Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 253: Loving Unloved Consoles and How to Play Old Games

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Live from Long Island Retro Expo! Jeremy chats with Rob Russo and Kurt Kalata from HG101 about loving unpopular game systems, then muses on the means and philosophy behind playing old games with VGHF's Frank Cifaldi and MLIG's Coury Carlson.

Hey, everybody, it's Bob here with a special announcement about our next live panel. It shouldn't come as any surprise, but we will be heading back to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and yes, of course, Portland, Oregon for another live Retronauts panel. PRG happens from Friday, October 18th to Sunday, October 20th, but our panel will be at 9 p.m. on Saturday in Auditorium A, and the topic will be when celebrities and video games collide. It's going to be a fun late-night panel, and we'll have tons of amazing. clips of some of the worst celebrity appearances in video games and a few of the best.

Again, that is happening at 9 p.m. on Saturday, October 19th at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in Auditorium A. But we recommend you stay for the entire weekend and enjoy the fun festivities of PRGE. Thanks again for listening and we'll let you get back to your regularly scheduled podcast. Hello everyone. Welcome to Retronauts at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo featuring Hardcore Gaming 101. I am Jeremy Parrish. these guys with me here. Kurt Kolata. And I'm Rob Russef from the H.G. 101 podcast. Thanks for joining us again this year.

I think the show just started, and that means you are the live beta testers for the presentation set up. So if there's a few bugs, I know they're still kind of getting everything worked out, so just bear with us. And hopefully we're good to go and roll. So this year we're talking about love for the unloved, or basically, trying to find the good in game systems that people tend to write off, overlook, talk down.

This was inspired in large part by my recent journey through the entirety of Virtual Boys Library, which I went into with some trepidation, and it actually turned out to be pretty good. I would say better on average than most systems I've played. I guess it wasn't around long enough to really have the stinkers come out. But in any case, they kind of got me thinking about,

I think there is kind of this prevailing mindset online not necessarily groupthink but the meme gets around that a certain system is bad or that nothing it did was good and that just becomes sort of the prevailing attitude for it but I think it's worth stepping back even for systems that genuinely were bad

and saying like what was good here the people who created these systems and the games for it they weren't out to create garbage they wanted to create something good they believed in what they were doing, or at least at some point in the creative process, they believed in what they were doing, even if it went wildly out of control at the end. This kind of how'd happen with Virtual Boy. So let's try to find that nugget of goodness, that seed of inspiration that drove them to create this thing

and find what's good inside of that. I don't know if you guys want to speak up any about this particular topic. Not until we get into the systems that we all picked. Yeah, I mean, it's, when you talk about games long enough, like in consoles and things, you sometimes have to sort of find what is good about, like find the good console that's hiding deep within the heart of the kind of not so good. And a lot of times you'll see that the failures were just people who had the right idea too soon. And I think we'll see that with a lot of these.

There's a lot of business issues that, you know, they had lots of great ambitions, but just because of funding or, again, coming to early just collapsed. Capitalism is the enemy of video game creativity. But no, I mean, you know, even the great systems, the systems you love, the systems you have fun memories of, the NES, the Genesis, the Game Boy Advance, go out on that show floor, look in the bins of games, and you're going to find a whole lot of crap that you would never want to play. There's bad on the good systems, and there's good and the bad systems.

So this episode, this presentation is focused on finding the good in the bad, and that is love for the unloved. And we're going to try to run through this pretty briskly. So anyone who has thoughts or opinions they'd like to share, we'll try to leave some room for that at the end. So if you could hold your feedback, comments, questions, until then, that'd be awesome. But, yeah, I think we're just going to kick it off. Kurt, if you would do the honors.

I think you're hitting play there. There you go. Oh, so here we go. Virtual Boy. Oh, wow. Rob even put together a nice little breakdown of the Virtual Boy's stats. That's more preparation than I did for this. this show. So yeah, this was kind of the genesis of this whole panel topic, Virtual Boy. How many of

here actually have owned a virtual boy? I have a broken one. That counts. That's most virtual boys at this point. Yeah, how many people's virtual boy is broken? How many of you actually played a virtual boy? Okay, so pretty much everyone at this point. So you know what you're in for when you play Virtual Boy. You know about the weird graphics and about the eye strain and about the fact that the system has warnings built in to say, please, take a minute every, take a break every 15 minutes. The game Telleroboxer even has taking breaks built into the gameplay. If you don't take a break between rounds, then you don't gain back as much stamina for the second round of the fight as you do if you actually step away from the system and, you know, let your eyes rest.

Your character actually also recharges. So, you know, even at the outset, this launch game, Nintendo It was like, oh, yeah, there's some problems here. We've got to account for that. But at its heart, I think Virtual Boy was inspired by a few really good ideas. I don't know if you said your virtual boy is broken. Have you had a chance to play any virtual boy games? Back when it was on display and nobody beats the whiz. I was super impressed by, was it, was it Red Alarm or Red Alert?

Red Alarm, just because it was 3D. And then there's a couple of games I played on emulators, like Jack Brothers. which is now, I mean, a lot of those are kind of like holy grail of collecting stuff. And it was a homebrew game. I played out a convention where they had a Street Fighter 2 port. Yeah, hyperfighting. Yeah. And that was pretty...

There's a copy of that out there for $1,200. I think they made 60 copies of that thing. Yeah. At a convention, though, I was at in New Jersey. They actually had a little bottle of painkillers. There's virtual boy medication. No, I almost bought one when KB was clearancing him out because they were on the shelf, like,

30 bucks. And I didn't. And the only one I have is a broken one I picked up at a store that was going out of business. But yeah, I never played it long enough to get a headache. Okay. Well, that's probably the best way to experience it. Rob, what about yourself? Yeah. So I was one, I did not have a virtual boy. I probably put my face on some dirty virtual boy kiosks in the day. I did have a friend who was really rich and spoiled. And so he got like one of everything when it came out. And he had a virtual boy. So I got to play it that way. I had put up with his like insufferable younger brothers but one of them threw a bagel at my face once what is that uh it's kind of like the virtual boy experience of the bagel fighter it really feels like there's a

bagel flying at your face i must have liked the virtual boy because i kept uh i kept playing um so yeah it was it was cool like i i remember not having like strong feelings about wanting one and i think that's probably what doomed it is not necessarily the like what we talk about now when we talk about like it's problems like oh you get headaches so it looks weird it's like I think most people at the time weren't expecting something that was going to, I wasn't expecting Dactal Nightmare. I mean, not something that, you know, mind-blowing, but it wasn't mind-blowing if you haven't played Dactal Nightmare. Don't worry about it. But it was just like it wasn't, like, good enough.

And, like, we've seen 3D stuff. They used to run 3D movies on TV when I was a kid. So it's like, it really just wasn't the same. I actually kind of liked the wireframe graphics, though, is what I remember about it. Yeah, the interesting thing about Virtual Boy is it was sold as, you know, the hint was there in the name of virtual reality, but that's not really what it was. It wasn't, you know, it didn't have head tracking. It didn't have that kind of, you know, spatial awareness. It was just parallax visuals. Basically, you know, it took the red and blue anastropic 3D that, you know, showed up in movies and television in the 50s and 60s. And instead of making you wear glasses said, let's build that into the system. so it gave each eye a separate display and you know basically the the visuals on each screen were slightly different and the differences created a sensation of 3D and it's forcing your brain to see something that's not there and that's why virtual boy can create eye strain and headaches it's because it's forcing your brain to reconcile with an illusion that really doesn't exist and isn't real but you know and it's it does sit in kind of this weird place like it was supposed to be the next step forward and when you sit down and play it like I have with a video tap out to a television in grayscale, you're like, oh, this thing is Game Boy 2.

This is four shade monochrome graphics, but in high resolution with a lot more processing power. And, you know, I think if they had released the system, just ditch the 3D gimmick and release the system as a handheld, it was like Game Boy Ultimate or something, it would have sold like crazy, especially if it was backward compatible when, you know, people could still play Pokemon on it. But that's not what they went with. And, you know, the idea was to create something more of a virtual 3D space. And it does kind of evolve from that Nintendo attitude of, let's take affordable technology, make something accessible to the public and give them an interesting experience

that they couldn't have anywhere else for, you know, a fairly reasonable price. Although I guess you could argue that 179.95 and 1995 was not a reasonable price. Yeah. Yeah, that was, I think, one of the issues with this. It was pretty expensive. And the other problem is it was really just kind of hard to sell it to people who hadn't seen it. So on the commercials, they have advanced 3D gameplay cannot be seen on TV. It's like it's really hard to sell that.

Yeah, it's like when you get nowadays, you know, HDR or 4K demos as a video on your computer, like you're not experiencing the actual HDR or 4K on your computer. Right, yeah. I mean, and this is even more obvious because it's like it's supposed to be popping out at you and it won't because it's on TV. and it won't even look like the game looks like because part of the charm of the Virtual Boy

is like actually also like one of my favorite systems, the Vectrax, which is just like the kind of weird flickery I always felt like what the future was going to be like in 1982. You know, like that was cool. I mean, there were other things.

I mean, just look at the difference in box art, right? Look at the American box art, which looks like... It's like the 90s threw up on you. Yeah, and then like the The Japanese box looks like it was designed by, like, Apple two years ago. It's just, it's totally different. But, you know, I mean, the other thing is, like, it does have kind of a toy-like element to it, doesn't it? It is kind of rooted in.

I mean, there were 3D goggles made for the Famicom. And for the Sega Master System. Yeah, I think they both work the same way. They're like the flickering shutters, yeah. I have one of those, and I've never used it. I have one of the Famicom ones. You can strap it to your head. Yeah, that's, yeah, I've never used it.

but I should. I want to find out whether it works. All right, but we've kind of laid out the case for why Virtual Boy, sorry, was kind of a mess. But let's talk about the good things that happened with the system. Like I said, it's a Game Boy successor in a lot of ways. And that means the library, if you kind of avoid the really bad games, there's a few of them out there. You know, the good games really feel like, you know, they were successors to Game Boy. Like there's a fantastic Wario Land game that a lot of people know about. But there's also, as Kurt mentioned, Jack Brothers, which is a spinoff of the Shin-Magame Tensee games that is a top-down twin-stick shooter.

It's not actually twin stick, but it's twin D-pad. And that's another cool thing about Virtual Boy is it had this controller where they were thinking like three or four years ahead. This was before, you know, the dual-analog, dual-shot controller for PlayStation before the Xbox was even a thing. You know, when they launched the N64, they actually took a step backward and had a D-pad and a D-Pad and a D-E-Pad. joystick. And so when you wanted to play 3D games, you kind of use the camera buttons as an Ersatz Dpad or controller. And it didn't work

so well. But Virtual Boy had twin D pads. And so games like Red Alarm, you were actually controlling the camera with the right pad, just like you do in a modern dual stick shooter. With Jack brothers, you're moving in one direction with one pad, or moving with one pad in all directions

and firing in all directions with the right pad. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about we don't think about this, but the And the designers definitely had to think about it, which is that this is not just a, you're not supposed to look at the controller when you play games, of course. This is a game where you,

the system where you cannot look at the controller because you cannot tear your face away from like the weird, like, you know, goggle thing that you put your face into. And so they had to make it so it's like impossible to drop. So it doesn't just have like wings on it. It's got like literal handles, you know. And they didn't make it too complicated either.

I think that was why they used, you know, I think they were nervous about giving it too many buttons or anything like that. They just wanted to keep it simple. It was going to play like a Game Boy. It just had this extra little detail. And it turned out to be pretty forward thinking. Yeah.

