What Retro Console Activity did you get up to today

Lets try this one for console activity you got up to today as the other seems to be dominated by retro PC activity. Might be easier breaking them up

Played various Sega Saturn and Dreamcast games, Wip3out, FIFA, VF, Panzer Dragoon, Crazy Taxi 1 and 2, Soul Caliber, Propeller Racing to name a few. I must admit playing some of these old games without instructions (Soul Caliber was a fucking laugh after a few beers with mates and NFI about the moves) is very funny. Button mashing ahoy. Goddamit crazy taxi.

Did I mention I am an old Sega Fanboi that didnt play the Saturn or DC much when it came out due to the PS1 and not owning either back in the day. The DC controller is one of the best controller I have ever used. Gives me an analogue boner!

 

I'm cool with keeping it in the other thread, either way

I'm working through Phantasy Star II on the Mega Drive. Would be so much easier to use an emulator on the phone, but I wanted to play on Hard Mode without the temptation of save states (PSII is a turn-based JRPG, but you can only save in towns). It's very grindy as JRPGs of the era were, but it's fun in short play sessions.

 

Does the 3DS virtual console count? I clocked a few games this week -

Fantasy Zone

Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis remake) - missed 2 emeralds, forgot the later zones have no special stage doh!

Sonic the Hedgehog (Game Gear) - too easy to find all the emeralds, except for the last stage, luckily my 12 year old self reminded me.

Spent a few hours with Gameboy Tetris and Game Gear Columns, but now playing through Metroid II on GB.

I was also a massive SEGA kid, joined the SEGA club and everything, wore my t-shirt to school with pride!

 

The console might not be retro but the games you played are. I stayed up too late last night, was pleasantly blown away by some of the Dreamcasts graphics with a VGA box. A 15 year old console still holds up in my opinion.

I played Phantasy Star to death on the SMS but never finished it as a friend sold my Game Gear and Games. There is a very funny clip on youtude of someone using the TV Turner to play Xbox 360 games via the AV input. Not my clip below but shows off Propeller Arena. Not as crisp as the VGA.

 

I still remember the day I bought a Dreamcast, it was glorious. So much fun playing Soul Calibur with my brother, and then when Quake III came out with mouse and keyboard I got my first taste of the internet and pretty much got interested in PCs from then.

The Dreamcast had some killer games but the piracy was so easy to get around, not that it would have mattered much in the end. Nothing beats trying to complete the forklift level for days in Shenmue without knowing about the bug.

Im suddenly tempted to go find an original Gameboy and use it just for Tetris now.

 

Just lost a few hours to Sword of the Berserker: Guts' Rage. Nice trippy game. In the past I just jumped to the fight scenes which was a mistake, story line is nuts. I just love the sound effects.



Soul Calibur I have played to death along with several others.

 

Finally got all the pieces together for my home retro setup to be hooked up using RGB output.

I don't have a TV that supports SCART/RGB in, but I did recently get my hands on a Sony Trinitron that was made in the 2000s, and the image quality is light-years ahead of anything I'd used before - it'll get good use, but only has a single composite input.

So after a trip to ebay (then several other trips to sort out issues with dodgy sellers), I've got my planned setup:

- RGB-capable consoles with SCART leads
- A SCART multiplexer so that I can leave multiple consoles plugged in (it has no switch, you just need to make sure there's only one signal on at a time)
- A SCART RGB->YPbPr Component converter (with a SCART audio breakout box attached)
- A Composite (RCA) switch box, to allow for connection of more modern consoles with Composite out. This one is active and comes with a remote.


Click to view full size!

To be fair the signal processing of the TV is really good even with the console plugged in using composite video, but it's nice to have no colour bleeding as opposed to minor colour bleeding

 

Colour me confused but I thought the MD only did composite out not Component?

 

It has composite as well as RGB signals on the A/V port which were used for SCART TV's mainly in Europe. You can also get the luma and chroma signals separately off the video encoder chip and mod an S-Video port into the case for a slight improvement over composite:
http://www.mmmonkey.co.uk/mega-drive-2-av-port-pinout/

Using RGB is slightly more convenient when region-modding the console to switch between PAL 50hz and NTSC 60hz - if you bypass the PAL/NTSC TV encoding, you don't need to install a crystal oscillator to provide the non-native clock signal to the TV chip. Switching to the non-native TV format without feeding in the correct clock signal results in a black & white image on the composite out.

 

thanks for clearing that up, I always found s-vid much better than straight composite.

what I would have given to run that back in the day. The whole PAL/NTSC I always found to be an annoyance - bloody americans and their crazy 60Hz bollocks.

Still remember modding the Amiga to run like 1 or 2 NTSC games.

 

Got given an old TV this morning, so went and bought a Wii this afternoon. Loaded up with some Wii points and grabbed Super Metroid, Super Mario World and Wondery Boy IV.

Cant wait to see how I handle the wall jumping in Super Metroid after so many years.

 

I bought an original release PlayStation and a bunch of disks with two controllers all packed into a nice plastic box at a garage sale recently. Looked inside and it is chipped too. Neat. $30 seemed a bargain.

 

re-fixed my ps3 60gb over the weekend, this time it seems the re-flow work is persisting, no more ylod reoccurring, i'm very happy

played a bit of Raiden 3 (PS2) on it and some FF8.



also, got some long sought after boxed n64 games to test and wrap up tonight.

 

Playing some Warioland 2 on Super Game Boy, love the border.

 

Wario Land 1 and 2 are really cool platformers, probably some of my favorites ever. In my youth I 100%'d both of these games. IMO much better than the Donkey Kong Land series. Pretty amazing what they could make the Game Boy do.

Super Mario Land 2 isn't too bad either

 

Yeah love SML2. The best DK game is Gameboy Donkey Kong, incredible value and still holds up today.

 

So ages ago I bought a bunch of cables, one of which was a SCART cable for my PAL Megadrive 1. At first I bought the wrong option, and got a cable with pins that were way too fat to even fit inside the connector at the back. Turns out this is the pinout for the US Genesis 1, and it won't fit in a PAL MD1.

Fine then, I went back and ordered another. Got it delivered some weeks later from China, and all I get is red and no sync. Yup, Japanese JP21 (not EU SCART), where red is the only common pin between the two standards.

Ugh.

So almost a year later, I finally got off my butt and rewired the thing today. Works wonderfully in my SCART TVs and through my Shinybow SCART to YUV converter. But no dice in my Sony PVM - picture looks very dark - reminiscent of when I plug under-amplified RGB signals into my arcade monitors.

A quick Google about, and yup, folks are recommending at least 470uF caps (as opposed to the 220uF standard ones) for a MD into a PVM. Checked it with my PAL MD2, and it was the same situation - fine on SCART TVs, no good on the PVM.

Oh well, good enough for now. Spent a few minutes using a SCART switch to jump back and forth between MD1 and MD2 (gotta use my 5 copies of Sonic 2 for something), and reinforced for myself once again how much worse the MD2 sound is. Might consider doing a Crystal Clear Audio Mod on the MD2, seeing as that wasn't an original console of mine, and I don't mind hacking it up for experimental purposes.

 

Played Diddy Kong Racing on my N64 - quite a difficult game! Eyeing off an Everdrive 64 for it at the moment.

 

I installed a Mega Amp in an MD2 and it was amazing, totally worth it.

 

Interesting. I'm going to download and listen to all the samples later tonight and see how they sound.