General Old Game Hardware Thread

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Thu May 20, 2021 8:23 pm

Adding: The answer to "Why not just play it on my MiSTer?" is that MiSTer's Genesis core doesn't support EEPROM saves.

If you tried to play Wily Wars in an emulator back in the old days, you may have noticed saving your game didn't work (and therefore you couldn't access the extra Wily Tower game that requires you to beat the other three games). That's because it saved to EEPROM, not SRAM like most Genesis games. I think most Genesis emulators support EEPROM saves now, but the MiSTer core isn't there yet.

There are various versions of the game that have been modded to use SRAM instead of EEPROM, but this version of the game isn't one of them. AIUI, this is based on the ROM on the Genesis Mini, which is a more recent revision than the Sega Channel one that's been floating around for decades. And on top of that, the Limited Run listing says that Retrobit has made some tweaks to reduce the severe slowdown that was present in the original version. Which, on balance, is a good thing, though I gotta say being able to bullet-time my way through the Yellow Devil fight had its advantages.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Fri May 21, 2021 12:34 pm

And here's an ad:



Preorders are open, for the next 30 days.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Sat Jun 19, 2021 4:01 pm

Game Boy Advance game gets split-screen multiplayer through new FPGA core

Somebody's built a MiSTer core that implements 2 GBAs simultaneously and implemented link cable functionality for splitscreen multiplayer.

I've mentioned before that I'm curious about whether anyone can achieve full Super Game Boy functionality, which would require running a SNES and a Game Boy core simultaneously. Wonder if this gets us any closer to that, or if it's feasible on the DE10 Nano.

Some discussion in the comments about the toxicity of the MiSTer community, which I was unaware of but which is sadly unsurprising.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Blossom » Sat Jun 19, 2021 9:14 pm

let me know when we're emulating a full 16-player deathmatch of faceball 2000 on the game boy
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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby JD » Mon Jun 21, 2021 10:38 am

I remember when the NO$GMB emulator let you do split-screen multiplayer and you could use it to trade Pokemon between Red and Blue. A limitation was that you could only emulate the same cartridge, but since the save file format for Pokemon Red and Blue are identical, you could just rename the savefile from Red to Blue and it'd work.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Tue Aug 31, 2021 3:17 pm

More than you ever wanted to know about TG-16 color palettes and why emulators were doing it wrong for decades. (tl;dr there were some color adjustments made in the digital-to-analog conversion process that have only recently been reverse-engineered.)

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Sun Dec 12, 2021 6:04 pm

They're opening Pocket preorders again on Tuesday. They're claiming that this time "everyone who wants a Pocket will be able to secure an order" but of course what that means is that when you don't order fast enough you'll get a "great, we'll take your money and send you one in a year or two" message instead of a "sold out" message.

That said: Analogue is generally pretty highly-regarded (despite some muddled messaging about whether or not discontinued products were really discontinued); they're a reputable company that makes quality products. I expect that people who preorder the Pocket will get one. Eventually. Possibly sometime in 2023. If there aren't more delays.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Mon Dec 13, 2021 3:28 pm

Ars Technica's Sam Machkovech reviews the Analogue Pocket and it's extremely positive. He's got a few complaints but overall he's really impressed by it.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Grath » Tue Dec 14, 2021 12:33 am

Thad wrote:They're opening Pocket preorders again on Tuesday. They're claiming that this time "everyone who wants a Pocket will be able to secure an order" but of course what that means is that when you don't order fast enough you'll get a "great, we'll take your money and send you one in a year or two" message instead of a "sold out" message.

That said: Analogue is generally pretty highly-regarded (despite some muddled messaging about whether or not discontinued products were really discontinued); they're a reputable company that makes quality products. I expect that people who preorder the Pocket will get one. Eventually. Possibly sometime in 2023. If there aren't more delays.

Worth noting, apparently they were massive dicks to the lead dev on an emulator project, and promises of opening some source and documentation have fallen through with previous projects.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 14, 2021 11:40 am

That's disappointing but not exactly surprising. Proprietary software advocates tend to have some very strange ideas about the benefits they get from keeping their software proprietary.

