I recently bought a Snes and a few games, unfortunately it's a horrible shade of brown.
So i had to buy some games for it. Super Mario World, Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Doom, and Starwing. I thought Doom for the Snes came with a Red cart but mine is just a normal grey one :S.
The shop I found all this in had some extremely cheap Megadrive/Genesis games so I bought a few of them too, Including Lemmings, Flashback, Sonic and Knuckles, Premier Manager (for £1 lolz)
and just yesterday I received a copy of
ZERO WING!
I do actually like this game, especially the music.
It's just a pity so many people lose the cases, I know Snes games came in flimsy cardboard boxes but Megadrive games were in hardcore plastic cases (Bar Sonic and Knuckles).
I bought a lot of retro games and consoles last year. I have Nintendo and Sega complete now, all standing in a row. The cable mess is driving me crazy.
Assault Andy Administrator
I make other people create vaporware
Registered 29/07/2002
Points 5686
18th April, 2010 at 00:43:25 -
I bought a Commodore64 a couple of months ago. I haven't played it much. I had to buy a cable of eBay to make it work better with modern tvs. I need some better games for it.
I think the most recent purchase is probably the dreamcast. I have a few retro consoles that I either had given to me or bought that don't have games, AV cables, controllers, or some combination of the three.
Not bought any retro stuff for a while, though i do have a Mega Drive (mine from '91), Game Gear, Saturn, Dreamcast and an N64 to go with my PS1, PS2, DS and XBox 360. Not played any of them for a while now though......
Awesome . My nes and snes take pride of place next to my tv. Also have master system, megadrive, n64, gc, ps 1 (needs fixing), xbox, wii (hardly gets used at all now i have completed the mario games) and an xbox 360.
Need a new ps2 too as its also broke (i just love sony!).
Latest additions are a zx81 and a zx spectrum I was given after a family friend passed away
Oooh, that's a nice collection there! I used to have a ZX+3 with a floppy disk drive - i'd love to buy another one sometime! Also, think it's about time i bought a SNES, i never owned one!
Originally Posted by Assault Andy I am. But I'd like to get an old crappy TV one day.
Oh dear. "old crappy TV", the CRT extinction was a devastation. It's the only way to fully appreciate 2D video game art.
Because the colors generally bled out which made them less sharp and left more for the imagination to assume it looked better. It was over time, that we grew a respect for the graphics as they were. With that said, I'd actually prefer a clearer display so that I can cleanly see the sharpness of the graphics I appreciate so much.
A lot of art was drawn knowing how blurry the TVs were. So dithering looks much better on CRTs so much so that an area shaded with one black pixel and one white pixel alternating would look like a perfect shade of grey.
Originally Posted by AndyUK A lot of art was drawn knowing how blurry the TVs were. So dithering looks much better on CRTs so much so that an area shaded with one black pixel and one white pixel alternating would look like a perfect shade of grey.
On a black and white TV yes... On a color tv it would flicker between green/pink unless you have an RGB cable.
The reason not to use an LCD TV with old games is that when you display a standard definition source on an LCD it has to deinterlace and upscale it, which delays the picture and gives you a worse response to your controls.
Also, many early systems output a non-standard video signal, which wasn't a problem for CRTs, but may confuse an LCD TV.
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
Alternating black and white pixels causes a high frequency luminance signal, which causes interference in the chroma signal (when using an antenna or composite cable)
This interference causes flicker between different colors because the chroma signal's phase is shifted slightly between each field, while the interference is in the same phase on every field.
The flicker I was talking about was the colors, not the actual pixels.
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
Any resolution that's of multiples of 4, should come out clear on an LCD monitor. The reason they don't come out clear is because LCD's have built individual lights for each pixel on it's native resolution. If you make it less then it's native resolution, it tries to use a fraction of a pixel to light up a whole pixel which blurs it out since it can't do that. If you upscale beyond native, it wont be able to display all the pixels.
So on a monitor with 1440x900 native, 360x225 is really the highest low you'll get a crystal clear picture with. Any resolution on an LCD though will get you a more clear picture than an old CRT though, and like AndyUK said, this might have been the intent. However because I already know and appreciate what pixel art looks like off of a blurry CRT, I'd prefer seeing it as clear as possible - on an LCD
I disagree with your idea that CRT's are automatically worse. It's just that making CRTs of very large sizes is very impractical. That's the reason why LCDs are taking over.
For a vintage video game system a CRT TV is better. You get an analog signal from the console which directly drives the CRT in the TV. On an LCD TV the analog signal has to be digitized and upscaled to the native resolution of the screen. While theoretically pixel art could be nicely scaled at multiples of the original resolution by duplicating pixels, the LCD will most likely scale it as a "photograph" (some form of bicubic resizing probably) since movies and TV shows will look better that way.
