GravyThief

I was just about to purchase it. £12.99 for the physical seemed more than reasonable. But then it added £6 for postage (in the UK), nearly half the cost of the book. Surely it can be posted cheaper than that?

Excellent re… oh wait, that’s what I commented back in 2019 when I first read this article and have since completely forgotten 🤣

Well I for one am glad it happened exactly the way it did.

My favourite Castlevania soundtrack is probably the first N64 game. That violin on the opening title screen is amazing, and I love the ambient and atmospheric tunes that play throughout the game. I actually like the game as well (yes really)

I’m intrigued by the C64 one, as I had one growing up so would love an easy way to play many of the games again. I tried emulation on my laptop but it was too fiddly and I never game on laptops.

However, I don’t recognise any of those games, so I’d have to rely on loading my own ones via SD card. But will that be easy and seamless, or will it be fiddly with glitches and issues? I’d need to understand that a lot more before spending money on this.

@sdelfin thanks. I’ll definitely try that. I did read the manual last time (not that I remember any of it now) so I’ll try and find a guide or a video just to help me along. I used to love SIM City on the SNES, so I’m not averse to some light sim’ing in my games, I just need to know what I’m meant to be doing.

I really should try and get into this. I love the first level, the music, how it plays etc. It’s the sim part that comes next that puts me off. From the above comments it sounds like those parts are quite linear and simplistic, which is actually a good thing for me. I think I just need to spend a little time figuring out what you’re meant to do.

I would never even consider powering my consoles from the 80s, 90s and 00s with any type of USB adapter. It’s just never entered my consciousness. I always just buy the original power bricks.

I won’t be buying one, but it has nothing to do with who owns the company, I just have no interest in the Neo Geo. If I did, then I’d buy it. I cannot be ar5ed considering who owns what company in my purchasing decisions. If I did, I’d probably hardly buy anything and be less happy as a result.

Great read, thank you!

As expected, graphically it looks much nicer than any of the NES Mario games, and is much more colourful too. It’s a shame it didn’t receive all the good games that the NES got, it was a much better system hardware-wise.

I had an email a few months back to say that DOOM on SNES was delayed from Jan’26 to May’26. I was fine with this. Although I did receive an email earlier this week to say they’re preparing my order for shipping. So I guess they’re sending them out sooner than they anticipated. Which would normally be good, except I’m on holiday next week and they use EVRI on the UK side. So goodness knows what’s going to happen to it. They usually just leave parcels on my front doorstep, without waiting to see if anyone is actually in or not. I really hate EVRI, hopefully they go bust soon.

Given you need to have the cart in hand, a good old gamebit screwdriver is a much better and cheaper method in my opinion. Just open it up and check the board. And it works for any system, not just gameboy.

Thought that was Clarkson when I first scrolled down

There’s something out already where you can literally plug the GB camera directly into your phone via USB-C and it shows as a drive, where you can transfer the photos to your phone. It’s literally plug and play. I forget which device it is now. Is it the Benn Venn Joey Jr?

Really interesting, thanks!

@Damo how do you manage to keep the print on such old till receipts? I have receipts from a few months ago that I can barely read!

@Sketcz I have no idea who Frank Cifasda is, or how to pronounce his surname, but what did you guys here do to make him hate Time Extension so much? Did you make him cry?

Thanks for showing the picture of a screenshot showing the pop-up of an arbitrary achievement counter. I don’t need to read the rest of the article to realise this isn’t for me. Cheers.

What’s the issue? What are these unintentional amusing moments? Or do I have to watch a video to find out?

I have great memories of playing DM on the SNES. I found the first person view and ambient sounds so immersive, even if I did get lost and confused sometimes due to the single frame movement without it being obvious which direction you just moved in. Was the ST version the same or did that have smoother movement?

I also found it hilarious that you could kill your party by walking into a wall enough times 🤣

I never did get that far into the game. I didn’t really understand RPGs and levelling up at the time. I suspect I needed to do some grinding, but as I didn’t know anything about that I would have just ploughed ahead until I found the enemies too strong and gave up.

