X68000

Have they eradicated the immense slowdown?

That was always a dealbreaker for me. Not as bad as MS2 but still annoying.

The toaplan cart is amazing value for money considering the games you're getting your hands on would cost you thousands to buy legitimately on other older physical media.

As others have said, midnight resistance will be a difficult game to play with the lack of analogue or rotary controls. Intrigued to see how they map the controls though 🤔

The jump physics look way off. Seems to jump too high then drops like a stone. Definitely needs more time in the oven. Also, the enemy and platform placements are different.

So what screen size and screen res does this have?

The stick should have been dropped all together. It just gets in the way of the D Pad. Boo stick.

I've barely used mine despite it mimicking (in my view) the ultimate joypad, so no faults as of yet.

I've found the initial firmware niggles and lack of useful updates a disappointment. It's a pain (for me) to tinker with compared to the Steamdeck and even though it's made to play whatever you wish, it feels almost locked down at times.

Now over £57000 (fifty seven thousand pounds)

The cartridge slot, the joypad ports and the av connector are all slightly different, leaving this as a museum piece only.

It’s a shame it didn’t have a prototype red button controller and one of those generic press sfc carts to go with it.

Ps. Price is now approaching £4000.

Taki is well placed with a background in electronics engineering. I'd be reluctant to believe the claims if it was anyone else, but he is a stand up guy and I'll take him at his word.

These were effectively first party titles as Epyx were the developers of the hardware and were originally going to release it themselves as the Epyx Advantage.

This is great news, I have the 12.9” iPad Pro with a 4:3 ratio screen. Perfect for retro games.

@isitafox it’s all down to their willingness to accept anything as part exchange against their goods.

@RetroGames with SEGA handing distribution to Virgin Mastertronic in this market, they created their own ads.......thankfully!

@RetroGames I don't think anyone outside of the US had any clue as to what blast processing was about. It seems to have been an American marketing tool.

Who is this YOSHIRO guy?

EDIT: I’ve checked and he has a producer credit only.

Didn’t he also direct the recent Goemon spiritual successor, Otogi Katsugeki Mameda no Bakeru?

I need to check the end credits again, but I’m sure he has a director credit for that too.

I cannot believe that such a gnarly collection had such a bogus licensing agreement in Japan.

Wait til master splinter hears about this.

Jacques made some of the cringiest music during the Saturn era. He’s no miss and I’d probably avoid his calls if I were SEGA.

@Peteykins he should have been jailed for said crimes but was let off with a suspended sentence.

Naughty Naka 🙄

What a strange choice. The arcade version was average at best and the MD port was one of the worst conversions on the system.

Great article Damien! 👏

I'm still hooking the Saturn up to a 28" CRT broadcast monitor, but have invested in a MODE purely for convenience. The Satiator seemed to be in development for years...couldn't believe it when it actually began shipping.

Going to give that patched Silhouette Mirage trial disc a try tomorrow....thanks for the heads up 👍

Ps. Would love to see the 3D analogue controller reproduced. The analogue triggers where fantastic for Sega Rally Plus.

I'll have to give this a try. Love Silhouette Mirage, but don't always want to play through the first couple of levels.

4th Master System
3rd Dreamcast
2nd MD
1st Saturn

The main reason for preserving laserdisc based games now is to rip them in their original state before laser rot becomes a problem.

Many discs, especially pressed by DADC (Sony) suffer from video and sound noise caused through defects in their manufacture which only worsens through time.

My 41 year old copy of Astron Belt by SEGA has video issues and is unsuitable for archival. I just hope that better examples are still out there.

@RootsGenoa I’m a mean person then 😱

Onexplayer cannot make a working dpad. They are a massive let down.

@RetroGames the SNES really isn't more suited than the MD.

It's a pain and difficult to work with in ASM compared to the sega genesis development kit c compiler on the MD.

The 68000 cpu is far quicker than what the snes offers and the RAM is easier to access too.

There are legitimate reasons behind the snes lack of homebrew.

@KingMike there was one console port of the first game at for the Amstrad GX4000. I'm sure it was a good conversion for the limited hardware.

Since then, the Jaguar amd MD have had ports in the last few years (if you include unofficial releases)

Ps. This has whetted my appetite for a playthrough.........going to dust off the old A500

@Futureshark or……..
Lotus 1,2,&3
Super cars 1&2
Top Gear 1,2,&3000
Impossamole
Monty Mole series
Loaded&Re-loaded
Bounder
Switchblade 1&2
Thing on a spring
Nigel mansell’s world championship racing
Zool 2

@Ellie-Moo Think that was called VR Soccer is the U.S.

I'm all for what Laserbit are tackling with this new title.

I've heard big strides have been taken since this trailer was released almost 2 years ago. I cannot wait to buy it myself.

Now this is a game that deserves to be supported.

These guys are absolute geniuses and this needs to find a publisher who can springboard this title to a larger audience.

Ironically, it will be a little underpowered for solid saturn emulation, but this for me is the ideal layout and will be great for MAME and 16 bit systems.

I cannot wait!!

Good article, but I find it typical of EA employees making out that they invented a sports brand identity in video games first when Cinemaware had already done it with their TV Sports series.

Not only did Cinemaware do it first, but their football, basketball and hockey games were far more in depth and polished in terms of a genuine TV presentation than EA have ever achieved.

@kobashi100 tried a mega drive pad once and it just didn’t seem to work for me. Most Amiga games had such clunky controls nothing but a microswitched joystick seemed to work for me. Especially since jump was always mapped to the up direction.

As for which machine had the best sound, Amiga was always tops for games but the ST had midi capabilities so had its own fans too.

@riccyjay speedking joystick my preferred controller.

Joypad was always a no-no on the Amiga.

Biggest issue with Anbernic handhelds is the terrible D-Pad. They are virtually unusable.

Unfortunately, most Chinese handheld devices suffer with the same problem.

The Dave Perry/Mario 64 debacle is still TV gold.

@Enigk Hula, his cousin is okay too.

Coverage of this here on NL feels a little biased. Almost advertising feature in tone.

SG1000 would effectively be just the card only Master System games. It must be DC!!

@floxi they are Chinese clone Gdemu’s which cannot be updated using official firmware and have potential damaging affects to your Dreamcast.

Best to get the genuine one........if you can.

@Gs69 it mentions that there is no soldering required. Just switch the ribbon cable and a connector. It's totally plug and play.

The no coin op versions is not a big deal, since titles like Midnight Resistance wouldn't be playable as they had dedicated control systems not easily replicated on a handheld......plus the megadrive soundtrack on this one was a huge improvement over the arcade original.