Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 437: High-Fidelity Classic Gaming Redux

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Jeremy Parish, Joe Modzeleski of Limited Run Games, and Porkchop Express of MisterAddOns.com revisit a topic from long ago (episode 62!): The many evolving options for experiencing classic games in top quality. The play field keeps changing... Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, we're coming at you in more P than ever. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish hosting this episode, and this episode is what I'm calling High Fidelity Retro Gaming Redux. And we are going to be talking about, this is, you know, kind of a practical episode as opposed to like, oh, remember that thing that we loved or, hey, here's the history of this thing that we researched. This is more of a kind of practical almost like a primer for people who really kind of want to hear what options

they have to play classic games these days and you know you want to do something more exciting than just be a raspberry pie guy like yes that's fine you can be a raspberry pie guy but there's so many more ways to play classic games that it's really it's actually a little overwhelming so with me on this episode we have two people who have never been on retronauts before although one of them, honestly, I can't believe we've worked together in the same office for quite a while, two years, and yet you've never been on the podcast. But in fairness, I've never actually gone over to your house to take you up on your offer of playing all your vintage Nintendo arcade machines. So I guess we're even. So please introduce yourself. Yeah, we both are to blame for this one. My name is Joe Majuleski. I am the development lead at Limited Run Games. And yes, we shared an office for... you know, ignoring the quarantine portions for, yeah, around two years. It was about 18, 20 months, and then in actual time spent in the office about four. Kind of a weird situation, but it was bookended, and we're good buddies now.

And basically share a love of classic games and really, you know, trying to experience classic games in the best fidelity as possible, whether that's the way they were originally intended to be played or just. just, you know, like something we've, you know, someone has bodged together to kind of create an enhanced modern experience. And also on this episode is, uh, someone who has been just an incredible resource and just an invaluable contributor to, to a lot of that, uh, through his shop, Mr. Adons.com. Please introduce yourself. Hello. Yeah, I go by Pork Drop Express online. I run the humble website, Mr. Adons, and electrical engineered by trade, vintage, and retro game enthusiast by hobby, and big fan of the show. So thank you for having me. Yeah, well, thank you very much for being on and thank you for, you know, the work that you've done to help support me

personally. Like, getting me set up with a Mr. a few years ago has been a huge help in capturing actual, you know, good quality arcade footage of the games that are available on the arcade course of Mr. as opposed to just, you know, know, like poking around online and saying, well, here's, here's some footage on YouTube of an arcade game that isn't completely terrible. I guess I can use this. Now, you know, when it comes to games like Wonderboy, which I'm putting together a video for right now, I'm able to actually jump into Mr. Load up the Wonderboy Sega System 1 ROM and record really great looking footage of it. And so, yeah, you've, you've been a huge help to my work. So, you know, I'm very grateful for that and glad you could be on the show. Oh, thank you. Mr. is so great, but that's, I really have little to do with how great it is. I'm just kind of a fan alongside other one else. But I feel like you've been a great evangelist for it, and you've done just so much to make the system kind of accessible, because, you know, it's a very technical device. And, you know, when I first looked into Mr. several years ago, it's a little overwhelming if you don't do a lot of engineering or programming or just tinkering.

with electronics. And I'm not really the kind of person who does that. I'm interested in the end result as opposed to how to get there. And so it was kind of overwhelming. But having this device that's basically an all-in-one like pre-packaged unit where you just pretty much just, you know, put in a pre-formatted SD card and press go, that's fantastic and really brings this great technology to a much wider audience than, you know, would necessarily want to hunt down a DE10 nano and also find the right

RAM modules and also figure out the right, you know, USB configurations and all that. Like just, just having it there in a single kind of, you know, one-stop shop is just a huge, huge, you know, a win for a lot of people. And so I really appreciate the work that you've done there. Even, you know, sure, it's business for you. But, you know, it's, it does good for the community. So it kind of lifts all the ships with that rising tide, as they say. Well, thank you. One last note before we get rolling too much. I don't know if you know this,

but I remodeled pretty much my last house listening to Retroknott. So this is pretty cool to be. be on here. So appreciate it. All right. Well, now is your chance to correct us on all the things we got wrong. Anyway, so like I said before, about six years ago back in 2016, Frank Cefaldi and Christian Nutt and I recorded an episode called High Fidelity Retro Gaming. And in the six years, since we recorded that episode, so much about this space has changed. The first time I really became aware of the fact that you could, you know, take classic games and make them look really great again as opposed to just kind of dealing with, you know, virtual console on an LCD TV stretched

out and with lag and everything. It was really in about, I think when this, the show came back through Kickstarter in 2013 and Ray Barnhold was talking a little bit about the Framemeister. And it sounded interesting. But then he said, yeah, it costs about $3 or $400. And I said, I would never spend that much on something to make my video games look better like that. That's ridiculous. But then the following year, I started Game Boy Works. And when I started Game Boy Works, my solution was not the most technically impressive. I was using one of those retro super NES handhelds, the emulation devices, with a super Game Boy.

And it had a composite out connection, standard video, standard definition video. And I put together my first few episodes like that. And then someone who enjoyed the work that I was doing wrote to me and was like, okay, dude, this is not okay. And actually, no, somewhere in there, I said, actually, this is kind of bad. So then I switched over to a retro five because it could do HD video. But that was also problematic because it was constantly skipping frames and just, you know, nothing sounded quite right.

It was still better than what I had before, which was like off pitch and fuzzy and running the wrong speed, but still, like someone said, you know, this is killing me. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hook you up with a frame Meister and you find a, you know, a one-chip super NES that outputs, you know, clean RDB video. And I'm going to get you a frame meister and you can capture in high definition. You can run, you know, Super Game Boy and it'll look better. Then I ended up getting a Super Game Boy 2, which is accurate. and it just kind of snowballed.

But, you know, I started branching out and trying to find other ways to get the best performance out of my classic consoles. So the following year, I said, all right, I'm going to dig deep and buy an analog NT because the video quality on that looks really good

and I want to do NES games. And then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I could capture in high definition through the Frammeister, but also do light gun games and rob games. And I feel proud that I was the first. first weirdo to have like actual high definition capture of gyromite and stackup online captured from the console actually using Rob. No one cares. But I, you know, it's just, I still felt like,

wow, I'm doing something good and worthwhile. You know, I'm being faithful. That's great. And it just kind of continued from there. But it's been a very expensive process with a lot of trial and error. A lot of, a lot of consoles that have had to get RGB modded, try to track. down cables, deal with differing standards and compatibility. Like, initially, I was using S-card connectors with an RGB21 Japanese connection, but most people want to use Euro S-card, which is a different wiring, you know, finding hubs for all these things, just dealing with, you know, the brightness issues that come from having all these things daisy-chained and, you know, putting capacitors and

resistors and stuff on, or resistors on the, like, the cabling and recapping systems with fresh capacitors and just so many things. It's just so complicated, it's been so expensive. And the thing that kills me is, you know, if I had started this project like four years later, five years later,

I could have just gotten a mister and done basically everything from Mr. It's so, there's so many options now and it's so convenient. You can really spend a lot of money on getting, you know, high-end capture from consoles and, or not even capture, just like high-end display for a great LCD TV or an HD TV or,

you know, 4K or whatever. You know, the options are out there. And some of them are very reasonable. Some of them are like just, you know, kind of the neo-geo side of things where it's crazy expensive. There's a full range of options. And, you know, I feel like we live in difficult times, uncertain times, as the commercials were saying a few months into the pandemic.

But at the same time, when it comes to playing classic games, aside from the fact that they're all stupid expensive now, we just have a wealth of options and are truly blessed. That's my stance. So I want to talk about the blessings. But first let me, oh, go ahead, Joe. I was going to say, you're totally right. And I think still today in 2022, we still have the notion that this preconceived idea that if you want to get into retro gaming, quote unquote, the right way or the high end way, that it's going to cost you an insane amount of money. And with how many options we have now, there are a ton of options that aren't super expensive and can give you very good quality for minimal effort.

I'm using a retro tank right now, and some people are going to look at me and act like, I'm a crazy one here, but I still use composite for some of my systems through the retro tank, and I think that looks awesome. Very playable. It's very versatile with all my modern stuff, and I don't have to get my systems RGB modded if I don't want to. There's a ton of options. You can get really good quality on the cheap.

Yeah, I mean, that's the great thing is that, you know, these classic consoles were really well built for the most part and a lot of them actually have really good video output options even though they're kind of the lower end technology like composite like the NES's composite is pretty damn good and when you get a good upscaler for it

it upscales really cleanly and looks nice that's really what it comes down to yeah it's what you're doing with the signal more than like hey I really need to modify this to give me a different signal you know I've used an HDMI moded in 64 that I don't really think produces

that much, at least not to a worthwhile extent, how much it costs. I don't think it produces a picture that's really all that much better than using composite on my retro tank. And I don't think either of them look better than using composite on my pvm. So it's like, it's what you do with the signal. It's how you upscale it. It's what you're doing with it. You know, like you said. Well, and there's also the question of what do you find acceptable?

