7 ms·

Wow, that's incredible! Major props to byuu for doing this in the quest for better emulation. Wish I could justify the cash to pick this up, though it does ma

by daeken 14y ago

Wow, that's incredible! Major props to byuu for doing this in the quest for better emulation. Wish I could justify the cash to pick this up, though it does make me think about picking up an SNES again.

moepstar 14y ago
Go for it - you won't regret it :) I've done so half a year ago and also purchased ~35 games - Best 150€ spent in quite a while...
- daeken 14y ago
  I've recently been picking up old consoles/computers both to revisit some old games I loved, but also because I'm getting into demo development for retro hardware. I'm currently hunting for a Vectrex -- can't beat developing for a system with 1KB RAM and with a unique vector display. I just wish I had kept all my old hardware from my childhood; I sold my NES and all my games for something like $20 in ~1998. Quite a shame.
  - moepstar 14y ago
    I've also sold all my old console back then, when i thought i'd never play them again... And i've been wrong about that, on each and every one.. But yeah, lesson learned - nowadays, i'll just pack them into a box and stow them away.. :)
    - Adirael 14y ago
      I've sold everything up to my PS2. I've found better to just have a gamepad adapter to USB and use an emulator in the rare occasions I want to play Super Mario Bros. I have an arcade cabinet in my living room so I usually just stick to joypad tho :)
  - primitur 14y ago
    I have kept every single 'special' computer along the way, since my first coding days, and I have to say that there is definitely a kind of zen state that occurs when you return to the old systems after decades, and re-code things. It has actually improved me as a modern developer, to return, see what it was I did in my youth, fix it, and move on. :) So .. in this sense, I will represent to you dear reader the value of such activities by enthusiasts/archivists/mad-scientists who still collect and keep these old systems in order. Does anyone remember the Oric-1/Atmos line? Well .. It Lives!!!! The revival of software development as a social, fun activity, on these machines is producing a virile scene, indeed .. from the demo tree, of course, mostly, but some recent releases have been very special. The Oric-1 sort of missed a lot of big effort in the 80's, if it'd had just a small percentile more attention, the titles would have been amazing. Nevertheless, the machine has some merits in the 8-bit fashion, and new-school developers are pushing its limits with extraordinary results never thought possible in the mindset of the 80's market. Space 1999 http://space1999.defence-force.org/ http://space1999.defence-force.org/ Pulsoids: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=1515 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... Impossible Mission: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=2214 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... SkoolDaze: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=2215 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... 1337 (Elite clone for Oric-1) http://1337.defence-force.org/ http://1337.defence-force.org/ StormLord: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=2211 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... (Edit, fixed links and added Elite&Stormlord, fabulous games..) None of the above games were made in the 80's, when the Oric-1 was born. These are all new, revived products, from talented individuals pushing their Oric-1 machines to the limits .. By way of 'virtues of collectors', here are the Top 150 Games in the Oric scene: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150games http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150... For Oric-1/Atmos/Telestrat users who still turn the machines on today, a lot of it happens with the Oric Defence Force. But there are more groups, and http://oric.org/ http://oric.org/ provides a unique experience for Oric users, what few of us are out there. Many of us need to learn French. ;) Emulation of the Oric/Atmos works quite well (http://oric.free.fr/emulator.html http://oric.free.fr/emulator.html), but I am fortunate to be able to turn my old hardware on, and the effort to get the machine on the 'net, and thus connected to this amazing archive and new activity, is a surety. In short, the collectors value is in the future of the machine. If it still turns on, and works, then use it. And make it available to others to use, even if you don't use it.
- kahawe 14y ago