The very best virtual boy games either feel like an evolutionary leap for what came on Game Boy or they feel like, you know, games that were designed 10 years too soon and just didn't quite have the tech to support it. I mean, a big part of the problem with the system is that it was, you know, all about 3D visualization, but it didn't really have the processing power to produce 3D graphics. because you could get the wire frames like in Red Alarm, but otherwise it was just sprites that were creating a parallax effect. So it just wasn't quite where it needed to be,

but they put a lot of care into it. And some of the more esoteric games for the system, like V Tetris, doesn't really do much with the hardware, but it's just a really interesting take where they kind of said, hmm, Tetris and 3D, what can we do with that? That's not just like looking down at an isometric angle at the well. And so they actually give you like a well that

rotates and you can move blocks around and create combos that way. Or virtual bowling, which is a super rare game that was released at the very tail end of the system's life in Japan. It's an amazing bowling video game. Everyone should play this bowling video game because it's really, really good. It's also $2,000,

so you can't. But the opportunity ever arises, play it because it really makes kind of straightforward use of the virtual boy hardware to give you a great simulation of bowling on a handheld system or tabletop system. I don't know that anyone was asking for that, but the creators for the system, they put their hearts into it and really cared.

Even Galactic pinball there, that was like the project that came for the Super Metroid team after Super Metroid. It's not a follow-up to Super Metroid, but a lot of the love and care that they put into Super Metroid shows up in this game, and it's a freaking great pinball video game. It is Metroid Canon now, too. That's true. You have to show up. Yeah, so I guess we can move on to the next one, right?

Anyway, that's my case for Virtual Boy. It's worth playing, but maybe don't spend $2,000 on virtual bowling. And definitely don't spend $2,000 on virtual lab because it's garbage. Next, we have the Nokia Engage, which everybody remembers as the cell phone that could play games. I remember it as talking. The side talking, the taco. The taco. I always get this confused with the game.com.

no sir they are two different things yeah but the principle was the same it does feel like a second take it because I think the whole point of it was like you can play online games like online multiplayer on a on a the world's ugliest cell phone

at the time they was all those like Java based cell phone games and they were more popular in Japan and you could get them here but their distribution was very weird I remember at the time like you could get a version of Eath but you could either like pay for it once or they'd charge monthly. And one time I got

paranoid and just kind of delete it from my phone because I wasn't sure. Like if I was going to get charged for it consistently. But this was normal. You would buy things on little cards and then stick them in. Engage was, you know, like mobile gaming these days is huge. And I think this was an attempt by a

non-Japanese company to kind of say, well, you know, people like to play video games on their cell phones over in Japan. There's got to be something to that here. But instead of just giving you like the little simple flip phones that they had in Japan, with very simple controls and simple games. They were like, let's make it a proper Game Boy,

advanced style game for hardcore gamers with 3D graphics. And, man, it's a weird system. It is a phone, a cell phone, and also a game system. And this came out when I was working in the press already. So I actually reviewed a few games for Engage,

and it never felt right. And I always felt like a weirdo, like sitting on the bus, you know, riding home, playing Engage. I was like, are people laughing at me? I feel like they are. I had a game pad. which is nice, but the buttons are still just the phone buttons. So it's not great feeling, especially since, I mean,

it was competing with the Game Boy Advance at the time, but it did have 3D graphics. It did. I remember playing, one of the games I reviewed was Ashen, I think, which was a first-person shooter. And it was really hard to play a first-person shooter on that when you're like strafing with buttons that are right next to, you know, the forward movement and shooting buttons. It was a strange layout. Yeah, could the Engage games use all of those buttons as face buttons?

I think most of them, yeah. If so, it's like, it's up there for like the Jaguar. Most buttons, yeah, with the Jaguar, like you could have every button. There's got to, you could have done like a flight sim on that, really. It would have, I don't know, I mean, it wouldn't have been great, but yeah, check out that advertisement, by the way, like, you guys think that the 90, like, really the 90s continued on into, like, well into the George Doug. It took a while for them to go away.

I love that giant speaker peripheral I found. If you thought you looked like a dork on the bus with the note, you know, like, imagine if you got this like, you know, it's like a jambox. Like that speaker is just, it's going to be like three inches away from your face. I mean, it's like an update to that scene in Star Trek 4 where the guy is just like blasting music on the bus. This is like Mr. Spock is going to pinch you for playing that. Yeah. This system, it did let you, like, it has a USB cable so you could put MP3s and stuff on it, which is still like a pretty big novelty back when this came out. Yeah, I mean, the main.

The thing about it is, like, their impulses were not wrong, right? Like, at the time, like, as we've said, like, all over East Asia, like, people were playing tons of cell phone games. Those are huge moneymakers. And people played games on their phones here, too, but it was, like, you know, snake or something like that. And a lot of the stuff you get on Engage is just what people play on their, like, Androids and iPhones now. Like, a lot of the earliest online, I mean, it even took a while, but they got there. It's got some weird stuff on it, too. The Elder Scrolls, I did not know that there's an Elder Scrolls game on there.

There is, and it's remarkable that there was an Elder Scrolls game for Engage. That was a proper, small Elder Scrolls game. And they pitched, like, teased the idea of Elder Scrolls travels for PSP for years, and that never materialized. So that's one up on the Engage over the PSP. That looks like the best aspect ratio to play an Elder Scrolls game. Yeah, they still have the vertical orientation. which is okay for the games that made to use it, but if you see the Sonic Advance ports that they did,

you either have to play it so the view is very narrow or it resizes it so the aspect ratio is like the Game Boy Advance, but just really tiny. Yeah, and Ash and a first-person shooter, you don't want to play one of those in vertical orientation. But still, despite the fact that we've been kind of dogging on it, like Rob said, you know, the impulse there, the instinct there was really strong.

Like, they were right. They just didn't go about the right idea in the correct way. Like that game Pocket Kingdom is actually an MMRP made by Sega. And that was super cool at the time. Like, when I got an Engage, I didn't have the Sogress because I had my own cell phone, so it wasn't able to play the online stuff. It sort of seemed like, I guess, a Dragon Force or Oro Battle-type game.

Based on the screenshots I found, like, the people who were, I don't know, because it was made by Sega, right? Yeah. So the people who were translating this were just like, if you will get every single, like, early 2000s meme or joke, is going to be in there. It looks pretty special. I don't know. It's one of those things.

I don't think there's any way to play it now or ever will be again. It works. I remember playing it offline. I'm playing it is that it ran. It didn't do much. No, I mean, like, it's not going to be the same, though, because just like all these MMOs, of course.

You know, I think the Engage could have been successful with a different layout that didn't look so ridiculous. And also with, you know, mobile carriers that were designed around this idea. But like Kurt said, the idea of having to subscribe to an East game to be able to play it, that's strange and that's just not how you want video games to work.

That's worse than games as a service. That's video games as a disservice. Yeah, the distribution never made a whole lot of sense. But as far as games here, like the one that I do legitimately remember playing that never got ported anywhere else was that game Pathway to Glory. And it's a very ex-com-type strategy game

that's set in World War II. And it's not like particularly advanced or anything, But it actually is pretty well done, since it's entirely 2D. It doesn't deal with any of the clumsiness that all the 3D titles did. And there were a couple of RPGs that were done by Western developers that came out near the end of the system's life, which I was never able to find even when the GameStop's were cleansing them out. But they're pretty well regarded.

Rifts was one of them. They're based off of real pen and paper RPGs. Yeah, Rifts and Roots, Gates of Chaos. And they have the same sort of, like, isometric view lately. They never were brought up any sort of other systems either. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me also how hard Nokia was pushing this thing

because when you look at a lot of the games we're talking about, like a few of them, like the Elder Scrolls and some others, like a lot of the games came out for it like a year after its launch. So already when people were like, this thing is not doing well, we've got to make it less taco-shaped version.

And they really were investing in it and not just Nokia, the other developers, right? And publishers were really, they were smart to do it, to be honest. because it's like it could have taken off, and it just didn't. There was almost a Leisure Theory game for it.

That's not really a plus. Is that what that threesome in the back of the cab was about? All right, why don't we jump ahead to Rob's first pick? So how many of you guys knew that Capcom made a console? Yeah, they didn't really. But what this is is... It wasn't shaped like Capcom, so... Like the word Capcom, so it's hard to know.

you know, if that thing didn't start up and go, you know, then it's a problem. But now, what they did was, they didn't really make a console. What they did was is they found themselves in, like, 1994, and they were going to transition to some new, you know, Street Fighter 2 had blown up big time, and they were going to transition to a new arcade hardware.

So they had this, what was the CPS-1 board is what, like, everything from, like, forgotten worlds all the way up to, maybe Street Fighter 2 Turbo were on, I think. I think they were already to CPS2 by this point. Yeah, they had already done the CPSDash for like four games. And then to do that, they made a housing for it. And that's the first time that the CPS board would come in, like a plastic housing that you could like plug into your arcade thing

if you owned an arcade. But the CPS1 boards didn't have that plastic housing. That's what all the CPS games, you know, arcades had after that. It was like much more modular. and I am trying to stall to find my notes. I close it for some reason. So, yeah, so they had this thing where we've got a bunch of extra CPS1 games, and we've got hardware, like, we can encase those boards in plastic now.

What should we do? So what they decided to do was to sell a system that was really just a thing. Like, you guys know what a super gun is? I'm familiar with that? It's like a thing you hook up to an arcade board, and you can play it on your TV. It converts, like, the JAMA inputs and outputs and et cetera. So they made a thing that would literally just clip on to a CPS1 board. If you could advance the next slide, you'll see it.

So they just basically just drill. They screwed a plastic plate on top of these boards. And then the console, which really had no hardware other than the conversion stuff to, like, output the video, would just clip onto it and plug into the pin out. And then they, if you've got to look at that, the, changer console, that thing, it had Super Nintendo inputs. And so what they did was is they sold this thing through magazines, and you could get a deal for like $700, basically, today.

You could get the Capcom fighting stick for the Super Nintendo, right? And then they'd give you Street Fighter 2 Turbo, just the arcade, literally the arcade, and then they'd give you the thing to connect to it. could plug it in your TV. And that was what it was. And it's like, it's not really a console at all. It's just an arcade with a way of getting it on your TV. And they sold like, I don't know how many games. I think they were just clearing out old inventory, to be honest. It was a pretty brilliant idea. I'm not sure how well it's sold. So I thought we were here to talk about bad game systems and systems no one likes, but this sounds kind of awesome.

It's like Capcom's take on the Neo Geo, basically. Yeah. I mean, being able to play these arcade games at home, it wasn't cheap, but, like, Like if you were into the kind of NeoGeo experience, this was the price you were going to be paid. Except the NeoGeo was designed to be made as a home console. So they, you know, the console was literally a console and you plugged the ROMs into it, right? This one, the cartridges were just the arcade boards, the entire arcade board, and they just had bolted stuff onto it so you could kind of make it work.

And you can see how it wasn't designed because like the heat vents on the outside of the board are covered up partially by the thing you clip on to it. There's like a volume knob that you're supposed to be able to use if you're an arcade operator to turn that damn music down and that thing doesn't connect to anything. So you can just spin it all day long and it won't do anything. Stuff like that.

But the fact that you could get like if you loved Street Fighter and you wanted to have the ultimate Street Fighter, you could do that. Or the ultimate Capcom arcade quiz. Oh yeah. I mean definitely. So yeah, there's like, the games

are basically just some CPS1 games. And the only thing they did differently, they ported one game to it. They found a way to get Street Fighter Alpha to work on CPS1 hardware. And I think they basically did that by cutting out some animation frames pretty much. So it was the PlayStation version to the arcade games, Saturn version? Yeah, I mean, they managed to put Street Fighter Alpha games on like the Super Nintendo, on the Game Boy and stuff like they were pretty good at this. But yeah, so

it did have Q sound. I know I love Q sound, so it was in mono, which is also interesting because on the front, there should be like an output on the front of the arcade board, or the back, rather, for left and right channels for the Q sound, because the housing was made for the CPS dash, which had Q sound. That was the first one. But those are just covered up, but they still label the left and right audio for some reason. So it's like it's really funny how McIvered up this whole thing was.

