91–100 of 268 posts
No duck hunt!? What gives?
Light guns aren't super great on modern TVs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5128407
It's a pretty good deal for $60 but I hope there will be some way to add more games through emulation or download or whatever. Also I want to see a Nintendo Classic Gameboy once. Please!
I'm really interested in the architecture of this thing. I'm guessing ARM running a NES emulator (rather than ports of the games), since they've got such great experience doing that on the 3DS. If it's hackable, this would be a fantastic gadget. As a project box alone, it looks really pretty. HDMI out, USB power, and controller inputs make it really appealing. Depending on headers and connectivity inside, hacking a U…
> I'm guessing ARM running a NES emulator Really surprised people expect it's anything more than one of these but with official licensing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System_...
Simple ARM chip + software emulator means you could just do everything one one chip without headaches. Plus it'll likely be cheaper.
I'm amazed noone here has mentioned RetroPie[1]. A model B Raspberry Pi or even a Zero (if you can get one) should play NES games perfectly fine. You can get USB NES controller adapters pretty cheap or some knock-off USB NES controllers instead. I have a SNES-USB adapter for my setup that takes two SNES controllers. [1] - https://retropie.org.uk/
Anyone in the market for hardware, I've found that the abilities of various devices tend to be overstated. Pi2 was in fact good enough for close-to-perfect NES, almost good enough for perfect SNES (fine for many games if you can tolerate the occasional slowdown or audio glitches), could play Mario64 acceptably but pretty much no other N64 games. Bizarrely decent at Playstation.
I'd imagine the Pi3 is pulls off SNES very well, just judging from the specs, though I don't have one yet. Be aware that these games will not look right without beefier hardware that can handle CRT shaders to (sort-of) correctly fuzzy-up the image. So, not a Pi. I now run Lakka on an Asus chromebox, which was about double the price of a Pi with a decent power adapter and not-hideous case, but can do the CRT shader thing and handles later consoles much, much better. Emulation on x86 tends to be more stable and better supported (faster) in general, so know you'll be on second-class (though rapidly improving!) platform if you go ARM.
Try out several controllers before settling. I found that the easiest solution (XBox360) failed my usual test of Punch Out and Super Mario. Couldn't block or dodge worth a damn in Punch Out (unsurprising given the 360's Dpad's reputation) and kept running into bottomless pits in Mario (I found switching between the "A" and "B" face buttons to be too slow). The 360 controller made it feel like the emulator input was lagging, but it in fact wasn't. PS3 controller works well for me. Wii Classic Controller Pro is even better, but I have yet to find a to-USB adapter that isn't messed up in one way or another—last one I tried would periodically register a bunch of wild analog stick input for no obvious reason, making it useless for N64 and Playstation. A big Retroarch-specific benefit of a PS3 or Wii Classic Controller is that you can use their home/menu buttons to bounce to the Retroarch menu, saving you from configuring a button combo for that—IIRC the 360 controller wouldn't let me use its home button for that purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I played a bunch of old NES games on an emulator in the early '00s. Two things stood out: (1) the graphics really were pretty lame, and (2) games I was addicted to as a kid seemed a lot more tedious as an adult. Not saying the classics don't stand the test of time, but some of those old games are better as a memory.
For me there has been huge leap between the NES and the SNES in terms of graphics and game complexity. Most of SNES games have aged much better than their NES counterparts, Super Metroid, Zelda, Chrono Trigger are still terrific games that I could play even today, while I agree that most NES games feel too old.
I can't entirely disagree.
For context, my first console was an Intellivision, so, no, this is not because my first console was a SNES. I did own one for a while... in the early 21st century, long after the PS2 was established.
I think some of it is just that the limitations of the medium were just so shocking prior to that. The Atari era basically couldn't have text; every text you see on the 2600 is freakishly expensive. The Nintendo era was still counting every letter. The SNES era may still be terribly constrained by modern standards, but at least you could make pictures that were recognizable, play recognizable sounds, use text without too much fear, include more variations in play without too much effort, etc. There's a handful of games prior to that that work miracles with the resources they have (Super Mario 3 isn't "just" a classic, it's legitimately amazing for the hardware).
I'd point out that even the people putatively writing Indie games with "old school aesthetics" almost never hold themselves to the limitations of the Nintendo era or before. There are some games that come reasonably close to SNES aesthetics, though.
I'm really interested in the architecture of this thing. I'm guessing ARM running a NES emulator (rather than ports of the games), since they've got such great experience doing that on the 3DS. If it's hackable, this would be a fantastic gadget. As a project box alone, it looks really pretty. HDMI out, USB power, and controller inputs make it really appealing. Depending on headers and connectivity inside, hacking a U…
If enough of these sell, some game developers will have good reason to make NES games again.
Well NeoGeo released a new handheld portable a few years back running a bunch of classic NeoGeo games, and it failed miserably on the market.
Also, the hardware was crap. Even though the games were made for 4:3 monitors, the system shipped with a 16:9 phone screen (likely because 4:3 screens are harder to source cheaply nowadays).
I'm amazed noone here has mentioned RetroPie[1]. A model B Raspberry Pi or even a Zero (if you can get one) should play NES games perfectly fine. You can get USB NES controller adapters pretty cheap or some knock-off USB NES controllers instead. I have a SNES-USB adapter for my setup that takes two SNES controllers. [1] - https://retropie.org.uk/
But this is official, with licenced legit games from Nintendo, so some people prefer that.