Razieluigi

@bluebonics No question, which is why I noted above that software emulation is still important and necessary.

@FurgelFrNurgle Okay.

@Blast16 They did just give us the Haunted Castle remake, which was a cool surprise.

Other than that, though, I don't expect anything great from Konami nowadays. It's sad to see such a storied developer reduced to what it is today.

Not really clear what "support" means other than to watch it, but sure. It's a great series — easily one of the best game-to-TV adaptations I've ever seen — so I do hope it keeps going.

Seasons 1 and 2 are must-see for anybody who loves Castlevania III. Season 3 ventures into its own (sometimes weird) territory, and I think it pays off but it definitely strays far from anything that appears in the games. And I've been eagerly anticipating Season 2 of Nocturne, which was just fantastic.

October is always Castlevania month for me, so I've been binge-watching the series in-between playing through Aria/Dawn of Sorrow. Once I'm done with those I'd like to finally finish Rondo of Blood, a game which I adore but have never seen through to completion.

@Scollurio I'm not sure it's a "craze." It's just a new technology that is, when done correctly, an improvement over old technology. And as it becomes less and less expensive, it will be easier for people to decide that it makes sense for them, too.

Software emulation will continue to be important and necessary. It's the easiest (and, for now, only) way to get old software running on things like consoles and PCs. And high quality software emulation can be extremely good.

But a good core running on FPGA gets you as close to the original hardware as possible without tracking down original hardware. And good cores are proliferating at a shocking rate. The sheer number of things I can play on my Analogue Pocket (thanks to diligent developers and not Analogue themselves) would make teenage me faint from jealousy. This thing has become every single console through the 4th generation and a portable mid-90s arcade — a feat that would have been impossible without FPGA technology. To see all of that on a $220 device is insane, right? Toss in a Dock and a controller, and you're in retro gaming utopia.

So for enthusiasts who really enjoy retro gaming, I'd flip your question around. Why not FPGA?

As a 46 year old, this speaks to me.

I don't think there's any such thing as "bad nostalgia" per se. I revel in many of the things I loved in my younger years, and have a fairly robust setup for enjoying retro games (among other retro media).

I do think that nostalgia can become problematic, though, if it prevents you from enjoying and engaging with new experiences entirely. The nostalgia itself still isn't "bad," but anything enjoyed without balance can still have negative consequences.

Do I find comfort in old games, movies, and music? Of course! And I always will. But I'll always seek out new things. After all, one day I'll find myself nostalgic about those too.

@Bonggon5 Maybe I'd feel the same but I can't justify the expense of seeking one out. The hard truth is that CRTs are destined for extinction since new ones aren't being made anymore and the manufacturing process exceeds the ability of even the most dedicated hobbyists. Once existing sets burn out, that's the end of that.

The only time I really miss CRTs is when it comes to arcade games. There was something about seeing Pac Man's phosphor glow against that jet black background in a dark room that is inimitable. But even that is hard to separate from my general nostalgia for golden era arcades, so who's to say?

All that said, people should definitely play whatever way makes them happiest! It's great that these old games continue to find audiences all these years later regardless of what screens they're being displayed on!

I definitely remember seeing some faint rainbow colors as a kid, but it certainly wasn't as pronounced as whatever that filter is doing. CRTs produced all sorts of color fringing artfiacts like this, and they'd vary in severity depending on the TV and the quality of the video connection.

I definitely break from most retro enthusiasts when it comes to CRTs, however. Even as a kid, I wanted to see crisp, perfect pixels. Media like Nintendo's wall calendars (and the "black box" era cover art) leaned hard into that aesthetic and I loved it. I remember my dad upgrading our Genesis to an s-video cable, and being disappointed that it didn't resolve the inherent fuzziness of our tube TV.

So for me, seeing these games displayed with every pixel clear as day across a ginormous 4K screen is finally the realization of what I always wanted. I'm in my retro gaming glory.

Cartridges feel like games in crystallized form. I understand the nostalgia for them.

Discs never had the same magic that a solid-state cartridge did.

Please stop giving these clowns attention.

This is a scam. Everything about it screams that it's a scam. And every decision made by the scam artists — like preposterously announcing that they think they'll be able to use the Sega brand — has no intended purpose other than to generate a news cycle to get them in front of more eyeballs before they make their bid for crowdfunding.

@-wc- Ridiculously (and despite my avatar) I've never played Blood Omen! I really should get around to it, but it just never appealed to me the way Soul Reaver did.

