I've finally got a system I've meant to get for a long time. The Turbografx, or PC Engine, sold pretty poorly in the U.S. but came in second behind the SNES in Japan, and had a rather surprisingly strong "import following" in Europe. You know it as that one system with the caveman mascot.
Well, I did a lot of research and concluded the best one for me (that's actually affordable) was the Japanese version with an interface unit and the CD-ROM expansion. The DUO consoles lock out various add-on devices, and the SuperGrafx is just ridiculously expensive (and had like... 7 games). And, on an artistic level, I simply prefer the sleek and unique look of the Japanese original and that "briefcase" that links it with the CD-Addon. It's a cute system, and competes with the Ouya as smallest console ever made (depending on which dimensions matter to you).
There were some caveats. I found a very cheap one online (I've found... alternatives to eBay when it comes to buying imports from Japan), but the CD-ROM unit was heavily yellowed. No problem, I have a retrobrite setup and just the right hair product that perfectly substitutes for retrobrite. It worked, but I neglected to remove a metal plate in one half of it. Did you know that retrobrite drastically rusts metal with just a few hour's exposure? Well I do, now! Alright, I remove the RF plate and soak it in some white vinegar for another day, scrub it with a sheet of aluminum foil, and it's rust-free again (if not as shiny). One last detail. I've become better and better at soldering over the past few years so there was one last mod. I added a region free mod that involved slicing through 8 cartridge connector slot pins and wiring them to a little board someone made. The board made the process FAR sleeker and easier, and it looks like it's supposed to be that way. I removed the RF adapter from the board to make room for the region switch which is right where the former "channel switch" was located. I won't miss the RF output, not least because it only worked on Japanese TVs. Further, the interface unit pulls it's own video out the back so I have composite just fine. I'll add a composite mod to the PC Engine itself later on.
Well, now I've got it, and there's an amazing collection of games on the thing. Of course, I have Bonks one and two, and am currently looking for a cheap way to get the third. I have Rondo of Blood, Splatterhouse, and a much cheerier game about rainbows and islands called Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2.
The console itself has only one controller port, but fortunately right at launch they had an official 5 player multitap, so literally every game supports it without the need for a switch. Unfortunately, the connector plug is different between regions. I'm using Japanese controllers which isn't an issue but I could always get the US multitap and just mod it's connector to the Japanese style if I needed to.
It doesn't matter which region you get, the controller cables are SHORT! Three feet... both the Famicom and the Super Famicom committed the same sin, but this one's unique in that it's true for the US as well. This one as well I could probably resolve by finding an extension cable and plugging the multitap into that.
Anyway, next up is Bomberman. NEC and Hudsonsoft cooperated to make this system, and it shows. Heck the custom chips inside (the same "base" design as the NES and SNES processors) all have the Hudson bee on them. I'm going to get that and really put the multitap to it's intended use: bombing runs.
Hmm... next up would be.. more Atari consoles (I'm thinking Jaguar and 7600), and... shudder... the Neo Geo. Don't misunderstand, the Neo Geo was an AMAZING console with modern (for the time) arcade level hardware and utterly massive cartridges that closed in on the gap between CD and cartridge storage space. It was also $650 in 1991 money, and the cartridges were incredibly expensive as well (and bigger than the boxes SNES and Genesis games came in). You didn't think you were getting TRUE 1:1 arcade level performance cheap did you? And that's why I shudder. That expense made the system bomb. SNK made all their money off their Neo Geo arcade cabinets (the games were literally just the arcade versions with a few slight alterations to account for the lack of DIP switches and coin slots, and so the home and arcade machines can actually run each other's games, with a BIOS mod), but the home console tanked. So it was super expensive at launch, and super rare due to poor sales. That makes them even more expensive today, including the games! If I'm going to get into collecting these, I will likely either get the home console and BIOS mod it or find an arcade machine and "consolify" it's innards with a different mod (and also the BIOS mod). In either case, I'll be collecting the rather dull looking arcade cartridges since those are far more plentiful and, as a result, far cheaper.
Well we all saw this coming. Of course MS would be on the list of giant corporations guilty of sweeping horrible abusive behavior and treatment of "lessers" under the rug. They're a giant corporation. They're ALL like this.
Sony, at long last, is taking backwards compatibility seriously just when MS is washing their hands of it after such a long period of taking it seriously themselves. I wish these companies would just commit already.