Also, many systems used non-square pixels, for example the NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Colecovision and Sinclair Spectrum all used 256 pixel wide screens. If you want to display those at their proper aspect ratios you have to resize the picture.
Edited by Phredreeke
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not directly disagreeing with you. I will play an older game on a CRT without complaint, I'm just voicing an opinion here.
However, in response to the upscale, you're right with regards to TV's which might have all this scaling stuff automatic, however if we're talking about using a computer LCD monitor (remember, if you own a console and the game, it's legal to possess the roms), then depending on your video card settings, you'll likely have a better picture on the LCD monitor. I speak from personal experience though. I've found that my LCD monitor has a generally richer amount of color and clearer picture when I sat it side by side with almost any CRT TV I've used. Maybe I'm lucky, idk.
If we're talking about reliving our past, I will gladly grab an old CRT monitor, pop in an old Genesis with Sonic 3 and Knuckles and enjoy myself.
GBA had a good Mario Kart, some good Castlevania's, the Golden Sun games, Minish Cap and the Advance Wars games. Also I had fun with Wario Land 4. The rest seemed mediocre.
I quite enjoyed the GBA's library. There was a lot of licensed junk, but there were good games to be had.
Off the top of my head there was:
Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga
Mario Kart
Super Mario Advance 1-4
Advance Wars
Pokemons
The Donkey Kong Countrys
Minish Cap
4 Swords
Megaman zero 1-4
Sonic Advance 1-3
Megaman and Bass
Metroid Zero Mission
Metroid Fusion
Mario Tennis
Puyo Pop!
(Can't personally vouch for half of these though. >_> )
And then for megadorks like me, the Battle Network series. ALL BAJILLION OF THEM. There were others too, like Golden Sun and a Final Fantasy or two. But I wasn't generally interested in them.
The thing I love most about the GBA was the original's form factor. I would love if the 3DS went to something as comfortable.
1. You needed a very strong lightsource to make out anything on the screen. Yes, they put out a frontlit version a year and a half later, and then an actual backlit version, but by then I was already fed up with the system.
2. SNES ports (Super Mario Advance, Donkey Kong Country games) were priced the same as new games. I would loved to play Super Mario World on it (well, had I actually been able to see anything on it) but not for £45
I wouldn't consider GBA retro anyway (or any system made in the 2000s)
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
I never considered the SNES ports actual GBA releases. What was Super Mario Allstars or 5-pack on the SNES was released in overpriced bits on the GBA and the DKC ports were inferior to the SNES versions, especially music-wise. Why did DKC3 need new music?
I agree with OMC, it was the most comfortable handheld ever. I never play the DS because I hate holding it.
I loved my GBA but even the really good games never got much playtime. I only really played Mario kart super circuit and Sonic advance 1. I hardly touched Golden sun, Yoshi's island or Zelda minish cap even though they're excellent games. Strange really. I also have 2 pirate carts that are just a Nes emulator and 100 roms but they're just awful lol.
Astro Boy by Treasure is supposed to be really good.
The games I enjoyed were
Megaman Zero
Golden Sun (too much talking)
Iridion 3d was alright but suffered from difficult to read collisions
All of the snes ports that I played were absolutely terrible and made me want to commit suicide instantly. Seriously . . . look at Earthworm jim. Even the mario ports weren't superb (though they weren't as bad as the others)
Sonic advance 1 was OKAY. The game was plagued by "run off of this platform and have no idea what you're falling into" crap.
Other than that I gave up after downloading a bunch of roms and all of them being absolute crap.
wow. gba was not even as terrible as you say. not to mention its huge backlog of gameboy and gameboy color games.
"You needed a very strong lightsource to make out anything on the screen. Yes, they put out a frontlit version a year and a half later, and then an actual backlit version, but by then I was already fed up with the system."
as did you also for the gameboy color, gameboy pocket, and original gameboy, whats your point? if you really cared you could have modded it like most people to have a front or backlight or bought one of those addon light things. i never had a problem with needing a "very strong lightsource" all i needed was a lamp turned on while i was on the couch, or if i was in the car, as long as it was daylight it was fine. no idea what youre going on about.
Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga
Super Mario Advance 1-4
Pokemons
tLoZ: a link to the past + four swords adventure
f-zero
megaman battle networks
...more i cant remember
...super huge backlog of gb/gbc games
gba was by far the BEST iteration at the time of the gameboy series.
oh and on topic: the most recent system i bought was a playstation for 10$ which i *cough*modded*cough*. im playing Croc: legend of the gobbos and the jumping flash series right now.
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Edited by AndyUK
. My nes and snes take pride of place next to my tv. Also have master system, megadrive, n64, gc, ps 1 (needs fixing), xbox, wii (hardly gets used at all now i have completed the mario games) and an xbox 360.
i used to have a sega genisis but i think it was sold.
