DCEmu Latest News Update - The Battle of The Handhelds
Retro Consoles/Translation News
by Published on May 7th, 2012 00:26- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
Despite the interactive entertainment industry's manic obsession with relentless technological progress, improved audio visual capability and cutting-edge artificial intelligence, the enduring popularity of vintage software proves that good old-fashioned gameplay remains the biggest draw for most players. All three current console manufacturers offer the ability to digitally download past classics to their systems, and on the PC, retro enthusiasts are ably served by the likes of Steam and GOG. Clearly, all the deferred rendering, anisotropic filtering and bump mapping in the world can't change the fact that good games never die, they just mature....
While it's unquestionably a positive thing that modern-day players have access to such a wide range of retro titles through current-generation hardware, there's a definite buzz to playing on the original systems. The unmistakable feel of the authentic joypad, the sound of a cartridge clicking home and the strangely addictive pleasure of sourcing games in their original packaging - all of these elements drive a retro gaming industry which is worth millions worldwide, and shows no signs of flagging.
Many collectors do it for the love of the systems; they might have owned a particular console when they were younger, and now that they possess a large disposable income wish to revisit their misspent youth and attempt to replicate the thrill they got when they saw Street Fighter II running for the first time on a Super Nintendo. Younger collectors don't have that nostalgic link, yet the high esteem in which some of these ground-breaking machines are held means that even those who weren't even born during the original release period still crave a piece of history.
Below is a selection of some of the world's most popular and collectible vintage gaming machines, some of which you'll no doubt be familiar with, others possibly less so. Regardless of whether or not you recognise the name or can recall when you last booted one up, each of these platforms is well worth reassessing from a modern perspective.
The RPG King: Super Nintendo
Nintendo faced a stern challenge when it came to creating the successor for its 8-bit NES, but the Super Nintendo did not disappoint. Launched as the Super Famicom in Japan, there were reports of buyers being mugged for their newly-acquired consoles, such was the unprecedented demand.
"While heavily criticized for its seemingly slow processor, the Super Nintendo quickly became the system of choice for some of the best platformers and shoot 'em ups to come out of the 16-bit generation," explains Nintendo Life's Corbie Dillard. "It didn't hurt that the system was packaged with what is still one of the greatest Super Mario titles ever crafted."
Nintendo enjoyed what was arguably its golden era with this console, producing some brilliant titles. To supplement games like F-Zero, Super Metroid, Yoshi's Island and Pilotwings, the SNES was ably supported by every developer worth their salt, with the likes of Konami, Capcom, Square, Irem, Hudson, Taito, Koei and Enix all throwing their weight behind the machine. The list of third-party must-have titles is exhaustive: Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, Cybernator, Parodius, Super Castlevania IV and Axelay - amongst many, many others - proving to be solid gold slices of interactive brilliance. However, it's for its services to the RPG genre that the SNES is possibly best remembered.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df...llectors-guide
by Published on May 4th, 2012 00:27- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
Instructibles user [Danjovic] managed to get his hands on an Atari 2600, but all the joysticks were damaged beyond repair. Instead of building an atari joystick from scratch, he looked to a slightly newer generation of gaming and decided to us an NES controller instead. This was done fairly easily with the aide of an Arduino.
This seems like a nice easy mod that could breathe a little new life into some old games, but we just can’t imagine playing without that original joystick!
http://hackaday.com/2012/05/02/using...an-atari-2600/ ...by Published on May 3rd, 2012 15:23- Categories:
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by Published on May 2nd, 2012 00:03- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
MIT's The Tech published an article with technical details behind the Tetris hack they did on the Green Building earlier this year. The article includes photographs of the LED modules, as well as a link to some of the source code used in the hack. The hackers have released some of the source code on GitHub, and are looking for people to contribute code that could run on the system.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...-code-released ...by Published on April 30th, 2012 00:25- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
This week saw the 30th anniversary of the launch of Sir Clive Sinclair's legendary ZX Spectrum - the more powerful, full-colour follow-up to the seminal ZX80 and ZX81 - and a genuine gaming phenomenon.While the Spectrum's place in gaming history is indisputable, it was not the only computer launched in 1982 that offered a generational leap in power over its predecessor; later that year, the brilliant Commodore 64 arrived to replace the lacklustre VIC-20. Coming in at over twice the price of the 48K Spectrum, the C64 wasn't cheap, but it was packed with custom hardware clearly aimed at offering arcade-style gameplay to the home computer audience. While the Spectrum dominated sales in the early 80s, the C64 began to catch up and thus the scene was set for the first great platform conflict: the basis for thousands of classroom arguments and countless playground brawls.So with the benefit of hindsight, which was actually better - the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64? On the face of it, from a technical perspective there's no real contest here. While the Spectrum enjoyed a resolution advantage, the C64's VIC-II graphics chip offered hardware scrolling and sprites that weren't available on the Spectrum, while the impressive three-channel SID chip annihilated the efforts of the poor single-channel speaker embedded in the Sinclair machine - and it was the C64 that helped define the chip-tune musical genre that is still going strong today. In short, one machine was designed primarily with home computing and programming in mind, while the other had advanced custom hardware dedicated entirely to smoother, richer graphics and vibrant sound."Commodore spent a huge part of their efforts developing the audio and video chips. Why else would you put them in there if it weren't to make games?" says ex-ZZAP! 64 reviewer, erstwhile C64 games dev and current studio head of Ruffian Games, Gary Liddon."The VIC-II chip seems to be built off of concepts that were already fairly common in arcade machines; mainly sprites and smooth scrollable screens made from character sets. Contemporary arcade titles like Scramble already had similar capabilities."Jason Page, the ex-C64 coder and musician for developer Graftgold, now heading up Sony Europe's audio R&D department, concurs with Liddon's assessment."I'd think that if the C64 was aimed at education and learning to program, then it certainly got it wrong - C64 BASIC was essentially a load of POKEs. I'd say that there was certainly an 'entertainment' element in the C64 design. If Commodore expected it to be used for games, I guess that's likely," says Page.Looking at the two major HD consoles of today, just imagine the cheaper Xbox 360 launching without any kind of graphics hardware at all, while the PS3 retained its Cell/RSX CPU/GPU combo. The technical curiosities and tweaks in visual effects work that tend to separate cross-platform games of our era would expand into an enormous gulf of difference if the same game had to run on one system with no graphics hardware support at all. To a certain extent, that's how it was back in the day on the Spectrum and Commodore 64.http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...s-commodore-64...by Published on April 29th, 2012 23:15- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
[Kyle] and an a few of his classmates are wrapping up a microcontroller interfacing class at Purdue and thought it best to send in the . It’s a version of Super Smash Bros. made by just bitbanging pins on a microcontroller.