You know, everyone is going to look at something and say, well, this isn't what I want. Either this isn't how I remember these games looking, or this isn't, you know, I remember these games looking kind of bad and I want something better than that. For me, you know, I'm trying to capture footage as cleanly as possible for videos and for print. So having like a nice clean, RGB signal that's upscaled to 720P is great because it's an even upscaling integer, you know, three times video scaling. And when things are upscaled well, it's really, it's crisp, but it's not, you know, like emulator crisp where every pixel has a hard edge. There's still some some softness to it that kind of blends a little bit, but without getting like super fuzzy. You know, there's, there are the famous images that go around social media sometimes where someone takes a picture of like, you know, Zelda 2, and it's basically, the video is

just bleeding and everything is a smeary mess, and they're like, this, this is how they intended these games to look. And I don't know that that's true. But, you know, if that's what you want your games to look like, yeah, God bless, go for it. That's always like, there's an argument, there's an argument to be made that like the Sega Genesis, you know, a lot of developers did design around bleed and create. to the checkerboard dithering effects

and, you know, to simulate transparency. And that doesn't work on an emulator or even like really crisp RGB. It just works on, you know, composite with color bleed. And, you know, fair enough. Yeah. And that's something to consider, too, that back when they were creating this stuff, the different pixel art for these different hardware at different periods of time, the TVs were constantly changing.

And the TV that a consumer had in their house, you know, you go to 50 different houses, it's probably 50 different displays, different sizes, different quality, different issues with overscan or whatever. There's so many different ways these games could look. I always think it's funny when somebody does what you mentioned, like the overblown, terrible bleeding picture of Zelda 2. This is how it was meant to look.

It's like, well, it almost feels like they were designing it for so many different variables of display that there isn't really a preset way that it is supposed to look. That's just kind of like there's a range of how it's supposed to look. and then our memory of it determines where in that range we think is accurate. Sure. Yeah, I totally agree with that. It's fun to think that there is some kind of absolute standard for analog video back in the day. But I think as we see even on the same system, from game to game, they handle the aspect

ratio a little bit different. Some of them, you know, have made a circle around. And sometimes the circle is a little bit stretched out on a 4x3 CRT compared to a computer monitor. It's kind of fun to think about. And then also today, the challenge is, how do you wrangle all of these varying analog signals that are about the same in terms of brightness? The, you know, the horizontal scan rate is slightly different. Maybe the vertical scan rate is slightly different. And how do you present that in a clean way to the average consumer who says, hey, I want the best experience playing these games I remember for my youth.

And I just want to be able to buy something, pretty much plug it in and go. And I think that's the market's done really well, kind of filling that need. Yeah, they just announced yesterday before, you know, as of this recording, the Pixel FX Morp, which is an upscaler-type situation made by people who have a lot of experience doing this. And it's going to be like completely modular where they have different modules you can basically dedicate to each console you have. And then the system will remember like the on-screen display and the system memory will, will remember what's plugged into each port and automatically configure itself to output to the standards that you want. So, you know, you can be one of those people who, uh, gets the firebrand X, uh, obsessive settings for, you know, the analog in T and is like, this is, this is the ultimate way

to display NES. And, you know, that, that device will basically say, okay, that's how it's going to be every time you turn it on, which sounds really promising. I'm very excited about that. Yeah, it's the first time hearing about that. That sounds pretty cool. I feel very fortunate in that I'm friends with Mike G and I'm friends with Woozol from Pixel FX. And so, you know, both amazing products. It'll be interesting to see how they stack up head to head. And I definitely think there's going to be a price and a feature list that'll appeal to almost everyone out there. Yeah, it seems like because it's kind of an add-on system, an additive system, you'll have the opportunity to get in pretty cheaply.

But if you're, you know, me, then you can create. this kind of infinity train, like, you know, a human centipede of different connections and spend a whole lot of money. But, you know, if that's what it takes to kind of like end up with the ultimate one-stop shop that would greatly streamline my process, that's great. And already, I'm kind of looking at streamlining a bit and moving, you know, away from all the different devices I have because they're not really necessary. Like I invested quite a bit in getting a consoleized MVS and a Neo-ST system. But ultimately what I'm doing is like, you know, okay, it's NeoGeo hardware, but I'm using a flash ROM device to play games because there's no way I'm going, no way in

hell I'm going to pay NeoGeo prices for cartridges. But, you know, what's the difference between that and just running the NeoCores on Mr. Like, none really. Aside from like this, this vague claim of authenticity. Like, yes, S&K manufactured some of these chips in here and, you know, assembled the stuff. And then it was pulled apart and reconfigured. So, you know, it's kind of a ship of Theseus thing. At some point, you might as well just go with the Mr. Solution. So, yeah, like, it's neat that that exists, but I, it's kind of superfluous. So this episode, you know, I kind of want to talk about how you can sort of create a catch-all solution for playing classic games to make them look great, to make them look the way you want them to,

and, you know, have a great time doing it. And, you know, I think the answer generally kind of comes back around to Mr. It seems to be sort of the best middle ground solution that has a lot of versatility on par with, you know, the suite of emulators available up to a certain point, you know, moving up to PS1 at this point in Saturn. But at the same time, you know, because it is all in one, it ultimately proves to be pretty economical if you are looking at a mister versus a whole bunch of a whole suite of other systems. So yeah, that's a that's kind of the spoiler for this episode. I think we're going to go. I think you're right though. I think the spoiler for the whole thing is there's two great options. There's like if you really want to make it simple. There's the

mister, which for everybody that wants to play there's like their consoles on a TV, whatever, like the mister is great. And then if you have a PC, like basically any PC software emulation these days is for the most part phenomenal. There's a lot of really, really amazing games you can play so accurate that you're not going to know the difference on your PC. Yeah, for sure. And there's also, again, we mentioned it, takes a lot of hate. The Raspberry Pi is not a bad product for the price. It's a good value product for what you're getting. And there's a lot of people who want to play games. I know somebody that plays their N64, hooked up to their TV through composite and stretches it out and they have the time of their life. It drives me crazy. But like those customers,

yes, we do. I know what you're talking about. Those customers exist. They want to play the games too. And it's something like Jeremy, you mentioned a few minutes ago, that it's just the most important thing is how much money are you willing to spend and what is your bar of quality? Because there is nobody out there that gets to decide, here is the bar you have to pass to enjoy these games. Yep. Ignorance is a little, is bliss to some extent in every hobby. Yeah, I mean, I definitely came from a place of ignorance myself. And I think I've mentioned this before, but for a long time, I would play classic games on, you know, once we have the kind of the HD TV transition, be like, man, these aren't as much fun as I remember.

Everything just looks kind of bad and feels kind of bad. And it wasn't until I kind of realized, like, I, you know, I discovered, oh, there's lag. There's, you know, scaling and stretching and upscaling. and it causes problems and everything feels bad because there's like, you know, four or five frames of delay between me pressing jump and Yoshi actually jumping. And over time, I've kind of come to realize that for me to enjoy playing a game, you know, having nice crisp graphics, that's fine. But that's not super important for me.

What I need is responsiveness. I need, like, the games to feel the way they did when I was 12 years old and playing NES games on a crappy little, you know, nine-inch TV because they're, you know, I was playing over RF and it looked awful. But the thing is, when I press jump, Yoshi or I guess at that point, Mega Man, you know, or Mario or whoever, would immediately jump. And there was no like kind of need to sort of plan ahead five frames to say, well, I think this is what's what I'm going to need to do and, you know, to kind of guess your way through Mike Tyson's punch out or whatever. It was just, It had this immediacy and connection.

And that's really what I love and seek after. And as a result, like, most emulation does not really do it for me. But that's just because I've kind of figured out, like, what is it that I need? Like, what is the connection with games that I need in order for them to really work for me? And that is the answer is like that immediacy of responsiveness. Like, you know, if I lose a frame or two, maybe, that's fine. but anything more than that, and I can feel it, and it really drives me up the wall. And I'm really glad that, you know, there are so many options and an increasing number of options of ways to play games that don't involve, you know, a lot of layers of emulation, software emulation, that does introduce that lag.

And, you know, emulators are getting better. And they're, they're starting to, I don't even understand, Joe, you can probably talk about it, but like, basically it's predictive or something. there's like, it leads ahead. It's almost like, you know, frame buffering or something. Yeah, there's, there's so, like, I'm not the person that's going to be able to get into the technical, like the real nitty-gritty with you, but the basic idea is, you know, say you're playing like Mega Man X. There are some emulators, I think, like the stuff through Retroarch, I think Beast Nass will do

this where you can, I don't even know the right technical way of explaining it, but basically it's like you can send your inputs into the few. kind of like so you like you'll it's the it's running ahead and you'll hit jump and it'll actually like it'll go to an instance it's like I think like three or four frames however you want to set it behind you and like switch to that instance and put you on the same frame as if you had pushed the jump button four frames earlier than you actually did and there's things you can do like that in emulation to try and make games feel more responsive but you run into a lot of problems with that because it's not a catch-all solution.

It kind of, like, my understanding as a technical nitwit standing on the outside, is that it kind of sounds like rollback net code in fighting games, where there is this kind of, you know, it's basically smoothing things over for the eye and, you know, kind of dealing with stuff in the background and making the lag and the, you know, the issues with responsiveness that are in, to the technology less evident. And so things just feel better. Yeah.

