NE146

I mean you have to look at its time. It was actually 1985 and Joust/Robotron were my favorite games when my brother went with a group to Japan, and stayed with a host family. When he came back he told me about a home video game system (and game) they had that was so amazing, he actually had a hard time describing it. He was talking about going to different worlds, going underground, visiting castles, finding things that change you and give you powers, and finding tunnels and secrets.... to the point I remember thinking it sounded more like a movie or show, vs any type of video game. Of course it was SMB. And later on in life when we finally did play it, it was totally and fully groundbreaking vs. anything we had ever played before.. and yes it was fun, and stayed fun for a LONG TIME. There is zero friggin doubt about that. To try and downplay the game itself, and its impact is pointless. It was like the big bang of Eddie Van Halen/Jimi Hendrix in the rock guitar world, where perceptions and expectations were just changed forever. THAT SAID, I will fully 100% admit that eventually I did find SMB boring (I don't even like the current batches of Mario platform games), but by then years had passed and all the newer video games had already taken their cues from it.

A lot of the decisions in the TG16 packaging and launch were misguided in retrospect.. but it was still early in the post-Atari video game market, where the NES taking the US by storm was still a current thing. So there wasn't a lot of precedent or history for marketing decisions and they had to try to guess what would make sense. Seems silly now but also at the time the common wisdom was that nearly everything had to be americanized (e.g. "bigger" for one) for US consumers, etc. I don't know though.. as one of the few, the proud, launch-buyers of the TG16, it DID feel fully next gen, especially once you started playing the games. Once you saw something like Blazing Lazers light up your TV, the NES just couldn't compare. And yeah that would have been a good pack-in game. BUT.. Keith Courage was decent for the time as well. Although that didn't last long.

Sure maybe! Heck I forked it out for the NT Mini and the Noire.. so I'm always open to checking out any product that actually comes into fruition. 'Course that's all theoretical though. 😜

But why not? 😛

Well I'm pretty sure it will get jailbroken (unofficially), like every other analogue console, but I doubt it would be for PS1 stuff. However even if it does.. it would kind of be the same thing at least for me where there's just too many options, with a few regular Playstation (modded) to play discs, and the MiSTer playing psx stuff well. And not to mention the PS3 does it pretty ok also. I'm just getting too much redundant ways to play the same games. 😜

Yeah I was always considering it but I think this will be the first Analogue FPGA console I'm going to sit out on. I do have a bunch of TG16 and PCE cards, but having the Analogue Pocket, the MiSTer, Emulation of all kinds including the TG16 Mini, the PCE Mini, my original two TG16s, my TurboDuo, and Everdrive paired with them (and a Retrotink 5x Pro) it just becomes hard to justify the cost for more redundancy. Granted.. redundancy didn't deter me from the other consoles, but it's getting ridiculous. 😜 Not to mention, I was a early adopter of the Turbografx in the US at launch, and have pretty much played most any Turbo game I would be interested in to death over the decades, etc. as the library isn't exactly huge. So yeah.. looks great but I'm going to sit this one out. I do fully reserve the right to change my mind at any time though.

(sorry for the multiple posts but I can't edit old ones ;p) Just to further the cocktail cabinet theory: the Taito ones were pretty ubiquitous in the early 80's across Asia. and looking at the side profile, it very much looks like a cartoon illustration of one wouldn't you say?

I’ve been playing NES Open on the switch and simply rewinding until I get a good shot. I get birdies or eagles on every single hole

The way I interpreted that cutscene is he was popping out of his own video game. So yes, inside 100%

What? No man unless I completely misinterpreted it all these years that's a side view of him sitting there playing the cocktail version of the video game! And he's not banging his head on it.. he's playing it. But hey if we want to think of it as a martini I guess that's related to cocktails anyway lol Cocktails were almost 100% the primary arcade games we got in that part of the world so when I played Pengo, it was in cocktail form. So that pic made instant sense I guess.

Well that's all fine and dandy but then what about 5 months from now when people start asking when is the next update?

According to this site https://openfpga-cores-inventory.github.io/analogue-pocket/ it looks like there's CPS1, and Tamagotchi and it does looks like a number of Jotego updates to his existing cores, but I haven't looked what.

I've been a big fan of handheld gaming since the 70s.. even mechanical stuff pre-LCDS, LEDS, and VFDs (like the Tomy pocket games and various EM ones) and remain so. Matter o fact it's my primary way of playing games today in 2023 (since the majority of my "free time" to game is in the throne room ). I don't think it's going away at all and there will always be a market to playing games on the go in some fashion. Regarding the Switch I don't see what the debate is. For the record 99% of my time playing it is done in handheld form so I'm all about the Switch being a handheld. However in the few and far between times I put BOTW on a 80" screen for example... I was blown away. It's also a console. Same for steam deck.. it's a handheld, and it's a PC. So I do agree that the homogeny we see among the consoles like PS5/XBOX and PC gaming is similarly happening within the handheld form where future mainstream iterations are along the lines like Steam Deck, Switch, the various emulation consoles, phones, or even the FPGA Analogue Pocket where the focus is more on versatility rather than a unique dedicated form. But then again who knows! You never know what the future is.. e.g. maybe a little holographic display or something to give a unique handheld experience not available otherwise.

My assumption for any new A1up is it's going to be software emulation.

Well you made me look and yeah it was definitely classicgaming.com http://web.archive.org/web/19990224183433/http://www.classicgaming.com/ ... as one of the "hosted sites" http://web.archive.org/web/19990224234650/http://classicgaming.com/shmups/ That said.. I noticed it says right there at shmups.com at the bottom how old it is, granted it hasn't been updated in about 13 years.

