The retro gaming thread!

[Stevo985]

Doesn't look great does it?

A shite game lineup and they've not even executed it well.

[Chindie]

4 minutes ago, omariqy said:

But didn't we all play the PAL versions growing up?

It looks like the n64 classic won't be coming out any time soon.

We did, but that's because we didn't have much choice. The PAL versions are objectively worse, and today there's no need for them to be used. That they're used for the likes of Tekken is just shit.

[omariqy]

1 hour ago, Chindie said:

We did, but that's because we didn't have much choice. The PAL versions are objectively worse, and today there's no need for them to be used. That they're used for the likes of Tekken is just shit.

Interesting, I never knew they were that much worse. Was it just the graphics that were worse?

[hogso]

It wasn't exactly the graphics that were affected. At the time, standard PAL (European) TV sets operated at 50hz - the refresh rate of the screen. In the US and Japan, NTSC operated at 60hz. The main issue here was the speed at which the game on screen operated. As Chindie mentions, for something like Tekken, there is a noticeable difference. PAL games also often had a big black border top and bottom. You're right in one respect - yes, a lot of people wouldn't know any better, but the truth is we were literally playing an inferior version of those games at the time. I seem to recall some PS2 games actually had an option where you could choose either the 50hz or 60hz version, if you had a compatible TV.

[Stevo985]

47 minutes ago, hogso said:

I seem to recall some PS2 games actually had an option where you could choose either the 50hz or 60hz version, if you had a compatible TV.

Yeah I remember that.

I had no idea what it meant, but I definitely remember being given the choice

[Wainy316]

Good article on the Dreamcast 20 years on.  Can't believe it's been that long!

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/nov/28/sega-dreamcast-at-20-futuristic-console

 

 

Quote

 

In 1998, the Sega Dreamcast changed the whole face of console and games design, but it was haunted by an unbeatable competitor

Keith Stuart

 @keefstuart

Wed 28 Nov 2018 12.30 GMTLast modified on Wed 28 Nov 2018 13.12 GMT

 

 

 It was something entirely new – a fully connected entertainment machine … Sega Dreamcast console. Photograph: AP

The Dreamcast looked like nothing else out there. A lighter box than the uniform black or grey, four joypad ports, a bizarre controller with a memory card that had its own screen and worked as a separate miniature games console. The name – a portmanteau of Dream and Broadcast – was strangely ethereal for a games console (Sega had apparently gone through 5,000 possibile monikers to get here). When a prototype was shown to the press in the summer of 1998, there was no Sega logo. This was a new dawn. This was the future.

Sega was the perennial underdog in the video game console market. When it launched its first consoles – the SG-1000 and Master System – in the early 1980s, it was dealing with a competitor that ruled 96% of the market via its ubiquitous Nintendo Entertainment System. Back then, people didn’t say they were playing on a console. They said: “I’m playing Nintendo.” The brand was utterly dominant.

Then came the Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis in the US), a mighty 16-bit machine, with sleek arcade conversions and a new hero in the spiky form of Sonic the Hedgehog. 45m sales later, Sega shared half the market with its old foe. The 32-bit Sega Saturn followed in 1994 but by now there was a new competitor: Sony. The PlayStation was supremely powerful, expertly marketed and designed for the new era of 3D polygonal visuals. It destroyed everything in its path.

 

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 The Tokyo Game Show, 2001, shows the Dreamcast among its rivals. The odds did not look good Photograph: Katsumi Kasahara/AP

But Sega had a vision. When work began on a successor to the Saturn, the company’s manufacturing divisions began to rethink what a games console should be. This was the mid-1990s, the dawn of the world wide web as a mass phenomenon, the era of Netscape Navigator, America Online and emerging web-hosting services such as Angelfire and Geocities; the internet was becoming a place to meet, communicate and play. At the same time, the PC was coming into its own as a platform for gaming, thanks to the arrival of specialist 3D accelerator cards, which boosted the graphics performance of the incoming Pentium-series machines. And somewhere amid all this, Apple was preparing to unleash its iMac vision on the world.

Dreamcast embodied all of this epochal action. Inspired by the PC market, the machine was built from “off-the-shelf” components, rather than proprietary chipsets, to drive down costs. At its heart the Hitachi SH4 processor, married with a graphics chipset provided by PowerVR (one of the big names in the PC hardware acceleration market), promised unparalleled visual performance; a deal with Microsoft saw the machine adopting the familiar Windows CE operating system, which would vastly increase the number of developers who could conceivably work with the hardware. Dreamcast was also the first major console to come with a built-in modem as standard, and Sega (which had already innovated with online games services on the Mega Drive) set about creating an online infrastructure to provide owners with multiplayer gaming, webTV, email and web browsing. It was something entirely new – a fully connected entertainment machine.