But they did it, and they must have, they probably cleared out some of their wear. warehouse, so good on them. All right. So expensive and kind of goofy and maybe ill-considered, but still awesome? I mean, I don't know how much. They probably didn't spend that much money on it to do it, really. So yeah, it's pretty

brilliant. And now they go for like thousands of dollars. So if you're a collector, it's like a pretty cool thing to have. But yeah, it's about all I have to say about that one. I just found it pretty interesting. Okay, so

Okay. Jeremy's not talking about the GP32. I didn't know that. So this is about the predecessor. Successor? Yes. The GP32 came first. Right.

Okay. Why don't we back up just a little bit? So, yeah, this is kind of digging into the obscure, but about 2004, 2005, everyone was kind of trying to create portable handheld systems that could do lots of stuff. You know, the PSP came out. and immediately people started hacking it to do more than it was supposed to be able to do. So the addition of this extra processing power in handheld systems over and above Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, that kind of thing, really sort of open the doors to new avenues of creativity in the handheld space.

And we kind of saw that with the Engage. That would not have been possible with the GBA technology. But at PSP level, yeah, sure. So over in South Korea, you had a company called Game Park, who wanted in on the, action. And South Korea had kind of a weird I wouldn't say weird but complex relationship with

video games, specifically Japanese video games because after World War II things weren't so good between Korea and Japan and there was a law set down in South Korea that a lot of imports from Japan were not allowed in South Korea at all. And that includes video games.

So Game Boy, Game Gear, Wonder Swan, Neo Geo Pocket, none of those systems ever made it to Korea. But, you know, Korean still wanted to play portable games. And so Game Park kind of stepped in and said, let's do it. So they created the system, the GP32, and it was kind of, you know, like an interesting start. But the creators behind it had kind of a falling out when it came to following it up. And some of them wanted to go in a more 3D direction, like the Engage or PSP. And others said, we want to stick more with, you know, 2D gaming and kind of what you expect from handheld gaming, you know, from like Game Boy Advance.

and that sort of thing. So Game Park continued along and did its 32-bit 3D system, and they went out of business pretty quickly. But there was also a company spun off called Game Park Holdings, and they created the GP2X. And that was a really interesting system, because it was kind of like a successor for 2D handheld gaming. It didn't look quite like this, but kind of similar.

And it was also interesting because it could run operating systems, I believe Linux. And so immediately, out of the gate, it was this really cool system for homebrew. And, you know, I imported one and kind of fumbled my way around. There were a few, like a handful, maybe eight legitimate releases. But basically, people were doing homebrew. They were creating emulators for GP32, or GP2X, games like Cave Story. I've played Cave Story for the first time all the way through on a GP2X.

And it was a great little port to this system. So, you know, this is the very definition of obscure because not a whole lot of people imported a handheld game system from Korea right around the time that DS and PSP were really gaining traction. Like, you know, if you have those systems, what else do you need in terms of the handheld space? But I was always interested in kind of like branching out and finding out what else is out there. And the GP2X was really, really interesting. It had better emulators than the PSP.

It had, again, you know, like some really great homebrew or conversions of free games. It had its share of piracy as well. But it was a neat little system as long as you could handle kind of the complexity of dealing with a Linux-based interface and, you know, get things up and running. Oh, yeah, Tomac Save the Earth again is a sequel to a PlayStation shooter that originated in Korea where you are trying to save the planet and you play as a girl, I think. It's like you're a potted plant, but you have a girl's head. I don't really understand it, but it's

very interesting. It kind of is cut it from the zombie nation and like a cross between zombie nation and K.O. Flying Squadron. I don't know. It's really strange. But I don't know if anyone here has ever even touched a GP2X, let alone heard of it, but please raise your hand or give a shout or something

if you have owned one of these or played it. All right, we've got a few brave souls who were willing to risk life and limb and money and play a weird little emulation system from overseas. But this never really went much of anywhere, and I think it was kind of soon supplanted by better solutions. But again, kind of like with the Engage, you really see here a company saying,

let's push the limits of what you can do with a handheld system. And, you know, games like this and Engage, or systems like this and Engage, we're really paving the way to what we have now in terms of mobile computing, mobile gaming with basically pocket-sized supercomputers that can play pretty much anything at this point. But it was the kind of like the step between

Game Boy and iOS. It was weird things like GP2X. So even though it really didn't do much of anything, never really went much of anywhere, I'm really grateful that it existed. It was an interesting experience. and kind of an important but largely forgotten little step in the evolution of handheld games.

I'm sorry, I've just ranted for like five minutes. Do you guys have thoughts? I have no personal memories of this console. I saw it at a digital press store once in the window, and that is as close as I've ever come to it. I mean, it sounds cool. It's like, you know, it sounds like what, like, you know, owning a computer was like in the early 80s.

Like, if you had an Apple 2, like, that's what a lot of it was. It's like people were just making cool stuff for it. The spray work on some of these games is pretty good. Yeah. What were they ports of, like, other PC games or anything? I think a lot of them were original. Yeah, they looked pretty good.

There were some attempts to bring PlayStation games to the system. Like, again, Tomac started out on PlayStation. But there were some original games, some homebrew. Yeah, I think you're right. There were probably some PC ports. I didn't really delve too much into it because there was just not a lot of information about it on the English-speaking web, and I know zero Korean whatsoever.

But, you know, it was a good way to play Cave Story, at least. Taito X-55. This is one of my choices, which I don't have a whole lot to say about because nobody can play this thing anymore. It's not actually a game console. It is a karaoke machine. And the big advancement here is that it had a 9600 bod modem into it. So you would hook up to the internet and you would download a song. And it was tied in with Namia Amorra was one of the big J-pop stars at the time. She was in a commercial for it. Most of what I know, knew about it was based off of a Twitter thread from this one Japanese guy who made a game for it. The size of these things, since it was over a 9,600 bought modem, that isn't very fast. So the size

of these songs where I think Esten made to be about a size of like a mega drive game, which is about, you know, one megabyte. And they figured like, well, why don't we try to sell a couple of games over here? And there was a port of space invaders, which isn't particularly interesting. But they wanted someone there to do a Tetris clone.

So the guy in charge of programming it, he created a game called Cleo the Patra's Fortune, which is this really neat little falling block puzzle game we have to entomb things and clear them off the screen. And that game would have disappeared forever, except they ended up porting it to another system. They port it to the arcades, and that's ended up on different compilations.

Yeah, it's on Switch now. Yeah, it is? Oh, yeah. It's a real big cult hit in Japan. If you try to find physical copies of it, they're really expensive. But the PlayStation version came out here from, like, a budget publisher for like $10. And there's no on-board memory for it.

So you would have to just download these games. And once they would shut them off, they would just disappear. It was very expensive, I guess, on the previous slide, I had the... There's nothing again about this. There's the two images. Nobody knows what this old version of Cleopatra's Fortune looks like. Yeah, that X, you know, you can see that homemade X-55 logo that I'd put out. That's just like, yeah, Georgia font.

Yeah, they would charge you, I think, like 10 yen for someone at a time to be able to play it. But once you shut it off, it would be gone. And, of course, the download service is, you know, gone for two decades, so it's just gone poof. And you know, Taito didn't save this stuff, so it's gone forever. Taito was actually in the process of making some other console that never went much of anywhere. They called, well, I want to say wow-wow or something like that. Yeah, that was like tied in with the Pippinatmark too, wasn't it? No, that was Bondi, sorry.

I get my failed mid-90s consoles all mixed up. Yeah, that was one crowded ship of fools there. So again, there's not much to say I just wanted to bring it up because I want more people to play Cleopatra's Fortune. All right, well, Rob, hopefully you have more to say about your unloved next unloved title. Yes, I have a lot to say about this. Who has heard of the Zavix?

Yeah, I see two people and other people getting ready to leave. so the Zavix is actually it's a this came out as you could see in 2004 and it was basically the we before the we so instead of using motion controls like a motion control tracker it had like infrared sensors which kind of worked better in some ways and probably didn't work as well in other ways it was invented it was kind of like the brainchild of this guy who I can't remember his name he's not super famous but he did help create the Famicom back in the day. Katsuya Nakagawa. Yeah.

I feel bad now. I just read it in your notes. Oh, yeah. My phone keeps going to sleep. But he kind of, the few interviews I was able to find with him, he seems like he was really disturbed by how he really took the family part of the family computer name seriously. And he thought this was going to like, you know, all the family would rally around this and we're all going to play like, you know, mahjong and whatever.

And it ended up being a thing where dad played golf sometimes and then the kids play Dragon Quest and never the twain shall meet. And he was really, it probably freaked him out a little bit because, you know, Japanese family rooms are small. So like if it's like it becomes this like isolated cave for like kids to play games

in and they disconnect from their parents and they're not going outside and playing, I mean, I think that bothered him. So he wanted to create something that was going to be easy to understand for everybody that it wouldn't quickly get too complicated for adults and old people, and then that the family could do together, and that would be active.

And so it came up with this thing. And everything is sports. And the thing about it is, is that if you see like the little square shape on the top of the console, to insert the cartridges, you have to push them down on that. It's like a platform. You push it down on it and secure them that way. And the reason why it's made like that is because most games would have an infrared sensor.

You'll kind of see one on the next slide. I should have done it better. You can see down like the lower left corner, or actually no, in the lower right corner where the fake bowling ball is, you see a little thing sticking out from the top of the cartridge. That's the infrared sensor. And so every game came with its own controller. And so like kind of like it wasn't like a Wii moat in the sense that it's like one thing that is made to mimic other things. It's like many things. They're all schemorphic designs, right? So the tennis game had actual tennis rackets. and it would track your movements on the screen by the way that you moved the racket in front of the infrared sensor,

which is pretty cool. I'm looking at that bowling ball controller and thinking about, you know, people before their wee straps were mandatory throwing their Wii remotes accidentally into their TVs and breaking their TVs. And I can only imagine the kind of mayhem that a bowling ball controller could have caused.

It would have been great if they would have made it like an actual like bowling ball sized heavy object and just well I mean you've got it next to the console there it's hard to judge scale yeah that's probably I think the bowling ball is about like the size of a grapefruit that's a little disappointing

so the cool thing that they did with this my favorite controller that they came up with is the baseball one because you think this would be impossible to do right and yeah you are kind of like flinging a thing and pretending to throw it but you got to keep holding on to it but what they did was is that the way you select your pitches

it's got four buttons on the outside of the baseball and you press down sequences of buttons or combinations of buttons that correspond roughly to the kinds of grips you hold when you're pitching a baseball. So I don't know what those are, but I'm just going to make something up and say if you do like the outside two buttons, it's a curveball. If you do like the inside two buttons, it's a change up or whatever. And that's how they did it. And that's a way so like, you know, the player could select a play or, you're not in play, but select a pitch without telegraphing to the bat or what he was going to do. So that's pretty cool. And the bat could probably really hurt people. It was a little bit short, but I can imagine that people got clobbered by that on accident. It had it, as you see... They should have done, like, Konami with their Famicom Cominics or whatever, the line they did with the inflatable instruments. That would have been smart.

Not weapons, but sports utensils. What do you call things like a bad or accessories? Yes, that's it. I really want to know what the scale was all about. That seems like, I think it was just a straight-up, like, health models. monitoring tool. So they weren't all fun. But the coolest thing they did is they got Jackie Chan's endorsement to put out

two fitness games. And these games, I kid you not, you will get a workout. So you put out one that was called like the J-pad, I guess for Jackie. And it was basically like a cross between the Wii balance board and the power pad.

