Episode 437: High Fidelity Classic Gaming Redux
Added 2022-02-14 13:00:07 +0000 UTCThis week brings us simultaneously an informative public service episode and a call back to the podcast's past. Back in 2016, nearly six full years ago, we hashed out a rundown of the many different options available for playing classic games on modern devices. It was a little tech-oriented, but most existed as a breakdown of the options available beyond "digging up an Nintendo deck, plugging it into a flatpanel TV never designed to display low-resolution analog video, then weeping." A lot has changed on this front over the past half-decade or so, and mostly for the better. Yes, old games and vintage tech have ballooned in price, but at the same time, many new options exist for revisiting the games of the 8-through-64-bit generations and enjoying them in exceptional quality and faithfulness.
This time around, I pulled in my coworker Joe Modzeleski (who does a lot of work with Limited Run Games' emulation efforts) and the enigmatic Porkchop Express, patron saint of misteraddons.com, to join me for a high-level overview of the many, many ways in which you can play old games today. From software emulation platforms like Nintendo Switch Online and MAME to FPGA-based hardware emulators like Analogue Pocket and MiSTer to sophisticated mods and flash devices for original hardware, the greatest challenge facing anyone who loves classic games these days is not figuring out how they can play, but rather deciding how they prefer to play.
Edits by Greg Leahy and cover art by Nick Wanserski. Musical selections this time around:
- 05:08 - Super Mario Land (GB): Muda Kingdom
- 12:22 - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES): Battle Theme
- 20:53 - Super Mario World (SNES): Bonus Screen
- 29:02 - Yume KΕjΕ: Doki Doki Panic (FDS): Invincible Star
- 36:05 - Turbografx-16 Mini: Menu BGM
- 45:11 - Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX): Master Librarian
- 52:46 - Galactic Pinball (VB): Colony
- 1:03:55 - Tempo (32X): Hi-Fi Performance | Ninja Five-O (GBA): Select Menu
- 1:14:07 - Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch): Mappy Medley
- 1:24:38 - X-Men vs. Street Fighter (CPS-II): Storm
- Closing - Haruomi Hosono: Galaga (Name Entry arrangement from the 1984 album Video Game Music)
Comments
Some more thoughts: I am glad I got a 32X back when people didn't care about owning them. Aside from having better video encoding than most stock Genesis models (seriously the composite output on this is *really good*), I still don't think anything emulates it well. BlastEm is a better emulator than Fusion but doesn't support the extra hardware (Sega CD or 32X) and the other emulators that do (i.e., PicoDrive) are by my measure not as good as Fusion. Thank god Genesis emulator sound is actually good these days. I swear it wasn't until the mid-00s that it actually became halfway decent. I don't mean just differences in audio from different versions of the system, the FM implementations were straight up wrong, especially when it came to, say, the weird alternate envelopes. I will say though -- despite all of this, hooking up an old console to a modern TV isn't the curse of death it used to be. HDTVs from a decade ago were horrifically laggy, and even the 'game' modes in my experience didn't do much to deal with this. Nowadays I find that any console that I can get an HDMI adapter for works pretty well, though the TV I use has a few snags from time to time in terms of frame pacing. It's still shockingly robust; using the Wii with it in that way I detect basically no lag. I even have a DVD recorder that has some composite inputs that I've used for my Dreamcast and even that is a shockingly responsive and reasonably clean signal. I use this weird setup because a lot of homebrew system tools display important info past what my CRT has as overscan (which probably needs a physical tweak -- the 2P life icons in Sonic 2 are cut off when I play the Genesis on it). Again, seems to be fine but I haven't done much of a formal lag test with it. I say all this again with the caveat that I am not and have never been a pixel counter on TV games. For those games and, say, Apple II, where the signal messiness was usually designed around intentionally, I will actively search for blur effects to un-pixelfy the visuals. The CVBS blur in Fusion is excellent for this, as it applies the blur filter without the color artefacting some people might expect with NTSC signals (so the colors are cleaner than most consoles would put out -- but again, not my experience with the 32X; hell, I *can* actually identify pixel boundaries on my CRT with it!). It's certainly all a step up over the RF input that I used when I was a kid.
