RetroGaming

Originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1998, Resident Evil 2 came on two CDs and used 1.2 GB in total. Of this, full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes took up most of the space, as was rather common for PlayStation games. This posed a bit of a challenge when ported to the Nintendo 64 with its paltry 64 MB of cartridge-based storage. Somehow the developers managed to do the impossible and retain the FMVs, as detailed in a recent video by [LorD of Nerds]. Toggle the English subtitles if German isn’t among your installed natural language parsers.

Instead of dropping the FMVs and replacing them with static screens, a technological improvement was picked. Because of the N64’s rather beefy hardware, it was possible to apply video compression that massively reduced the storage requirements, but this required repurposing the hardware for tasks it was never designed for.

The people behind this feat were developers at Angel Studios, who had 12 months to make it work. Ultimately they achieved a compression ratio of 165:1, with software decoding handling the decompressing and the Reality Signal Processor (RSP) that’s normally part of the graphics pipeline used for both audio tasks and things like upscaling.

Texture resolution had to be reduced for the N64 port.

In the video you can see the side by side comparisons of the PS and N64 RE2 cutscenes, with differences clearly visible, but not necessarily for the worse. Uncompressed, the about fifteen minutes of FMVs in the game with a resolution of 320×160 pixels at 24 bits take up 4 GB. For the PS this was solved with some video compression and a dedicated video decoder, since its relatively weak hardware needed all the help it could get.

On the N64 port, however, only 24 MB was left on a 64 MB cartridge after the game’s code and in-game assets had been allocated. The first solution was chroma subsampling, counting on the human eye’s sensitivity to brightness rather than color. One complication was that the N64 didn’t implement color clamping, requiring brightness to be multiplied rather than simply added up before the result was passed on to the video hardware in RGB format.

Very helpful here was that the N64 relied heavily on DMA transfers, allowing the framebuffer to be filled without a lot of marshaling which would have tanked performance. In addition to this the RSP was used with custom microcode to enable upscaling as well as interpolation between frames and audio, with about half the frames of the original dropped and instead interpolated. All of this helped to reduce the FMVs to fit in 24 MB rather than many hundreds of MBs.

For the audio side of things the Angel Studios developers got a break, as the Factor 5 developers – famous for Star Wars titles on the N64 – had already done the heavy lifting here with their MusyX audio tools. This enables sample-based playback, saving a lot of memory for music, while for speech very strong compression was used.

Video

Well, its been a hot minute since I’ve updated the blog. Life decided that it had other plans for me over the past 18 months or so. The good news though, dear reader, is that we are back and …

From the post:

Download from itch.io now!

I’m the original developer of Star Quest 1 in the 27th Century, first released in 1995. I spent the last few weeks updating it for a 30th Anniversary Edition so it runs on Windows without the need to install and configure a DOS emulator yourself. I also modified the code to support game controllers and joystick with HOTAS setup and revised the keyboard and mouse control too.

The game has different play modes and missions:

• Dogfight, Racing, Surface strike, Tactical where you lead a squadron of wingmen.

Missions:

• Shoot asteroids from a rotating cannon to protect a space station.
• Bomb generators on a planet's surface.
• Deathmatch dogfights in deep space.
• Protect a space convoy from attacking spaceships.
• Race against up to 10 CPU ships around a space platform.
• Destroy enemy resources spread across a planet protected by turrets and hidden in space.
• Perform a surface strike on a mining colony while being blasted by ground turrets.
• Race around planets with asteroids in your path.
• Go on an adventure in search of a mysterious weapon.
• Follow a transport to attack a hidden enemy location.
• Lead a squadron to destroy an enemy convoy.
• Race across a mountainous planet and around the rings of a gas planet.
• Order a squadron to protect your star cruisers while they destroy an enemy station.
• Reach the enemy stronghold with your fleet to annihilate their base.

Some of the features:

• Customizable Challenge: 10 levels of difficulty and a cheat mode for invulnerability.
• 3D planets with atmosphere simulation.
• Full 360-degree freedom of movement, including light-speed, reverse and stop.
• Layered sound effects with volume that decreases with distance.
• Explosions with flying debris.