This was before iPad. Well before iPad. Yeah. Oh man. Did Apple rip this off? Do you step on your iPad vigorously? I do, but I don't know if that's recommended to use. Yeah, that would be an interesting game. But, yeah, so they have one.

So there's one that's kind of like it's the J-pad, and you're just like kind of, it's bouncing. It's kind of like dance-dance revolution, essentially. But with Jackie Chan talking to you at all times, like, you can do it, like that kind of thing. But it will get your heart rate up. It is kind of like DDR on that. But the cool one is power boxing.

The peripherals were boxing gloves. And the way it worked is, you see it had an IR sensor there on top of the cartridge. and it was basically like punch out, and you would just move, you put your gloves together like this to block, and it really worked, and then by doing that, you would dodge from side to side, and then you could just punch the snot out of these people, and this game was just like, boop, bo, boom, boom, and it tracked it. So you really felt like you're punching people. It is awesome, and I've never been able to find one to buy, but I really, really want one. This sounds like they actually managed to do what UFORS wanted to do for NES, but completely failed at. Yeah, it wasn't a lie. Like, it's, now, the IR tracking can be spotty, I think. But if you stand, once you get used to it, it does work. And it works in a ways that the Wii was only pretending to work.

Unfortunately, nobody bought it. But you can see it came out just a few years before the Wii. And they really knew they had the market perfectly. Because Wii Sports was huge. And it's still huge. In a way, like, they're, you know, nursing homes, they're like buying up old wees because the old people love them. It's awesome. It's a great way to get people moving. And they all had, they had that. And it was one of the Nintendo guys. I've never

been trounced as badly in a video game as by playing Wii sports bowling with some elderly Vietnamese immigrants. Like they just, they annihilated me. They were like 70, 80 years old and just crushed me. It's great. So in a way, like he accomplished his goal. It just somebody else ended up accomplishing it, but he accomplished it and that he cracked the code. He found what people would, and it just couldn't get it off the ground. The only other interesting thing about it is that

it's like, although it came out in 2004, the games all look kind of like Super Nintendo games, because it runs off of the same kind of processor. So that's all I have to say about the Zavix, but if you find one for cheap, you might really like it. All right. We're running along time, aren't we?

Oh, yeah. We got that's 15 minutes left. Oh, 15. Okay. All right. Let's bring it on home here with my first computer, the Colico Adam, which was a very well-intended concept. It was kind of, actually sort of, there was some parallelism here because the Colico Vision, which was the heart of the Colico Adam, was basically the same hardware as the Sega SG-1000. And the SG-1000 had a computer version release called the SC-2000.

in Japan. And this was basically the same thing. It was like, hey, let's take the processor of a console and turn it into a personal computer. And it's not a bad idea. There were a lot of peripherals, like add-ons being created for systems. Colico Vision had different controller peripherals. Like, there was a big triangle.

That was Colico, wasn't it? The steering wheel and everything? Yeah. And then there was supposed to be an adapter that would let you play Atari 2,600 games. It was tangled up in legal disputes for a long time. And this was also considered an expansion module. You could buy the Calico Atom on its own,

or you could buy a version that plugged into the ColicoVision you owned, which is what we had because these did not sell well and were discontinued at very cheap prices, and that's what we got. And that thing was huge. Like you had what you see here, the big sort of the drive and console part, but then there was also the part that plugged into the Calico Vision. So it basically took up your entire desk, plus the keyboard, plus there was a printer that came with it,

And it wasn't just a printer. It was like a huge daisy wheel. I think they had a dot matrix also. But we got the daisy wheel, which was less expensive. And that thing was loud. It sounded like there was a machine gun firing off as that thing typed out. So there were a lot of logistical issues with it. It wasn't necessarily the best execution.

I think it also had a lot of problems because by default it had a tape cassette drive as opposed to a diskette drive. And the tape drive was, by all accounts, better than the ZDX Spectrum tape drive or something like they they loaded games in a couple of minutes as opposed to 20 minutes so that's good but the the atom when it launched when it booted up sent out an electromagnetic an electromagnetic surge that would erase anything in the tape drive so you could not start up with anything in your system or near your system you had to kind of move your tapes over here and then start up your computer and then once it booted then you could put your tape in and play buck rogers planet of zoom or whatever that's so terrible. This really, I mean, this came out around the time that the video games market crashed in America, and I feel like this was just kind of like dirt on the grave, you know, just that extra little grace note of finality. So this pretty much sank calico, like the company never really recovered from this debacle.

Still had that cabbage patch kid in mine. Yep, and, you know, it sold for, I think, 700 bucks. Was that right? Yeah. Yeah. Which was not cheap in the early 80s for, you know, a computer. computer that basically would do what a Commodore 64 could do for you for half the price. So that's rough.

Yeah. But at the same time, it was pretty cool. I mean, you had a higher capacity game cassettes than you have with cartridges, so they took longer to load, but they could do more, they could have more content. It had, you know, a lot of

Calicovision games. It could play any Calicovision cartridge for one thing, but then it had a lot of like super packs is what they called them, expanded versions of Colico games, the best console version of Donkey Kong to that point, outside of the NES, which wouldn't ship in America for a couple of years. Yeah, lots of good stuff, lots of interesting arcade ports. Dragonslayer.

Yeah, I don't know about Dragons Layer. That's not a game that was designed to be played on any system that didn't have high-capacity media. They tried. They did. I just like the idea of getting Dragonslayer on cassette. That just makes me smile. Makes me sad.

But yeah, like, it was a, maybe it's just memory, like nostalgia speaking, but I had some pretty good times with the Colico Adam. It had a really great type tutor, which wasn't a game, but it had fun little musical jingles. It had art programs in the style of Mario Paint. Many years before Mario Paint and that sort of thing, you could print out your creations on the Daisy Wheel printer, and it took about 20 minutes per page.

And it was, like, filled the sound, the house with the sound of machine guns the entire time. It sounds like the G-Men. So it goes. I don't know. Good stuff here, in my opinion. Do you know, really quickly, do you know if that Donkey Kong Jr. thing, did it have some kind of exclusive content? I don't recognize that. I mean, I'm not a dokey Kong expert.

Where did that screen come from? That's the Calico Adam Donkey Kong Jr. And it says, like, bakery level is was what I saw in the caption. I don't remember ever hearing about this. But it's like, it's like a baking mixer. I don't know. I had that cassette. And I remember because it came like all their arcade super cassettes.

sets came in these really cool boxes. They were about this wide, that tall, and were shaped like arcade cabinets. So it was very memorable. The cartridge sat in the body of the arcade cabinet. But I do not remember that level. If I played it, then it is completely erased from my memory. Okay.

So what do we want to do next? We got 10 minutes. We can talk about the Neon for a minute. The Neon wasn't really, again, an actual console. It was a technology. It was a chip that they were going to try to stick into as many DVD players as possible,

sort of how the PlayStation 2 was both a game system and a DVD player, but they did not have the power of Sony behind them, so it died almost immediately. The interesting thing about the Neon, I think, is because it was non-standardized hardware. They had more controllers than games.

Some of these controllers, I swear, are just Mad Cat's controllers that were like, had Neon. That top left one, it looks like Sony went the well for that, and we're like, hmm, PlayStation 3 controller, that's what we should do. Yeah, I think it's the battering. Yeah. But yeah, they were eight games from.

One of them was only recent Korea, and nobody has any record of except one guy. One of them only came with certain consoles. The only one anybody really care about probably is Tempest 3,000. Because some of the people involved in this were also involved with the Jaguar, including Jeff Minter, who did

the visualization for the thing. And since he was doing a visualization, he's like, well, I'll just import my old Tempest 2000 here. updated a little bit. And, you know, at the time before TXK and Tempest 4,000 came out, it was, you know, it was a little bit improved over 2000. And that's what someone buys a console for is a modest improvement over a game they already own. Yeah, I remember here, I read something at the time, it was hard to mark these things

because, like, people at the retail store didn't know what they were and were just stick them with the DVDs in a bin somewhere. So it was impossible to find these, actually. The other sort of interesting game here, which I've never played, is free fall. 3050, which the guy who made it described as a combination of the what do you call it the parachuting parts of pilot wings with quake.

So, you know, we got there eventually, right? Kids play games like that now. And then some of these like Iron Soldier and Mervyn Racing ended up getting ports later, which I don't think anybody was really excited about, but yeah. All right. So can we close on this then? Yeah, let's wrap on. All right, so we've got five minutes to talk about FM Towns Marty.

Let's have an FM Towns. Towns party. Have you been saving that up? Actually, I think I heard Bob say it years ago, and I have been saving it up. Actually, not saving it, I say it all the time to myself. So the FM Towns Marty is the kind of successor to the FM Towns,

which was a Japanese microcomputer, did not have a lot of success. Computer was mostly kind of, they were very frustrated because the education part of it took off in a way and kind of defined the system and the game stuff didn't and so they tried to fix this this is Fujitsu

Fujitsu made these and so Fujitsu had been in the Japanese microcomputer game for a while and I think this is the first like real console they did huge failure I don't know what Marty means I've looked everywhere I cannot find an answer

they were incredibly expensive and the controller had like two face buttons I don't know what they were thinking. The interesting thing is that it was a CD-based console. It was released in early 1993, so it made it. It had a mascot that I don't really know what's... His name is not Marty. His name is Mr. T.

All right, so look, mistakes were made. So the cool thing about it was, though, is that you could play FM Towns games, which is why I think most people who had one did with it. Eventually, because they wanted to release Street Fighter, they had to do, it's like they didn't learn their lesson from the PC engine or anything. It's like, okay, now we've got to put out. Then, after they discontinued it, they decided,

how can we make this even less practical? And so somebody's like, what if we let people stick it in their cars? And so the car, Marty, was born. Fujitsu had an auto division. And what they wanted to do is they thought, hey, we're going to get on this GPS thing. And so they made a CD-based, CD-ROM-based GPS thing out of the Marty. Now, as you can see, that gigantic screen, that was what your GPS. But it was also just a regular Marty.

And if you wanted to try to plug it in in your house, you could. On the next slide, you'll see what it was like to install the Car Marty. So as you can see, the Car Marty was not just, the Marty was the thing that read the CD and output. the video. It came with like a one-handed controller. That was just a Marty controller. You used one's hand, which is great because there are a lot of adult games that were released for the Marty eventually.

And the, there's the, the GPS thing had to have its own GPS receiver. And it had to have the GPS kind of like, there's the receiver and then there's the separate GPS box, which went under the, which went under the passenger seat was supposed to go there. And then there was this other thing that I don't know what it does, and nobody I've ever asked about seems to know what it does.

And that also went under the passenger seat. The Marty unit was supposed to be somehow affixed to the central console in between the, you know, your armrest. And then you'd have to bolt the screen over somewhere. It was incredibly complicated, not sell very well. But they were very smart to have, it was the first GPS system that had one way that could plot roots using one-way streets, which in Japan is a really big deal. So it had a, well, it didn't have a chance. It had a selling point that could have worked if they, and eventually, you know, GPS systems did do this. But the fact that they actually made a GPS system that was workable in that country is really cool.

And these are incredibly rare, but, you know, I just love talking about VFM Towns Marty. Well, there's some games I know we were talking about before. There's some LucasArts ports. Oh, yeah, that's right. And there's some adventure games. That was sort of the platform that you wanted to go to for American stuff. I think there was a port of Wing Commander, Wing Commander 2. There was also a bunch of Sega arcade ports, which were kind of not too bad.