Soul Reaver is one of the greats. The opening cinematic is astonishingly good and holds up better than it has any right to all these years later. The gameplay felt like the mature take on Zelda that so many of us were craving at the time. And watching the world shift in real time between the physical and spectral planes is still an unmatched delight. I was also lucky to experience this on the Dreamcast where the added horsepower really made it shine over the PS1 version.

It's a shame that the sequels really didn't do the first game justice. Soul Reaver 2 felt like warmed-over leftovers from the first, and Defiance took a left-turn toward being a lazy Devil May Cry ripoff with an unsatisfying conclusion to everything that had been set up before.

Looking forward to the remasters later this year, but nothing will ever match that first adventure with Raziel.

@romanista Totally agreed. I do think we tend to personify companies and forget that they don't actually care about anything other than making the next dollar.

But Nintendo does make a lot of those dollars by leveraging this exact same sense of personal connection, so I feel like they still missed a marketable opportunity by not bringing a few VB games to the 3DS.

It's nice to see, but Nintendo really missed their chance to give the Virtual Boy its due on 3DS.

Virtual Boy emulation is one of the best reasons to jailbreak a 3DS. It's great that this weird little experiment in Nintendo's history can finally be explored without tracking down (and likely repairing) expensive original hardware.

Absolutely the best in the franchise. I would love a proper HD remaster of this one.

Revenge wasn't awful, but the ability to just rear-end cars with abandon threw off the whole balance of the game and made it too easy to just stay in your lane and plow through.

Paradise just never worked for me. I get the appeal, but the open world results in too much downtime between events. Driving from race to race makes as much sense as having the player walk to the next bout in a fighting game.

I'm glad the interview was declined. This industry has seen no shortage of charlatans selling empty promises, and literally everything about this product smells of a scam. These guys shouldn't be taken seriously until there is functional hardware out in the wild to be tested and reviewed by trusted parties, and I wouldn't hold my breath on that.

Honestly, this should be the last we hear about this until (or if) that happens. These grifters thrive on the free exposure.

Tarnishes the Street Fighter characters!

Imagine working in the gaming industry and having absolutely no sense of fun.

Actually, maybe they were forward thinking. Having no sense of fun is half the problem with the gaming industry in 2024.

@JonathanChapman Oh, come on. The overall physical design is extremely similar to the Pocket, which is obviously what the author was referring to.

It looks far more like an Analogue Pocket than a GameBoy Pocket, which is why he made that comparison.

I don't have a strong opinion on this. I get the preservation argument as far as keeping as many OG Saturns in the wild as possible, but the Dreamcast sold fewer units than the Saturn and I had no qualms about modding one to work with an ODE. So am I guilty of reducing the supply of DCs on the planet by one?

That said, the disc drive argument is weak. In the long run, trying to maintain CD-ROM functionality on Saturns is a losing battle. Sure, they can be fixed. But optical media itself is fragile and a terrible option for long-term preservation of anything.

It's hard to remember that there was a time when EA was a scrappy underdog in the industry. After Sega insisted on draconian Nintendo-esque licensing terms for the Genesis, EA balked, reverse-engineered the console, and made games for it anyway. The games were so good that Sega came around and gave them favorable royalty terms and the right to manufacture their own carts. It was a fantastic success story that benefitted EA, Sega, and players.

There is precisely nothing left of that pioneering spirit in EA's modern shareholder-first incarnation. What a sad transformation.

That is absolutely stunning.

The Saturn is probably the biggest hole in my retro gaming lineup. I'd love a good way to finally dip into that library.

Seeing as like 80% of the FPGA cores on my Analogue Pocket are courtesy of Jotego's work, it's hard for me not to read this all as Somashekar spouting off with some childish beef.

That thing was designed as if they were afraid it might fit between the shelves of your AV console.

@BulkSlash This has been the least essential generation since the Atari 5200 so I don't blame you.

I've gotten by well enough with a Series S for a few years. It was cheap and it gave me access to new games (even if very few of them seem like they couldn't have been pulled off on last-gen hardware), but Sony has a lot of exclusives I'd eventually like to enjoy and I finally have a TV that would benefit from the horsepower.

I plan to get a Pro, but only becuase I never bought a PS5 to begin with. If I had an OG model, this would be an insane price for such a marginal upgrade.

In honor of Walz's breakthrough viral moment, I feel like this mod should be called Weird Taxi.

@Poodlestargenerica Cannibalize is arguably the wrong term, but any sale of one unit likely prevents the sale of another one since most people don't need a whole slew of these things.