The Japanese launch in November 1998 was a stumbling, halting introduction, thanks to trouble manufacturing the PowerVR chips. But customers queued in their hundreds outside the big game stores in Tokyo, keen to see this odd new console and its killer app, Virtua Fighter 3tb, a new version of the biggest fighting game in Japanese arcades, boasting detailed models of favourite characters, 13 beautiful arenas, and sleek 60fps animation. It was an enticing hint of what was to come from this graceful 128-bit machine.

 

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 Shenmue introduced many new gameplay conventions, such as Quick-Time Events and forklift truck racing for capsule toys. Photograph: Sega

The Dreamcast, in its first two years, saw a burst of creativity and gameplay innovation that has perhaps never been surpassed. Sega’s talented internal development teams were utterly inspired. Games such as the urban skating adventure Jet Set Radio, the fast-paced puzzler Chu-Chu Rocket, the massively multiplayer role-playing adventure Phantasy Star Online and the open-world masterpiece Shenmue introduced whole new forms and conventions of interactive entertainment. There were astonishing arcade conversions in the shape of Crazy Taxi and Soul Calibur; there were oddities including the subaquatic life sim, Seaman, and the zombie-infested keyboard tutorial, Typing of the Dead.

The rules of game design were being rewritten; true visionaries such as Yu Suzuki (Shenmue, Ferrari 355), Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Rez, Space Channel Five) and Rieko Kodama (Phantasy Star, Skies of Arcadia) were in their pomp. Established genres were being mashed together to create hybrid beasts not divided into regulated stages or levels but set in vast, open environments: Sonic Adventure, Metropolis Street Racer, and of course, Shenmue, a game that required players to effectively live in a mid-1980s rendition of Yokosuka.

The Dreamcast hinted at a new era of games: connected, open, complex and reactive to player curiosity. By building in a modem from the start, rather than requiring consumers to buy them separately, it made online features an intractable part of the console games industry, two years before Microsoft’s Xbox took that concept and really ran with it.

But it was too early and it had too much baggage. Outside of Japan, major publishers hadn’t forgotten how the Saturn bombed against the PlayStation, and when Electronic Arts decided not to support Dreamcast, other companies followed suit. The original dialup modem was too slow for the coming era of multiplayer shooters (though it ran a wicked version of Quake III Arena), and the attendant online services too complicated and unwieldy.

And on the horizon, just out of reach but utterly tantalising, was the PlayStation 2. Sony was preparing something special, a much more powerful machine with a hyperbolically named Emotion Engine processor, backwards compatibility for PlayStation titles and the capability to play DVDs. Dreamcast enjoyed a decent US launch in 1999, with 500,000 units shifting in the opening weeks, but this was a blip on its downward trajectory. When Sony premiered the PS2 at the Tokyo Game Show in September with Tekken Tag Tournament and Gran Turismo 2000, the game was up.

The Dreamcast was the future in so many ways, but, like many technological groundbreakers throughout history, it had the right ideas at the wrong time. Its great highs live on, however – in the careers of Sega’s great designers, in the legacy of Shenmue, in the memories of players who first discovered the thrills of taxi simulations, graffiti sims and maraca-shaking rhythm action games. But by 2001, the dream was effectively over.

There was nothing else out there quite like the Dreamcast. In many ways, there still isn’t.

 

 

[villarule123]

I've cancelled my pre order. 

After getting a Shield, where I can play any game not 20, it's made these a bit unnecessary. I include the N64 when I say that too. I might buy one to add to the collection when they come down in price. 

[Chindie]

5 hours ago, omariqy said:

Interesting, I never knew they were that much worse. Was it just the graphics that were worse?

As hogso says it's not the graphics, it's the performance. Not only is there the issue with PAL games, it also makes some of the NTSC games run worse than they did when originally released. Digital Foundry goes into it below

Quote

We've only just started to look at the PlayStation Classic (our unit arrived today) - and it's not a pretty picture right now. Remarkably, even the NTSC games have issues. You can see that with the performance snapshot of R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 embedded below. Original hardware runs this title locked at 30fps with perfect frame-pacing - a new frame is delivered every two screen refreshes without fail. Running under emulation on the PlayStation Classic, not only are frames delivered with 'blips' adding some stutter, but there also appear to be performance dips too - which do not occur in the game running on original hardware. So even if Sony had delivered a full NTSC line-up, we'd still have problems with this product falling short of the quality delivered by the actual Playstation.

