Nostalgia, Gaming, and You!

An issue I have ran in recent years for the first time with older cartridge is dying batteries. I own three cartridges of the wonderful, wonderful Donkey Kong gameboy game, two of which have died (and that game needs its saves). I am guessing this may become an issue in the not too far future with GBA games as well.

Somebody electronic enabled might be able to replace those I am guesing, but that is way beyond my own abilities.

It’s a simple CR battery (model varies), so should be easily achievable with the appropriate screwdriver and a local hardware store. No specialty skills needed!

Oh I’ll have to look into that, then: I had always assumed some soldering would be required!

Perhaps. But it looks like a simple one.

Warning, I’ve never tried myself, but for the few bucks a battery runs I’d certainly give it a try. Soldering is pretty easy, and this looks like about as simple as it gets .

Maybe not a viable solution but I’d you have a DS or 3DS you can get Donkey Kong ‘94 on DSWare.

You can get help at http://www.retrogameboards.com if you decide to take a stab at it. Some systems are easier or harder based on the cart design. Folks on that board routinely do things I have never tried myself and it’s amazing. There’s a thread right now where someone took the chips off a Chrono Trigger with a cracked PCB and soldered them onto an identical board from a Super Famicom version of the same game. It’s fascinating.

I went there to check that out, but I got stuck in an infinite timeloop on the CRT porn screenshot thread there!
All of my console’s gamepads are wasted, because there has been a flooding in the basement of my building a couple of years. I have thus not been able to plug any of my beloved blipblop spouting machines back on my Barco, excepting for the Playstation (I had a PSX gamepad+adapter stashed away for my nephew’s PC gaming purpose).
I’ll have to look into ways of cleaning the infamous mold without ruining the electronics or losing a lung in the process. More endeavours!

Good times. Water damage sucks.

The RGB forums astound me sometimes with the depths of depravity that some descend to there to get top notch image quality while not sacrificing to lag. That 240p thread took a wild turn recently with Danexmurder running his Switch at that resolution… with scanlines! DOOM 2016 looks pretty amazing!

I fastforwarded to take a look at that, and that’s pretty awesome! It reminds me of the way looked 3D prerendered games that they were doing in Japan in the late 90s because nobody was willing to stand on camera or something in that country. It’s very interesting.

It’s probably inappropriate, or even illegal! to link directly a snap from that thread of the retroboard here, so here is a direct link, because it is so wonderful. The second snap of Musha Aleste by that fellow named Sublevel is amazing.

Aw yeah… those were great shots. I love that game, too.

I learn so much from reading those forums while at the same time I find all sorts of interesting games I never had the opportunity to play, too. The 16-bit era and to a lesser extent the 32-bit era will forever be my favorite eras of gaming. I just love pixel art from those times and the purity of the gameplay. There are some modern games that are just as good of course, but something about so much produced then just feels so tight and is fun to look at.

Those people are maniacs. I will grant that what they’re doing is kind of interesting though.

There’s something about the 16-bit and especially the Saturn / arcade full-frame anime pixel art that I find incredibly appealing, for reasons I can’t really explain. I think it probably comes from continuous exposure to those titles in attract modes in arcades and stores, but never actually owning them. I’m a little surprised that none of the retro-game style revivals have tried to tackle that, although I assume it’s a) expensive, and b) not really part of the western nostalgia canon.

I have always admired the effort that went into the pixel art toward the end of the 2D era. All those hand drawn frames of painstakingly animated character art are beautiful to look at while simultaneously providing life that you often don’t get from polygonal designs. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of Nintendo in the 3D era is that their 3D games exude that same level of care in art and animation while presenting full 3D. They’re the next logical step on from where the 16/32-bit era ended for me.

There have been some retro revivals that have tried, but they are definitely fewer and further between than the 8 and 16-bit types. One game that I’m really hoping sees the light of day is Watermelon’s Paprium which is somewhere between 16 and 32-bit in presentation in one of my favorite genres… the beat 'em up.

http://www.paprium.com/

Anyway, yeah, RGB has some maniacs! They’re awesome maniacs, though. I really enjoy reading and posting over there. There’s a ton of knowledge there and everyone is chill for the most part. We just all love retro.

Today is 9/9… It’s thinking. 🤔

Wow, next year will be 20 years.

Huh, only dug mine out of storage – for the first time in years – yesterday. Like, I literally had to brush webs and spider exoskeletons off the box it was in. That’s weird timing though. Its laser’s knackered anyway so I’ve no idea why I’ve still got it. It sometimes plays games if I turn it upside down.

There’s a mod you can buy for the Dreamcast that replaces the laser with an SD card reader, solving the biggest issue with the machine, in terms of load times, noise, and as a failure point. It’s pretty amazing, although they’re pretty absurdly expensive.

This sounds very cool, but how do you transfer your games? I seem to remember some DC cds were tricky to dump?

TBH, I’m not sure, as I dont own one. A friend of mine does, but I’m not sure how he sourced the ISOs. Outside of a few outliers, i believe that Dreamcast ISOs were pretty trivial to copy.

He may have downloaded them, but he only downloaded images of games he owns! I can make that statement confidently, because he owns a complete collection of every Dreamcast game released in the US.

I just noticed my concern was silly: of course you probably can download anything nowadays, instead of going through the hassle!

I had been digging through boxes at my parents’. Fortunately, the ones filled with my console games had been stored far above the ground, and there was no damage.
Anyway, I had a single goal, since a single of my consoles is in any usable shape right now: to find my copy of Kessen 3, and hopefully the complete manual released as two extra books in the Koei fashion (you never milk enough your fans). And today, finally, in an obnoxious-looking box on the upper floor of a locker, here they all were!

I still needed to open the defective CD tray of my Playstation 2. It turned out to actually be super easy: after a failed attempt with a clipper, I just needed to slide a credit card, in the manner they unlock doors in American fictions.
I have jumped back into it and the game holds up quite well (RTS meets beat’em’up!) although it sports that weird trend of very awkwardly comical cutscenes (I remembered those in Dynasty Warriors 3, but I just witnessed Imagawa’s death, and it was pathetic).