Martin_H

@bring_on_branstons You make it sound as if the SNES was some sort of dismal failure due to CPU choice. In reality it was a phenomenal success with a library of games that sits up there with the best of the best. And that's coming from a Mega Drive fanboy like me!

There's that phrase "Neccisty is the mother of invention", perhaps if Nintendo had thrown a 68k, a 386, a DEC Alpha, an Arm2 or something else in we'd never have got that library.

@smoreon it's interesting, especially if we look at what other companies were doing.

SNK went with the Rolls Royce approach, and spent the next few years trying to make things more affordable.

NEC went with the limited add-on route, but went too early with it's next gen hardware.

Sega went with the max add-on route and met limited commercial success with them. This probably also hindered the Saturn and Sega as a company.

Nintendo went with a capable but cheap base system, enhanced by the carts themselves.

I'm a Mega Drive fanboy who bought into the Mega-Cd and 32x, but if you ask me which strategy was most successful I'd point to who is still making hardware today.

Mass consumer electronics is a cutthroat business. You have to design to a cost and make the most of it!

@bring_on_branstons Nintendo's philosophy does make a lot of sense, though. Instead of having an expensive system that will quickly become obsolete, build a cheaper system that is user upgradable in a transparent way via game carts. Each cart has the potential to add features/performance and, better yet, in ways that suits the game being made rather than in some generic way. Plus you can push all of the extra cost onto the consumer!

@obijuankanoobie no problem! 👍

@obijuankanoobie my Anbernic RG XX Cube is my current Pico-8 device of choice. Its 1:1 screen is a perfect match.

@Damo Well the rather delicious irony is that if people hadn't "preserved" these roms in the first place, then Blaze, SNK, Taito, Capcom, Sega and all the rest would have nothing to sell!

At 2.8" that screen is far too small for my knackered old eyes. At £50 this competes with umpteen Chinese emulation handhelds that beat it in every respect, unless you're determined to hand over money to whichever shell company now owns SNK.

That takes me back - dusted monkey asses all round!

I want to propose a toast to refraction who has worked on PCSX2 for over 20 years!

$8 for that? What a rip off!

I'm going to resist, like I did the last two times. I'd love to have one, but I know I'd set it up, play with it for a couple of hours, and then box it back up and put it in the cupboard never to be thought of again.

Yes indeed, get well soon Mr Lida!

@JJtheTexan it was an era of unbounded creativity that, thanks to the speccy's low price, was available to a far wider audience than any other system or console at the time.

@mjparker77 Golden days

@Fighting_Game_Loser So they can sell it back in a couple of months for $5!

My second favourite bit is Bruce Everiss, who years later on his blog tried to claim Imagine's downfall was all due to piracy. We had a tremendous amount of fun reminding him of this.

My favourite bit of the programme is Imagine's sales exec trying to flog the concept of a £40 (£130 now) speccy game to a distributor. To say he looks unimpressed at the prospect is an understatement!

And if you don't like this, wait 5 minutes and Anbernic will release another device.

@WileyDragonfly Don't get me started, or I'm going to have to go on a tirade about "begging the question".

I don't think the problem is AI, but consumers who constantly demand new content but aren't willing to pay for it. Look a look at the web: it seems to me to be funded by adverts for fake products and dubious services, rather than by people paying for quality content they like.

All AI is doing is filling the void that our rampant media consumption and unwillingness to pay has left.

@jamess Limited Liability doesn't give carte blanche to criminal acts. If there's a suspicion of criminality it should be investigated by the police and if the evidence merits it, the accused brought to trial.

@NoirConceit in the early days it was fine, it was only when the crooks saw it as an easy way of fleecing people it became a big no go.

Give it a couple of weeks and it will be wanting to play Global Thermonuclear War.

The links in this article appear to be broken.

Anbernic are a strange company in that for every product they bring to market, they always seem to bake at least one thing wrong into them.