  > Go for it - you won't regret it :) I have to agree with you - maybe it's because I grew up during the time of those consoles and with absolutely-not-realistic graphics but I actually miss that good-old-days video games look since nowadays most games are trying to look realistic like Unreal or Doom or FarCry wow-ing user when they were released. Maybe my taste is strange but if the game is trying to be very realistic then it's already small things that can annoy me and throw me off, while a totally unrealistic 80s/90s videogame look is perfectly acceptable. I actually prefer it probably for exactly that reason. I don't want all my video games to look super-realistic; while that might be a selling-point for the FPS crowd I think other games should NOT buy into that race and instead focus on the gameplay and on showing me pretty colors.
  - joeguilmette 14y ago
    this phenomenon is called the 'uncanny valley'. it's quite fascinating.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      I'm not so sure that applies to most of it. There's a large gap between games that appeals to me and games that are approaching uncanny valley territory. For my part, I'd date the "end of interesting games" to approximately the rise of Doom. These games are nowhere near realistic enough to enter the uncanny valley, but to me that's when enough games lost their appeal to me that I stopped playing much. There's nothing objective about that timing, of course. Just to me, Doom never appealed, and indeed most FPS's don't appeal, and Doom heralded an age where most games changed in a way that made them less interesting to me. It is conveniently also a way of indicate roughly the timing of the fall of the Amiga and other not-so-3D-capable computers and game consoles, and the styles of games popular on them. There's definitively exceptions - I bought Sim City 3000 and Alpha Centauri and Terminus long after Doom (those specific games because I've never owned a console nor a Windows PC, and they were amongst a small set of commercial Linux ports available after my last Amiga gave up the ghost). I'm actually contemplating making my own "retro style" game (only thing stopping me is lack of time to devote to it at the moment) exactly because I keep seeking something that evoke the type of fun for me that the games I grew up with did (what I'd like to do is some sort of mix between International Karate + and Chambers of Shao Lin - never martial arts games don't interest me much). Of course a lot of this is down to pure nostalgia, and a lot of people would get disappointed if they actually went back and played these games again (with exceptions - I have a Minimig, an Amiga FPGA reimplementation, - and there are certainly games that survive even being blown up on a crystal clear 42" LED TV despite the fact I last saw them on a grainy 26" CRT 20+ years ago). But there's also a stylistic difference, whether in graphics (cartoon-ish pixel art with lots of metallic gradients vs. "realistic" art that often try to look real), music (80's chip-tune electronica with lots of inspiration from a strange mix of Jarre, heavy metal and others), as well as big changes in gameplay (e.g. 80's games were usually far less forgiving in terms of losing lives and ending the game), and 2D vs. 3D (even for games which today are nominally 2D the graphics is still often in a 3D style).
- primitur 14y ago
  With regards to emulation and a return to the classics, I got an Open Pandora (http://openpandora.org/ http://openpandora.org/) recently and have been having a blast returning to all my old cartridges, type-ins, tape archives, and so on. My first computer was an Oric-1, the ZX Spectrum, and I have (had) masses of tapes of things I'd done with those machines .. to think those old tapenames are sitting there in a little emu dir, in my pocket right now, for the train-ride .. pure joy of computer.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    You're the first person 'in the wild' I've come across with an Open Pandora. Nice to see they've finally got to a point where they're selling them, it was spun out of the old Gamepark (GP32/GPxx consoles) and had a serious amount of emu devs involved.
    - primitur 14y ago
      Yeah I've been there since the GP32 days, and have Pandora #008 (the eighth one to ship) so I'm kinda lucky that way .. and yeah, the emu guys are really key to the Pandora scene, a bunch of them are still kicking out titles and optimizing things extremely tightly. The Pandora really is a fabulous machine - maybe its too expensive - but to the HN crowd that shouldn't matter much. Its an amazing amount of power in my pocket, and with MOAI now onboard, I have the ability to use it to develop apps for Android and iOS and Windows, and so on, simply by ssh'ing to it and firing up vim. ;)
aidenn0 14y ago
My biggest non-purchase regret was when a friend going off to college offered to sell me his SNES and ~150 games for $150 (about 50 games were Japanese superfamicom carts, including all the DBZ, DQ, and FF RPGs). I have my old NES, and my wife has her old Sega Genesis, and we spend almost as much time playing those as our newer games.

