird ways unlicensed games got around the lockout chip, the most infamous being the Game Genie for the NES and Super 3D Noah's Ark for the SNES. As for the Genesis, dunno.

As for that fight stick, that's pretty great. Heavy-duty shit right there. Reminds me of the NES Advantage, or that Genesis arcade stick that's apparently pretty well made:


Mark from Classic Game Room did a review of it a while ago and I remember really wanting to get one when I got my Genesis. (Then I never did.) Kinda weird that these used to just be official controller options and now the only people who make fight sticks cater almost exclusively to the tournament market.

 

[sikotik]

The other thing is, I wonder how they got past the Genesis lockout chip. Everything else is properly documented if you know where to look, but the lockout chips in the NES, SNES, and Genesis escape me. Must be some proper custom chipwork, or maybe they reuse chips from other games. Dunno.

Trademark Security System and Sega v. Accolade
Main article: Sega v. Accolade
After the release of the Sega Genesis in 1989, video game publisher Accolade began exploring options to release some of their PC game titles onto the console. At the time, Sega had a licensing deal in place for third-party developers that increased the costs to the developer. According to Accolade co-founder Alan Miller, "One pays them between $10 and $15 per cartridge on top of the real hardware manufacturing costs, so it about doubles the cost of goods to the independent publisher."[65] To get around licensing, Accolade chose to seek an alternative way to bring their games to the Genesis. It did so by purchasing one in order to decompile the executable code of three Genesis games. Such information was used to program their new Genesis cartridges in a way that would allow them to disable the security lockouts on the Genesis that prevented unlicensed games from being able to be played.[66][67] This strategy was used successfully to bring Ishido: The Way of Stones to the Genesis in 1990.[68] To do so, Accolade had copied Sega's copyrighted game code multiple times in order to reverse engineer the software of Sega's licensed Genesis games.[69][70]

An edition of the original model of Genesis, known as the Genesis III, was the model at the center of Sega v. Accolade for its incorporation of the Trademark Security System (TMSS)
As a result of piracy from foreign countries and unlicensed development issues, Sega incorporated a technical protection mechanism into a new edition of the Genesis released in 1990, referred to as the Genesis III. This new variation of the Genesis included a code known as the Trademark Security System (TMSS), which, when a game cartridge was inserted, would check for the presence of the string "SEGA" at a particular point in the memory contained in the cartridge. If the string was present, the console would run the game, and would briefly display the message: "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises, Ltd."[66] This system had a twofold effect: it added extra protection against unlicensed developers and software piracy, and forced the Sega trademark to display when the game was powered up, making a lawsuit for trademark infringement possible if unlicensed software were to be developed.[67][70] Accolade learned of this development at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1991, where Sega showed the new Genesis III and demonstrated it screening and rejecting an Ishido game cartridge.[67]With more games planned for the following year, Accolade successfully identified the TMSS file. It later added this file to the games HardBall!, Star Control, Mike Ditka Power Football, and Turrican.[67]

In response to the creation of these unlicensed games, Sega filed suit against Accolade in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, on charges of trademark infringement, unfair competition, and copyright infringement. In response, Accolade filed a counterclaim for falsifying the source of its games by displaying the Sega trademark when the game was powered up.[69][71] Although the district court initially ruled for Sega and issued an injunction preventing Accolade from continuing to reverse engineer the Genesis, Accolade appealed the verdict to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.[72]

As a result of the appeal, the Ninth Circuit overturned the district court's verdict and ruled that Accolade's decompilation of the Sega software constituted fair use.[73] The court's written opinion followed on October 20, 1992, and noted that the use of the software was non-exploitative, although commercial.[66][74] Further, the court found that the trademark infringement, being required by the TMSS for a Genesis game to run on the system, had been inadvertently triggered by a fair use act and was the fault of Sega for having caused false labeling.[66] Ultimately, Sega and Accolade settled the case on April 30, 1993. As a part of this settlement, Accolade became an official licensee of Sega, and later developed and released Barkley Shut Up and Jam! while under license.[75] The terms of the licensing, including whether or not any special arrangements or discounts were made to Accolade, were not released to the public.[76] The financial terms of the settlement were also not disclosed, although both companies agreed to pay their own legal costs.[77]