There was Galaxy Force. There was one arcade game that was lost for a long time called Last Survivor, which was sort of an early competitive game that it only kind of survived because there was an FM Townsports of it. I don't know if it was Mardi compatible. Yeah. I don't know. Do they have it out here at the console thing?

Yeah, they usually do. I think I'm ever playing something. Like after Burner 3, I think, originated as an FM Towns game. It's not a bad console. I think we can't really go any further with this one. Yeah. So I think, yeah, we're going to. wrap it up here. I don't think we have

actually time for questions, but we'll be around, so bug us. Feel free. If you see us here at the convention, tell us about your favorite unloved video game system and why you love it. I'm gonna be a good

I'm gonna Bhop'i! B. B. B. ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... Hi, everyone. Welcome to a panel called, what is it called? How to Play Old Games. I think that's the name that they gave it. I don't know if we gave it that. But if you're here for like a DIY, like how to do this thing, I don't know that we're necessarily going to be talking about that. It's more like what avenues are available for playing.

of video games. Obviously, there's things like the Super NES Mini, visual systems like that, and there's computer emulation where you can find a ROM site and download games and play them in the gray market. But that's not really what we're focused on here. We're looking more at the ways to actually experience games,

more the way that they were intended by the people who created them, more in the environment in which they were designed to be played in. And so that's what we're going to be focusing on. I am Jeremy Parrish, one of the co-hosts of the Retronauts podcast, and I've got some extremely knowledgeable and talented people who are probably going to be more informative than me here. Guys, introduce yourselves.

I'm the talent. My name is Frank Sefaldi. I'm the founder of a nonprofit called the Video Game History Foundation. I also moonlight a little bit at a game studio called Digital Eclipse. We do classic game compilations through software emulation, and I've been a video game archivist for about... 20 years now, which mostly means putting pirated stuff on the internet. My name is Corey Carlson. I'm one half of the creative team

behind a YouTube channel called My Life and Gaming. It does deep dives into console hardware, playing them on modern televisions, and like other game-focused episodes, playing different versions, different hardware. And since Frank is the one who actually makes part of his living by making old video games playable for you, legally and otherwise. I feel like I'd like to have him start out and just kind of talk about the sort of the philosophical underpinnings of the work that he does. And, you know, you've been very outspoken in recent years, places like game developers conference,

about the fact that emulation is not inherently bad and it's not inherently inferior to any other, you know, format of playing games. It's all about the approach that's taken and the methodology used. So I'd love to hear you talk more about. that and in kind of this context. Sure. And then also, I think what I'm also interested in maybe discussing and we could bring this up later is that what I'd like to discuss

a little bit in this panel is when we say how to play old games, I don't think that's necessarily just like what is our physical setup for playing old games. Like I think there's also sort of a mental component to it. How do you approach playing old games? You know, like what kind of mindset should you be

in? Should you approach them like, you know, watching an old black and white movie and then appreciate them for what they are as opposed to what they were, I should say, as opposed what they are now. Yeah, yeah, if you boot up an NES game looking for gotcha or loot boxes, you're going to be really disappointed. You're going to have to let go of those things

and have it a different experience. But, yeah, to your point, like I've done a lot of work with Digital Eclipse to present older games in the way that I feel they should be presented, the we do at the studio, I should say,

which is that for a lot of older games they're not really that good you know like like um it's like you can't just kind of plop like a random old n-s game in front of someone and and like especially younger generation that didn't like grow up with these things and and have them understand out of the gate why this is fun and why i should care um the approach that we take i like to say that we make like coffee table books about the games but they're digital and you read them with the controller as opposed to, like, collections of old games. So we've done four now.

I'll just list them, because in case you guys have played any of them. Mega Man Legacy Collection, Disney Afternoon Collection, Street Fighter 30th anniversary, and then SNK-40th anniversary. They're older than Street Fighter. We did not do Konami 50th anniversary, which we had. And the way that we tend to approach these is that we context. the game so that you understand their place in the world and what they were at the time and why they were important. So we do a lot of sort of behind-the-scenes stuff to tell you what the creators were thinking and, you know,

concept art galleries and things like that. And then, you know, I've done two GDC talks. If you want two hours of me going off about this stuff, please look them up. They're probably good because they're pretty popular. But a lot of what we do is also, and this is a whole topic, but interpreting how people played games at the time and translating that to modern language, right? So, like, for example, in SNK-40th anniversary,

we did a lot of SNK's arcade games where they use what's called a rotary joystick. I don't know if any of you guys have played. Akari Warriors is probably the most popular, the arcade game, not the any of it. one. I see a lot of nodding. This is probably for the NES one. So you probably remember that the joystick you tilted it to move, but you

twisted it to aim, right? Yeah, you played it too. And you know, on a modern controller, there's no, you can't like, well, you probably could twist the switch the switch stick, we'd break it, and it wouldn't help you in the game. So, you know,

we spend a lot of time thinking about like, well, what was the intent of the original creators and how can we best translate that to a controller, and then we spend months working on twin stick support that should never have been in that game but works miraculously. That's enough from me for now. All right, well, I will say that I feel like the work that I do that's relevant here is kind of similar in philosophy to what Frank does, but from a different perspective,

whereas he's sort of unearthing games and the history behind them to present them to you so you can play them and experience them, I'm kind of on the outside and can't really do that. So I have a podcast, Retronauts, about classic gaming, and I also have been producing a weekly video series called VideoWorks or Retronauts Video Works or whatever you want to call it. But basically I've been going through the libraries of various systems. Right now it's been Nintendo, but hopefully someday I'll branch out.

But Game Boy, NES, Super NES, Virtual Boy. And the idea there is, you know, I don't have a whole lot of insight into the developers. I don't have access to the people who made a Game Boy game 30 years ago. But what I do attempt to do with these series is to talk about the games and then place them in the context of when they were first published, when they were first created and released. So, you know, you may go back to, say, Super Mario Land on Game Boy, and that's not a very impressive-looking game,

especially compared to later Mario games that came along on the same platform compared to Super Mario Land 2, 6 Golden Coins. Super Mario Land is kind of primitive and janky, But you have to understand that this was like the first, you know, Game Boy game ever. I mean, along with Alleyway and baseball, it was created when the idea of portable gaming was brand new, almost. You know, what had come before that was much more primitive.

It was LCD handhelds, and it was things like microvision or game pocket computer, which were far less powerful, powerful, far less capable than Game Boy. So, yeah, Mario Land doesn't look that great, but it was a, what, like a 12-stage, Mario game with pretty good controls and fairly accurate physics, although the ball thing is weird, and kind of strange enemies,

but still recognizable. Like, it gets the Mario experience across. And if it feels alien and strange now, well, yeah, but when it came out in 1989, we weren't like, oh, this is a very strange take on Mario. Why is he so small? Why is he shooting balls? Instead, we were like, wow, cool, I've got Mario,

and I can take him in the car or on the bus or on an airplane. I can, you know, when I have to go to grandma, house for a week and, you know, spend a week in the woods or whatever, I can still play Mario because here he is on Game Boy. And it wasn't really much of a Mario canon yet. So it's like, okay, he fights lions now. Yeah, especially in the U.S., where we had Super Mario Brothers, then the American Super Mario Brothers 2, and then Super Mario Land. We didn't have Mario 3. We didn't have Japanese Mario 2. So there wasn't that sense of continuity. It was like,

it's Mario, he jumps, he like shoots stuff. That's pretty much good enough. So yeah, maybe he's in a submarine. Why not? And, you know, I think it's important to have that recognition, that context, the understanding of what games were like when a game was created, and, you know, what had come before it to lead up to that point, to really understand why this was good, or why maybe even at the time we were kind of like, I don't know about this one.

And, you know, what kind of knock-on effect it had throughout game history. So that's the approach that I take. And so, yeah, that's not really how you play games, but it's sort of why I play games and what I want. to impart through my work? I guess we kind of focus on the various ways to play these games and alternatives between emulation, real hardware. And that's one of the things that we think about.

We tend to focus on official emulation options. I mean, I know there's a lot of emulators out there that do certain aspects better than others, but we like to we think it's more interesting to look at what the developers themselves like what they chose to how they chose to do it themselves or they hired somebody like

Frank to emulate these games in the best possible way not typically the goal when they release these old games right well they want to make it as good as they can but I mean I'm sure there's like people developing these emulators

that, you know, squeeze some extra stuff out in different, like, you'd look at Dolphin or something like that. You know, that's doing a lot better than something you'd see, like, the Wii compatibility on the Wii. Sure. So, yeah, I mean, we tend to look at stuff like that. But mainly we focus a lot on real hardware, just like different revisions of hardware. their capabilities in outputting it to different displays, but also how can they be modified to give them

enhanced abilities, such as, you know, HDMI output and 1080P. And, yeah, I mean, that's... I mean, I'm kind of interested in pivoting from here to, like, why are we playing on original hardware? Yeah, that was going to be my suggestion, too, yeah. I mean, you know, if you want the true NES experience, go out there by an Nintendo Entertainment System,

buy a game or two, and find yourself an old tube television, get yourself an RF adapter or maybe composite cables if you're feeling fancy, and there you go. That's the authentic experience. Climb back into your mother's womb. Yeah, exactly. That's not really realistic or practical. Those old tube TVs are very few people make them anymore. They're hard to find. I don't think they really sell new ones in America anymore. You have to go to China or Korea. And even then, they're just made. They're garbage. Poor quality. Yeah. So, you know, Why would you do that? There are other options available.

But at the same time, there is a value to the original hardware itself, because that is the machine that these games were being programmed for. Is that why you play on original hardware? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I'm not going to say that I only play on original hardware, but if I am recording footage, I prefer to record on real hardware because that is the authentic experience

that's going to run exactly. the way that it was meant to run. It was designed to run. And, I mean, that's a big part of it. If I am sitting down to play a game, like, I can't, I want to play the original version. And I don't have much of a problem putting myself into the mindset of the time that it was made in certain shortcomings of that time. And, you know, some people say, oh, these games have aged terribly. But at the time, like, they were basically

just doing what they could. to make them as playable as possible. And it's, I mean, well, what I was going to say is that, you know, I work in commercial emulation, right? I have been a proponent of emulators since I discovered them in the late 90s. You know, like the bulk of my having played old games has been through emulation, but I do maintain old hardware on a Sony PVM, you know, I'm one of these RGB fetishists, like all of us here.

And that's maybe when I sit down to capital P play a game, that's how I play a game. And I think for me, it's just, I don't see an inherent disadvantage to using emulation necessarily. It's that emulation is like 99.9% accurate, right? And for me, it's just, I like the peace of mind of knowing that, you know, what I'm playing is, like, actually completely accurate. Right, right. But, like, that for almost everybody that shouldn't matter, you know, like, there might be a random error in, like, Speedy Gonzalez on the Super Nintendo or something. But then the rest of the library is fine, you know, and, and I guess. Most people are not going to think about it.

Right. They just want the easiest way to access and play that game. And I think something. that frustrates me is that it almost feels to me sometimes and this might just be me that there's this kind of weird gatekeeper aspect in the community sometimes

where it's like oh you're not playing on the real hardware you're not really playing the game and I don't like that I don't I don't think anyone should have to maintain antique hardware to play the game for real I think that that emulating a game gets you the real game and that there's

nothing wrong with that and I recommend that should that should should be your gateway into old games if you want to go exploring. Which is, like, one of the main reasons why we position ourselves is we don't give you a definitive answer. You know, we say, here's your options. Play in whatever way works for you. You can make this choice, and here's everything, just laid out.