by daeken 14y ago

moepstar 14y ago

Go for it - you won't regret it :) I've done so half a year ago and also purchased ~35 games - Best 150€ spent in quite a while...

daeken 14y ago
I've recently been picking up old consoles/computers both to revisit some old games I loved, but also because I'm getting into demo development for retro hardware. I'm currently hunting for a Vectrex -- can't beat developing for a system with 1KB RAM and with a unique vector display. I just wish I had kept all my old hardware from my childhood; I sold my NES and all my games for something like $20 in ~1998. Quite a shame.
- moepstar 14y ago
  I've also sold all my old console back then, when i thought i'd never play them again... And i've been wrong about that, on each and every one.. But yeah, lesson learned - nowadays, i'll just pack them into a box and stow them away.. :)
  - Adirael 14y ago
    I've sold everything up to my PS2. I've found better to just have a gamepad adapter to USB and use an emulator in the rare occasions I want to play Super Mario Bros. I have an arcade cabinet in my living room so I usually just stick to joypad tho :)
- primitur 14y ago
  I have kept every single 'special' computer along the way, since my first coding days, and I have to say that there is definitely a kind of zen state that occurs when you return to the old systems after decades, and re-code things. It has actually improved me as a modern developer, to return, see what it was I did in my youth, fix it, and move on. :) So .. in this sense, I will represent to you dear reader the value of such activities by enthusiasts/archivists/mad-scientists who still collect and keep these old systems in order. Does anyone remember the Oric-1/Atmos line? Well .. It Lives!!!! The revival of software development as a social, fun activity, on these machines is producing a virile scene, indeed .. from the demo tree, of course, mostly, but some recent releases have been very special. The Oric-1 sort of missed a lot of big effort in the 80's, if it'd had just a small percentile more attention, the titles would have been amazing. Nevertheless, the machine has some merits in the 8-bit fashion, and new-school developers are pushing its limits with extraordinary results never thought possible in the mindset of the 80's market. Space 1999 http://space1999.defence-force.org/ http://space1999.defence-force.org/ Pulsoids: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=1515 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... Impossible Mission: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=2214 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... SkoolDaze: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=2215 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... 1337 (Elite clone for Oric-1) http://1337.defence-force.org/ http://1337.defence-force.org/ StormLord: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail&num_log=2211 http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=detail... (Edit, fixed links and added Elite&Stormlord, fabulous games..) None of the above games were made in the 80's, when the Oric-1 was born. These are all new, revived products, from talented individuals pushing their Oric-1 machines to the limits .. By way of 'virtues of collectors', here are the Top 150 Games in the Oric scene: http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150games http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software&fille=top150... For Oric-1/Atmos/Telestrat users who still turn the machines on today, a lot of it happens with the Oric Defence Force. But there are more groups, and http://oric.org/ http://oric.org/ provides a unique experience for Oric users, what few of us are out there. Many of us need to learn French. ;) Emulation of the Oric/Atmos works quite well (http://oric.free.fr/emulator.html http://oric.free.fr/emulator.html), but I am fortunate to be able to turn my old hardware on, and the effort to get the machine on the 'net, and thus connected to this amazing archive and new activity, is a surety. In short, the collectors value is in the future of the machine. If it still turns on, and works, then use it. And make it available to others to use, even if you don't use it.
kahawe 14y ago
> Go for it - you won't regret it :) I have to agree with you - maybe it's because I grew up during the time of those consoles and with absolutely-not-realistic graphics but I actually miss that good-old-days video games look since nowadays most games are trying to look realistic like Unreal or Doom or FarCry wow-ing user when they were released. Maybe my taste is strange but if the game is trying to be very realistic then it's already small things that can annoy me and throw me off, while a totally unrealistic 80s/90s videogame look is perfectly acceptable. I actually prefer it probably for exactly that reason. I don't want all my video games to look super-realistic; while that might be a selling-point for the FPS crowd I think other games should NOT buy into that race and instead focus on the gameplay and on showing me pretty colors.
