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@ludotaku You've probably already played 2D pixel art games on 3D engines without even realizing it! Shovel Knight is an example of this.

There are also some indie games now that use polygons, but render in 240p by default (like a PlayStation or N64 game), which gives the impression of pixel art when played on a modern screen.

And of course, there are voxel games like 3D Dot Game Heroes, but this is a specific aesthetic, not a more efficient way to create pixel art.

@-wc- Are you talking about your friends, or the wide sentiment that you perceived outside of that? Because if we're talking about friend circles, I see where you're coming from. Based on the people I knew, I would've thought the GameCube was way more popular than it was, and that Xbox was in a distant third place.

When I say the Xbox was considered cool, I'm going more by the impression I got based on other factors besides my friends. It's been 20+ years, but the examples I remember are gaming magazines, bits of online chatter, pop culture cameos, and random acquaintances (some of whom were admittedly my age or younger, and I'm a bit younger than you are, still being in junior high when these consoles launched).

I always thought of the annoying FPS kid stereotype as something that started with CoD4: Modern Warfare, but now that I think of it, it had some roots in the very first Halo as well.

@Tobunari Rush, like the 3D "boostathons", can be fun when you get to know the levels well enough to blast through them. I'd forgotten about the enemies (I also finished it years ago, got the emeralds, etc., and never went back to it), but I did remember that it throws in a lot of pits and things to discourage you from going fast.

I don't like any of these boost-based games as much as most people seem to- Sonic Adventure is still the closest to getting 3D Sonic right, in my opinion.

@BulkSlash As a GameCube fan, I kind of get this (remember when Resident Evil 4 was one of the console's biggest exclusives?), but it's great to see games ported to more platforms, so more people can play them- sometimes with meaningful QoL and performance enhancements as well.

Far too many games are still stranded on "dead" platforms to this day, with no way to purchase them besides expensive used copies (assuming the game wasn't digital-only!). Being able to purchase and enjoy these games today easily beats out any sentiments around exclusivity.
If you ask me, anyway.

@Darthmoogle Are you having trouble with a particular game? Let me know, as it's possible I've seen it before.

The latest versions of Dolphin are usually pretty good about just working, with no settings needing to be changed (aside from telling it where your games are, and mapping the controller buttons). But there are definitely exceptions, and the old laptop might add an issue or two of its own.

Nice! Sonic Advance 1 was about as close as anyone got to the classics (until Mania, of course), but Advance 2, Advance 3, and Rush all felt like a considerable step back: too often, they had just one path through the level, bottomless pits everywhere, and hard-to-anticipate obstacles to make sure you fall into said bottomless pits unless you know exactly what you're doing.

It's great to see 2's level design getting the attention and refinement it needed!

Aw, yeah! This is happening!

Definitely going to check this out, as Sonic Adventure is one of my favourite games of all time, rough edges and all.

@BorkYeahGames Linking GBA and GCN emulators has been possible for a while, but now Dolphin has GBA emulators built in, allowing for easier setup- including straightforward netplay without using Parsec!

About the HyperCube, I'm impressed: both that you got this working in the first place, and that you somehow made it even more complicated than the original setup with all that it entailed!

Interestingly, these screenshots were taken in high resolution mode. Was Sonic X-Treme ever shown off running in 480i, or did Sega crank the resolution up for the purpose of taking pictures?

(Dinosaur Planet had a similar situation, with a bunch of early images being 640x480, but the leaked ROM only runs in low-res 240p mode.)

@dimi That's not bad, if it also unlocks a wide library of CD-based games as well. Other systems would have you spend 2-3 times as much for a CD-ROM drive, instead of just tapping into your existing CD player.

@N64-ROX Probably 5Mb, since bits were what almost everyone used in that context!
5 megabytes would be insanely huge (almost unheard-of, even on SNES). 5 megabits, on the other hand, would be in the same league as TMNT2 (512KB or 4Mb) and Kirby's Adventure (768KB or 6Mb).

The thought of having huge amounts of space on the NES is an interesting one, though. It should be possible to store a ton of audio data, and then flip through the banks 16KB at a time to stream music. Come to think of it, there was a demo ROM that did something like this on a small scale. It looped a segment of everyone's favourite Rick Astley song in impressively clear quality.

Though streaming proper PCM ties up the CPU for too long, and the NES's usual DPCM is always a bit muffled, so neither is ideal.
And running actual Redbook CD audio (like the Turbografx or Sega CD did) might only be possible on the Japanese Famicom, as the other regions' NES models had no way to pass audio through the cartridge port.

These look really cool, and now I'm back to wanting Pokémon for SNES to be real! (I used to wish there was a console version, back in the day.)