And that's a really good way of looking at it. The way it works, from my understanding, is it uses save states. So it runs ahead a couple frames, uses save states, and then reloads that save state so that you're basically traveling back in time, basically to run ahead. And it's really cool. And people say, hey, look, you can get better latency than original hardware because we know now that some games like Super Mario World have a certain number of frames of latency kind of built into the actual code of the game.

And so now you can do better than that. And where I come from is I'm a simple man. I still mostly game on a CRT. And too many options really kind of like it adds friction to the process of sitting down and playing a game. So run ahead's great for people who really want to twist the knob and choose how many frames is right for each game. And for me, it's just kind of like, oh, man, another decision to make.

Exactly. And then that's where you run into the problem too. is, like I said, there's no catch-all for it because there was a great, like, example, you said, like, Mario World, there is innate delay to that game just on a, on a software level. And that's going to be different than Mega Man X and Super Mario Cardin, Super Metroid. And, like, as soon as you start messing with that stuff, you're going to get games that sometimes feel snappier and sometimes feel like something's horribly off. But the fact is, you know, developers recognize these issues.

And there's a lot of work being done in very subtle ways. You know, they've kind of climbed the obvious mountains in emulation. There are still, you know, like really random edge cases that haven't been, you know, arcade machines that haven't been emulated in maim. And there's a few machines that don't have proper emulators available yet. Like, I think the epic cassette vision doesn't really have an emulator because each game was the processor, not the console. So, you know, stuff like that's kind of on the outside.

But for the most part, you know, NES emulation, super NES emulation, genesis emulation, that stuff's as good as it's going to get. Yeah. Just about. Like, all they can do that at this point is, what's that? I was going to say NES emulation is basically perfect to the point where they accept speed run records in NES emulators. Yeah, I mean, people have been hacking with that in the public sphere for 25 years.

And it's a whole lot of people, not just one person. And it's not proprietary. It's, you know, kind of an open community. I mean, there's, you know, the rivalries and arguments and scene disputes and whatever. But for the most part, it's a lot of really smart, really passionate people all putting their heads together and tackling common problems. And they've ironed just about all of them out. So the next frontiers of emulation are just about the really subtle refinements that distinguish emulation from real hardware. And, you know, even on Mr., which is, you know, emulation of a sort, like on the hardware level, you're starting to see, I think,

a new set of front ends just showed up that have options for display that to emulate, you know, aperture grills or shadow masks and, you know, kind of create different CRT effects on HDTVs, you know, like plasma or LED TVs or 4K TVs. And, you know, it's still not perfect, but it just keeps getting better and better. And in time, you know, like maybe there won't be a reason to use anything but an emulator. And there's no problem with that, in my opinion. Honestly, I think if I'm talking to anybody that's not already ingrained in this space, right? Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I already think that we are at a point in time where it makes the most sense to either use a software emulator or an FPGA thing like analog consoles or a mister. I think the day of telling somebody they need a CRT and they need original hardware is already over.

Oh, hold on. We can still have CRTs, but no, I'm with you on. Don't talk crazy now, Joe. So here's the thing, though, because I say that recognizing that I'm still in the niche that still loves that, right? Yeah, I'm going to niche too. No, no. I'm saying that as if, no, no, no, I got you. I'm saying it more as if like you're trying to bring somebody new into the space, right?

Because I still got a Triniton-Tron PVM right over. there. And I use it, my retro Tink, and my analog consoles, all kind of equally at this point. In fact, if it wasn't for CRTs, I probably would have not really stayed into retro gaming as much as

I am, because much like you, Jeremy, I had this period where I was starting to get back into them, but I noticed immediately, like, when I plugged my Super Nintendo into my HDTV at the time, that it looked bad, it played bad, and I still had a CRT in the house. And I

think if I had not had that CRT to like go back and be like, is this really as bad as it looked and felt? If I had not had that, I think I may have just not returned to retro games because of how bad the experience was on that TV. Yeah, the memory I always kind of go back to is maybe like 15 years ago at Tokyo Game Show after the show was over, you know, we always had a few days to kind of kick around Tokyo, do some retro game shopping. And I very excitedly bought a, a Famicom twin system, you know, that had the cartridge slot and the disc drive. And I was like, finally, I'm going to play dokey, dokey panic. And I went back to my hotel room. I was hanging out with Catherine Bailey, Kat Bailey. She came along with me. And we, like, very excitedly plugged in

the twin Famicom and started playing dokey, dokey panic. And we're like, oh, yeah, this is weird and different. It's kind of like Mario, too, but not. But at the same time, I was just like, this isn't that fun. This is actually, like, not an enjoyable experience. experience. We were playing on some, you know, hotel television, some flat screen. And it just really kind of sucked. And I was like, maybe I just don't love classic games as much as I thought I did. But, you know, since then, I've played dokey dokey panic on, on like an actual FDS, on a CRT with zero lag. And I'm like, okay, this is not as good as Super Mario Brothers 2, but it's still way better than that first experience I had. Well, and take the difference

between like, you and I probably had that experience around the same time. Like, what year would you say that was? Like 2007? Okay. Yeah, I'm thinking like 2009 for me. Think of the difference nowadays that if somebody wants, like back then, if somebody wanted to revisit retro games, most people just had an HDTV now. They didn't have CRTs around their house anymore. And if they pulled the old system out of their parents' house or whatever, that's what they plugged it into. There were no other options. But now, you know, you want to play some of these games. There are so many great options that you don't have to resort to that. And most of the time, money is going to stop you from resorting to that because retro games are so expensive.

So you're going to have, you have so many ways of having a better experience just jumping right in with software emulation or with something like a mister that I think it's easier to recommend those and not have to have CRT or old hardware on your checklist of like, you want to get into retro games, you got to have these. Because back then, you really did. Yeah, I have a good example of that today was taking my interesting. international packages to UPS to drop off. And the worker there was probably no more than 20 years old. And the guy next to me was like, what are all those things? You know, just white boxes with labels on them. I said, oh, video game stuff.

Because I kind of cut people off at the past because how do you explain FGA? I don't know. Anyways, I said, hey, video games. There's a little weird in here. Yeah. There's a little being in here. So he transforms into whatever you want them to. Yeah.

You play with Legos, right? No, it's the wrong. It's the wrong approach. I promise. I've tried it so many times. So he said, oh, what kind? And I said, oh, you know, like Nintendo and Genesis. And you kind of, and then you kind of feel it out.

Like, okay, they're still interested. They know what that is. Like, you don't cut to the chase. Anyways, the guy behind the counter was like, that's awesome. You know, I had a Raspberry Pi. So it's like we're in an era where people understand emulation. Maybe they grew up with Raspberry Pi. He said, in fact, I have a Pokemon emulator that's multiplayer on my computer I still use.

So it's cool to see that, like, these are not as mysterious as they used. to be. Yeah. I think the further and further we get to these devices just being more and more common and more and more known about. Like I said, I think that we are already at the point where if you're trying to bring somebody new in, you're not telling them to get original hardware for a CRT. You're telling them to get something different. Yeah. And from a, I mean, from a collector's standpoint, too, I mean, everything's going to die at some point. Right now, recapping fixes things, but what about when the chips start going bad? What about when the mask problems start going bad in cartridges or disk. I mean, it's like preservation is important for so many reasons up until now.

If you have enough money, you've been able to get it. But what about in 10 or 20 years? Will the hardware still be able to be maintained? I'm already dealing with that with the SG 1000 work that I've been doing. There have been some of the my cards that I bought and they look like they're perfect, but they just don't play. No matter what I do to them, they won't run in actual hardware. So, you know having the analog sg mega sg to be able to fall back on to do capture when the actual hardware doesn't work has been quite a boon and actually the the analog mega sg gives me better results for sg 1,000 video just because the the the sg 1,0002 that I've been recording from it looks really great on my CRT but the output is very kind of low luminosity even though

I Fix Retro did a mod on it to boost the luminosity, the brightness, and also get rid of jail bars, it's still, you know, when I record it from the actual hardware, it's kind of dark. And so then I have to bump up the brightness and then the color gets distorted because the SG-1,000 had this really distinct kind of pastel color palette. But when you bump up the brightness, it just becomes more intense and you lose that pastel quality. So the best video quality I'm getting for SG-1,000, is not from the SG-1,000 for my video. videos. So, you know, there's a certain point at which you're, you're trying to do too much with classic hardware, with actual hardware. And sometimes it's better to use like a really, really good fake. That is, you know, when I, when I play SG 1000 versus mega SG, you know, the same games on my television, my CRT, they look the same. But then the output to digital is going to be different.

And, you know, I actually think the SG-1000 looks more authentic that software coming from analogs system, which is, you know, just kind of makes me wonder, why am I doing this? That's ridiculous. We do it because we love it. I love it, and I love the pain and suffering. So we've talked a lot about emulation. So I just want to give kind of a quick rundown, you know, kind of as a guide for emulation options available. Joe, you mentioned emulating on a PC. There's so many emulators out there that it's almost impossible to, you know, to go through

and give a rundown. You said, what are the best, what would you say the best emulator for like NES? super nes and genesis are let's just go with the kind of baseline models so um i best is hard to say because everybody's going to have different opinions in my opinion in my opinion my recommendation so nes it really doesn't matter there are so many things out there you can use you can just pick and choose they're they're all great at this point um i care more about super nintendo and genesis and right now i really really like beastness and um blast them i've been using for genesis both of those have great options

both of those are incredibly accurate especially beastness is incredibly accurate it's been a really really cool reference I guess you know full disclosure I work in emulation so it's been a great reference to look at things like that

Blastom 2 has been something that's really really good to look at and compare it to original hardware but Genesis is really hard because there's so many variations of the hardware that all kind of look like primarily sound different that you can have something that one person says, this is what you should do as you play it.

