Oh definitely. I mostly buy digital games for PC now. And there's so many digital storefronts, often with competitive pricing, it's insane. For the consoles, it's the same price all year round mostly, except during sales offers. But I still have an adoration for the cartridge era of gaming, which I still don't know why.

Oh btw my best friend is currently in Tokyo for vacation. I kinda want to be in Japan again, but I just recently changed jobs, no leaves accumulated yet haha. Anyway he asked me if I wanted anything for my birthday, so I asked for an FC Twin + MD. I'll be trying it out for the weekend. Anyone has Famicom/Super Famicom/Megadrive carts I can borrow/buy? I want to test out some games on it if possible, and since my friend isn't a console gamer, I can't ask him to look for Super Potato or something.

Tokyo still has the lion's share of retro stuff I think. Though prices are more expensive now due to tourists, like me haha. The place you're looking for is Osu Kannon in Nagoya. Honestly though, it's a hit or miss. It's a small-ish town compared to Akihabara or even Den-den. Looking for good stuff is kinda like looking for stuff at a flea market. Lots of common stuff, jual lambak, even broken or missing parts. But look a bit closer, and you sometimes find some buried gems here and there. Even the arcade scene's small there.

Huh baru bukak ke? Dang it

Ye la relatively baru bukak. Launched in December 2014. I was there in September 2014. Bro banyak pegi Japan ni? Are you a pilot or something?

Hey guys. My friend already bought the FC Twin + MD for me, but I don't have any Megadrive/Famicom/Super Famicom titles to test out. Anyone mind loaning me some games to try out? I may even be willing to buy those games. My Japan trip is only coming up in July, so kinda want to test it out first.

Oh just to be clear it's one of those third party products that probably run SOCs or even emulators. It doesn't even accept the original Famicom/Super Famicom/Megadrive controllers, instead it uses PC based USB controllers.

This post has been edited by tripleB: Mar 24 2016, 09:06 AM


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Ada je FC Twin, but I wanted something economical just for playing some good old Sega/Nintendo. This one's for playing, not for my usual collection.

The thing is that when I collect, it's collectible only. Maybe further down the line I'll buy the original systems. But this one is for personal use, since I never, ever got to play on actual cartridges when I was growing up. So the next time I'm in Japan, I'll just buy some loose cartridges for playing! Emulators just don't do it for me somehow.

Beli dari mana?

Ooo ni yang the most recent trip ye? The Nagoya trip bila?

Wah boleh tahan your Japan purchases ye. Quite often dah. Bro, can I kirim some SFC and MD carts from you? I still haven't powered on my FC Twin. No games to play Oh, and maybe USB clone controllers for Famicom, Super Famicom and Megadrive too? Just to get a more "authentic" feel hehe.

Thank you bro killermall for this haul! My first time owning game cartridges, so I probably went bonkers asking for all these hehe. And it was a pleasure finally meeting for the first time. Really awesome to meet fellow retro enthusiasts too!


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Back then, when I didn't have access to a Super Famicom or Megadrive, I always used to adore games that were on the consoles. Especially if it's an arcade port. I swore that Street Fighter II for Super Famicom looked "arcade perfect" back then. Now that I can finally run it, I can see the sacrifices that had to be made when porting to consoles. Just the other day, I fired up SF2 Turbo Hyper Fighting, and noticed them right away. Yup, sometimes nostalgia can cloud your judgement, and you lose sight of objectivity. Nonetheless, I can still appreciate that it was still an excellent port, given its limitations.

Video game art, like all types of art, is subjective. Some people might like something that represents the game well, some people just like to have simple art. As for me, I do like video game art from the 90s, but MOSTLY the Japanese covers. For whatever reason, the Western cover absolutely must be as different as possible from the Japanese cover. Just look at the Street Fighter II covers:

Super Famicom



Super Nintendo



Megadrive



Genesis

A few things actually. Resolution would be the first one. Then, you start noticing the background detail, frames of animation, music, speech. But I won't say timing. The console versions retain the gameplay of the arcade version, which is still the most important trait. I can replicate my Guile combos pretty well even on Super Famicom. Haven't tested the Megadrive version yet though.

True, just like today's consoles. Framerate or better FPS? Which is why I find it very hard to believe that today's modern consoles still have a hard time running 1080p at 60fps. Even the new God of War shown off during E3 didn't really run at a stable framerate. Granted, it did look really, really good.

Consoles are good because it offers the developers a known hardware environment, that's true. No need to worry whether their code will run on different hardware specs. Kinda makes me pity PC developers back in 1997, when unified APIs like DirectX weren't yet the standard. Instead, the developers had to worry about supporting as many 3D accelerator cards as possible. You had Glide (3Dfx), Rendition (3D Labs), RAGE (ATI), Trio/Savage (S3), Orchid, Intel, M3D/Mystique (Matrox), and way too many for me to remember. Nvidia was actually the new kid on the block at that time, with their first Nvidia RIVA card back in 1998. Ugh I'm oooooold

Oh definitely. Any kind of middleware or API will require more resource and incur performance hit. The consoles more or less talked direct to the hardware, hence getting more performance out of relatively low specs. I think the Saturn required programmers to be proficient at Assembly language, versus just using C for the Playstation. SEGA even blamed "lazy programmers" for being unable to squeeze power out of the Saturn like they could. Well, those "lazy programmers" just ended up being pro-Playstation and never looked back. I really don't how SEGA thinks sometimes, despite my love for them.

Oh yeah, PowerVR! At that time it was considered very powerful, but it uses tile-based rendering, which was ok for the time, but cannot possibly compare to later tech that uses hardware transform and lighting. Eventually this was used as the graphics processor on the Dreamcast, where it finally had mass market penetration.

Playstation was the internal working code for the Super Famicom CD add-on by Sony. This was a famous backstab by Nintendo, but the story goes that Sony wanted control of the manufacturing of the game discs, which Nintendo doesn't like. Remember, ONLY Nintendo can manufacture the Famicom and Super Famicom cartridges and no one else. This guaranteed big profits, since they were monopolizing the manufacturing and sales of cartridges.

Then, on the day they were supposed to co-present the Playstation add-on to the world, Nintendo announced that they have a chosen a different partner, Philips, for the CD add-on. This betrayal angered Sony, that they were determined to beat Nintendo at their own game. Enter the Sony PlayStation (notice the capitalized S). Cheap to manufacture, powerful 3D graphics, and much bigger storage than cartridges, Sony steamrolled both Sega and Nintendo, despite being the newcomer.

As for the Philips partnership, Philips came up with the CD-i, which DID have some Nintendo authorized games. Too bad they were shockingly bad. I guess it's already infamous by now, but The Legend of Zelda: Faces of Evil and some other games I can't be bothered to Google right now, were garbage. And to think this was what Nintendo had in mind for a partnership...