It just seems a shame to sacrifice a Super Game Boy for each one of these. Hopefully, someone will be able to decompile and port the original games to SNES- maybe with audiovisual enhancements?

@Daggot Yeah, on that last point, Acclaim comes to mind as one with a similarly rough story: they went bankrupt, and all of their physical assets got auctioned off to who knows where- including any workstations, servers, or tapes containing the repositories, backups, and dev materials.

A treasure trove of beta content (along with the ability to bring some lost classics to modern consoles) was jettisoned in ~2004, and for all we know, someone could have wiped and reformatted it all away, just so they could put some boring accounting database in its place or something.

@gingerbeardman Right, they could get a bunch of these running without the source code if they just emulated them... i.e., put them on back compat.

@BulkSlash Is it common for publishers to keep a copy of the developers' repositories? It probably has been done before, but I find it hard to imagine it is (or especially was) common.

Guess I land right in the middle- I started with the NES and a bootleg cart containing a ton of pre-1986 titles (including many that were otherwise stuck in Japan!), but this was in the early '90s, like 1992-93.

The NES stayed popular for a long time: well into the late '90s, at least in my family/friend circles.

@Serpenterror But imagine how wonderfully awful it could have been!
Maybe it would have starred Samus and American Kirby (complete with muscles and facial hair, like in the commercials) working together in a side-scrolling shooter, like the Rolling Thunder games, but with a buddy cop kind of story tying it all together.

This is a weird twist, but as someone who actually listens to Rick Astley's music unironically, I'm interested in seeing how this turns out!

I've always wondered: if Shinobi III is the third game, then which one doesn't count? Shadow Dancer, presumably, since "Shinobi" only appears in the subtitle? Or Shinobi (1), since it was only on the 8-bit systems?

The Japanese numbering makes more sense to me, since it separates the Shinobi series into two games of each style: Shinobi and Shadow Dancer have the slightly slower pace, with lots of ledge hopping and hostage rescuing. And then Super Shinobi I and especially II amp things up with more moves, crazier enemies and situations, etc.

I was not expecting this relatively obscure game to get a remake, but I'm glad it is! Shadow of the Ninja is already great, and Tengo Project has turned out nothing but gold for the past several years, so this should be a great match.

@AJB83 Thanks, but you don't need to go to the trouble! I haven't even played this enhanced port yet, but when I do, I won't mind cutting and looping one track. Unless you want to for your own sake, in which case, have at it!

@AJB83 Thanks! I checked it out now, along with the album version, and it seems the latter would actually work pretty well as-is. The reason I mentioned radio edits was because I was familiar with the album (Risotto) version of Goodnight Lover, and that one would definitely need editing. Otherwise, the race would be ending just as the music really gets going!

I don't know why Nintendo didn't take advantage of Yoshi's inclusion in Tetris Attack: the game itself is full of Yoshi characters, but they're nowhere to be found on the box art!

And when they lost the Tetris branding, that should have been all the more reason to set things right: rename it "Yoshi's Puzzle Attack" or whatever, and whip up some new box art featuring Yoshi and friends. Nope. A couple of releases with Pokemon (at the height of Pokemania, to be fair), but then it was all bland, straightforward presentation from then on.

PS: I'm not so sure, though, that an English release of Panel de Pon under its original title (back in the day) would have worked. Any would-be purchasers would be like "What the heck is a Panel dee Pawn? Or Panel day Pwn? Or whatever?"

Very cool! I'd been considering picking up Wipeout 1, and this looks like a great enhancement!

I've only ever played Wipeout 64- I assume that takes after the Wipeout 2 model? (Scraping a wall can kill your momentum pretty quickly, but it's not as bad as Wipeout 1 sounds.)

Speaking of Wipeout 64, I wonder if Absurd and Goodnight Lover have radio edits that are suitable for racing... without being chopped up and compressed, I mean. Those music tracks would be great to race with.

@samuelvictor You got it. With 60 different images per second, A and B (even and odd lines) will never match unless there's no motion at all!

The high-level hardware rendering offered by many emulators can bypass the whole issue of video signals (see basically any N64 emulator, for example!), though this is a less accurate approach than a software renderer that closely mimics the original console. You may find that a lot of Saturn games only work well with software rendering for now, but high-level emulators with 480p and HD support should eventually offer the nicest experience, if their accuracy keeps improving!

@samuelvictor Interlacing on a CRT does give the illusion of a crisper image than would otherwise be possible with just 240 lines. There's a bit of fuzziness, but the comb effect isn't usually noticeable on CRTs (with some exceptions).