The hardware for the project is based around a Freescale 9S12c32, an updated version of the 30-year-old M68HC11 microcontroller. For the controls, the guys used a Playstation 2 joystick and buttons housed in an Altoids box, and the actual console is made out of strips of wood stapled together to look like a crate from Super Smash Bros.
There are nine playable characters: Pikachu, Captain Falcon, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Mario, Luigi, Link, Kirby, and Fox. Despite these characters being only four pixels high, the game looks extremely playable (at least when two players don’t choose the same character). After the break is the video demo of Super Smash Bros: Bitbang edition, along with a gallery of pics showing the console and gameplay. All the code is up on GitHub for your perusal.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/29/bitba...er-smash-bros/ ...by Published on April 29th, 2012 23:14- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
Halo may have made its way to the Atari 2600, but wouldn't porting a retro game to this '70s-era console be more appropriate? MAKE Magazine has the skinny on former Atari dev Scott Williamson's port of the Cinematronics shooter Star Castle. Though Atari execs decided the title was too complicated to bring over in the '80s, Williamson took it upon himself to make that transition possible. The result of some serious coding is 8K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM's worth of good ol' space war. But he didn't stop there -- he redesigned the cartridge with a transparent casing and LEDs that flash during gameplay. Click through to the source link for the full step-by-step.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/27/s...le-atari-2600/ ...by Published on April 29th, 2012 22:56- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
Product delays that push back release dates a full year are never good. What's worse? When that product finally does launch and even someone inside the company votes against it. That's exactly what's going down with the CT510 GameBox, the Eedoo Kinect competitor for the Chinese market. Though it's gone through a fair share of reincarnations before arriving at its current config (it was formerly known as theeBox), the final package has a dual-core CPU, a minimum of 250GB in HDD storage and a 3D GPU, and comes pre-installed with eight games and ten apps. All told, it will cost a cool 3,799 yuan ($600) when it ships on April 29th -- some very ambitious pricing, considering that the imported Xbox with Kinect (the console isn't officially available in China) already sells for about $459 in China, according to M.I.C. Gadget. A director from the Lenovo-backed company seems to agree: in a Sina Weibo poll asking users whether they'd buy the product (pictured after the break), he selected the answer, "No way! Price-to-performance ratio too low." Though to be fair, the gentleman later clarified that it was an honest mistake, and that his company is targeting the high-end family users instead of the core gamers. Well, we shall let the sales figures do the talking.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/28/l...onsole-launch/ ...by Published on April 28th, 2012 22:00- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
Retro emulation-based handheld GameGadget has had its RRP slashed from £99.99 to £59.99.
Makers Blaze say the move is due to “phenomenal demand and support”. Furthermore, the company has said it will refund all current owners £40 to make up for the price drop.
“Demand and support for GameGadget has been phenomenal taking us completely by surprise,” GameGadget creator Jason Cooper stated. “It has enabled us to secure significant cost savings on future production, well ahead of schedule.
“As we are serious about GameGadget becoming a “must have” gadget, that everyone can afford, we are therefore passing on our cost savings immediately.
“From day one we said we would be honest with our customers. We shall be refunding all customers the equivalent value of today’s price drop. They and future customers can now be confident that GameGagdet has reached its optimum price, in record time. There will be no further price reductions.”
Since launch the device has been beset by problems, including a software issue that prevented it functioning correctly out of the box.
Some owners have also been angered that, for the time being at least, only 30 titles are available for the machine, all of which are Mega Drive titles priced at £4.99 a piece.
Blaze is marketing the download service as “the gaming equivalent of iTunes”.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/blaze...-owners/095178 ...by Published on April 27th, 2012 00:09- Categories:
- Retro Consoles/Translation News
No, it’s not just another MAME cabinet build. [Le Chuck] over on the arcadecontrols.com forum built a fully functioning 1/6 scale replica of the classic 1983 Atari arcade game Star Wars.
The hardware is a CAANOO Linux-based portable media player running an emulation of the classing 1983 Star Wars video game. When [Le Chuck] turns his cabinet on, MAME4All boots up and goes directly into the game.
Because there are no 1/6 scale arcade parts, [Le Chuck] needed to fabricate most of his build from scratch. The case is basswood, along with the very-accurate light up coin slot doors. The joystick for the game was a bit tricky; the Star Wars game used an X Z joystick modeled after the yoke in the cockpit of an X-wing. To build this joysitck, [Le Chuck] took apart a few pots and crafted the joystick out of thin sheet metal. The controls operate exactly like the original, only in 1/6 scale.
After the break you can see the video of this incredible build in action.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/26/micro...a-work-of-art/ ...- What is the DCEmu Homebrew & Gaming Network
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