@Coalescence what / when is this concert exactly please? I’ve tried Googling it but I’m getting lots of different results, including it seems, reference to some in-game concert in the Chrono Cross game. I just want to get the right thing to check out, I love the Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross music so much.

Gosh who picks the track listing? They’re missing some bangers.

What about Green memories, Corridors of time, Scala’s theme, Desolate World, Singing Mountain, Tyrano’s Lair, Epoch Wings of time?

But hey, least we get Robo’s Theme.

Thankfully I purchased the Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra version of the soundtrack years ago. It’s just the full soundtrack in orchestral form, and it’s delightful.

Unless I’ve missed anything, I’m not sure there was much competition was there?

Wonder Boy III Dragon’s Trap did it long before Castlevania. So the genre should be called Wonderoid. Or Metroboy.

I’ve only ever really heard the DS version of the soundtrack, and I think it’s great. I’ll have to check out a comparison of the two versions.

There’s a simple solution to this. Once you’ve finished retro-brighting your vintage hardware, sell it on straight away while it looks its best, to maximise your profit. Easy.

The soundtrack Wise did for DKC Tropical Freeze is also excellent. Busted Bayou is probably my favourite from that game, shame it only play on one level.

These projects/ports are definitely interesting. But the aesthetics of games like Spyro and Mario 64 are so tied to their host console they just don’t look right on another one. At least to me. Spyro isn’t Spyro if it doesn’t have that PS1 pixelated, wobbly polygon look. Same with Mario 64, it doesn’t look right if it doesn’t have that typical N64 look about it.

I’m in the UK but most of my GBA and GC games are US for the very reason you mention. The UK/EU equivalents of a lot of these games have awful, black and white manuals devoid of artwork and are super thick just for the sake of having loads of languages in. Whereas the US ones are smaller and full colour. Lovely.

They should have just done this from the start. It’s not like you’d really use this controller for any other console given its button layout, the all black colour scheme makes no sense whatsoever.

@hste I also take all these reviews with a pinch of salt. I bought a RetroTink 5X after all the glowing reviews. All I can say about it is ‘meh’. It’s a decent upscaler, yes, but is it worth £300+? Nope. It’s easy to sing a product’s praises when you don’t pay for one with your own money, but the moment you do you become a lot more critical (and realistic) about it.

I’m happy with my N64 and my CRT. I especially enjoy it using RF! It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside from nostalgia (a bit like the picture quality coincidentally 🤣). While obviously the frame rate on some games is far from ideal, it’s never bothered me too much. The good games on the system are good games regardless.

N64 and PS1 games really don’t look good when they’re super crisp and clean on a HD display. Hopefully Analogue has some filters available on this thing to make the games closer to how they’re supposed to look, but still better than plugging your N64 directly into a HD TV.

Meanwhile, I’m more than happy playing mine on a CRT. I did have their Super NT for a while, and although I could appreciate it was a good machine and one of the best ways to play SNES on a modern TV, I still just went back to playing on a CRT. You can’t beat it.

Dang. I already have two GBA Everdrives. The one from years ago which is larger than a standard GBA cart, and the current one that’s the same size as a standard cart. I only bought the latter earlier this year, if I’d have known this was coming I would have waited. I wonder if I’ll end up with a third one 🤣

Why is there packaging for Time Crisis 2 in the first picture if that game isn’t included in any of these packages?

This seems a good idea, but not worth the price in my opinion, especially how you’ll only get 4 games maximum, and even then you have to pay £150 or more to get all of them.

Thankfully I have a GunCon, PS1 and CRT so I can still play these (plus many other games) if I want to. And I can confirm that it isn’t 100% accurate all the time so might be similar in accuracy to this product.

I just hope the physical version is widely available at launch. I want to wait for reviews and some gameplay footage before I decide if I buy this or not. But with smaller releases like this you never know how long they’ll be available for.