Yeah, I mean, what does the word authentic even mean in this context? Like, I don't, I have no intention of telling other people how they should play a game. they play a game and they enjoy it, congratulations, you've done it right. I would never recommend someone used like one of those at games mini Genesis systems that have been coming out over the past decade. Those are a genuinely bad experience,

but people buy them and apparently enjoy them, so... That's okay. It's good enough for them. But for me, the pursuit of like a good, quote-unquote, authentic experience has been much more personal, and it's because, you know, ever since I discovered emulation back in like 96-97, whenever that was, I thought it was really cool

and I've played emulators and games on emulation but it just never felt quite right to me and I never really figured that out and I think it was the changeover to HD television and flat panel TVs where I kind of had this like watershed moment and you know I would plug in an NES or like I bought one of those twin Famicoms

in Japan that has you know the built-in Famicom Disc System and the cartridges and I was like this is awesome I've always always one of one of these, this is so cool. And I plugged it into the TV, the flat panel in my hotel, and immediately jumped into play dokey, dokey panic. I was like, finally, I'm going to play Mario 2 the real way, the way it was intended by Miyamoto-san. And it was, it was awful. It was a terrible, terrible experience. And it's not because the game was terrible. It's not because the system was terrible. It's because the way that system talked to the flat panel TV was not good.

and it created, you know, it, like, smeared the graphics and stretched them out, and it created this, like, significant delay and responsiveness on the screen, so everything was out of sync with what I was doing. And for a while, I was like, maybe I'm just over old games. Maybe I've outgrown them, and I don't like them anymore. And it was a few years later when I think you were at OneUp with me at the time, OneUp.com in the offices. People were given offices, and I was given an office that was actually a storage closet,

and that was still okay because, you know, I have, an office. And there was this really huge... I had a cubicle. Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to rub it in. It was a seniority thing. I'd been there for a long time in my cubicle. And I got a storage closet. But there was a huge CRT television that was going to be thrown out. And I said, actually, you know what? Stick that in my office. That's going to take up half my office, but that's okay. I'm going to slap a super NES on there. And anytime someone

wants to come in and play an old video game. They can come in my office and sit down. So for a while, we were just like, you know, every afternoon people would come in and we'd play Yoshi's Island or whatever. And playing on that, you know, that TV on original hardware, that was a really different

experience than the flat panel experience that I'd had with dokey, dokey panic. And that kind of made me realize, you know, like there is a difference in this technology. And I didn't really pursue it for a while. But, you know, maybe about five or six years ago, I started thinking, you know, I'd wanted to produce video content and basically just settled for the most convenient capture setup I could, which was one of those like portable super NES emulators and I plugged a Super Game Boy in. It sounded terrible.

The video quality was bad. The audio was like staticy and distorted. And someone wrote to me and was like, you know, I'll give you some equipment that's better if you will stop doing this. So that was the point at which I said, wait, okay, so it is possible, you know, through these devices, through upscalers and that sort of thing. and RGB cables and mods to actually play these games on an HDTV and still have that kind of, you know, that experience I remember from the NES days, from the Super NES days. And so that kind of set me on this horrible self-destructive spiral

of trying to find the best possible ways to play as many consoles as possible and also be able to capture them at high fidelity, which it's been a long and expensive road, but it's come a long ways. and I'm, I feel like I can stop now soon. I'm impressed that you can say you can stop. Yeah, I've never heard anyone, it doesn't end. I say that to lie to myself, because if someone comes up with, like, a video out mod for

Wonder Swan or NeoGeo Pocket, then, yeah, maybe, and there's like a consoleized MVS that's coming out soon that has, like, H.DMI output, okay, the Behar brothers, I think, are making that. I'm probably going to buy one of those, but, like, in my heart, I feel pretty complete. But it took like a decade to get to that point. And I'm, yes. So where are you in your quest of doing probably the same thing? Well, I mean, it's become such a thing that it's relaxing just to sit there and see how I can optimize stuff.

And I probably spend more time tweaking and optimizing my setup more than I do even playing games a lot of times. And if I have some downtime, I'm like, hmm, how can I reroute this so I'm using less wires? Which, you know, it's always something. It's always something. You know, I have several systems, and now I even, you know, I have an extra switcher now that I can have multiple revisions of the same system hooked up so I can easily, you know, instead of unplugging them and plugging something else in, it's, I mean, it's stupid.

That sounds like a dark road. Yes. But, you know, I had extra space in my racks. I'm like, what am I going to fill the space with? And so I'll put in, like, you know. A Gold Star 3DO. Like a launch model, Super N-E-S. and a one chip.

You know, I can easily... And I'll hook up one of them in component. The other one will be RGB. Hmm. It's... It doesn't end. It doesn't end. So it's like having a shack next to a mansion, basically.

Basically, it's all in my attic, though. You know, it's... You know, I've so many CRTs and stuff up there. I mean, my wife is like, no more. If I see another one come up here, it's over. And it's like, I have to carry up three flights of stairs. So I only try to take things out, if I can. So I tried for a little while to have just a setup where everything just works.

And I did okay. I have a TV cart with my RGB monitor, inspired by Bob. I don't know if he's been here. Yeah, Bob had like a cart on his side. I was like, oh, that's a good idea. And, you know, I just kind of have, like, the six systems that I might actually play in there. And then every time I try to stream, like, I just kind of, reinvent the wheel and then have to rewire everything. And I just gave up on having a set up where

everything just works. But I have a TV and I have, you know, a way to plug in power and RGB. So like if I need, if I'm really going to play something, it'll take me a minute to hook it up. And I discovered pretty quickly that it's like, all right, I have them all hooked up. I can play whatever I want. I don't want to play any of this actually. But, But, you know, I discovered that pretty quickly, and so, like, I don't know, like, I think I've come around more to just, like, if I'm actually going to sit down and play a game for more than an hour, I can invest the five minutes setting that up. You know what I mean? And that's fine. I can just grab the system out of the shelf or the garage or whatever and do it if I'm really there.

But a way I really like to play these old systems, though, I call it channel surfing. And, you know, we all use flashcards here, right? We're not pretending. I mean, we have the complete libraries that we've legally backed up, of course. Yeah, sure. My complete selection of virtual boy games, including the $1,000 cards. Absolutely, yeah. And you delete the ROMs every 24 hours, and then you can re-download them.

No, you re-wrip them. Oh, yes. You can't download it. And a way that I like to play is to just kind of, like, you know, put in the Super Nintendo ever drive or whatever. I guess I don't even have to do that anymore because Super NT just has the SD card thing.

And just kind of like, what's the letter G have? And just start like exploring. And I like playing old games that way because you can't play new games that way. You can't jump into a game quickly and start laughing at it. Yeah, I mean you can be like through the one stage

of Mega Man too by the time copyright and Dishan carly game fade out in your login screen. Hey, you have to be logged into Bethesda.com. to be able to start this game. And I'm not saying that in an old man way. Like, it was better. Remember the times when you turn on the system

and there was no updates. Like, I don't, that's, games are so much better now. But, but that is a different kind of playing that I like to do that I can't get with modern games. It's just, like, loading up some garbage and looking at it. That's interesting, because I feel like if I have a whole list of games,

like, I don't spend any time like dedicated to one game. Sure. For me, if I'm going to, really sit down and play through a game. I want to play on my original cartridge because that's, I've paid money for that and I have an attachment to it. I've committed to it. So,

you know, the flash card is great for I'm going to get a quick clip from this game or this game. But I will never like to sit down and play through an entire game that way. Because I think in a lot of ways, having access to this huge list of games has given the idea that

certain games are worse than they are because a lot of people will say, well play one life and like, oh, this game sucks. Like, it's way worse than I remember it being. Then they'll stop, move on to something else. And then they'll go on the internet and say, you know, this game, it's horrible. You know, and I think that they will, without

really committing to it, to say that it's bad. I notice someone's filming this piracy discussion. You're not a cop, are you? Just making sure it's all good. You can film. It's fine. I'm just kidding. Yeah, you know, for

me, having access to this alphabetical list of every video game for a system has other benefits, too. I have a nephew, he's about 9, 10. He loves, you know, current games, like he loves playing Pokemon, Minecraft. He loves Undertale. And he's actually kind of gotten into sort of retro-style

games because of Minecraft. He sees them, and he's like, oh, that looks like Minecraft except it's flat. So he loves to just come over, and, I mean, he loves, you know, Zapper games, playing those on a proper CRT and shooting ducks or criminals or whatever. But he'll just, like, sometimes, he'll just say, I just want to play a game.

And he'll scroll through a list and he'll find a game that sounds interesting. And it's maybe something I've never played. Like, one time he booted up Mystery Quest. I was like, oh, so this is what mystery quest is. I can visualize the box, but I have no idea what the game is. Yeah, it's like a little platformer. Neat. Yeah, so anyway, like,

that's a great experience. You know, I'm learning new things and he's kind of I think appreciating the value of having these old games. But yeah, for myself, when I try to acquire as much as possible, complete in box old games just to document them and put them into my videos and then into the books that I create out of those videos so that, you know, there will be like a printed record of what all these games complete inbox look like and what their cartridges and manuals look like. But I don't want to keep hundreds of games. I don't have space for that and I don't have the interest. So I'm like, okay, I photographed it. It's on. And, you know, if it's a game that I can't play through some other method, you know, if it has a special chip or something or like the game Robo Pond for Game Boy color has like rumble and a real-time clock and an infrared sensor, and it does not work on

flashcards because of all this crazy crap that they crammed into the cartridge. And that's fine. Like, I'll keep that cartridge. That's interesting. But otherwise, like, I don't have too much, I don't place a lot of, I guess, stock in owning a thing just to own it. I have a collection of games that I keep for sentimental value, but I'm much more concerned about the actual hardware. and, you know, the way that interfaces with televisions and the way that I interface with it through that, you know, kind of the experience that creates. And I'm not honestly hung up on original hardware, like field programmable gate array systems, those are pretty awesome. And I feel like I kind of stumbled into this whole obsession at just the right time because I started, you know, getting serious about playing old games in the best fidelity possible right around the time that analog started producing systems. And their first analog NT was kind of, it was an interesting idea, but not producible in the long run.

But the mini that they produced is maybe the best system that I own or have played. It's so versatile. And it's very, very accurate. It has digital out so I can plug it straight into an HDTV. And it has analog out so I can plug it into a CRT. And I can play it either way. And it's a great experience. And that has become a mainstay of my recording setup.

It's just such a great device. I would love for them to make more of those. because now they're selling for thousands of dollars. And they're great, but maybe not worth that much money. But it's something, I feel like there should be access to that for everyone. But the 16-bit systems they're doing, the Super Inti and the Mega SG, those are also great. And they keep getting better with new releases for firmware and jail breaks and things like that.

And I have no qualms about playing games and, you know, capturing quote-unquote reference quality material footage from those systems because they're very, very accurate, maybe not wanting. 100%, but I can't think of too many experiences where I've been like, oh, this doesn't feel right. Yeah, it's just a great alternate opportunity. And I feel like these things are going to be a lot more durable and sustainable than trying to play on 30-year-old hardware.

Like NES is, you know, those are 35 years old now, and it's hard to find them. You have to refurbish them and, you know, mob them. Well, and like you said earlier, if you just plug them into your modern TV, it just looks like smeary garbage because it's, not meant for that. You need to scale that image before it looks correct. But I mean, yeah, so

what Jeremy's talking about, FPGA-based approaches to essentially emulating the software, it's rather than recreating an old system like a Nintendo entirely in software and putting it on a computer, essentially an FPGA approach

is to, God, it's so hard to explain this. It's essentially like having the hardware itself physically alter itself to behave more like that original system.

