General Old Game Hardware Thread

[Thad]

I'm interested in trying more WonderSwan games, since I've never actually played WonderSwan before.

The only one I've really tried so far is Mega Man and Bass, and it is not good but I was impressed by the graphics. You know, for a late-'90s black-and-white handheld.

I also didn't get far enough to hit any of the vertical segments, so I'm not sure how smoothly those play on the Pocket. But judging by the options in the menu, it appears that the core supports rotating the picture and swapping out the button mappings for vertical mode.

There are a number of translations available, as well as games that aren't text-heavy in the first place, and a handful that have an English-language mode in the options with no modification required, such as...oh dear, it looks like the WS has an excellent version of the original Wizardry, with an automap! and I am sorely tempted but I should really know better; trying to play the original Wizardry only ends in tears.

Other games of interest: I hear good things about Klonoa, there's a Chocobo Mystery Dungeon and what appears to be some kind of Chocobo farm sim/board game I guess, and AFAICT this is probably the best version of the original Game Boy Makai Toushi SaGa? (Though if I want to play a SaGa remake, I'm probably better off going with the DS versions of 2 and 3.) I keep hearing I should check out GunPey and Blue Wing Blitz, and I hear Buffers Evolution is a fun platformer.

I've got plenty to keep me busy on the Pocket, even just limiting myself to handhelds. I just finished the color hack of Super Mario Land 2 and started the color hack of Wario Land, and one of these days I oughta give Oracle of Seasons another shot. And Stuart Gipp over at Retronauts has been doing an exhaustive retrospective on the Game Gear library. But I'll try to remember to give the WonderSwan some attention too.

[nosimpleway]

Dad of Boy is resurfacing the fucky thumbstick issues I'd had previously, so I'm gonna have to shelve it for now. I wonder if, like, phone-repair shops clean out controllers. It doesn't seem like a complicated job, it's just one that I don't have the tools to do.

The shop wanted around $100 to replace both thumbsticks, which a) is not what I asked for and sunglasses smiley is two and a half times what the controller cost in the first place.

So I guess I get to go nutshit on the screws inside knowing the solution is probably to replace the whole controller anyway, and if I manage to clean out whatever grit or crumb or whatever is making the stick... uh, stick without breaking it, then hey, bonus.

[Thad]

Here's a fun read: My quest to re-create Street Fighter’s long-lost pneumatic controls, by Vincent Pureza.

[Mongrel]

That was really neat - never heard of that thing before, but it's cool as all get out. Thanks Thad.

[Thad]

I linked this a couple years back; it's well worth a read if you missed it then: Street Fighter 1: An oral history

[Thad]

Grimace’s Birthday is a new Game Boy Color advergame, and I’m kind of lovin’ it

[Thad]

apparently the EverDrive keeps the currently-loaded game's save on the onboard battery and will overwrite whatever's on the microSD card with that. So you have to load another game and then shut down before you replace a save file on the microSD card. Hat tip to this Reddit thread: [EverDrive GB x7] Transfer saves FROM computer TO Everdrive?

FuuuuuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK I forgot about this and it looks like my Oracle of Seasons save got wiped.

Like, completely; not just sent back to an earlier save but the beginning of the fucking game.

[Thad]

I think I've finally wrapped my head around "super resolutions" and why I keep finding instructions to set my resolution at some ridiculous number like 2720x240.

As I'd previously noticed, AMD cards will output extremly low nonstandard resolutions like 320x240 but Intel and nVidia (generally) won't. Turns out super resolutions are a workaround; give them a high horizontal resolution and that'll compensate for the low vertical resolution. And at stretched fullscreen on a CRT, there's no visible difference, because CRTs output lines, not pixels.

Anyhow, I bought an Intel-based Lenovo mini-PC a few years back that I thought could be a decent emulation box but then I gave up on it because I couldn't get it to output 320x240. I just fired it back up, tried it at 2720x240, and that works, so I think I might be able to get this thing to work as my 240p emulation box.