In any case, yes, they are going to have a subscription access pass. Good, that's going well for MS and for Nintendo after all. What sets them apart (from Nintendo) is that you'll still be able to permanently purchase individual games and just own them, if you so choose (and I do). Further, all past digital purchases of retro games on PS3/PSP/Vita will be honored in the new store. (Hear that Nintendo?) FURTHER, unlike Sony's incredibly disappointing and bizarre "Playstation Mini", these games will all be specially tuned with modern expected emulator features like CRT effects, save states, and perhaps even using the right game for each region! (Sorry, the Playstation Mini is an easy target...)
All in all, very good news all around. If they can get something going for PS3 games as well as PS1/2/PSP (Vita to be determined), we'll really have something here.
Reggie Fils-Aime has been doing a lot of press recently, saying a lot of things. Some of them are good, some interesting stories about when he was head of NoA.
But then, there's this: Reggie likes NFTs, and wishes he could NFT monetize his Animal Crossing island.
And uniquely so. Knight used to actually be pronounced with the k.
I guess the takeaway on this is that rather than snobbishly look down on people online who spell things "wrong", we should only look down on them when they spel it rong but in a way that isn't fonetikly korekt. Also, bring back the thorn and whin letters.
This is not new news, it was discovered in 2020 with further developments happening since, but... I decided to make a thread now because why not.
So, when Sega designed the Dreamcast in 1998, they being an arcade company also made an arcade version of the system. That is the Naomi. However, the Naomi has additional hardware in it, more RAM specifically, so the Naomi is a boosted Dreamcast, not a Dreamcast. The Naomi games that didn't get home ports on the DC cannot simply be converted over without major reprogramming.
Later on, Sega released a second revision, the Naomi 2. This one adds a second boosted Dreamcast attached to the first one, essentially, so it is even farther removed from the base console. If Sega had had the money to stay in the industry maybe this would have been the basis for their next machine? Who knows. It'd still be somewhat underpowered versus some of the competition but not as badly as the base Dreamcast. (The DC was a next-gen machine and has fantastic image quality, but it also has a 3 million polygons per second hard limit. The Gamecube, XBox, and Playstation 2 all can do in the 15 to 18 million polys per second range.)
Then, in 2003, Sammy released an arcade board based on the Dreamcast, the Atomiswave. This cartridge-based system was designed to kind of be like the Neo-Geo but newer, and had support from SNK. It did okay but not great and got several dozen releases in arcades over a few years before fading out. Unfortunately, though, most of the games stayed arcade-only; only the SNK stuff, which include KOF NeoWave and XI, Metal Slug 6, and Samurai Shodown Tenkaichi Kenkakuten, got home ports. For a long time, everyone assumed that like the Naomi, the Atomiswave was a hardware-enhanced Dreamcast with added RAM and such, so the games stayed arcade and arcade emulator-exclusive.
And then... someone doing some digging into the hardware realized the truth: that is not true. In fact, the Atomiswave is a Dreamcast with a cartridge port instead of a disc drive. Its hardware is identical to the original Dreamcast console, there is no additional RAM, or anything else, other than the cartridge-based games and an SRAM save solution that is entirely different from how the VMU saves. This meant that it would be easy, with only a little work, to run all Atomiswave games on the Dreamcast itself! And so in 2020 some people set off to do those conversions. The only major limitation is that cartridge port issue -- a cartridge can read data much faster than a disc, so while it can be possible to convert some of the Atomiswave games to run off of discs, not all of them can. All Atomiswave games have now been released on Dreamcast, but only some have disc conversions; the rest require a GDEMU (SD card based disc drive replacement)-modified Dreamcast. There is one third option, a SD-based stick called a Dreamshell that you can plug into the serial port on the back of any Dreamcast to attempt to run games through the serial port, but from my experience this does not work reliably; I tried, but it just keeps crashing in some of the Atomiswave games no matter what settings I use. Even just loading the Dreamshell menu was unreliable, it crashed frequently. It's a neat option and is dramatically cheaper than buying a GDEMU Dreamcast, though. Also you cannot play Metal Slug 6 and maybe a few other games through a serial port device for some reason, that game uses the serial port for something else.