Especially the ones who are selling hardware.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Dec 14, 2021 11:43 am

That one definitely reads more like incompetence than malice to me*, but of course it's 2021 and we've all learned that in most cases where it can be either it's safe to assume both.

The closed source FPGA stuff is scummy but ultimately harmless imho, at least to people not in line to be buttfucked by Nintendo's legal team. My only interest in the Pocket remains, hey look, a fully portable, field-programmable field-programmable gate array.

* Source: I am a former and quite possibly near-future 1099 software dev and have had contract negotiations go exactly like that, usually with advertising guys.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 14, 2021 11:59 am

...anyway, there's a followup review of the add-ons.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 14, 2021 12:25 pm

I went ahead and ordered one, plus a screen protector. No word yet on what order group I'm in or when I'll be getting it.

I figure I'll eventually order a dock (and a DAC so I can use the dock with my CRT TV -- ETA and maybe a Game Gear cartridge adapter; I've got some Game Gear cartridges around here somewhere) but that's more money than I wanted to spend today. And again, I don't even know when I'll be getting the thing; if I end up in the "yeah we'll get it to you sometime in 2023" group then I'm not exactly in a huge hurry to get a dock for it.

It'll be interesting to see what other devs come up with once they start getting their hands on them. There's that second Cyclone V FPGA, which is the same one they've got in their Genesis and SNES clones, so I expect we'll see those implemented before too long. (I don't know much about VHDL but my understanding is it's not hardware-specific and should be easily portable. If that's true, then I expect to see a lot of the open-source FPGA-based console cores show up on it. That Cyclone V isn't as burly as the DE10-Nano that the MiSTer uses, so I wouldn't expect it to handle, say, Neo-Geo, but I'd expect to see most of its 16-bit contemporaries at some point.)

Way I see it, the holy grail is getting the two FPGAs to work in tandem, one simulating Game Boy and the other simulating SNES, for real-ass Super Game Boy reproduction. I don't know how feasible that actually is, but it would be pretty damn cool. (Not exactly necessary in my case -- I've already got a Super Game Boy and a Game Boy Everdrive -- but "not necessary, but a pretty impressive technical feat" is kind of the name of the game here.)

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Niku » Tue Dec 14, 2021 8:12 pm

I'm hoping the preorders are actually like, up in perpetuity until they just become orders and are not a one-day thing 'cause I can't really put phantom money down this week what with it being right in the middle of Christmas season what the fuck Analogue.
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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Mon Mar 14, 2022 7:54 pm

If you've been thinking about getting an EverDrive but haven't gotten around to it, you may want to get on it. Krikzz, the guy who makes them, is Ukrainian and unable to make any more for the foreseeable future due to the Russian invasion. (According to RetroRGB, he's left the country and is safe.)

Stone Age Gamer still has some models in stock at regular prices, but it's not going to be long before you'll only be able to find them overpriced on eBay. I went to snag one of the N64 models while I still could but they're already gone.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Mongrel » Mon Mar 14, 2022 9:33 pm

Thad wrote:If you've been thinking about getting an EverDrive but haven't gotten around to it, you may want to get on it. Krikzz, the guy who makes them, is Ukrainian and unable to make any more for the foreseeable future due to the Russian invasion. (According to RetroRGB, he's left the country and is safe.)

Stone Age Gamer still has some models in stock at regular prices, but it's not going to be long before you'll only be able to find them overpriced on eBay. I went to snag one of the N64 models while I still could but they're already gone.

FYI when I clicked on it just now it was showing some N64 models in stock. Maybe if you move quick?
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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 18, 2022 10:03 pm

Previously, in the Final Fantasy thread:

Thad wrote:The grunts weren't too difficult. The greatest challenge was my old nemesis, Incorrect Blitz Input. I found that left-left-down-down-right worked most of the time for Phoenix Dance but it still failed sometimes too. By the end I was tempted to dig out my old macro controller. (I'm kinda curious what was responsible for the failure rate. Is it that blitzes were always finicky? Is it that problem with diagonals I've heard about on 8bitdo controllers? Flaky Bluetooth? At any rate it seemed like it failed a lot more than usual.)