And you're like, this doesn't sound right. But I think if you're kind of coming out of a casual way, you're on a PC that you got in your house or a laptop or whatever, and you want to play some classic games, if you download Deasness and Blast them, you're going to have a really great experience, you know, in 2022. Also, the only other one is PlayStation before I go off of this one.

I know you didn't ask about it. But I've recently been turned on to Duck Station. And I actually think that's a better experience than original. hardware. Wow. I've heard great things about it. I just want to chime in and say, in terms of audio and emulation, 240P test suite, and Artemio and all of his work with MD Forier is an invaluable way of characterizing console audio and getting these emulators fine tunes. So big shout out to Artemio and crew there. Yep, Artemio was on the show about two years ago at the end of 2019 talking about all the work he does. So definitely check that out if you'd like to learn more about

it. But yes, it's a great resource for people who want to get good fidelity from what they have from their setup. Another option for emulation is not using a PC, but rather using a device, like a standalone device made to emulate. A lot of these are kind of the same thing as a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is what, like 90 bucks for the full like a device that you can basically plug an SD card into and have access to like everything essentially and you know we'll run a pretty decent array of emulators with pretty decent quality but there are a lot of devices you can stand that just are or that you can buy that are just standalone devices like the retron which i don't personally recommend um the retro duo from retro bit is a generally better retro freak uh i heard good things about but then i played it

and didn't really enjoy it it's kind of hard to come by since it's japanese and doesn't really have U.S. distribution. But then one kind of popular option are all the mini consoles that, you know, first parties, the developers and publishers have released. Obviously, Nintendo had the NES mini classic, the Super NES, and now, you know, Sega followed up with a Genesis megadrive slash whatever. Sony had their PlayStation 1, which is arguably the worst of these. Neo-Gio had a little mini arcade cabinet, which, you know, like that's a whole separate

suite. that in the Astro City Mini and the Egret Mini 2 or Egret 2 Mini that's coming out from Taito are basically the standalone consoles but also have HDMI out so you can like play them on the built-in screen or play them on an actual television screen. Sega's releasing the Astro City Mini V, which is not very many Sega games. It's just a ton of shooters from like Toaplan. And it's, you know, called V because it's vertical, just like the vertical mode in Astro City games. So, yeah, there's a lot of features, and a lot of these devices can be hacked and modified. I think the manufacturers are working to prevent that and doing what they can to minimize the hacking after the, basically the NES and Super NES minis were just hacked all to hell. And people were like, hey, you can have your whole NES library on this device that's only supposed to have 30 games. And I don't think Nintendo was crazy about that. So now everyone takes safeguards, but there's still a lot of hacking that happens with those. Yeah, no doubt.

Those are cool. They were nice. I think the big benefit of the NES and the S&S mini was less about their usefulness as a product and more about the way that they kind of got people talking about these games again. Because the more people you have talking about it, the more people that are interested in it, the more you hate to say it, but the more you see the publishers that hold these games, they see that there's a market for them and that makes them kind of work towards making them more accessible. available, easy to kind of get your hands on. At the end of the day, I think that's the more valuable aspect of those products, is that it got a conversation going and financial interest in retro games for casual people. I agree. And a lot of times it's the 30-year-olds with their kids now who are going back and playing these games from their childhood, and how can you really put a price on that kind of experience that they would have never gotten a Raspberry Pi, never installed PC emulators,

or never gotten a mister analog, but they just want to re-experience something and share it with their kids. I think that's great. But maybe they did after. Maybe they played the 30 games on the NES classic and we're like, hey, this is missing a bunch of my favorite games. What is a way on my HDTV that I can play those

and they start finding some of their stuff? Whether it is, as Jeremy said, whether they find out about hacking those consoles or finding whatever else they can get. Yeah, it gets people talking about the games again, which at the end of the day, we fiddle with hardware because we love it, but like, what are we really trying to do? Are we trying to preserve and play these games? Or are we trying to play with the hardware?

Right. Yeah, I forgot to mention the PC engine mini, which is maybe the best of them. They put M2 on the case and put a crazy selection of really good and really obscure games on that mini. I wish they had put English localizations of some of the text-heavy games, but still, like, that turbographic's mini is not actually that mini. but it's it's fantastic yeah i bought that and i i have not even plugged it in yet and i was really excited about it and uh it's got dracula x on it yeah and that was what i was excited about because this is you know you know i'm a big castlvania fan um i've heard also a big retro game fan but that original like that version the turbo version i've never played it it's just a complete gap in my castlevania games and also the turbo uh or the pc engine in general is a

retro system that I am just, I never have played one. So I was really excited about that thing. And then I got it and I just never plugged it in. For shame. I will say that before the NES and Super NES mini came out, there were many consoles that existed like this, like the Atari Flashback and the At Games Sega Genesis system. Those were universally crap.

And there were bad. I did a video where I captured Sonic the Hedgehog from one of the the At games devices and it's like super slow and the music is like really distorted and out of tune.

It's not like, oh, this isn't the Sega Genesis sound chip that I remember. It's like someone is trying to drown this video game and it's like warbling for help while it's losing its oxygen. It sounds really bad. I got one of those just to experience

how bad. was because it was just at that point it was a comedy thing like it just was really funny to play some games on it i will say yeah that product is terrible and ad games was putting out some really really terrible stuff but in the interest of also being nice in case somebody from ad games is listening to this uh the at games legends pinball real good i have that thing in my home office and i play it every day so they shouldn't be allowed to make video games just pinball okay i think i think the trick is if you if the product is in stock at big lots Never buy it. I think that's the trick. Just avoid anything that sold at Big Lots. That's electronic.

That's where I get all my retro gaming heartbeat. Okay. Kind of a spinoff from this are the sort of standalone mini arcade cabinets of varying sizes and quality that are, you know, just have like one, two or maybe six games on them. There's like little tiny ones that have a bunch of, you know, it's the same lineup. It's always some Namco games. It's always some Data East games. It's like, you know, the companies that are just like, yeah, yeah, here, pick our properties, whatever. We don't care. But then, you know, you have, you know, we've talked about these. I've talked about these and interviewed people about them on different episodes. The quarter arcades from Numskull, the retro, sorry, replicades from New Wave Toys, those are very, very good. They're not perfect, but the amount of love put into them really shows through, and it's kind of about the experience. But, you know, you don't have to pay $200 to have a little handheld mini arcade. You can go spend $20 and have like a mini, like, a desktop DDR, which is ridiculous, but I love that it exists. It's got three songs and you use your fingers on the pad.

It's so dumb. But, you know, it's out there and that's great. Another kind of, another, you know, to kind of wrap up emulator stuff, there's also dedicated emulator handhelds that run on usually Android. These kind of are, to me, descendants of the Game Park 32X, where they are meant to be like basically portable PCs that you don't really use for computing. They are very, like, game-oriented. you can buy one of these on like Amazon for a hundred bucks.

It's going to come preloaded with thousands of games that you do not legally own. And no one seems to care. I got one just out of curiosity because I heard how good they are. I didn't really love it. But I did appreciate the fact that it came preloaded with the decent PlayStation simulator that had a hacked version of Castlevania Symphony the Night where like all my staffs were just like jacked way up and everything I hit, including bosses died in one shot. I was like, well, this isn't the experience.

I really wanted, but neat, okay, something that I had in a handhold. That's, you know, something Nintendo hasn't done for us yet. So, yeah. Be careful if you're looking at those, though, because they come in varying degrees of quality. Yes. Are these like the Ann Brinick devices? Is that one of the brands? Yeah.

I think, oh, crap, I can't remember what it's called. There's one that people seem to regard really highly. The name totally escapes me, but I do know that it comes in many colors. There's like yellow and pink. pink and purple. It's, you know, kind of, kind of going for the Nintendo Switchlight thing a little bit. Someone at the office has one of these, and I can't tell you what brand it is, but I used it as a point of comparison when working on some Game Boy Advance stuff. And it would, the sound on that thing was painful enough that I can't imagine ever wearing headphones with it. Yeah,

I've used one once. I've used one once my coworker bought one at my previous job. And he had Ann Burnick, A-N-B-E-R-N-I-C, I think. That's the most popular one. And my opinion is, in 10 years, those things are going to be great. They're severely underpowered right now. They're not very well-configured. It's running either Android or it's running Linux and neither one's a great solution. And it's maybe in 10 years, you know?

Yeah, once the steam deck comes out, it's going to basically be imitated far and wide. I am confident that the steam deck will be great. and I'm confident that as soon as it hits the market, there will be 20 companies trying to do the same thing in a smaller form factor and a cheaper form factor and some of it's going to be garbage and some of it's going to be really, really good. Yeah.