The way I always describe it is like nanomachines go into a computer and move all the gate arrays around until like it's a Nintendo. And so there's been some commercial systems that do this. Like Jeremy said,

there's been the, from analog, I think entirely. Has anyone else done a commercial? No, I think. Oh, yeah, that's true. The retro USB AVS is another. Right, right, right. That's a great entry point into actually NES and H-D. It's the one I recommend most. And it's a really good way of playing these old games

because the original cartridges just work. And sometimes people just, I mean, like you have this a little bit where it's just like it's somehow like a more holy experience if it's the real cartridge, right? So like it offers that. But then also, you know where to look on the internet. You can root the thing and just load ROMs into it, which I love.

Yeah, and there are a lot of sort of DIY solutions, kind of up-and-coming. Mister is really the big one, and that's growing in capabilities and power basically every week, and that is, you know, kind of, it's kind of like the equivalent of maim, but in simulated hardware. The thing is, it's not just like a plug-in-play solution as opposed to the analog stuff. So you really have to be kind of committed to making it work, but if you're willing to take that on, it's a powerful and capable system that can do things. No other console can. So definitely something to keep an eye on.

Yeah, definitely learning curve on it, though. Yeah, for sure. What I like about these from a preservation, well, the MISTER project specifically from a preservation perspective is that people who are writing new system cores to work on the MISTER, like, I don't know, the Atari 800 computer or whatever, right? Like, they're almost like revisiting, documenting that hardware

and making sure that it plays accurate. I think there's this sort of belief that like once a system was emulated, it's like, we're done, it works, but it's like, no, we're like, the idea of replicating this physical thing in a digital way, like it's a forever pursuit. There's no perfect. I mean, there is a theoretical perfect, but like not in our life. And so I love that people are revisiting this hardware, redocumenting it and doing it in an open, source way that is maybe sustainable forever, where, you know, even if all the boards that run Mr. just, like, disappeared, like, Thanos from the world tomorrow, it's like, if we have the software documentation of what those cores were, like, we could recreate that hardware in theory. And I really like that about Mr. and, like, the main project and stuff like that. And it gives you the option for, like, analog and H.T.MI outputs for video. You can do both at the same time. You can play on a pvm and capture over H.

Have we all done that? Yeah, I mean, my kind of come-to-Jesus moment with all of this was back in, I would say, four years ago. I was wanting to launch an NES retrospective video project to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the NES launch, so that would have been 2015. And, you know, if you take the NES in chronological order, pretty quickly you get to games like gyromite and duck hunt that require accessories that only work with CRTs. I mean, there are people who are working on solutions to make those work with, you know, flat panels,

but it's, you know, it's still kind of early days on that. But the thing is, like, you know, if you want to upscale video and capture it in digital, like making that possible while also still outputting to a CRT television where you can actually use the light gun or rob or whatever, that was really challenging. And I spent months and a lot of money trying to tinker with different ways to make it work. And my initial solution was to, you know, have a modified NES and run video into a Sony PVM professional video monitor that has high-end video inputs and also has pass-through. So it'll feed a signal into the television. You can see the signal, and then

that signal will be sent out. And then from there, you can upscale it and record it and send it to an HDTV or whatever you want to do. So I'd be able to record. But that's not a perfect solution because the video signal loses a lot of brightness and kind of quality in the process of being passed through. So the output was kind of janky. I was still like really proud that I made it happen. It was like I feel like I accomplished something. So I got, you know, maybe the first HD capture of gyromite and stack up on the internet,

which is actually not that great an accomplishment. No one really cares. but I was still proud to have done it. But then, you know, the analog in-team mini came out, and that has the analog output. And around the same time, the G-S-CART SW, I think that's what it called. Or the G-Skars. Yeah.

G-Skart Switch. Okay. So that's a video switcher where you can plug in, I think, eight different devices and have it output, but it has dual output. It has VGA and S-CART. so I was able to like send one signal from that to my pvm and then the other output goes to my HD setup so I wasn't losing any of the luminosity or anything like that and I was getting even better signal quality and that was when I realized that this was over my pay grade and I really am kind of out of my depth but I made it happen somehow and honestly retroRGP was a huge help if you have never been to that site and you're interested in this stuff like go there first because it breaks everything down for you.

And there's so much to worry about when you're dealing with analog standards because, you know, in addition to the different kind of hookups, there's also different kind of video sync. I don't even want to get into it. It just makes me, like, my head is actually hurting, just thinking about it right now. But, you know, these are the kind of obstacles

you have to overcome if you have some sort of weird obsessive project like I do. And, you know, the end result is that I can sit down and plug and play an NES game or a Super NES game and, you know, use light guns and things like that and record into my computer and create videos out of it, which is really cool. But the process

of getting there, it's daunting. Much easier now than it used to be, though, especially since there's so much information out there. If I tried to do this, you know, 10 years ago, I don't think it would have been possible. Well, and everything you guys are talking about is to capture four content that you create. Right. Absolutely, that's a huge... Do not

do this for fun. Yeah, there's no reason to play games on a, you know, a CRT, and recorded in HD unless you're doing some sort of project, like, you know, for public dissemination or for archival research or something. But otherwise, like, we're creating a lot of steps for ourselves, a lot of pain that you don't need. Yeah, I used to do exactly that when I would stream mold games with my wife. Like, we liked playing on the Sony PVM. It's like our child. And we would,

what we ended up doing was getting a good RGB splitter from, I think, Shiny Bow. So it was like one in, two out. And that didn't lose any of the luminosity or anything. So we, yeah, we went into the... It made it more complicated for myself than I did, so I guess. Well, you can't, like, Google, like, RGB splitter and, like, good results, you know? Like,

I understand. That was a lot of, like, forum trawling, I think, if I came up with that. But, yeah, we would do the same thing. We'd go straight to the TV with one, and then Framemeister to capture card in the other. Like, I wasn't even looking, like, we didn't put it in a TV or anything. It was just, like, It just looked nicer to stream in HD while we played in SD.

So we did that for a while. But again, like, none of this matters. It's just like weird pursuit of perfection sometimes that I think we all get trapped into. And I'm very guilty of it myself. Like, you know, when we're even talking about like the analog consoles and it's like, oh, it's spitting out in HD, it's perfect. So I'm like, no, it's not perfect because actually, and you know this, you know where I'm going with this. It's like, if you're scaling, like, an NES game to the exact, like, pixel aspect ratio that it was meant to be on a CRT, those pixels, no, they're not one to one. They're eight wide, seven tall.

So to get, like, a completely accurate pixel aspect ratio, you're actually scaling that thing beyond 1080P, which these things don't even do, so even that's not accurate. So, like, it's, you can go down this rabbit hole forever, or you can just emulate the things perfectly in a 4K monitor. But, I mean, even emulating, you know, you've learned over time that, get that on a higher resolution. Yeah. You know, the emulators have to be able to, like, interpolate the image, you know, so that when you, when the screen scrolls, you know,

have some pixel columns are wider than, or may have more, are wide than others, and you'll get this weird, like, call it shimmering, but it's kind of like a like a bowing or whatever. It looks bad when it's it's kind of like a centipede moving where it's like the back edge of pixels kind of like

fall behind and then catch up, but really really fast. Like a really fast centipede on your screen. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like shaky. I don't know how to describe it. Don't go looking for it because you can't unsee it. But yeah, to your point, it's like that's when some like commercial emulation packages or

some systems. I think the NT Mini does no interpolation. Right, right. Yeah, neither does like the high-def N.S. Yeah. The NES mini didn't, but they added it into the Super NES Mini. Oh, that's right. So even Nintendo learned, yeah.

And that's, I mean, we can get into the tech credit all day, but it's like, that's basically like, you know, an actual NES signal is just this tiny image. It's like 240 pixels tall. dish. And when you stretch those out to fit in 1080P, it's not a clean multiplication.

You know, like you have to actually squash it back down. And essentially you know, some of the pixels, if you're blowing it up four times, they're going to be, you know, four by four, but some are going to be like three by four because the math doesn't work. And interpolation is a way of like softening it on one

axis so that it, you know, everything looks at the expense of a little bit of Christmas that I swear God, you cannot see. If you're a human being, you lose some sharpness, but you're not jittering anymore and everything. And you can do, like, perfect scales within the 1080P screen, but you'll have black around it.

There's a lot of people to be like, I don't want any blank space on my screen. Yeah. Even though a lot of old games were designed, you know, it's smaller than the full resolution. You never see it because of the overscan. Well, no, not necessarily. Except for, like, Final Fantasy 3, you'd see it on the bottom.

Yeah, I mean, there are some games, like, when you play them, they're kind of, you know, even on a CRT, they're in sort of a box because they were doing so much within that space that they, you know, they had to, like, cut off the top and bottom Starbucks is that way, yeah. Yeah, and I can speak to that from digital eclipse where, like, we, you know, we basically crop in on the games individually based on, like, where the actual data you're supposed to see is. So, like, on S&K40s anniversary, Crystal is, like, I cut off, like, eight pixels on the left because it's just always black. and if you just present the game as it is and you put the border on I learned this from Mega Man Legacy Collection people are like, why is there this black border you guys are lazy developers

like no that was actually there it's in the Nintendo game so we started cropping in on them but even that's just like well if you crop in on that Mega Man game then you're going to miss some of the level select screen yeah because different screens are different

but then when you go into the level then that part's black but yeah like we end up starting to crop individual games, which we hadn't done before, and that applies to any system. Because to your point, it's like to, like, Star Fox is a really great example. Like, they have black around the screen because, I mean, they're doing 3D math on a Super Nintendo. They have to, like, shave off as much as they can to, like, get that game running at full speed. Or what passes for full speed?

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, like 10 frames a second in that game or something. So you've mentioned, I think we've mentioned upscalers, and you actually called out the Framemeister, and that's probably worth explaining, because if you do want to use original hardware and play it on an HD TV, like you've got a nice 60-inch TV, you're going to have some big, chunky pixels, but if you want to play that with minimal lag, there are a few options out there, and basically upscalers will take the video signal, the 240P video signal, or 480I or 480P, depending on the system you're using, and scale it up to the 1080P resolution

of your TV or 4K or whatever you're using. I think right now they top out at 1080 p. But you know, it'll maximize the image and it'll do it with much less lag than you get through the built-in upscaler on your television.

So you don't get that delay where you press a button and it's like half a second later Luigi finally jumps. So that's really important. I think the most popular has been the Framemeister, the XRGB Mini, but unfortunately that's no longer being produced. They just stopped producing that. So whatever is in stock at Solaris, Japan, is what

exists out there. But there are other solutions available, including the open source scan converter. And that's not quite the same thing. It's a line doubler. But it pretty much does the same thing to the end user. It's a different kind of tech, but it's increasing the number of pixels, yeah, and filling out your screen. And I think that has even less lag than a Framemeister, right? It's zero lag. Yeah, well, there you go. I mean, it's such a small number that you might as well just say zero.

I would also, for casual play, like, if you want to play on a regular old system on your modern HDTV, like, man, the chief ones on Amazon, they're okay. Like, have you guys tested these? Like, the skirt to... Or leaving the composite to HTML-like scalers. A lot of the problem is, is a lot of these, those scalers will interpret the 240P signal as 480-9. Right, like, if you get the right one, like, some of them don't. And to me, like, doubling 240 feet of 480p, like, that's like 80% of, of, of, of, you get the

of, like, getting old games to look correct on a standard of modern television? It's taking a progressive signal, interlacing it, and then making it progressive again. Okay. Do none of them double 240P correctly? I mean, there might have been some, but they're even within the same device, like, different versions of it. Yay. So it's like there's no really way. I just want there to be a $40 thing people can buy in its composite and it works.