- joeguilmette 14y ago
  this phenomenon is called the 'uncanny valley'. it's quite fascinating.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    I'm not so sure that applies to most of it. There's a large gap between games that appeals to me and games that are approaching uncanny valley territory. For my part, I'd date the "end of interesting games" to approximately the rise of Doom. These games are nowhere near realistic enough to enter the uncanny valley, but to me that's when enough games lost their appeal to me that I stopped playing much. There's nothing objective about that timing, of course. Just to me, Doom never appealed, and indeed most FPS's don't appeal, and Doom heralded an age where most games changed in a way that made them less interesting to me. It is conveniently also a way of indicate roughly the timing of the fall of the Amiga and other not-so-3D-capable computers and game consoles, and the styles of games popular on them. There's definitively exceptions - I bought Sim City 3000 and Alpha Centauri and Terminus long after Doom (those specific games because I've never owned a console nor a Windows PC, and they were amongst a small set of commercial Linux ports available after my last Amiga gave up the ghost). I'm actually contemplating making my own "retro style" game (only thing stopping me is lack of time to devote to it at the moment) exactly because I keep seeking something that evoke the type of fun for me that the games I grew up with did (what I'd like to do is some sort of mix between International Karate + and Chambers of Shao Lin - never martial arts games don't interest me much). Of course a lot of this is down to pure nostalgia, and a lot of people would get disappointed if they actually went back and played these games again (with exceptions - I have a Minimig, an Amiga FPGA reimplementation, - and there are certainly games that survive even being blown up on a crystal clear 42" LED TV despite the fact I last saw them on a grainy 26" CRT 20+ years ago). But there's also a stylistic difference, whether in graphics (cartoon-ish pixel art with lots of metallic gradients vs. "realistic" art that often try to look real), music (80's chip-tune electronica with lots of inspiration from a strange mix of Jarre, heavy metal and others), as well as big changes in gameplay (e.g. 80's games were usually far less forgiving in terms of losing lives and ending the game), and 2D vs. 3D (even for games which today are nominally 2D the graphics is still often in a 3D style).
primitur 14y ago
With regards to emulation and a return to the classics, I got an Open Pandora (http://openpandora.org/ http://openpandora.org/) recently and have been having a blast returning to all my old cartridges, type-ins, tape archives, and so on. My first computer was an Oric-1, the ZX Spectrum, and I have (had) masses of tapes of things I'd done with those machines .. to think those old tapenames are sitting there in a little emu dir, in my pocket right now, for the train-ride .. pure joy of computer.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  You're the first person 'in the wild' I've come across with an Open Pandora. Nice to see they've finally got to a point where they're selling them, it was spun out of the old Gamepark (GP32/GPxx consoles) and had a serious amount of emu devs involved.
  - primitur 14y ago
    Yeah I've been there since the GP32 days, and have Pandora #008 (the eighth one to ship) so I'm kinda lucky that way .. and yeah, the emu guys are really key to the Pandora scene, a bunch of them are still kicking out titles and optimizing things extremely tightly. The Pandora really is a fabulous machine - maybe its too expensive - but to the HN crowd that shouldn't matter much. Its an amazing amount of power in my pocket, and with MOAI now onboard, I have the ability to use it to develop apps for Android and iOS and Windows, and so on, simply by ssh'ing to it and firing up vim. ;)

aidenn0 14y ago

My biggest non-purchase regret was when a friend going off to college offered to sell me his SNES and ~150 games for $150 (about 50 games were Japanese superfamicom carts, including all the DBZ, DQ, and FF RPGs). I have my old NES, and my wife has her old Sega Genesis, and we spend almost as much time playing those as our newer games.