So I was just going to say, I completely agree with you that I think we've already gotten it down to the form factor. You got something cheap, affordable, it's portable, it's got a screen, it's got a speaker. It's all great. It's just, it's not quite there yet on a hardware level. Give it, I mean, like you said, give it 10 years.

These things that are being made are probably going to be a really, really good solution that we're going to be sitting here like, man, why would we spend $2.250 for an analog pocket when we can buy this thing and it, when it looks and sounds and plays great. But I will say. Because the analog pocket is all about, you know, paying tribute to classic games. I have two analog pockets staring at me. Sorry, it was making fun of the marketing there.

It's through the, oh, yeah, through the cellopane. I haven't opened them yet. I'm just kind of biting. I love my. It's a really good device. We'll talk about analog stuff in a little bit. Sure. I'm a big fan of it. But I do want to mention that, you know, another option for emulation, and we're going to move on from emulation here, but a lot of consoles can be hacked to run emulators. Some of them are built-in emulators. Like you can hack a Wii or a Wii to basically, or, you know, PSP to exploit some of the built-in emulation.

You know, we has virtual console, and it didn't take long for people to figure out how they could crack open virtual console and inject ROMs that Nintendo never released, never would release, has no right to release. Xbox is basically a miniature PC, and that was kind of the first console that people really used for emulation. And that was kind of by design. We talked about that on the recent Xbox anniversary episode. like Microsoft was like, yeah.

I mean, I don't think they necessarily thought, oh, emulation, yes, we're going to do. That's what this machine is for. But, you know, they designed it to be kind of open and accessible to people, you know, for those who were interested in digging into it. And so, yeah, people put together emulators. And very, you know, back in like 2003, 2004, everyone, I think, knew someone who had an Xbox that they would turn on and just have, you know, the entire NES library right there. I think even today, you know, if it's something.

that's listening to this and you're looking for a way to play a lot of stuff, um, you can go out and get an Xbox series S. So it was a $300 console and that thing has a open enrollment dev feature that you can turn your console into a dev kit and people have released emulators for it. It costs you like 20 bucks to just get dev mode on your console and you can load it up with emulators and play it that way. Like is it kind of a gray, is it a gray air? Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know. It's extremely gray.

Ambulation's all great. I mean, like, is it, like, is this gray or is it like a, you know, black situation where it's like you're, what you're doing is just inherently wrong? Who's to say? But you can walk into a Best Buy, buy an Xbox series asks for $300, throw it under your TV, pay $20 to get dev mode, and there you go. And you're running, you can run PS, like, there's Duck Station on that. It's just, it's just there. It's so easy. This is my favorite category of software emulation because the hardware is all the same.

So the emulators can be fine-tuned from Wii to Xbox to the Xbox series stuff. I love that you can optimize emulation for a target hardware. And that's kind of my view with PC games and everything. It's, well, which settings are you running at? What anti-aliasing? What's your upskilling factor? Are you super sampling? And it's like, okay, I think, you know, I love the fact that with these solutions, everyone's playing with the same hardware.

All right, so related to that for people who don't want to hack their console, but just want to, like the software, but just want to play original games on their console with the best quality they can, there are a lot of options. you know, we talked a little bit about having your system RGB modded. A lot of systems are capable of outputting RGB, you know, high quality, high-end, pure video, analog video with the right connections and the right wiring. And so there are a lot of systems that people can go into and, you know, the hardware only shipped with composite output or like, you know, only came with S-video cables originally.

But it has the potential to be RGB modded. And, you know, someone who knows their stuff, and has the right tools, can do that at a pretty reasonable price. You know, it's probably going to run you like $100, $150 all told in addition to the original hardware. But all of a sudden you have an NES that is outputting really, really clean, crisp video without, you know, any kind of emulation or anything like that. It's just like tapping into the potential of the video system.

And it's, it's one of those things that when you see it for the first time, if you haven't seen them before, it is remarkable. it's pretty amazing to see what kind of video you can get out of original hardware like that kind of signal but it is one of those things again it depends how much you want to spend because you said it is reasonable

$100, $150 you get your hardware modded but what if you're like me and you have like 25 systems well then that's going to be really expensive then it becomes a very expensive option but there is no arguing with the quality of it this is Nirvana for hardware purists in my mind is RGB be modding all of your consoles and getting cables, whether HG Retrovision or

RGB start cables and upscalers, and that's like, if you're a hardware, diehard, that's what you're going to do. And the cost will just be a secondary factor. Yeah. And there was a point where this was kind of looked at as like this was the way. I remember kind of distinctly, there was a point where if you talked about being into retro games at all and you weren't doing this with your hardware, you were kind of like shunned in that space because this was what everyone aspired to. It was the universal best solution. And interestingly, that's not necessarily the case anymore. It's like you said, like if you are as that diehard, like in that specific avenue of this, that's still the best, like the pinnacle of where you're trying to go. But it's no longer

the pinnacle that they're trying to kind of tell everybody this is where you should go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I, like I said, when I started doing my video series, this was kind of the only option for getting really good, clean video from hardware. You know, you had to use the original hardware. But now that's not necessarily the case. But, you know, I think the next horizon is HDMI mods. So instead of going, you know, to RGB video, you're going straight, like converting to digital and getting pure digital output. And there's a bunch of systems that now have HTML mods. Those, I think, tend to be a little more expensive. But, you know, if you really love your N64 and are like, I, I want,

those smeary textures to look as crisp as possible, then you can get the N64 HGMI mod and spend a whole lot of money for it. It's kind of hard to get, come by, but that is an option out there. And then kind of combining all those things, you also have consoleizers for devices that were not intended necessarily to play on a consumer television, such as Game Boy Advance, Wuzzle put that together, virtual boy that was invaluable for me, the virtual tap

in recording video for virtual boy works you can get an MVS consoleizer and have like the arcade NeoGeo hardware which is identical to the home arcade or to the home hardware but you know runs cheaper carts Yeah cheaper games and yeah have those hooked up to your television

So those are kind of the three big categories is like RGB, HTML mods and then consulizers But then you know For those who want to go the next step and don't really care necessarily about running original cartridges, but they still like having that original hardware, you can combine these mods or not even bother with optical drive emulators, which are really great for devices that originally had obviously optical drives, such as Sega CD, PlayStation, Saturn, Dreamcast, etc. where basically you have a device that taps into your system and functions like the CD-ROM drive or, you know, GD-ROM drive or whatever, but without having any moving parts, without having any need for disks, it's just reading stuff off a hard drive or an SD card and essentially giving you access to the entire library in a small form factor built into your system. but, you know, in a way that convinces the hardware, like, oh, yes, there is still a disc drive inside of me. It's like, you know, replacing someone's heart with a machine that works just like a heart.

It's, you know, a robot heart. And it, you know, it can play music and stream MP3s and stuff. But your body is still like, that doesn't actually exist as far as I'm aware. But, you know, imagine that it could. Yeah, I'm not talking about like new technology that you guys have heard about. It's just, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about. Anyway, so OBEs are really cool. I think these are actually some of my favorites in the whole space because, like, you and I have talked about this before, but like kind of the most important thing to me out of all of this, this entire space is just the preservation and accessibility of these games in a way that I don't focus on 100% accuracy as much as I used to, but just in a way that is accurate to the original experience.

And a lot of the times, the easiest way to do that is original hardware, but disc drives an old consoles. Like, my Sega CD just doesn't work anymore. I don't want to fiddle with trying to get that fixing. These are what I think, maybe the most important ones for CD hardware. If you want to have a truly accurate experience, I'd say like a Sega Saturn, which is still not the easiest thing to emulate, having a drive emulator for something like that is going to save you when really the big thing that's going to break on that system is the disc drive.

Your dreamcast, the disc drive's going to break. Your Sega CD, you know, I think these are really, really important. and I'm curious to see where this stuff is going to go in the next few years because right now, maybe I'm just not in the right bubbles, but I don't think enough people are talking about these as an option. I think if you look at the Fenrir in particular, that is a genius device. It is $5 worth of hardware, the ESP32 microcontroller doing the heavy lifting,

and those are ubiquitous. I think if more optical drive emulators can switch to that kind of platform, that's great. And I agree. This is the pinnacle of 2D gaming. So a lot of these systems are really beloved by a lot of people. Yeah. So the primary options that I'm aware of are X station for PlayStation. Finrear, which you mentioned for Sega Saturn mode, I believe is available for Sega Saturn and Dreamcast. And it's basically one size fits all, like depending on which console you plug it into, it's going to work for that system, which is amazing. And then Terra Onion has a bunch for, you know, older hardware. They've got the Mega SD to emulate Sega CD. They've got the Super SD System 3 to emulate the PC Engine Duo or Turbographics CD, and then the NeoSD, which is, you know, capable of playing both NeoGeo cartridges and Neo CD games. But without having to use a 1X CD ROM drive, which is a true blessing.