Going by the comments in the Itchio page and the post I found it through, it's still a DOS game, but preconfigured with DOSBox. Can't check though as I'm not on PC and the installer can't be extracted with InnoExtract.

Originally found the news through Spillhistorie:
https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/02/frister-det-med-et-30-ar-gammelt-romspill/

Hey ya'll,

So I have a HD graphics text gen 1 Genesis. Since I got it, it powered on fine but just flashes white and then black screen. I did get past the license screen once or twice in a game, but it froze up after that. I took it apart and cleaned and inspected it best I could, cleaned and bent the cart reader pins out to make sure that was fixed, and still get the same issue.

I have another genesis so I don't really need this one, but I would really like to know what else to do to fix it. Seems most people online just say "buy another one" because they are cheap. I may just sell it, but I'd like to figure out the issue. I'm decent at small electronics and have most of the needed tools (multimeter, good solder iron, o scope). If i know how to diagnose, I can do it. Ive fixed a few amps and built a few effect pedals here and there, calibrated my tape machines, but if I don't know what to do first i'm kind of stuck.

Has anyone else had this issue or are there some chips I need to look at testing?

This is not meant as an attack in any way, anyone can obvously buy whatever makes them happy.

I'm just really curious who buys consoles that aren't that old for such high prices.

I can see the appeal of holding childhood consoles in your hands again, and I can also see the appeal in collecting cool really old stuff. But I struggle to understand why someone would buy e.g. a New 2DS XL for €300 or more.

So just out of curiosity, if you are someone like that, what's the appeal that makes it worth spending so much money, instead of e.g. just going with a steam deck and an emulator instead?

Edit to avoid confusion: I am not talking about new reproduction systems (like the N64 Mini) or premium emulation/FPGA systems (like the Analogue Pocket or the MISTer), but about original game consoles that aren't supported any more but also aren't really old. Something like the DS/3DS, PSP, Wii U, Playstation 3. Some of them are now more expensive in mediocre second-hand condition than they were when they were new.

I bought a 3DS XL sometimes last year. It was under $200.

After seeing the surge in demand, I feel lucky that I bought it when I did. I also decided to take it out and play some animal crossing new leaf for the first time and I’m really enjoying it.

I sometimes wonder if I should have bought the “new” variant back then, but they were much more expensive and I’m still not sure if the performance improvements would have been worth it.

I’m basically just using not for ds and 3ds games, so, I’m guessing the power difference would not really matter.

I owned a Dreamcast 20 some years ago. It was one of the funnest systems ive had. It sadly got destroyed in a flood. Ever since then ive been on the fence about getting another one; well I figured, theyre getting old and its gonna be impossible to find one soon, so I bought 2 (kind of on accident, I won a bid i didnt intend to)!

Im super pumped. I already have way too many consoles but the dreamcast is just too awesome. I know I'll likely have to do the sd card mod and replace the psu, which is fine.

I was also very excited to see the online hobby community is still alive!! I would LOVE to get mine going for some online games someday.

Now to make space for it or decide if I can part with another console 🤔

I picked up some old CRTs from an ewaste find and had real trouble getting them to work around 2022.

I found a guy in southern California that can fix them but he was 2+ hours away and the monitors weighted around 100 pounds.

Just a few weeks ago I finally made the drive and got the first one repaired. It needed a few small parts and a service, but had a new picture tube installed.

It was a Sony BVM-D24E1WU.

The other monitor takes about 10 minutes to warm up. Pat the repair guy told me it would only support sd resolutions (480i) I didn't take it for repair since I didn't know what I would hook up to a SD only monitor. That one was a Sony BVM-20F1U.

Doing some quick searches it seems I got super lucky in the model both displays they were, as well as finding someone who knows how to fix them.

It seems that I should do some retro gaming. My retro system is a PS3 . Is there anything that just wows on these displays?

