Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

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Here's that M64 FPGA deep dive.

Interesting analysis on what FPGA actually is and how it works aside, the part most people will care about is the accuracy comparison. They showed some tests where M64 is more accurate than Analogue 3D, which is good to know. The major areas that require improvement are:
  • CPU floating point instruction timings are too slow (currently ported from the MiSTer core which is also inaccurate)
  • The RSP dual pipeline (biggest issue; a vector instruction + a regular instruction can be executed in one single clock cycle on a real N64, but it still takes two cycles on M64)
  • The TLB buffer implementation causes issues with virtual memory address mappings (also ported over from the MiSTer core which needed to take shortcuts to run on the DE10-Nano)
These issues are all fixable given the final hardware, they just need to actually make the fixes. There are other smaller issues, but those three make up the bulk of the known accuracy problems.
 
All this talk of N64 and collecting convinced me to dig through eBay for N64 games, and it’s amazing(ly depressing) how much cheaper Japanese games are. Pretty much any major game you can think of is maybe $10-15 max, usually cheaper, and then several times that for US copies. As a random example, I looked for Mario Tennis and found a mountain of Japanese copies for $10 or less including shipping, with only a handful of U.S. copies starting at $25-30. Pokemon Stadium 2, around $10 for a Japanese copy, $50+ for US (assuming it’s even genuine, eBay has a lot of repros that don’t advertise themselves as such). And you want to get something CIB, then expect to pay double for Japanese while US is like trying to buy the holy grail.
 
Two Dollars dijo:
All this talk of N64 and collecting convinced me to dig through eBay for N64 games, and it’s amazing(ly depressing) how much cheaper Japanese games are. Pretty much any major game you can think of is maybe $10-15 max, usually cheaper, and then several times that for US copies. As a random example, I looked for Mario Tennis and found a mountain of Japanese copies for $10 or less including shipping, with only a handful of U.S. copies starting at $25-30. Pokemon Stadium 2, around $10 for a Japanese copy, $50+ for US (assuming it’s even genuine, eBay has a lot of repros that don’t advertise themselves as such). And you want to get something CIB, then expect to pay double for Japanese while US is like trying to buy the holy grail.
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N64 region locking is just a physical block that's pretty easy to mod, but a lot of people are retards that are too afraid to open their consoles or any vintage electronics.
 
Two Dollars dijo:
Explain how that’s supposed to help me read Japanese.
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You need to know Japanese to play Mario Tennis?

Just offhand you could do just fine with that, Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Smash 64, Mario 64, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, and Kirby 64 without really needing to read anything important.

This %age skews even higher with something like Game Boy or Famicom.

Two Dollars dijo:
And you want to get something CIB, then expect to pay double for Japanese while US is like trying to buy the holy grail.
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Years ago before prices went up a lot I would dig through Hard Off JP GB game bins, at some point I realized the perfect condition CIB copies weren't much more and were easier to look through so I now have an embarrassingly large number of GB boxes sitting in Banker's Boxes with the carts stored separately for easy access.
 
Baraka Obama dijo:
You need to know Japanese to play Mario Tennis?

Just offhand you could do just fine with that, Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Smash 64, Mario 64, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, and Kirby 64 without really needing to read anything important.

This %age skews even higher with something like Game Boy or Famicom.
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Don’t be pedantic. Yes, obviously some games from other regions can be comfortably played by some people. But I’m not going to tell a kid or a guest “lol just fumble through menus until you find something”, and even playing a game you’re familiar with is annoying if you can’t read the text. You can certainly forget about playing an adventure game or RPG (your next line is “but n64 doesn’t have that many rpgs”). And that’s also ignoring the fact that games can be different in ways other than text, like Smash having different balancing or Mario 64 having different sound effects that, in my opinion, make the game worse.

You can’t use that argument for 8 and (to a lesser extent) 16-bit systems either since those games often used English text in the Japanese release or even the exact same rom.
Baraka Obama dijo:
Years ago before prices went up a lot I would dig through Hard Off JP GB game bins, at some point I realized the perfect condition CIB copies weren't much more and were easier to look through so I now have an embarrassingly large number of GB boxes sitting in Banker's Boxes with the carts stored separately for easy access.
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If I were older and wiser a couple decades ago, I would’ve done what Mike Matei did and bought garbage bags full of old games.
 
Thread bros, what are the proven solid emulators these days and where can one get them/how hard is it to acquire them? I'm talking NES, SNES, PS, PS2, possibly Dreamcast.
 
Two Dollars dijo:
Don’t be pedantic. Yes, obviously some games from other regions can be comfortably played by some people. But I’m not going to tell a kid or a guest “lol just fumble through menus until you find something”, and even playing a game you’re familiar with is annoying if you can’t read the text. You can certainly forget about playing an adventure game or RPG (your next line is “but n64 doesn’t have that many rpgs”). And that’s also ignoring the fact that games can be different in ways other than text, like Smash having different balancing or Mario 64 having different sound effects that, in my opinion, make the game worse.

You can’t use that argument for 8 and (to a lesser extent) 16-bit systems either since those games often used English text in the Japanese release or even the exact same rom.

If I were older and wiser a couple decades ago, I would’ve done what Mike Matei did and bought garbage bags full of old games.
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The Google Translate app works surprisingly well for translating screen text. I used it to navigate the menus in a Power Pro Baseball game for PS3, and those menus can be brutal.
 
Samuel Fuller dijo:
The Google Translate app works surprisingly well for translating screen text. I used it to navigate the menus in a Power Pro Baseball game for PS3, and those menus can be brutal.
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How accurate is Google Translate though? I keep hearing people say that it isn't very accurate.
 
Captain Quazar dijo:
How accurate is Google Translate though? I keep hearing people say that it isn't very accurate.
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It can handle START GAME, CANCEL, OPTIONS, etc just fine. For more complex things, it at least won't add meme references and tranny propaganda, so it's got that much on professional translators.
 
Calandrino dijo:
It can handle START GAME, CANCEL, OPTIONS, etc just fine. For more complex things, it at least won't add meme references and tranny propaganda, so it's got that much on professional translators.
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Frankly if you can't figure out how to recognize スタート or はじめる or ひとりで or occasionally つづける from fumbling with a menu for 20 seconds you might as well just rope, it's usually the first item anyway
 
Baraka Obama dijo:
Frankly if you can't figure out how to recognize スタート or はじめる or ひとりで or occasionally つづける from fumbling with a menu for 20 seconds you might as well just rope, it's usually the first item anyway
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これを翻訳してもらえますか？
 
Dean Pentel dijo:
NES, SNES, PS, PS2, possibly Dreamcast
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RetroArch does a decent job, makes the core download easy, if you care to learn it. RetroArch has BSNES and Snes9x cores for SNES. The NES coverage has been perfect, didn't notice any issues with any of the cores I tried in a small sample. PS2 is PCSX2 and is sketch. Standalone might work better than RetroArch for people. Been a while since I did Dreamcast but it's a simple system and the RetroArch cores worked well last I tried. PS1's best results are from DuckStation standalone but the RetroArch cores are quite good too.
 
I found out the easiest way to fix my Xbox One X with the dead optical drive is to transplant the one from my one with the dead GPU. Simple enough, the only annoyance being that the circuit board form the dead system's drive needs to be replaced with the one from the bad drive, which requires desoldering and re-soldering two wires.

Now I just need to find out if I still have my soldering iron.
 
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