That Terra Onion MegaSD might be like in my top three retro devices. that I've bought, like in the modern era, like the last four or five years, that thing never comes out of my analog mega SG. I use it constantly. Yeah, it's really great. My only disappointment with it is that with the mega SG, it does not work at the same time as the, well, actually, that's not true. I was going to say it doesn't work at the same time as hooking up a 32x to it

using the digital analog converter, but that's not correct because I believe, Laser Bear produced an extender for the CD-ROM connector on the Sega Genesis, which also is on the analog mega-sG. And then you can plug in that thing on the side. I still think it's not compatible with the video system hooked up to 32X, but you can plug it in at the same time. Maybe one of you guys actually already know this, because I haven't been paying attention too much in the last year or so.

But what I'm waiting for is some way to actually. use my 32x on my mega SG conveniently, because it seems like there really is no way to do that. Right now I have a Model 1 Genesis with the 32X on it plugged into my PVM. And if I ever want to play 32X games, like that's pretty much my only option right now. It doesn't seem like there's any real great ways of solving that problem. Yeah, you just need the DAC. If you get the analog DAC, the digital analog converter. Which I do have that, but then I'm stuck.

you've got my PVM. I want to be able to use because all my analog stuff I use on HDTV. Oh, yeah. Well, in that case, you have to do this really counterintuitive thing where you use the DAC to kind of process the video from the mega SG to work with the 32X, which only does analog. And then you output analog and then you have to upscale it, which, you know, that's cumbersome. But that is a failing of the 32X. That's not, yeah. That's not an issue with anyone who's making aftermarket stuff. I guess I could... I guess I could run that through my retro tank.

If I really wanted to. That's what I've got. I mean, I've streamed like Star Wars Arcade and tempo from my mega SG before. With the 32X? Yeah, using a 32X and then running it through the DAC and then upscaling of the Framemeister. It's nonsense. Yeah, that seems like just the stupid kind of thing that I would like to do. And I have the DAC right over there.

I should give that a shot. There you go. That's something for you to do tonight. The Tower. Daddy, what are you doing? Why are you insane? The power that was on in a new form factor. I had my Sega CD on my analog mega SG for a while until the disc drive started making a lot of horrible sounds at me,

and I just was like, I'm done with that. Yep, and that's why Odees are great, because eventually disc drives are going to die. I mean, geez, my PlayStation disk drive died in like 1999. So some going faster than others. My PS2 right now makes a lot of really horrible sounds that I'm not a big fan of. So I'm going to start looking into options for playing PS2 games without needing to disk drive soon.

Coming soon to hyperX.com, HP.com, and more fine retailers everywhere. The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless gets up to 300 hours of battery life, so you'll spend less time charging your headset and more time listening to Retronauts. It's like 100, 200 episodes. It's a lot. The dual chamber drivers enhanced by Premium DTS Headphone X spatial audio provide reduced distortion, allowing you to hear audio cues with pinpoint precision. Up to 300 hours of battery, two chambers, zero wires. The new HyperX cloud alpha wireless.

Take a time machine back to before the world went to hell. Around the year 2000. The 80s and 90s were so rad. The movies, the music, the TV, the games? That's what I want to talk about. If you're cool enough. Join us and listen to less than 2000, because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000.

Now part of the HyperX Podcast Network Previously on Chat of the Wild Good to know I wanted to use this time to impart some words of wisdom from Eslo Straighten up your hair once I'm gone You got a style all over the ladies

La La La La La La La Are the words to his new hit single Live Long Love Long And also he woke up from a dream Where he forgot to study for the test So Did he really say all those things?

Yeah, yeah These are all things that I discussed. He discussed with me. That's magical. Chat of the Wild. Breaking down Zelda and Zelda-like games, one dungeon at a time. Wednesdays on the HyperX podcast network. Live long, love long, baby.

Coming soon from HyperX. The Cloud Alpha Wireless gets up to 300 hours of battery life, so you'll spend less time charging your headset and more time charging into the action. Hear audio cues with pinpoint precision thanks to the dual chamber drivers enhanced by premium DTS Headphone X spatial audio. Up to 300 hours of battery,

two chambers, zero wires. The cloud alpha wireless. Available soon at hyperX.com, HP.com, Amazon, Best Buy, Microsenter, and more fine retailers. So we've talked about a lot of things. We are kind of running low on time. But obviously, kind of the heavy hitters of this conversation we've saved for last,

which are the FPGA devices. basically there's, you know, two categories. There's clone consoles and there's all-on-one devices. The all-in-one device, I mean, you know, mister. But first, we should talk a little bit about the analog stuff. That's kind of been my go-to for the past seven years, even before they went to FPGAs when it was just the analog in T. But they did stop using like salvaged NES or Famicom hardware and started, you know, just using clones based on. the FPGA spec, put together by Kevtrus, who has done a whole lot of stuff, you know, with the HDNES back of the day. And they basically said, hey, come work for us and make systems. And he does. And they're

very good. And I know analog gets on a lot of people's nerves with their marketing. I was joking about that earlier because it's very sort of Apple-ish. Like here is a device that is expensive, and we are snooty about it. Yeah, it's prestige hardware for sure. Yeah. But I mean, That's the marketing line. That's what they do. Like, it's meant to be kind of the opposite of a Raspberry Pi. Like a Raspberry Pi is the Everyman device. Go, it's cheap. Go get one, stick in your TV.

You're good. It's fine. I will say, I think analog is a very good value. So, I mean, granted, you're buying, in most cases, one system at a time, except for the NT Mini and the NT Mini Noir. And kind of the pocket is a multi-system device. And I think the pocket is an insane value for $200 or whatever they're charging. I think that should cost way more.

Yeah, it's incredible. They might be like, this is probably one of my favorite pieces of hardware I've ever bought. Yeah, the pocket is really their breakout product. I mean, yeah, they made a Sega Genesis device and an NES device. It was much more expensive than the average person could afford, a super NES device. And I will say, you know, the mega SG is a multi-device product also, you know, in addition to being able to hook up to a 32X with the right equipment and being able to use Sega CD, It can also play master system games.

You can play SG-1000 games. You can play Game Gear games, you know, if you get the jailbreak. But it's all actually, no, you just need to get the adapters now that I think about it. So, yeah, it's pretty versatile. But the pocket is, like, it started out as 200. I think it's 220 now because things are more expensive than they were two years ago, a year and a half ago. But, yeah, it is an all-in-one handheld, basically the size of an original Game Boy. it has two FPGAs in it.

One of them is basically the same thing as in the mega SG, Super N-T. So in theory, it could play Super NES games. I don't know that they're actually going to let you do that. But it does play out of the box, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance. There's a Game Gear adapter currently out. They're coming out with a Lynx adapter, a NeoGeo Pocket Color adapter, and a PC engine adapter, turbo graphics adapter for my cards. So that right there is like seven different.

systems, six or seven different systems. And actually, with the right device, the Game Gear emulator, the Game Gear mode can also play Master System and SG 1,000 games, which is so cool. Nine devices. Yeah, it's really rad. And the big thing here, too, is the adapters for the different cartridges are all super reasonably priced. It's not, like, once you pay, like, yes, there is prestigious hardware.

There's, like, prestigious design to it, and the price kind of reflects that. But this isn't something that they're, like, really heavily nickel and diming you for for these add-ons. They're, what, $20, $30? Yeah, pretty much. And it's not like, you know, Poly Mega, where you buy an adapter and it's like, oh, now we have unlocked the ability to do this. It's basically just like, hey, you need a form factor, you know, that fits your cartridge for that specific console. Now you have it. And so you can plug those games into your system.

It's, you know, pretty reasonable. I agree. Well, and if this thing is jailbroken. you're going to be able to run those things without those adapters anyways. Yeah, we need to see if it's actually going to be jailbroken. I'm skeptical of it at this point. Yeah, I feel like their marketing plans and just general ideas for the pocket don't include a jailbreak. But it would be nice that they did because what I really want is the ability to play like NES games or Super NES games or whatever to have like a device that I can take with me along with a dock.

And, you know, assuming that it's going to be safe to travel again someday. I'm going to go places to be able to record stuff or just play games on the plane and work ahead for my video projects would be so good. As it is now, I have to go down to my office and sit down in front of the TV. And, you know, that's fine. I love that. But it's not always convenient and easy. Whereas having that in the analog form factor would be great. But even so, like even going beyond the potential, like the what ifs, it's just a good system. Like it's not perfect. It's still kind of early days as of the this recording, they're on the, I think, 1.0 firmware still. It's like 1.0A, right? Yeah, there's still a lot of stuff that hasn't been, yeah, there's still stuff that hasn't been unlocked that they, you know, promised upfront like DAC support for the doc.

And I realize DAC and Doc are basically just like the Boston way of saying the word and but yeah, like it's basically, okay, so we haven't really talked about what analog does, but it makes systems that, you know, take original cartridges. You can jailbreak most of them to run games off to SD cards. But they use FPGA tech to simulate very accurately, not perfectly, but very accurately, original hardware. I'll put it through HDMI.

You can get a digital audio or digital analog converter, a DAC to down sample, basically, these games to a PVM or CRT. and they are proprietary and only work with their systems, which seems really, you know, like, how dare they, until you actually use it and realize that it's, you know, like specifically syncing with the hardware. And the output from the DAC is so good. Like, once they release the DAC for the systems,

I retired my one-chip Super NES Mini because, like the second model Super NES, because the video output on the mega S, or the, sorry, super NT was so clean. compared to what I was getting through Nintendo's first-party Japanese JP-21 RGB cables on a one-chip system. Like, that was kind of the high end before, but like that, that video quality just pales compared to what the DAC was putting out. It looks so good.