Another great feature from Time Extension and @JackGYarwood. Thanks.

I’ve not heard of or come across this guy before, so it was refreshing reading a piece about videogame history I’d never come across before, which makes it all the more interesting.

That decimal represents 10,000, not 1,000, so it’s 10,000 units away from passing the DS.

Japan seems to have a very pragmatic system in place for cases like this. It’s a shame other countries, especially the US, don’t have something similar.

Ideal for playing Mr Driller.

@sdelfin thanks for this, really appreciate it. That’s really interesting and very impressive, to say the least! It’s amazing what’s possible these days, I can only imagine what the developers back in the 80s and 90s would have thought of something like this, especially those coding in assembly. I’ll give those videos a watch when get chance.

I would guess to make your game stand out and feel different to others developed using the GUI, you’d have to start tinkering with the code to a degree. I recall someone on YouTube (can’t remember who now) reviewing a home brew game (a platformer) and they said they could tell it was made in GB Studio by how it felt to control, as it felt the same as other GB Studio games, and they didn’t like it. That was on my mind when reading this article, I guess the GUI can only take you so far. But I still find it amazing that it’s even possible. I’d love to have a go myself, but with a full time job and family, what limited spare time I have I’d rather use to play games, rather than try and make one as some hobby project. But maybe one day, when I’m retired!

Thanks again for the info.

@NoirConceit right ok. I am now fully enlightened by your explanation. It’s been a pleasure.

@NoirConceit I just want to understand how you can make a game without doing any programming. I genuinely want to understand how it works as I’m intrigued.

"to enable users with minimal or no programming knowledge to make games,"

How exactly does that work? I don’t understand how you could make any sort of unique game without programming.

I got one of these recently, although they’ve been around for years now. I too had the old Everdrive GB years, but I upgraded to the X7 for some other reasons you haven’t mentioned but I think are just as important:

1) The X7 draws much less power than the old Everdrive GB (and all the other cheap flash carts). As everyone mods their Game Boys these days with screens that were never meant to be in a Game Boy, the lower power draw of the X7 is essential, some flash carts won’t work on modded game boys at all.

2) Saving. The old Everdrive GB has a really annoying way of saving its games. When saving, it put the save into its temporary SRAM memory (which is powered by the battery like a normal cartridge). It did NOT hard code the save on to the SD card until you played another game. This meant you could play a long game like Zelda and it wouldn’t update the save on the SD card until you consciously played another game. I even lost a save because the battery died before I’d got the save onto the SD card.

The X7 eliminates this annoyance by putting the save from SRAM to SD card at boot up every time.

These were my main reasons for upgrading. While I like the idea of save states, I find them too glitchy and finicky to ever use them (this is an issue with all flash carts, not just the Everdrive).

I have loads of Everdrives across multiple consoles. I can say without a doubt they are the best quality and most reliable, and worth the extra price.

Does it still look and sound like a NES game, or have they improved the graphics and sound too? The MSU stuff aside (I won’t go on about how much I dislike MSU stuff in SNES games), couldn’t all the other improvements just be done on the NES game?

Maybe I’m missing the point of these SNES ports.

My favourite gaming memories are on the SNES, N64 and the PlayStation. So I’m certainly glad it went the way it did.

I’m not an “AI bros” the article refers to (what even is that?), but I have to say I find the quality of this article much lower than what I’ve come to expect from Time Extension. I really feel like I’m just reading a generic ranting comment from any random corner of the internet. Many of the articles, features, interviews and deep-dives you do on here are excellent, which makes this stand out even more.

As for the subject matter, I can definitely see some uses for AI to ‘update’ old, low res images such as this. But it clearly needs to a human to gatekeep and touch up the output. There are parts of the image where I’d say it’s done a good job (such as the detail below the screen of the cabinet), so in the right hands I could see these tools been put to good use. And of course it should never supersede the original. But obviously it doesn’t work when done lazily like this.