Which, in practice, means probably MAME for arcade ROMs that the MiSTer doesn't support, plus Saturn and N64 emulation, and maybe the occasional ROM hack for other consoles that doesn't work on authentic hardware (eg the PS2 version of Phantasy Star).

Though Saturn and N64 support for the MiSTer appears to be coming along. (I do have an N64 around here somewhere, but I don't have a flash cart for it so I'm limited to games I've got the original cartridges for if I'm going to play them on the real thing.)

Batocera apparently supports 240p on Intel integrated graphics. Plus it's got Kodi, so I can watch videos on it too.

OTOH GroovyArcade is designed explicitly with CRTs in mind; it's more of a single-purpose distro, so probably no Kodi, but it's likelier to have things actually work at 15KHz with minimal tweaking. (For the games that actually work at 15KHz. This is a TV, not an arcade monitor, so I'd expect to run into trouble on games that weren't designed to run within NTSC standards.)

[Thad]

OTOH GroovyArcade is designed explicitly with CRTs in mind; it's more of a single-purpose distro, so probably no Kodi, but it's likelier to have things actually work at 15KHz with minimal tweaking.

Jury's still out on that one. If I select "15KHz Nvidia/Intel" at the boot menu, it gives me some ncurses screens that are fuzzy and barely legible but actually display correctly on my screen without rolling, which is a pretty impressive feat in itself, but I can't see any of the "Can you see this?" test screens, so the graphical environment never comes up.

I was really hoping for it to find some useful modelines on autoconfig, because I still don't really have a good idea how to set them up beyond trial and error. That

Code: Select all

2720x240_1 53.69318 2720 2900 3154 3410 240 244 247 262 -hsync -vsync

from that link I included yesterday works really nicely but I have no idea where they got that; that's not what I get when I type

Code: Select all

cvt 2720 240 60

, and while the values I get work, they don't fill the screen vertically.

Similar deal with the modeline I got from this Libretro thread:

Code: Select all

xrandr --newmode “1920x240” 37.7 1920 2064 2232 2400 240 243 246 262 -hsync -vsync

Looks great, isn't what I get when I run

Code: Select all

cvt 1920 240 60

, I don't know where the hell they got those values.

Really all I want is a working 480i modeline for menus and videos and stuff; my hope is that Retroarch's CRT Switchres takes care of the rest. So maybe I'll just use the 240p modelines I know are working to fire up Retroarch, then run RPM Racing or something that does 480i and see if I can get a modeline from that.

[Thad]

Definitely leaning back toward "well, this was fun but I don't want to spend any more time on it; I should really just get a cheap AMD desktop."

...what was the problem with the last cheap AMD desktop I bought, anyway? Case was way bigger than it looked in the listing and the processor wound up not being fast enough for Saturn games, wasn't it? Maybe I should try it again just in case.

[Thad]

...yeah, GroovyArcade pretty much just works out of the box on that AMD machine. I really should just give up (again) on trying to get this to run on Intel hardware and see if the current state of Saturn emulation works any better on an Athlon than it did the last time I tried.

If it does, I really need to buy a smaller case for this MF. If it doesn't, well, I can go looking for other cheap old AMD mini-PCs on eBay, or just go back to waiting for Saturn support on the MiSTer.

[Thad]

...yeah, GroovyArcade pretty much just works out of the box on that AMD machine. I really should just give up (again) on trying to get this to run on Intel hardware and see if the current state of Saturn emulation works any better on an Athlon than it did the last time I tried.

It does not.

I'd say I'm back where I started -- Intel graphics are not fit for purpose, AMD graphics are the way to go but this particular AMD processor is too puny for the consoles I want to emulate -- but what's changed since the last time I went through this song and dance is now GroovyArcade is a viable distro and now I don't have to manually fuck around with modelines anymore, which really changes everything. I definitely don't see attempting this again on any other distro but GroovyArcade.