So, the serial port converter's really cool and they are cheap, but ultimately, using it left me frustrated with the constant issues, either incompatibilities or crashing. From what I have read, there are some crashes in Atomiswave games on Dreamcast no matter what you do because none of the options exactly mimic the data loading speed from an Amomiswave cartridge. Ho well games work despite this varies from title to title. However, there are fewer crashes with a GDEMU than with a Dreamshell serial adapter. If I wanted a somewhat more stable experience with Dreamcast Atomiswave software, my only option was to spend a few hundred dollars on a GDEMU Dreamcast if I wanted to play all of the Atomiswave games on a Dreamcast with fewer crashes. So, last year, I bought one, set up a SD card for it... and promptly didn't use it for quite some time. Now I have and yeah, it's pretty cool. The games work and it adds several dozen high quality arcade games to the Dreamcast library, including a couple of racing games and a couple of light gun games, in addition to a bunch of fighting games, a beat 'em up, and two run & guns (Metal Slug 6 and Dolphin Blue). I actually don't have a Dreamcast light gun, so I can't test the lightgun games. There were only a very small number of original light gun games for the DC, and I've always been fine with playing House of the Dead 2 with a controller. This release probably doubled the total... it makes me much more interested in getting a DC lightgun. Someday. I also should get a DC racing wheel, playing racing games like these with a controller is not ideal, it's not precise enough. A wheel apparently also makes the DC version of Daytona USA dramatically more fun. But anyway.
However, there are two big drawbacks. Well, three including the likelihood of crashes in some titles, depending on the game and how you are loading it. But beyond that there are two more. First, because of the way the system menu works in the Atomiswave, there was no way of making any games' options configuration menus accessible. Instead, each Dreamcast Atomiswave image has the options burned into the image and they cannot be changed or viewed. So the main Metal Slug 6 image gives you a very high 15 lives per continue, who knows what difficulty level any games are set to, and such, and you can't change any of this. That's not great.
The other issue is about saving. You can't save at all. Atomiswave saving does not use the VMU memory card protocol for its SRAM high score / best time saving, it uses its own solution based on SRAM, so without significant game hacking that nobody working on these games now can do as far as I know, there is no way to add saving to the games. It sounds like it wouldn't be easy to do that. I hope somebody manages it someday though, it's really the biggest thing missing here. I know that as arcade games you wouldn't be unlocking anything or such, but saving your best times and scores would be fantastic.
Regardless, finally being able to play Dolphin Blue NATIVELY on a console, and it's the Dreamcast, is amazing! That's the big one here for me; sure, the four SNK games are good, or great in KOF XI's case, but they've all been ported to other consoles where they have features like saving and such. But Dolphin Blue hasn't. It's an arcade exclusive, as are all of the games Sammy published for Atomiswave. I much prefer using real games over emulation or downloads, that's why I have such a large collection of old games, but I just can't afford the space or cost or challenge of arcade PCB collecting. It'd have been far better if these games had had home ports back then, but they didn't, so this discovery is really, really cool.
The Dreamcast-Talk forum is where to go for all info about this.
Kotaku complained this means we won't see a sequel any time soon because of that. I'm kind of okay with that.
I'll be honest, Mario Kart 8 is a glorious high point in the series and a delight to play. I don't really see what a new game can do that would be so radically different. I'd love for Nintendo to focus on OTHER racing series they've got. F-Zero. Excitebike. Heck even a new Uniracers!
Well, alright I can think of one thing. The day Nintendo feels a desire to implement a fully realized single player campaign as well designed as Diddy Kong Racing and Crash Team Racing, THAT is when I'd love to see Mario Kart 9.
They sold off Deus Ex and Tomb Raider, well basically all their non-Japanese studios. At first, everyone was wondering just why they did it. Speculation ran through many possibilities. Some suggested they were trying to make up for "lackluster" sales in FFXIV (their MMO is actually extremely successful right now, to the point that you would be forgiven for forgetting they actually have three MMOs still in operation, another Final Fantasy and a Dragon Quest: So You Want To Be a Hero.... or was that Dragon Quest: To Heir is Human? No I got it, It's Dragon Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel). Others suggested they were attempting to "slim down" their operation in preparation for being bought out by Sony. Still more assumed it was just good ol' fashioned Japanese business culture making them desire to have all their companies within the home country.
No, none of that please and thank you. It was the least of these, a tease if you please for NFTs. I won't insert the Kefka laugh yet. They sold off Tomb Raider, that OTHER PS1 game with the big boombas lady "competing" with their own Tifa, in order to get more spendable capital to spend on NFTs. Customer good will? Providing products people actually want to buy? That's so old-hat. The future is forcing their product on the unwilling, and the future demands ever higher profit year after year forever, or until we all die. NOW I'll insert the Kefka laugh, because it's more nihilistic and thus character appropriate.