And since it costs money to develop each new unit, this winds up seeming like an inefficient business model to me, pouring resources into multiple products that all preclude the sale of the others. So I disagree that having your own products competing with each other is a desirable scenario at all, much less an "ideal" one.

Obviously Anbernic is doing well enough to keep churning these things out, and good on them. I have an RG Nano and I do like it (even if it's a bit of a novelty). But this can't be sustainable in the long run.

Options are nice, but surely Anbernic must be cannibalizing its own market at this point. It must take some amount of R&D to churn out each one of these designs, and they can't all be mega-sellers when the market is so crowded. I don't understand their strategy.

I think they'd benefit from maintaining a few clearly delineated product lines with consistent feature sets (orientation, size, compatibility, etc) and just updating those lines on an annual basis.

@PopetheRev28 Yeah, I still consider it a kind of emulation even if it's operating at the hardware level without a layer of software so simulate the environment. But the results are essentially perfect if the core is solid. I spent my morning beating Steets of Rage 2 on my Mega SG over a cup of coffee

@PopetheRev28 I definitely plan on building a MiSTer soon (I was also hoping the Taki Udon thing was for real), although the Pocket's FPGA development scene has been so active that it's been doing a good enough job in the meantime. I honestly can't believe how much stuff I have emulated on that little thing, and the dock makes it a pretty solid MiSTer alternative.

I'm surprised we haven't seen NGPC and Lynx cores released yet now that the adapters are out, though.

@Steel76 We really do need that. Anything trapped on WiiWare is being wasted.

This is a cool (and unexpected) inclusion in a package that probably would have been worth buying regardless.

I feel like this would have been better paired with a (much needed) re-release of Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth, but I'll take it anyway.

@PopetheRev28 Yeah, I hear SCART is brilliant and I've enjoyed learning more about it from MLiG, but I'm not willing to go down that path. I've pretty much cast my lot with FPGA devices for the vast majority of my retro gaming and rarely use original hardware anymore.

That said, I need to look more closely. I never noticed the Akura doing that, but I may not have been paying enough attention.

@InfinitysEnd Convenience, really. I wouldn't expect component or HDMI to offer an inherently better (or worse) picture than VGA. But most TVs don't accept a VGA input, so I think you just have a really unique situation.

@PopetheRev28 Yeah, I was one of those people until recently. My receiver had component inputs and the GCN cable was used pretty often. But I recently upgraded to a 4K set which required a 4K receiver, and I just couldn't find one with component inputs. So now I'm looking for new solutions and will probably just grab a Carby for my GCN.

I had purchased an Akura from Behar Bros to get HDMI out of my Dreamcast and that works great, but I found the connection a little fragile and the video would cut out occasionally. Eventually I got one of those cheap Pound HDMI cables and if I'm being honest, my eyes can't tell the difference. Haven't tested it on the new setup yet, though.

Kind of cool, despite Voultar being sketchy as hell. I've treasured my GCN component cables for ages now and there was a time when I'd have loved something similar for my DC.

But it's honestly getting harder to use component inputs. Modern TVs and receivers just don't often come with the jacks anymore, so unless you intend to pair these with additional solutions like an OSSC or RetroTink, I imagine it's a vanishingly small number of people who would be a target audience for something like this.

@Poodlestargenerica I agree that the collection is pretty lackluster and unnecessary, but I'm baffled as to what makes you say "there's not really a console less well set up to play Tetris on than the Switch."

I can't imagine what current console would be better matched to Tetris than the Switch.

Healthy skepticism, indeed. Unless there's a really concrete plan behind this announcement rather than just some vaguely stated tweet, I'm expecting a paltry number of overpriced old carts and discs, and maybe some banged up hardwere on some shelves in the corner.

I'm lucky to have a great locally-owned retro gaming store in my city. I'll stick with them.

This looks fun and the cup holder on the dash is a fantastic touch. But despite the mech trappings, the gameplay and overall vibes seem more Doom than Mechwarrior.

If I were to compare this to a classic mech game, it would probably be Shattered Steel, which traded some of Mechwarrior's slow and deliberate pacing for a more action-oriented approach. Although even that game had some sim elements to keep things feeling mechy.

I don't find this hard to believe at all, especially since we now know, with several decades of hindsignt and convergent evolution, that 4 face buttons has become industry standard across platforms. Whether this decision came from external pressure or internal deliberation, they wisely concluded that human thumbs struggle with more than 4 face buttons and that additional inputs need to be offloaded elsewhere (like triggers).