Thad wrote:And I managed to get an "Incorrect Blitz input" at least once on Pummel, which leads me to believe it's not a problem with the diagonals on this controller. Maybe it's just spotty Bluetooth. I went ahead and ordered one of those 2.4GHz RF controllers to see if that works any better. At the very least I shouldn't ever have to worry about having to do the fucking pairing dance.


Can confirm the 2.4GHz* controller works much smoother with blitzes. Phoenix Dance hasn't failed yet. This guy did a teardown and noted that the D-pad circuit is different, so that could have something to do with it (though he says he didn't personally notice any difference in the diagonals).



The first time I fired it up I did have a lot of trouble with presses just getting dropped. I had the Bluetooth dongle plugged into controller port 2 at the time; I unplugged it and didn't have any further issues, so I think it's likely the Bluetooth dongle was interfering with the 2.4GHz signal. Which is unfortunate because I would like to be able to do multiplayer with wireless controllers someday, but I've got a multitap and maybe the interference won't be so bad if the Bluetooth receiver isn't quite so close to the 2.4GHz receiver.

I've also seen benchmarks indicating that the 2.4GHz controllers are substantially lower-latency than the Bluetooth ones. Doesn't matter for something like FF6, but I wonder if I'd notice a difference on a twitch action game. I played through the entirety of SMB3 with one of those Bluetooth controllers and it was miserable; I'm pretty sure part of that was that I hadn't realized I needed to go on blood pressure meds yet, but in hindsight I wonder if latency was fucking with my reaction time too. The downside to the 2.4GHz controllers is that they're tied to the dongle they come with and you can't pair them to any other dongle, so I can't use this 2.4GHz SNES controller on an NES or any other console. (Though I guess if I wanted to play SMB3 with it there's always the All-Stars version.)

* Bluetooth is also 2.4GHz, but that's what they call it so I'm gonna go with that

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Thu Apr 28, 2022 5:32 pm

Was talking about PS2 controllers over in the game hacks thread.

Out of curiosity I checked and it looks like, since my PS2 is modchipped, I could plug a PS3 or 4 controller into one of the USB ports and play PS2 games with it. (Apparently OPL, the Open PS2 loader, supports it.)

But not a PS1 game, unless I used POPS.

POPS is an official PS1 emulator for the PS2 that was included in some PS2 releases that were collections of PS1 games. Modders have extracted it and you can install it on a modded PS2 as a general-purpose PS1 emulator.

I don't really see any point to actually doing that, beyond just to see if I could; the entire point of playing PS1 games on a PS2 is that you're playing them on original PS1 hardware (or something close enough to it as to be indistinguishable on the vast majority of games). If I were going to play PS1 games on an emulator, I wouldn't choose POPS. It's an interesting historical curiosity, but there are better choices as far as actually playing games.

There do appear to be dongles that'll let you plug modern controllers into the PS2 controller slot, though, and those should presumably work with any game that runs on a PS2.

I don't think I'll actually buy any of those -- I've still got plenty of PS1 and 2 controllers around here somewhere and I figure some of them are bound to be in decent condition -- but it's neat that they're out there.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 01, 2022 4:52 am

...and then there's this option.

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Re: General Old Game Hardware Thread

Postby Thad » Sun May 01, 2022 7:34 pm

I did find that Logitech wireless PS2 controller (while I was looking for something else).

I bought it when I was living in my first apartment, '06, '07; near the end of the PS2's lifespan. Wouldn't have used it much, comparatively speaking; I'm sure I played DQ8 and FF12 with it. So I'm probably never going to play enough PS2 at this point to actually wear it out.

I played up to maybe the second save point in SotN. D-pad gets the job done. Did find my left thumb cramping; not sure if it's the controller or just my general decrepitude.

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