Moving onto the PAL titles, the situation worsens. Tekken 3 does indeed run at 83.3 per cent of its intended speed, but more than that is the fact that a 50Hz gameplay is dropped into the Classic's 60Hz output, giving obvious judder. Looking at raw video captures, every sixth frame is a duplicate - there isn't even the rudimentary frame-blending used in PAL PS2 Classics running on PlayStation 4. In fact, Tekken 3 also includes regular 50ms frame-time spikes - two dropped frames in succession, something that shouldn't happen.

But it's the original 30Hz titles that fare worse. As they are based on PAL code, the maximum frame-rate here will be 25fps. Looking at Battle Arena Toshinden, that is indeed the case with the PlayStation Classic's output - but it's actually worse than that as in addition to the reduced frame-rate, you also see variations in frame delivery too. There's little consistency here, meaning that gameplay suffers from obvious stutter. It's a really, really poor showing here.

We finish up with a game operating with an unlocked frame-rate - Jumping Flash. This game was hardly a performance masterpiece when it first shipped, but comparing the original NTSC release here to the PlayStation Classic's output, it's clear that there's a yawning chasm in performance here between the two systems.

There's typically a 17 per cent drop in speed transitioning from NTSC to PAL, but the effect seems to be somewhat exaggerated here, with a performance differential that can even exceed 30 per cent in favour of original hardware. We'll be looking at the emulation in more depth soon but something is clearly amiss here.

The thing is shit.

[hogso]

I was also shocked to see that there aren't any special features, or call backs to the original PS1 when it was first released - for example, the demo disc everyone had (the T Rex and Manta Ray!). A horrible rush job.

[Demitri_C]

A crap flop from sony. N64 classic will blow this apart.

[Keyblade]

On 29/11/2018 at 17:24, Demitri_C said:

A crap flop from sony. N64 classic will blow this apart.

Don't think there's going to be one any time soon.

Gamecube Classic would amazing though (only because I'm just really diving into the system, and I already have an N64 with 90% of my favorite games).

[Demitri_C]

9 hours ago, Keyblade said:

Don't think there's going to be one any time soon.

Gamecube Classic would amazing though (only because I'm just really diving into the system, and I already have an N64 with 90% of my favorite games).

I reckon the n64 classic will be out late next year to be honest. They are deliberately not releasing any n64 games for the switch just for the n64 classic

[villarule123]

Seriously, anyone wanting a N64 classic should just buy a NVIDIA Shield. You can play anything perfectly up to the PS1/N64 era and not have to pick between only 20 games. Not to mention it's by far the best Android box for all the other media needs you'll have. 

[Chindie]

DF Retro with another good video, this time throwing the PS Classic under the bus.

[Dr_Pangloss]

Yep, it looks like a PILE OF SHIT,  better off with a decent emulator on your PC. In fact, why can't Sony just open emulation up on the PS4? Just a horrible company. 

[omariqy]

On 01/12/2018 at 12:19, villarule123 said:

Seriously, anyone wanting a N64 classic should just buy a NVIDIA Shield. You can play anything perfectly up to the PS1/N64 era and not have to pick between only 20 games. Not to mention it's by far the best Android box for all the other media needs you'll have. 

It's what I do. I purchased a n64 recently but sold it again and go the shield. Everything up to dreamcast runs really well. Currently playing diddy kong racing and it looks great. 

[Demitri_C]

On 01/12/2018 at 12:19, villarule123 said:

Seriously, anyone wanting a N64 classic should just buy a NVIDIA Shield. You can play anything perfectly up to the PS1/N64 era and not have to pick between only 20 games. Not to mention it's by far the best Android box for all the other media needs you'll have. 

But how do you get the n64 games on it and all the other things like snes etc?

[Keyblade]

2 hours ago, omariqy said:

It's what I do. I purchased a n64 recently but sold it again and go the shield. Everything up to dreamcast runs really well. Currently playing diddy kong racing and it looks great. 

Man I really need to buy Diddy Kong Racing again. Was better than Mario Kart 64 imo and I loved that game (was my first N64 game).

[Demitri_C]

2 hours ago, Keyblade said:

Man I really need to buy Diddy Kong Racing again. Was better than Mario Kart 64 imo and I loved that game (was my first N64 game).

I just want something that plays goldneye and yoshi story.My modded Xbox has All the games and most work but these two don’t 

[omariqy]

11 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

I just want something that plays goldneye and yoshi story.My modded Xbox has All the games and most work but these two don’t 

Goldeneye works well on the shield.