When it comes to paying homage to Bach, it doesn't hurt that the GameBoy sound chip didn't sound like most Earthly instruments but could do a pretty solid impression of a harpsichord.

I can definitely see myself grabbing this. I bought the physical NES carts from Limited Run a few years ago, which I regret. The carts don't work on my RetroUSB AVS and it's a little bit of a hassle to connect my OG NES, so I don't get much use out of them.

But what I've played of them has been pretty cool, and a nice tidy ROM collection on a portable console would be a better way to enjoy them.

Honestly, if the best that "official" attempts to preserve this media can accomplish is to lock them up in a building for nobody to see, then there isn't any point in preserving any of it at all.

As ever, the real work of preservation will be left to the emulation community. Say what you will about the legality or morality, but it's literally the only way.

@RetroGames Definitely an enthusiast-level device, although I'd argue the "regular" Pocket already was so this revision is aimed at a niche within a niche.

I could see myself considering one of these if I didn't already own a Pocket, but the metal shell isn't enough of an upgrade to swallow that price. The OG unit already felt pretty luxe.

I also have a lot of ongoing reservations about Analogue as a company. After a strong start with their earlier consoles (I adore the Mega SG and Super NT), they've become concerningly evasive and consumer-unfriendly. And while the Pocket has turned into a really nice device, that's owed largely to fantastic support from external developers doing amazing things with that second FPGA. Analogue's own support has been slow and, in my opinion, inadequate. I'd honestly be hesitant to ever buy anything from them again, which makes me sad to say after being such a fan of their earlier hardware.

Very cool fan project! It's always nice to see this game getting appreciated because it's a classic and had some really fun ideas.

I bought a copy of this after EGM gave it a pretty decent review back in the day. We were a Genesis household, and I was desperately craving a Zelda-like.

Stupidly, I sold it on eBay a few years later. I was in school and was just scrounging money where I could. Made sense at the time but when it comes to collecting, this is easily the dumbest thing I've ever done. This was before the price skyrocketed so I probably only got like $50-60 for it. A loose cart is 10 times that nowadays, so unless I'm feeling really splurgy someday, this will forever be a hole in my collection.

Yeah, this is sketchy as all hell and requires more than a few pinches of salt until they show it in action, which will never happen. Just look at those ridiculous "renders"! I wouldn't trust this team to design the shell, much less the guts inside.

The bit about Sega is just headline bait. These guys fired off an email (if they're even being that honest) knowing it wouldn't get a response so that they could disingenuously suggest there was some kind of actual discussion going on. There isn't. There won't be.

This "project" will vanish into the ether as soon as it gets the chance to bilk some gullible crowdfunders out of their cash. No matter how many scams like this come and go, there's always another herd of lemmings lining up for the cliff.

For me, this would be worth buying even it were just MvC2.

I'm not an avid fighting game fan. I'm just there to have fun. And MvC2 is easily the most fun I've ever had with a 2D fighter. Can't wait to have it on Switch.

The name is definitely confusing, as is Udon's suggestion that the word "pi" just suggests any generic SBC. In principle, a name change would be wise. But I'm also not sure it matters for something like this. This isn't a mass-market consumer grade product.

The kinds of people that are out there looking for MiSTer FPGA alternatives are enthusiasts that do their research. It's not like grandma is going to buy some kid the wrong one for Christmas.

I feel like my issue here isn't the USB stick or even the quality of the USB stick. It's that this particular item underscores the absurdity of "archival physical copies" for certain kinds of media. You archive a digital file by saving it and backing it up, not by putting it on its own little physical flash drive and stuffing it into a box.

You really want a Switch cart because it makes your collection pretty? Have at it. But if you're playing this on PC, there is literally no reason to buy a "physical" version of the game. It's wasteful and the DRM-free file on that drive could have been just as easily downloaded to provide literally the same experience. You can copy that file and back it up to your heart's content — it's not going anywhere.

People have gone too far with the physical media obsession. And LRG is becoming a really sad company.

"Emotion Engine" always just seemed like a natural counterpoint to Sega's "It's Thinking" campaign for the Dreamcast.

This kind of stuff is always nonsense. Another point in a very long line of console makers making silly claims for the sake of marketing.

Although regardless of what cutesy name they gave it, at least this was an era in which new console generations felt like actual improvements over the prior ones. Nowadays, we still get the rose-tinted marketing and overhyped promises but the games barely look or play different than the previous generation.