The previous iteration of this, the 556, could have been great except for the nerfed sticks and lack of updates to boost performance. This one seems to have nerfed the sticks in a different way, although it looks like they are doing some firmware updates to improve performance.

Maybe by the 558 they'll have a perfect device?

@Norintha depending on where you are in the world, it's more likely to do with gambling and taxation laws.

What a shame. I do question, however, if an out-of the-way industrial estate, in an out-of-the-way place (Portland), in the largely seasonal (and hence sleepy) part of a fairly sleepy county (Dorset) is really the right location for such a venture.

Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, if I were making the game I'd probably go for something like State of Emergency and play up to the Project Mayhem aspects of Fight Club.

"Heineman adds that, when she gets time, she intends to explore ways of getting Fallout 1 & 2's source code published online."

Source ports!

Best girl Reiko Nagase or no dice!

"Wise fwom your gwave!"

No chance! These graphics look shocking!

@roe your phone is likely more powerful and capable. Add a controller - lots to choose from! - and you already have a better gaming device.

@Razieluigi These products only exist to steal the IP of Western companies.

£30 on Steam!?! I think that can wait for a Steam Sale or CD Keys reduction

Before the Chromatic was released I'd never heard of Palmer. Once it all blew up about a supposed "arms dealer" creating a GameBoy I thought I should look into it. Rather than the Bond style villain he is portrayed as I found somebody who thinks that if you like peace and prosperity you have to carry a bigger stick than those who would take it from you.

@tofuman86 The big benefit is you end up with a native build of the game for a target system. So, for example, you take a PS2 game, decompile it to portable code files (like C++) and then re-compile to run on PC or PS5 or on an ARM based handheld etc.

Typically this would be more performant than emulation and crucially, because you've reconstructed the source code, allows changes to be made.

The downside is that each game is a special case in and of itself and requires its own decompilation, which is a complex process. The people doing this sort of work are real wizards!

@BlobExtension well everyone has to start somewhere.

Yeah, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so. Yeah. So. Yeah, so. So. Yeah, Yeah, so, so, so, so, Yeah.

Editors: DO YOUR JOB!

The best April Fool I've seen today came courtesy of the BBC Archive on YouTube. Have a look for The Curious Case of the UPSIDE-DOWN Library.

As per Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun. The internet makes this sort of behaviour more easier and more instantaneous. Prior to the internet people had to make do with spiteful letters sent anonymously, rude missives to the editor, crudely drawn graffiti, or spending 20p per word in the classifieds.

Gits gonna be gittish!

@slider1983 best mates with JD Wetherspoon, as I understand.

Ah ha! The "Short lived, but necessary, North American video game market correction" is the gift that keeps giving!

What I think a lot of commentators miss, especially proponents of the crash, is that there was a vibrant computer game market in NA at the same time consoles slumped. EA, for example we're doing big business.

Shadow of the Templars is one of my favourite games of all time. I have just about every physical version ever released in the UK on various formats. I've got big-box editions, budget-release editions, handheld editions, signed editions, you name it and I've probably got it.

I'm probably going to end up getting this, just because, but I do think £30 is a bit steep for a couple of PS1 ISO dumps.

There's an elephant in the room that no one mentions: FPGAs, like all hardware, eventually go out of production. Now you'd hope cores written for one would be portable to another, but it isn't that straightforward. Software emulators, however, generally are portable so in terms of preservation may be the better choice.

Interesting, but... It's likely to be Android, which isn't currently getting the latest and greatest emulator releases. I'd also wait to see how well that hinge fares.

At any point does Rignall explain the fixation with dusting monkey asses?

@Angelus3K slower than the DVD drive, but often depends on the game as to stutter etc. Way faster than USB though. On a fat PS2 I prefer the HDD option and a NAS running on a RPi on slim. But for convenience these memory card solutions are great. I don't know about this card, but some you have to be aware of SD Card compatibility and also Fat32 limitations for games over 4GB.

A remarkable bit of engineering wizardry and no mistakes!

I can't believe people are complaining about too much choice!