I might try fucking around with settings and maybe overclocking to see if I can get any better performance. Maybe try a discrete graphics card instead of onboard graphics (I've got an old ATI around here somewhere), but probably not; I don't think Saturn is one of the consoles where emulation benefits from more cores or a discrete graphics card.

If I feel particularly motivated I could try buying a cheap old AMD mini-PC (or even an old Intel mini-PC that'll take an old half-height AMD graphics card), but the smart thing to do here is to drop this project again and just wait and see how the Saturn MiSTer core works out.

[Thad]

Looking at the reqs for YabaSanshiro and Mednafen/Beetle I don't see getting this to work with a sub-3GHz CPU. (And I tried to do it with a damn Pi 4. Whoever said that was a viable option has lower standards than I do.)

The GroovyArcade hardware recommendations page says a Ryzen 2400G should do the job, and eBay is lousy with HP mini-PCs with those in them in the $100 range. The part that's a crapshoot is this:

The bridged VGA may not support low dotclocks or interlaced, depends on the mobo

and I don't see anybody specifically commenting on the HP model I'm seeing on eBay. If I were going to play this game, one potential tradeoff would be to spend $25 more to get one of the mini-desktop-sized ones; it would take up more space and I wouldn't be able to fit it in the rack with my other retro gaming stuff but if onboard video didn't work I could buy a cheap ATI graphics card and pop that in there.

But I'm probably at "mothball this again for now and keep an eye on that MiSTer core." Maybe keep an eye on those eBay listings, though.

[Thad]

The GroovyArcade hardware recommendations page says a Ryzen 2400G should do the job, and eBay is lousy with HP mini-PCs with those in them in the $100 range. The part that's a crapshoot is this:

The bridged VGA may not support low dotclocks or interlaced, depends on the mobo

...actually, if I'm willing to cede the latency of an onboard DAC, then...what's the point of buying a separate computer at all? I've already got a perfectly good desktop computer with an AMD graphics card in the same room as my CRT TV; I could just run one of its video outputs to a converter to the TV.

[Thad]

Hm. I've got an old 4.2GHz i3 I'm not using, too. Even if I don't want to fuck around with Intel graphics, I could always drop an old ATI card in it.

The MB it's in is not compact, though, and I don't have a case for it.

[Mongrel]

Now you've got me trying to remember... Was it one of you guys who builds their computers by mounting all the components on the wall, fully exposed?

[Thad]

Not me. But it would be handy to have a test station about now. If I *do* end up testing this thing out, it's probably going to be by precariously balancing it in a case it doesn't fit in.

[Thad]

Not me. But it would be handy to have a test station about now.

Ended up ordering an open-air case.

I got some birthday money, an amount where I can buy myself something nice and still have enough left over that I don't feel guilty about it. I'll probably buy some kind of retro gaming something, and it'll probably be another crack at setting up a 240p emulation machine, but I haven't made up my mind yet. An EverDrive 64 is still tempting; there's an N64 core in the works for the MiSTer but it's pushing the limits of the hardware and I'm not sure it'll ever hit the point where I can just stash my N64 and not need it anymore. But maybe!

Or I could get a WonderSwan. I've been pretty interested in the games since I started trying them out on my Pocket, and playing on the Pocket is great but it's one of those systems the Pocket will never be able to reproduce accurately, between the unusual refresh rate and the unusual form factor.

But most likely I'll keep pushing forward with the "try to build a 240p emulation box" project, since it's something I've been picking at for years and feel like I'm finally getting close to getting it.

But even with stuff like GroovyArcade making it a lot easier, it's still a complicated project, with all kinds of possible hardware variations whose compatibility isn't documented. Much as I'd love to have a mini-PC that I can just stash in the mini-cabinet with my consoles, the most versatile option is going to be a full-size computer case -- because that way I'm not stuck relying on onboard graphics, and if there's a compatibility/latency issue with onboard graphics I can just stick an old ATI card in.