Oh, and we talk about these, I was just so we talk about these being prestige products, but the proofs in the pudding. Like, you buy one of these and you use it, and it doesn't seem to matter what situation you want to use it in. it excels. It excels beyond almost every other average consumer option, like just off the shelf plug this into your TV option. They're better. When you pair it with your DAC and use it on a PVM, sometimes it's just better than original hardware. I don't know there's an asterisk on that, but like I think there's a reason that like a lot of people like myself and you, you check out

analogs hardware and your customer for life. I've bought everything they've put out now. Except their NeoGeo, I assume. Well, that's not. The $1,000 NeoGeo that comes in your choice of wood, exotic hardwood from around the world. That was how they got started. So they- Okay. So I didn't know about that. Yeah, that was the very first product they released. And it was, it was kind of, uh, it was excessive. But then the next thing they released was the analog in T, which was, you know, we found a bunch of probably like abandoned junk Famicombs that book off and said, oh, yeah, sure. We'll buy, you know, a thousand of these. for a dollar each or whatever,

because they're just going to be thrown away. And they salvaged the working components out of those and made basically, you know, a really nice NES clone in machined aluminum. You know, it was very Apple-like. It was like a MacBook, you know, that kind of metal that's been very carefully sculpted from a single slab of metal, that kind of thing.

But they've moved away from that, like, ultra-high-end approach to much more, Or, you know, with the pocket, a very reasonable mass market device that $200 for that device is extraordinarily reasonable. It's really, I mean, just the screen out that thing is so good. The screen's amazing. And I think this whole, this whole era of their devices started with the Super NT. Because, yes, the Super NT isn't the aluminum, saying, like, the super prestige thing. But the device was.

They took the aluminum away. They put it in a plastic shell. they took the built-in DAC out of it and said, yeah, it's just HTML. You'll have to buy a DAC later. Right. But that device, when you bought it, because that's the first analog device I bought. And that made me a customer. Like, it's just you put that thing in.

I immediately retired my Super Nintendo. I actually have not used my Super Nintendo. I don't even know why I still have it. I haven't used it since I bought the Super Antique. Yeah, so the kind of thing lurking in the background of any discussion of analog products, you know, like that meme where the dude who plays Aquaman is sneaking up behind Henry Cavill about to like mess him up on the red carpet. um is of course mr and that's why mr pork chop is here to tell us to evangelize mr because basically mr can do pretty much anything analogs products can accept you know the the portable element that's that's that's still a ways away that the de 10 nano that the mr is based on is

you know it's it's not really portable friendly and that that is the one huge advantage that the pocket has over anything uh mr related uh for for those who want to know more about kind of the basics of Mr. I had Smoke Monster on the show, who is a huge evangelist of the technology and has been very involved in it. Around the same time as Artemio, we talked to the same event. So actually, it might have been the same episode. So you can go check that out. It's from the end of 2019, early 2020. And you can kind of get a primer that way. But, you know, in two years, it's evolved a lot. And I feel like, you know, the Mr. Adons project has been kind of at the forefront under that and, you know, pushing the system in terms of its form factor and accessibility

and just, you know, purchase options into new and much more appealing directions. Yeah, kind of like you, Jeremy, about five, six years ago, I got back into retro gaming and in the form factor of a 36-inch Sony CRT that weighed 230 pounds. Oh, God. Oh, wow. So excited. Did it kill anyone? Did anyone, like, fall under it? My brother-in-law and I got up to Annapolis,

hefted it down into my basement, didn't kill anyone, and I found out, oh, these flat screen CRTs that has up to 1080I, these have inherent latency in them. So that thing had to go. So we all learned our lessons the hard way. But I was at the time, RGB modding all of my consoles. I was doing installs and selling them on eBay,

and I had just finished my very last custom. shielded RGB SCART cable when I found out about Mr. So I had just finished my entire fleet of consoles. They were all modded. I had a G-scart switch, learned about Mr, and basically sold all of my hardware that was represented on Mr. Within the next year.

Mr. is good. It's great. It's not perfect. You know, nothing is. It's emulation. So our understanding of these systems, even though they're 30 to 40 years old, still evolving case in point the um the turbographic discovery that furtech made um about the

rgb palette and how there's actually a non you know a non linear rgb calculation done on that that happened last year and this is super old hardware so i think the strengths of mr are really a open source pretty much open hardware if you like soldering knock yourself out make your own add-ons if you like programming dig in see what you can do. And I think just the community is probably the biggest boon to the project. Yeah, one of the big appeals of the mystery is its versatility, you know, because I didn't realize it at first.

It took me a while to realize that the VGA output port, like that can, you know, be made to plug into basically any kind of screen. It's not just a VGA monitor, which I did not understand at first because I'm not very technical. So once I realized that, I was like, oh, well, I can work that into my workflow. and then all of a sudden, you know, I had access to all those arcade cores and, of course, all the other cores, but the arcades are really the, they're kind of the real appeal to me because it's, there's just no way to use that hardware any other way, unless you buy like a super gun and then, you know, hunt down very expensive PCBs, you know, sometimes thousands of dollars for a single game. That's just, which is the problem I meant. Nonsense, yeah.

Because I, you know, collect, repair, maintain, and have a handful of arcade machines. And I really like arcade games. And when you were talking to me about the potential of arcade games on Mr., that's the first thing that made me start to reconsider, like, well, maybe this is a device that I need to have. Now, what are you saying about the VGA out port? It's, what can you do with that? There's an analog. There's, okay, so there's an analog out port on, you know, optionally on Mr. That you can, you know, it's got a VGA port.

port on it, a VGA connector, but, you know, that outputs to, again, I'm not good with the technical stuff, but I've got it plugged into my CRT, my PDM. And actually, I've got to plugged into two CRTs because I realize, like, you know, I want to be able to play these vertical arcade games on a properly oriented monitor. So I've got like the 19 inch PDM that I use as my main recording monitor. But then I've also got it split off so that when I, And a vertical game comes into play. I've got a smaller, like, eight-inch PVM over to the side. And I can play, you know, like Namco games.

Just about every goddamn Namco game is vertical mode. So I can play, you know, Pac-Man or Mappi or Zevius. God knows I have to play so much Zevius on this little side TV. But, you know, there's issues with it. Like, every core is different. Like, every arcade core is its own standalone thing. And so it's going to have different refresh rates. and sync rates and resolutions based on the original arcade hardware,

that's not necessarily going to play, you know, super friendly with a CRT. And so there's some stuff that needs to be worked through sometimes. But still, like, just having access to that is so great. And my kind of idiot project that I'm working on or, you know, wish I could work on because I wish I had time for it. But the pivot radius CRT monitor that pivot, company, or the radius, a monitor company created for desktop publishing on Mac and PC back in the 90s is a screen that rotates. It's on a pivot. That's why it's got its name. So it can be

horizontal or vertical. And the way this worked originally is like if you have the software for it plugged into your system, you could turn the screen and there was a mercury switch inside that would be affected by gravity and it would send a signal to your computer and you had the write software that would say, oh, time to rotate the desktop of your, like your entire screen on your computer seamlessly. Well, obviously, that doesn't work with anything that's not running that software. But, you know, when Mr. Outputs a vertical arcade game, it's just going to show up sideways on a screen. So if you rotate this monitor, the way it was designed to be rotated, then all of a sudden, you know, the arcade, vertical arcade core is right side up. The problem is it's got a really

weird resolution. And so I have to like figure out the exact fine-tuned settings to make things display right. I've almost got it there. But I just, you know, it takes hours to, you know, do this trial and error thing. But like once that's done, oh, it's going to be so good. Can the mister send a signal to like a different signal to two different monitors? Like can we do punch out like arcade punch out with this thing and get two screens? Let me see if I can succinctly summarize Mr. Video options because it is a little bit. I mean, there are lots of them. So So the main heart of the Mr. Deets 10 Nano FPGA development board sold by Tarasic has an HDMI output.

There is an internal VGA scaler that scales whatever the core's native video is up to whatever output you want. And I think the limitation right now roughly is 1920 by 1440. So that's the max that HDMI can do, which is a 4x3 aspect ratio. You can also do 1080p, 720p, and really any custom. timing you put in there. Then the analog. The radius monitor that I'm talking about has like a, I want to say 1152 by 824 resolution.