Aaron
2022-05-09 01:34:29 +0000 UTCThe worst part of all of this is the damn original XBox. I have one, but I'm sure it gave up the ghost ages ago due to that damn capacitor leaking. Probably not salvageable but I also have had no time to go look into it at all. At least PS2s can generally be had for cheap. If I had a working either one (I have a CECHE PS3, which is just barely on the positive edge of suitable for BC purposes, IMO) getting a composite switcher with a retrotink might actually start to make sense to me -- I think that gen of consoles is the first one where getting the video high-quality with low filtering doesn't have obvious drawbacks in terms of how the graphics were designed.
Aaron
2022-05-07 19:16:11 +0000 UTCNothing against the RPi but I tend to prefer the Phil's Computer Lab route of favoring thin client PCs specifically because they're more likely to have higher compatibility with non-emulator software. I have a T620 plus that I use for a few purposes, and I should set up to dual-boot XP (currently only running W10). There's no perfect solution for the games that are about 20 years out irrespective of platform, console or PC, but it certainly works well for that. Amusingly I've used my MiSTer most for pre-Pentium era PC gaming of all things. It's pretty good for *most* pre-Windows 95 software, especially since the CPU speed is very configurable. It's just not great with MT-32 stuff (at least when intelligent mode is required) or CD audio, and at least one of those things (MIDI performance lagging) is fixable by using a Pi as a makeshift external sound card. But I'm not a snob, and would happily get by with DOSBox-X and hardware OPL3 passthrough (https://www.tindie.com/products/sudomaker/retrowave-opl3-sound-card/) since OPL3 emulation is arguably the one thing that a modern computer can't effectively replicate 1:1 with old hardware. DOSBox-X in particular has shockingly good compatibility with old games, and the OPL3 is like the one part of old PC hardware that isn't replicated on modern hardware stacks; even the glide API can be efficiently translated into OpenGL (since it's a direct descendant of it). The way I see it -- if I see nothing wrong with using Nintendont to play GC games on my WiiU, I shouldn't feel any worse about using DOSBox-X to play old PC games, since they're compatibility wrappers that work in mostly similar ways. I would say I don't fetishize authenticity exactly -- though for anything before the Dreamcast, I tend to prefer using features that blur pixels to try to get a softer image more in line with what you see on the CRTPixels twitter account -- but I would say the main impetus for collecting the hardware I have is specifically for doing things like stress-testing demos or supporting stuff emulators have always been flaky about (hence why some of my earliest pickups were a 32X and a Super Game Boy) It really is the early 00s stuff that's problematic, being in the era before HDMI standards and also being too new to replicate in a setup like the MiSTer, so the only good options are something in the key of the retrotink or the various HDMI mods for those consoles. While the latter is obviously cleaner, I would have to favor the former if only because I'm not shelling out hundreds of dollars for all of my older consoles. But I'm also the guy who has a CRT in the living room for the Genesis, SNES, etc. in my collection. I tend to play on the MiSTer more often (especially because it's able to load mods and use modern input devices) but there's still a lot of stuff the MiSTer doesn't support (no Super Game Boy core, for example) and stuff that it supports imperfectly (though I'm extremely happy to see that there is a 32X core, despite some obvious imperfections in it). The MiSTer isn't *really* consumer level hardware (the DE-10's HDMI stuff tends not to play nicely with the electrically-controlled HDMI switches I have in my TV) but I do have a fondness for it, and with the subsidized price point it's useful. I did some FPGA programming in college so I would like to get into actually using it as a personal lab device, but I would need to do a lot of refreshing, and also looking at how MiSTer development actually works. I would nonetheless like to make a replication of the Z-Machine (Zork) hardware, given that it was always a virtual machine spec. Ultimately most of this shit is too rich for my blood. Just give me a 10" CRT in decent condition and a couple switcher boxes. Though I'll keep an eye out for those 4K retrotinks eventually going down in price (haha), maybe getting one to plug my Dreamcast into.
Aaron
2022-05-07 19:14:53 +0000 UTC