Your solution in video editing probably involves combining every two fields into one frame: you end up with 30 solid frames instead of 60 fields (or "incomplete frames" with gaps in them, if you will). This works well on 30fps content, but 60fps content (games like Virtua Fighter 2, as well as many old sitcoms and soap operas!) looks terrible with this deinterlacing technique, as every one of those 60 fields is unique, and splicing them together in pairs just creates a comb-filled mess.

Ignoring every other line, like you mentioned (called "bob" deinterlacing), is a better way to do things on 60fps content, and it's an option on the PS2 emulator, PCSX2. Not sure about other emulators, however.

PS: Hope that all makes sense. It's kind of hard to explain without picture/video examples- there are better explanations on the internet, but there's also a lot of misleading info floating around, which conflates 30fps progressive and 60fps interlaced.

@samuelvictor Yeah, there are a few emulators out there (for various systems, not just Saturn) that insist on accurately replicating interlacing... which is fine as an option, I guess, seeing as it's authentic. But most of us just want a clean, progressive picture!

I knew that the Saturn had some 480i games, which is why I suggested upscaling to 480p, as it should be about as close as you can get without enabling the ugly comb effect. I wasn't about to assume that you wanted 480p, though, as some people are sticklers for having the most accurate output- even if it seems (to me) to be a very strange preference in some situations!

@samuelvictor I wouldn't know about interlacing (I personally try to stay away from it!), but there are emulators that support arbitrary high resolutions, so you can do full 1080p, or I suppose there'd also be 704x480 progressive, if you want something semi-authentic.

IIRC, Yabause is one that does HD, but is less accurate, while Mednafen has accuracy, but is stuck with native resolution. Still not ideal, in either case.

@samuelvictor Saturn emulation was pretty rough about 10+ years ago, but it has come a long way since then. I admittedly haven't spent much time with it either, but it looks like a majority of games are playable with minimal bugs on emulators like Mednafen. I have a fairly old PC, too, but it runs well.

I'd also be up for collections from those platforms you mentioned! Sega/Mega CD, 32X, and Model 3 have all had an especially terrible record (i.e., close to zero) for re-releases so far. MD/Genesis collections are everywhere, which is great, but there's still so much Sega history trapped on arcade machines and, well, every other platform that's not Genesis.

I've said this before, but Sega should just bring their back catalogue to modern platforms. Offer ported or emulated versions of all of those classics (and oddities) that have been missed: Skies of Arcadia, Burning Rangers, the Panzer Dragoon series, JSRF, Ecco: Defender of the Future, even Chaotix!

Or do a Saturn Collection containing 20 games, or whatever.

As far as the difficulty of emulation, any semi-modern platforms should be up to the task, including Xbox One, 10-year-old PCs, and probably the Switch.

@Uncharted2007 In their defense, this does have to be a low-cost device, so it will be less capable than even a $200 phone.

Also, we're talking about emulation, not native ports: remember that the PS1 Classic Mini already struggled to run some games at full speed. The Saturn is a complex beast, and is a lot harder to emulate than the simple PS1.

More like pareiDOLLia!

Sorry.

I appreciate the acknowledgement that your hands are on the smaller side- it explains why the Nano didn't look quite as small as I expected- plus that and the comparison to a box of matches are both a lot more helpful than simply making subjective statements!

(I could see some reviewers just saying it's "small, but fairly comfortable" or "slightly cramped", and leaving it at that.)

Amazing game, and one of my favourite racers of all time.
Too bad Nintendo is celebrating the 25th anniversary the same way they celebrated the 20th, and the 15th, and the 10th.

Anyone have any good ideas for keeping track of ongoing mods/homebrew projects? Or even some good lists of complete, fully-playable projects?

I keep coming across lists like this, as well as presentations like SAGE and F3, but a lot of projects are unfinished... and then I eventually forget about them. (This list is unusual, in how many of these are already complete!)

I've tried to keep a plain old written list of projects to watch... and this has worked okay, if not great.

@SpeedRunRocks I wish game companies would have taken this stuff seriously from the beginning.
For movies? There was a precedent set by book and art preservation already, I guess, but people probably saw movies as more of a fleeting medium like live theatre, so I'll cut them some slack for not having the foresight that time.
But video games had the previous lessons of movies and TV (on top of the aforementioned media) to learn from, yet source code, dev materials, and even finished products have all been thrown away. I find that harder to take.

Great to see that Spyro mods are a thing now (I have not kept up with the ROM hacking scene!).
But are they showing that glitches have to be exploited in order to finish this hack? I'd totally be down for this, if it was Sonic Adventure... but Spyro? This might be just a little bit above my skill level!