But, I mean, you look at it, like, the open source scan converter is probably the best. option, I feel like. But it doesn't do composite. Like, it's like, well, now you've got to be one of these RGB weirdos. But the retro tank will do. Yeah, the retro tank does composite, but it doesn't have a comb filter. But, I mean, but no, I mean, it, it will, you know, take the 240P and it will double

it to 480P. Right. But no comb filter, so it looks really bad. The, you know, also do S video. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great. Yeah. Great. And most systems, not all.

We'll do S-video, like old classic systems. So that's a really good compromise. In fact, oh, it's great. It's like the biggest jump, I feel, like going from Composite to S-Video. Yeah, I remember back in the 90s when I finally made the jump from Composite to S-Video, and I was like, wow, I didn't know my games looked like this. I was on PlayStation, and all of a sudden, you know, instead of seeing transparent stuff, I was seeing meshes and textures and things.

I was like, oh, wow, I can actually see how they designed the game. that's really interesting. And RGB is a step above that, but not as big a step. In fact, I'm actually willing to compromise and use Svideo for capture when it's absolutely necessary. This is one of the things I've kind of had to come to terms with this summer is that I wanted to add Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color to my capture ability, but there's no official Nintendo product that will let you capture those in good quality in HD

from real hardware. The Super Game Boy only supports original Game Boy. And you can use the Game Boy player on GameCube, but the default software is terrible, and there is a way to, like, hack it, but it's very complicated. I've had no luck getting at work, and every time you boot it up, you have to kind of go through a process. And I like plug and play simplicity, because I'm a writer and an illustrator and a video creator. I am not a technical person. I am a creative person, and that means that I look at, you know, schematics and stuff and processes and just kind of say, oh, I can't do this. So I started looking around to see what would it be a good solution. And to capture these systems, there are dev tools that Nintendo released. There's the Wide Voice 64 that plugs into a Nintendo 64 and lets you play Game Boy Color games. And it looks great. And there are video capture devices that they sold to the press back for the GBA days.

And the Game Boy Advance dev kit or the Capture Kit only outputs to S video. but I did a capture run with it, and it looks phenomenal. And so I spent a whole lot of money this summer, and please don't tell my wife about this. She's going to be like, why would you do that? But now I have the ability to capture those things, and the quality on it is really great. And, you know, like I don't feel bad that I'm compromising

and, you know, using S-video for GBA, because it still looks phenomenal. We do have the option with the GBA consulizer. Yes, and that came along just a little too, for me, having already made this commitment. But, yeah, that does look excellent, although it doesn't do analog video out. Right.

I had to get a PAL GameCube from the UK to spit out RGP because that's the only GameCube that spits out RGP, and then I use the unofficial Game Boy Player launcher. Yeah, the Game Boy Interface by Extremes is incredible. If you have access to a Game Boy player around a GameCube, and you have to have an action replay thing

that goes in the memory card slot, but it's well worth it, especially if you have component cables. Yeah, it's great. Something I want to talk about is that we're all in pursuit of this perfect image, and I don't think most games were intended by their artists

to look this way. I think that if you're playing an NES game like Mega Man or whatever, I think the actual artists drawing those pixels were just using RF on a crappy on a crappy CRT TV. Yeah. And, like, they might have had dev tools where they were, like, you know,

you know, painting the pixels and they could see the perfectly sharp pixels, but then they were looking at the game, you know, on a Famicom over RF into a CRT, and, like, that's what they intended. And I think that there's a really compelling argument that maybe the more accurate way to play something like Mega Man is with some kind of, like, composite interpolator or something on top of it. And, you know, we, like... In our compilation, we did a very faky, like, see our composite simulation filter. You can turn off and on, and it's, like, when you're on, like, the level select for, I think, like, two or whatever, and, like, you turn the composite on, it's, like, suddenly the robots have, like, flesh tones.

You know, like, you can kind of see, like, jawbone shadowing and stuff, and it's, like, I think there's, I think a lot of times this art is meant by the artist to be seen this one. way. That was their canvas and if we're going RGB we're seeing something that they didn't necessarily intend for us to see. We're looking at these things in a fidelity that they never meant and it reminds me

a lot of I don't know if anyone reads like digital comic books but when they release a digital comic for like an older comic they interpret the actual colors from the printing plate as being what you're supposed to see which is really bright Garrish, because these colorists knew that they were painting for their medium.

They knew it would be on crappy paper, and they'd get a different effect when it went to print. And I think that by trying to get the perfect image out of these older games that I think were actually, like, in a way, rewriting history. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on, it changes from probably developer-developer to platform to platform. Because, I mean, you have, like, the master system and Genesis that are capable of outputing RGP. I'm sure that a lot of developers on those systems use those signals. But then, you know, even say of themselves, everyone will argue about the dithering in Sonic on the waterfall. Like, oh, it's meant to be looked at in composite because, you know, it makes the waterfalls look transparent. You get that rainbowing that makes it look like something the system couldn't normally do.

Yeah. Yeah, and that's why when I was talking about the word authentic earlier, I kind of used air quotes on it. Because, you know, it ultimately boils down to what you, the person, and playing want. If you want super crisp, that's great. If you want fuzzy, that's great. Like, you know, pursue what you want, have the experience that you want.

I think that's really the most important thing is, like, it's video games. It's not the end of the world, okay? It's supposed to be enjoyable, so whatever it takes for you to enjoy it. For me, you know, it was kind of making that jump from HD back into CRTs, and that was kind of the trigger for me that made me say,

oh, yeah, okay, I still do love these games. but you know everyone's going to have sort of a different like moment I think yeah and even for me like as I'm saying that it's like well I play NES in RGB or like digitally and it's like I have a weird personal line where it's like NES should be RGB anything before that should be composite

so you know it's at some point it just becomes a personal preference thing but I think it's worth at least realizing about yourself that like that part but also that that we might be interpreting these games in ways that artists never intended us to do and might not have wanted the games to look like. And I will say it's kind of, you know,

we need to wrap soon, but as I coded to this, official emulation is getting better and better. I mean, aside from the work that Frank is doing at Digital Eclipse, you also have, you know... Anything that's M2. Yeah, anything within two. That's, you know, the Konami collections and the Genesis Mini.

Even Nintendo's mini systems, they're not great, but they're also not bad. You can plug those in and you can play Mike Tyson's Punch Out. Well, no, you can't. You can play Punch Out and still, you know, fight Mr. Dream without any lack. And that's kind of the important thing, I think, with that game. So, you know, you don't have to be, you don't have to, like, give your life over to this pursuit of purity or anything like that. There are more and more ways to play classic games.

And I think as this becomes a growing market, and more and more, you know, there's more and more feedback and people see what sells and what doesn't, the threshold of quality increases because people are less willing to settle for, you know, at games, Genesis mini systems. They want M2 Genesis mini systems. And that's great. So, you know, maybe the best thing to do for a lot of people is just to kind of sit back and wait for emulation and, you know, official solutions to get better and better. And finally, you know, to hit that point where you're like, this is just how I remember it or better than I remember. And in the meantime, like something I say, even as someone in this commercial space that, like, sometimes makes a living off of commercial emulation, I think for the most part, the combined knowledge of the quote-unquote amateur emulation seen, the decades of shared knowledge that's gone into making amateur emulators, like, I would trust most of those more than I would trust most commercial solutions, because it's like people who are really obsessive fans about this stuff who are like, you know, like tinkering and making things perfect versus like, you know, like a studio that was hired to like crap something out in a month you know it's not going to have that that time to actually put and even us sometimes it's like our NES tech it's okay

like we got the individual games working but like we don't have this perfect NES emulator in-house because we don't have decades of combined knowledge and time and it's not a hobby for us you know so point being again like just go download some emulators

and it's fine it's the real games almost every time I think we have a few minutes left. If anyone has any questions or wants to shout something at us, this would be the time for it. Yeah, go ahead. Right there in the blue shirt. Okay, so the question was at Digital Eclipse,

what were some of the challenges trying to emulate these games or make them presentable, et cetera, et cetera. The two big challenges. One is that Nintendo's lawyers have this stance that emulation is illegal, which is complete crap. But it's something that all of their publishing partners, especially in Japan, like try to respect. So we

had to sort of work around that and have a way of emulating NES games as not actually an emulator. If anyone in this room's an engineer, we just kind of statically recompiled our emulation into C. So there's no emulator

on there, but it's the same thing. And the other challenge I would say is kind of what I was talking about earlier, which is interpreting the controls for a modern controller. for games like Akari Warriors, et cetera, where if you were to just map them, like, binary, like ones rotate clockwise,

one's rotate counterclockwise. Like, that would be the accurate way of doing it, but that's not the way the artist intended. So that's sort of the other bigger challenge. And like I said earlier, I gave actually two GDC talks about this. So there's two hours of me talking about this crap if you want to go online.

so let me repeat the question in a succinct way the question is basically there's different hardware revisions that the same software runs on and what's the accurate one what's the what's the goal right that we're going for I mean I can answer this from the digital close perspective but do you guys have other takes I mean that's what I was talking about when I said quote unquote authentic because you know it is it is personal so I think kind of it's a good opportunity for everyone to sort of say like here's different ways to do this what works best for me and you know the the game pavilion here the concourse upstairs is a great way to experience that right here at long island because you can go out and play a bunch of different systems in a bunch of different formats and technologies and say like oh okay I like this or no this doesn't seem right and then kind of work backward from there and say what's good for me so for me I think it's I always go back to artistic intent what we're the creators intending, and in a lot of cases, it's just for us a best guess on which system they were using. I don't think we've necessarily had to do that for any of our

compilations, but I think about things like the Famicom disk system, like different famicoms have different volume levels for the FDS expansion audio, which probably drives you crazy. It's, you know, it's the, I use the Intimini so I can adjust. Sure, but like adjust to what? Like, when was this game made and which revision of the Famicom were they using when they made this game. Well, and even the software itself, you know, if you look at NES packaging, you have like Rev 1, Rev.A, whatever.

So, you know, I think there's a pilot wings. Oh, yeah. They just came to light where they changed, like, the DSP chips. So the demo in the later revisions, the plane always crashes instead of landing safely because the math is different. Yeah. So, like, I would love to see a future

where it's like you switch between them or something because it's like in a commercial product. for example, we either make the call and say this is the best we can do, this is the best one, or we have to give you options to switch between things, which is why we do the composite with RGP. I mean, it's especially apparent with Sega Genesis as the audio hardware. And even the same audio chips in the same version of the system changed over time. That's why there's so many revisions of the Genesis, even just like of the Model 1 or of the Model 2. And, I mean, you look at something like the mega-s-G that it's able to recreate the audio as best as it can.

But now, I mean, recently there's a project going on that is called MD Fourier that is analyzing the audio from different versions of the Genesis, and they are trying to, they're finally able to kind of do their best to match it to each individual revision of the Genesis. and hopefully, you know, maybe there will be an option in later mega-sG firmware where you can choose from each, like, every version of the Genesis. And just on the note of accuracy and audio, like, I think that, again, like, I think in our pursuit of perfection, we're hearing the audio signals in a purely digital way, which is not how they were intended, and I think that the future of that, there needs to be some level of audio filter interpolation.

Audio filter. Audio is probably the toughest thing in games right now because it's very difficult for people to see the difference. They can't see the difference. You're dealing with YouTube compression or anything. Some people, like, as you get older, you can't hear certain frequencies and things that sound different. It's very, very difficult to lock down that kind of thing right now. Well, I think that is it for our time. But thanks everyone for attending. And if you have any more questions, if you want to just chat with us afterwards, please feel free. going to be around maybe for a little while longer. I don't know. I don't want to get these guys, but, yeah. I need to take off pretty soon too. But catch us before we go and otherwise, just go out and play some old games and say, like,

what do I like here? It's a good experience. Thank you.