Apparently, like I recognize that resolution when I started reading about it. I was like, oh, yeah, I've had a computer that had this. It was the original titanium powerbook G4. And there was one other computer, I think, like some screen. from Taiwan that's very obscure that also had that resolution but that's it like it's super it's super fussy and obscure and mr does not natively like you know and it's its presets does not support it so it involves some some tweaking but you can tweak the settings which is great if you really want to go in and start fussing with the configuration files the potential's in there yep it's a single line of code

and then so that the stand the analog i o board option it's like a little hat that plugs in that has like you said, an HD15 port, which is known as a BGA port, it can do RGBHV, which is a PC monitor where you have separate sync for horizontal and vertical on two pins. It can do RGBS, which is composite sync, which is what consoles and consumer TVs use. It can also do component YPBPR. And so those are the three options. Now, you have two separate video outputs. You can scale, you can either have the native core output on the standard on the VGA port. So say it's a NES, you're going to get

15 kilohertz or 240P out. You can double that or you can link it to the same output as the HGMI. So like you can do anything. Now, there's only one core right now that supports dual screens and that's the Game Boy advanced two player. So it actually loads

two instances of the core at once and lets you play head to head on two different screens. That's super interesting just because me and my team have been playing around with something similar in emulation. And that's, that's really cool. I didn't really expect that that was going to be an option on Mr. I never really looked into it. But that's, that's amazing. And if I can plug one more option, which is my own thing I made, it's a JAMA adapter for Mr.

And it has a mono, yeah, when you said arcade, I have three Astro cities and a new net city and a couple more cabinets on the way. I'm a huge arcade fan. So it was a, it was a pet project of mine, but it's pretty much plug and play JAMA adapter for mister that's amazing oh that's amazing yeah i have uh several arcade cabinets um and i'm super into arcade games which is what made you know um the arcade cores of the you know the mister were the first thing that may be interested in this because like as much as i love those uh as jeremy said PCBs you know for arcade games are very expensive and fussing with different cabinets to get the right configuration to play a game it's it's a whole deal and i love doing it but sometimes i just

want to play a game and I don't really want to have to make space for it or configure a cabinet for it or, you know, and I'm also a stickler for the cabinets being as close to original as possible. So if I'm getting a game to go into an arcade cabinet, it's a whole big deal. Sometimes I just want to play one. And if the mister can give me a lot more high quality options to do that with just like a USB arcade stick, because I have several around because I'm really into fighting games as well, that's a really big appeal to me. But the JAMA thing, I have quite a, I have a couple of Capcom Dynamo caps, which are great for almost any game because they're configured two sticks, six buttons each. A JAMA thing with the Mr.

I mean, that would be amazing because I could just open the control panel up and just slap this thing in there. It's a blast. I love it. I mean, I'm biased. I know. I realize that. But it's arcade stuff is, it's kind of pulls of my heartstrings. And I like to, I guess the last category of things that Mr. does is,

Well, two more. You have Flappy Bird, which let's not forget about Flappy Bird. And then the last one is the computer cores. And those are kind of older. But I don't know, computer emulations, it's an interesting topic. So just wanted to throw that out there. That's the, I would say is like the B tier thing I'm interested in is a lot of obscure. Obscure. And then like, I guess like to us, we wouldn't consider it obscure. But like DOS games and stuff like that, Commodore 64 games. And then there's more obscure stuff beyond that. but having a way that's a little bit more convenient to play those like I've got so many options me personally to play the big systems

that it's stuff like arcade stuff or old PC stuff ways to play those in an accurate, efficient and inconvenient way those are super appealing to me but before we go on I actually have one more question about the JAMA thing the JAMA harness is it just standard JAMA or is this does this support six button? Is it JAMA plus? it's yes that's a good question jama unfortunately well fortunately it's a very good standard but then you had neo geo that did the jama plus so this is mono audio so it does not do

support neo geo cabinet's native but it has chama wiring which is six button two player six button on the jamma edge connected there's a switch for that and then i also have a cps 1 and a cps2 kick header so yes two players that was that was my question too about the the kick harness is because I have a handful of JAMA cabinets that, you know, they're not wired up to support six buttons each. So you have to use like these kick harnesses, like my killer instinct and, you know, my CPS1 and CPS2 games. That's awesome.

That's awesome that it's like set up for that. All right. Yeah. And Jeremy, I don't know if you know, last thing, PC88 core came out yesterday for Mr. Which I don't know. I don't have much history with that, but new core there. And the X68,000 core just got updated a month or two ago. go and it's in pretty good shape. So yeah. Yeah, there's there's a lot of potential with the

computer cores. And you know, there's there's a lot of work being done on just reproducing classic computers with FPPA devices of their own, like the mega 65, which is a C64 device. It's like a standalone computer. There's the spectrum next, which is using FPGA to replicate a lot of the functionality of the Zetx spectrum, including like a tape cassette audio analog jack drive. Like it's, you know, there's a lot being done beyond, you know, analog and beyond mister in the space. And it's really exciting. Like, I kind of feel like if you love classic games, there is a way out there for you to experience those in as much fidelity or as faithfully or just as, you know, like, just crazy good or bad as you want. Like it's, it's, like I said at the beginning, it's we just live in in beautiful times where this one.

is concerned. Everything else sucks right now, but classic games being emulated or simulated, it's just unbelievable that we're here. Like even, you know, five years ago, I couldn't have imagined being, you know, kind of things being in this state. And it's, it's awesome. I never imagined that we would have had the options. I never would have imagined we'd be able to have the quality. And I, I didn't think people would care. I remember, even when I was just in high school, which was, you know, 2005, 2006 era, I went to, flea markets and found boxes of NES, S&ES games, and I'd be able to buy a box with like 50 games at it for 20 bucks. I never imagined. I was so afraid that like people like Frank

Sefaldi weren't going to come around and people just weren't going to care about this stuff and it was going to be completely lost. It is truly incredible the amount of options that we have and the interest that we have to still play these classic games. All right. And that wraps it up for this episode. We've really just kind of touched on the surface of so many of these things. I could see dedicating entire episodes to some of these topics. Some of them we have dedicated entire episodes too. But I just, yeah, there's there's a wealth of options for experiencing classic games the way they were meant to be played or even in ways they were never intended to be experienced, but are so much better. And you can really kind of customize your experience

however you want it. It's scalable to any sort of budget from, you know, basically like I've got five nickels here you go to I just won the lottery and I'm going to go all in and I hope this episode has been helpful in providing some guidance giving people a start I will once again give a shout out to retro rgb.com and like that's just an invaluable resource it's constantly being updated and it's a great starting place for you know kind of figuring out how to get the most out of classic consoles but there are so many other options available and uh we're With that being said, I will let everyone kind of give their own work a shout out. So let's start with you, Porkchop.

Yeah, so Mr. Adons.com. I have a new form factor, mister type thing, hopefully coming out this year. Maybe working on a portable eventually, but keep your expectations in check there. It's not going to be a $200 pocket. And like you said, no better time to be a gamer. All of this knowledge across all the decades from GeoCities and Angel, fire till now on GitHub to everything being shared is a beautiful thing. And so happy to be a small part of this community. Yeah, let me know if you need beta testers for that portable

thing because that's that's my space. I'm near sighted. So I like, I want a tiny screen close to my ideal form of game. All right. Anyway, but yeah, thanks again for all you've done. And I highly recommend anyone who is interested in getting into Mr. like start at Mr. Adons.com. That's not just me saying that because the guy who runs a site is here. It's just, it's so good and it makes things so accessible and so simple. It's just a fantastic place to start. And lots of great options that are just constantly getting better. Like I picked up the aluminum case and the fanless heat sink recently and got those put together. And like that really elevated my mystery experience even further than, you know, ahead of what it was before. So, and I will say that,

know a secondhand mister is a beautiful gift to give to a friend that you love um thank you anyway uh joe what about you uh yeah i'm not going to plug my main job because it's it's not my personal project and they they're they're big enough on their own um but if you want if you if you want to uh talk to me more if you're interested in arcade games pinball v pins um retro games at all look me up on Twitter. My handle is Super N.E.S. Joe. I also do independent game development on my own outside of my day job. I'm working

on an an RPG right now, in a dystopian future where Dodgeball is a way of life. And it's real dumb and it's real stupid. If you want to talk to me about that, then find me on Twitter and you can yell at me about how my game idea is really stupid.

And then finally, oh me, Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite here on Retronauts. You can find my YouTube channel on YouTube. It's called Jeremy Parrish. It's tricky, I know, but it's there. And you can see the results that have come from my years of hard work and

tremendous expense trying to get great video output. But it's all just there in the background of me talking sleepily about old video games, which I know everyone loves. And of course, Retronauts itself, you can find at Retronauts.com or on many, many different podcatchers and devices. You can also find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash retronauts. That's how this show exists and is supported and happens because of subscription. People like you, it's two, three bucks a month to get started a few bucks.

But for five bucks a month, you get started, by which I mean, you get every episode released in a higher bitrate quality than on the public feed. And then every other Friday, you get a bonus episode just for patrons. And then every weekend, you get a bonus column and mini podcast from Diamond Fight and also you get Discord access. So it's really one of the best values in gaming, even better than the analog pocket. It's like 20 months worth of analog pocket. And you get entertained every week. My God. No, wait, it's 40 months.

Oh, my gosh. That's so good. We're great. I'm not good at math. Okay. Anyway. How can you say it out at that? Exactly.

So check it out at patreon.com slash retronauts. We thank you for your support. And even if you don't support us on Patreon, that's okay. The show is free for you to listen to. Share it with your friends. Tell all your friends about us, just like you would, Batman. Anyway, yeah, that's it. So now it's time to go sit down in front of our choice of device

and play classic games in the level of fidelity that we individually choose. And there's so many options, it's a little overwhelming, but it's worth it. So thanks again, guys, and go play some video games. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you.