@no_donatello Oh yeah, emulation is definitely preferable in those cases (among others). Personally, I would just use standard PCs and set things up myself, but I can understand the desire to streamline things, especially if kids or light guns are involved!

I do wonder if this is a small niche, though...

Also, part of what I was commenting on previously was the choice of mini consoles for re-purchasing classic games:
Do I want to see more Saturn and Dreamcast games brought to modern platforms? Absolutely! But do I want to buy a $200 box for each system? Not so much, especially when I already own many of the DC's biggest hits twice over.
Similarly, I'd love to see Jet Set Radio 3, Sonic Adventure 3, Shenmue IV, you name it! I'm just not as thrilled with the idea of buying a hypothetical Dreamcast 2, whether it's a $600 modern console or a $300 "potato" with retro graphics.

PS: Your son is very lucky!

@UK_Kev Is it an anti-PC gaming thing, maybe? People don't want to play an emulated game on their PC, so they get a mini console... which is a budget PC in disguise, which runs emulators in disguise?

I also find the desire for more consoles (N64 mini, Dreamcast 2, etc.) a bit puzzling. I'm all for making old games legally available for purchase again (digitally or in compilations), but having to buy a dedicated machine for each batch of games starts to become a waste of money and space.
Okay, I do understand it at the surface level, but it just doesn't hold up when I think about it.

@themightyant Between that ambiguous button/nub thing and the way the start/select are on the screen bezel, it's giving me a bit of an AI vibe.

Agreed that it looks uncomfortable: besides hand cramps, that D-pad looks like it's hard enough to leave an imprint on the player's thumb.

It's a cute little (mock-up) device, though, and I also miss the old days of Sega. I just wouldn't necessarily want to actually play on this!

The graphics are already looking great, and well ahead of the NES version.
Sound is also really well done... even though the PSG can only do so much, unfortunately. (I'm curious, though, what could be done with PCM drums and FM for the rest. I bet it could be a lot like the arcade.)

That's a weird thing for Kirkhope to say, considering these same guys did their own attempt at a Banjo game, and it sold well (despite some criticisms).

To say nothing of the millions of fans clamouring for "Banjo-Threeie" for the past 23 years!

@GhaleonUnlimited There is already a 60fps mod for Journey of Dreams! As far as I know, it needs to be disabled to get past one specific section, but it works flawlessly for the rest of the game.

PS: Sonic's cousin? I guess that is true, in a sense...

The N64 homebrew and modding scene is relatively young (compared to something like Genesis), but it has already started to produce some impressive stuff. I'm looking forward to this, and to whatever else comes after!

Nice! A subtle upgrade, but this sounds like the definitive Zelda 1 experience. My next playthrough just might be with this on an emulator, instead of the original cart.

@ganonms I take it sunlight's not an issue, but what about humidity? Even in Canada, I've seen it do a lot of damage to DVD cases, in particular.

Most of my games are stored in a dark room with no sunlight, and the others are only getting a bit of indirect light.

That said, while it's always preferable to have games that are pristine, undamaged, and CIB, I'm ultimately in it for the gameplay experience, much more than the collecting itself. And it's good, because there's so much that can go wrong: our stuff won't last forever, and it's always just one incident away from damage or destruction.
Better to enjoy it, than to stress out over it!

At first, this seemed like a crazy way to announce the signing. But when you think of it, it's really quite Sensible.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that F-Zero has been neglected for so long, though I am glad that at least Fire Emblem and Metroid weren't left to the same fate!

So essentially, Sakamoto and Tanabe are using their clout to keep Metroid alive? (That theory holds water, as there probably aren't any influential figures advocating for F-Zero.) In any case, I can't see that the issue is specifically GX's sales, as it reportedly sold well over a million copies, landing in the top 20 on GCN- and outselling all of the Metroid games on Wii, I might add!
But it could be that the cost of developing a modern sequel is considered too high for a game that will only bring in maybe a quarter of Mario Kart's sales, at best. Why spend $10M developing that, when you could spend next to nothing and get Mario Kart 8 Deluxe?
...or maybe Miyamoto still has a chip on his shoulder. Who knows?

At the end of the day, Nintendo makes some frustrating and/or baffling decisions as to which series they develop, and when, and to what degree... "Nintendo gonna Nintendo", as they say!

@Tobunari Yeah, both SA games let you move the file, but not copy it. I forget if any games like GX, etc., are fully locked or not.

Right, you can offload your stuff to an external drive, but it's still tied to that specific console. Nintendo did offer migration tools to go from one Wii U to another (or from a Wii to a Wii U), but those delete the original data- unless there's an exploit involving a last-second unplug!