Does anyone have an HDMI to sdi recommendation? How do I de-embed the audio?

Update:

I realized that my Taiko Drum Master machine is a PS2. I tried hooking it up the the 20" monitor and discovered the BVM does not have a composite input, component only. I'll get a component cable since I can't imagine I'd get an input card for less.

Is there anything to look out for in PS2/PS3 component cables? I had a Sony set I got by mistake and can't seem to find them now that I need them.

This is a cool find to me, since the XB360 version of the game is very different from the PC release.

There are no good options for game gear games. Just putting them on the shelf makes it impossible to know what you have you can't even write on the edge or put a side label. Case solutions I found online are basically either find DS/3ds cases and hack them all up, but these are harder to source, more expensive both for the base and the printing and they don't look the best, or you can go the customgamecases route which is insanely expensive if you have a large or complete collection. I've gone with a different option.

These are some custom cases I've made for my game gear games. These are basically my mk.1 design. There are some slight changes/additions/modifications I'm going to make to both the covers I designed and the cases themselves. I'm using standard cassette cases because they're cheap and available. The games are just a hair too big so I need to cut a hole in the side of the cases. I seen a post from Reddit where someone did a case without cutting and they either can't easily open the case or found slightly larger than average cases. I'm hoping to clean up my cutting so it at least looks a little cleaner. The place where I sanded off the post looks bad so I'm going to maybe slap a sticker over it, just haven't decided what.

I'm not saying this is the best or even a good option, I'm saying all the options suck and I'm just showing off my sucky choice.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42166944

Hi, I have an Power Clutch SG by Asciiware (also known as the Sega Mega Stick), a controller for the Sega Mega Drive. It's one of my favorite controllers.

Unfortunately my son dropped it a few years ago and snapped the joystick clean off. I have disassembled and removed the joystick. The snap is clean and the 2 parts fit together neatly. I'm looking for the best way to fix this. The joystick itself has no aftermarket alternatives as far as I can find, and buying another one of these to harvest the stick itself is an exercise in futilty as it would leave the other unit without a stick.

The big question is, what adhesive brand/type is best to bond these 2 parts together again? Especially considering the stress this might have to endure.

Once I went to a children's birthday party and the place had this Arcade machine running emulators, I thought it was awesome. Then I went online and found HyperSpin and started building my own game wheels and stuff. I just wanted the controller and to plug the PC on a big TV and play, but all controllers I found to buy at the time had at best 10 buttons per player and it wasn't nearly enough to properly emulate a lot of games - not to mention only one Joystick wouldn't be enough to play a lot of games from Gen 6 and above (stuff that requires dual analog I'd rather play with a mouse on the computer than with a controller anyway), so I built that monstrosity.

I used to have a full mapping of how each emulator was configured there, but the PC I used to play died years ago and this controller has been sitting atop of my wardrobe since then. But the middle buttons are universal save and load and the top one is exit.

At the time (2013) I had made a blog showing how I built it hacking cheap USB PS2-like controller knock offs https://hsarcade.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html (but the page is in Portuguese - and I had zero electronic knowledge at the time :P), anyway, I just wanted to share the controller I built.

ps: Image is H.R. Giger.

I did post here a while back on the (New) Atari VCS - but this is more focused on the "Modern" controller.

First off, this is my favorite controller I own. It's SO comfortable, the buttons feel amazing, and it looks awesome. It's basically a better designed 360 controller. Very smartly designed D-Pad. Triggers are thicc and smooth.

The biggest downsides are, the bluetooth is super flakey. Not a huge deal as it comes with a really nice robust and long (5 ft?) USB cable. The bluetooth works perfectly in Atari OS but basically nowhere else. I have had it work on PC briefly, but it disconnects a lot. That could be linux/my bluetooth dongle.

You also cannot actually use it on an xbox, wireless OR wired, even though it has "xbox mode". It's a bit misleading they call it that when it really only works for PC.

Anyway, if you like interesting/different hardware, thought I'd bring it up! Maybe someone has an Xbox One controller they can compare to it? I do not.