And I've got this 4.2GHz i3 I'm not using that should do just fine as a GroovyArcade box if I stick an ATI card in it, but the cost of cases is high enough that it might be cheaper for me just to buy a used computer. Course, that raises a whole host of other questions.

At the very least, I've got that open-air case coming, so I can rig the i3 up to it and see how it does. I can figure out a case/computer after that, I guess.

Need a cooler and RAM, though. I think I probably still have the stock cooler around here somewhere. Not sure what happened to the RAM; I probably stuck it in another computer. Given that it was DDR4 my guess is I put it in my old desktop, which I've donated since. Oh well. Should be able to get 8GB of DDR4 for under $20.

[Thad]

The other thing about the WonderSwan is that the flash cart situation is pretty limited. The Flash Masta is the only memory card there is at present (and when I say "at present" I mean it's currently out of stock but the next batch is available for preorder), and with all respect to the folks who made it, it isn't exactly an EverDrive. It can only store 14 games at a time, and only one of them can have a save file. Somebody else is maybe possibly working on another flash cart, but it may or may not ever materialize.

It occurs to me that a Switch would be a good solid choice for WS emulation, but I'm always leery of jailbreaking a currently-supported device.

You know what's not a currently-supported device? The Vita. (I mean technically they delayed shutting down the store, so it's "currently supported" in the bare-minimum possible sense, but you're probably not going to lose out on much functionality at this point if you softmod it and never connect to the official servers.) And I see you can get one of those in (allegedly) pretty good shape for under $150 on eBay.

I already have one, sort of, but it's a PS TV, not a handheld.

I've never looked into WS emulation on the Vita but I suppose its layout would do in a pinch. It's got two sticks, one of those PlayStation D-pads that's kind of like four discrete buttons but not really, and four face buttons.

I've always kind of wanted a Vita. I don't know that it's any great shakes as far as unique titles (I think most of its best games wound up getting ported to Switch and/or PC), but even if it's just a PSP but better that's not a bad thing to be.

[Thad]

And I've got this 4.2GHz i3 I'm not using that should do just fine as a GroovyArcade box if I stick an ATI card in it, but the cost of cases is high enough that it might be cheaper for me just to buy a used computer. Course, that raises a whole host of other questions.

At the very least, I've got that open-air case coming, so I can rig the i3 up to it and see how it does. I can figure out a case/computer after that, I guess.

Need a cooler and RAM, though. I think I probably still have the stock cooler around here somewhere. Not sure what happened to the RAM; I probably stuck it in another computer. Given that it was DDR4 my guess is I put it in my old desktop, which I've donated since. Oh well. Should be able to get 8GB of DDR4 for under $20.

Couldn't find the stock cooler. Bought a cooler and some RAM.

The i3's onboard graphics actually work with GroovyArcade's framebuffer settings out of the box, so I can navigate the menus and install, but X crashes when I try to launch it so I can't actually play anything. Could try to troubleshoot it, but nah.

I've got an old ATI card (I wanna say Radeon HD 2560) lying around. It's only got DVI-I ports but I managed to find the VGA dongle that it came with. So far so good, everything working out of the box. Haven't actually tried firing up any emulators yet; waiting on software updates. But cautiously optimistic.

So it seems like I've got everything I need, though a more permanent case would be a good idea. Again, the MB is a beast, so that's something of a disadvantage, and this graphics card is full-height, so between those two things I'm gonna end up with a pretty big case, which isn't ideal but is something I guess I can deal with and probably get a good-enough one for around $50.

Or I could try to find a half-height card and/or a smaller LGA1151 motherboard. I could probably find both of those without adding too much to the overall cost, and then I'd have more options for possible cases. Nothing super-compact if I'm going to be using a graphics card, but can at least get something smaller than full-height/ATX.

Should probably see how it actually runs first. Cautiously optimistic; 4.2 GHz should be plenty. The i3's only got two cores, but I don't intend to use this machine for any emulators that really benefit from extra cores anyway.