It amazes me that page still exists.. I remember checking them out quite a bit in the late 90's.. probably even around 1997ish and on. Wasn't the xenocide/shmups page a subset of some other site (classicgaming.com... or something like that?)

For sure!.. 'Course via HDMI out, you can rotate or scale all sorts of ways, but when I play some arcade cores on a CRT I get the usual deal where some games meant for a vertical display are sideways, etc. (Is there a way to change that? e.g. Pac/Ms. Pac) . I just chalk it up to that's how it is with the arcade boards.

ah cool.. I always like new arcade cores on the MiSTer. Granted, any excitement of "new" is tempered by default with most any arcade game being already playable in Mame for years. But still.. great to have an fpga core for them!

These days with the Analogue Consoles and the MiSTer, etc.. they all got the HDMI/hi-def output covered. So if I'm playing an original console 16-bit and below, I just stick to CRT and composite. Looks good to me and if it was fine enough back then (and was such an improvement over RF ), it's fine enough now. Once you get to the N64/Saturn/PSX and up though, I do like the Retrotink 5x. I do also like to plug the MiSTer to a CRT via component, and that looks great as well.

I have always thought the presentation on 5200/8-bit Pacman is top notch. However even back in the 80s as a kid, I was critical of the gameplay. Again as I stated before it was the little nuances especially with the much-less-forgiving collision detection where close calls you would get away with in the arcade. e.g. https://i.imgur.com/f8OUVhe.mp4 (which we know the reason for it now: occupation of sprite's center pixel point within discrete tiles) , you couldn't in the 5200 version. i.e. once you brush with a ghost, you're pretty much toast. Conversely, it seems Pacman had to really pass over the dots before they were considered "eaten", so close calls with the power pellets and a ghost you would also lose whereas you would win the same situation in the arcade. Additionally, cornering didn't work as well when attempting to outrun pursuing ghosts.. i.e. ghosts seem to take turns at the same speed as Pac-man. Additionally I wasn't able to come up with any easy "patterns" in the 5200 version.. something of course everyone did in the arcade version (even though those who could score high without using patterns were considered superior players). Lastly.. I saved this for last because I forget if the 5200 version had the "safe zones" escape routes where you could escape ghosts going upwards right above or below the ghost-pen. I think it did actually so I don't know. Granted this is nitpicking and only if you were familiar with the arcade game. But many people definitely were (Pac-man was a phenomenon), and was wanting to have that same experience at home. The 5200 version came close but those little gameplay details were the annoying flies in the ointment that made you know you weren't playing the original. THAT ALL SAID.. it's probably unrealistic to think the developers at the time would have been able to translate those details anyway with the environment they were in (they may have been unfamiliar with them anyway), and regardless, it was the best around if you wanted Pac-Man at home in 1982 especially with the visuals, sound, and yes the gameplay. There's zero dispute about that

My choice of best game.. for me it's between DEFENDER or COUNTERMEASURE. Defender was a game that really translated the arcade experience well especially after coming from the 2600 version. However Countermeasure is a game I still like to fire up to this day and have a serious play of (although I usually use my MiSTer for it these days). I guess my vote is Countermeasure by a very close margin. I don't know about "no-centering" (that was never really a concern for me anyway) but my #1 issue aside from non-working buttons on the 5200 controllers in the early 80's as a kid were the joysticks would eventually stop being able to push in a certain direction.. so I'm not sure if maybe that's maybe the same thing just described differently? Yeah we know what to do about it now, but when I was 11 back then it was a show stopper. I don't think the 5200 controller dissing is a myth generated in the internet age.. it was literally something a lot of 5200 kids dealt with. My mom bought me about 4 extra controllers over time (in addition to the original 2) and also the Wico joystick (we never could find the keypad) and I still got to a point I was unable to play any 5200 game with the exception of Montezumas Revenge which would start automatically. That was very traumatic lol. To have those games and being unable to play them and I reluctantly had to store the 5200 away because I simply couldn't play the games! It was all because of the non-working controllers despite having multiple of them. Of course now I have fully working sticks, a working wico keypad to pair with the wico joystick, a trackball, etc.. and am fully set up. But not in the early 80s when I REALLY wanted to be.

I basically lived my entire 70's and 80's life searching for the dream of playing arcade games at home and while the 5200 ports of most of those games were at least better than the VCS ports, but I wouldn't say they were identical to the arcade. But I'm a little more nitpicky for stuff like Pacman where my criticism is the collision detection was less forgiving on the 5200, etc. THAT SAID, the 5200 had a damn good Joust, Defender, and Space Dungeon. It also had an awesome Berzerk but I recall that coming pretty late in the system's life. Everyone's right though in that the 5200 and the Colecovision were the best we could get at the time. But I do have memories for example of looking forward to Qix, and then getting it and thinking that the Qix wasn't as well animated. But hey it worked and where the heck else would I have gotten Qix? lol My one regret about the 5200 is we didn't get stuff like Tempest, Super-Pacman, Jr. Pacman, Millipede, Asteroids, Stargate, Blaster, Xevious, or heck even Donkey Kong until much later in life. I think if those titles were around in the 80's, then even those alone would have completely solidified it as an arcade beast.

nah I kid.. but yeah Analogue orders are pretty much just historically that way. 😜

I bought the first Megaman for gameboy as soon as it came out.. and although I could beat NES Megaman 2 (and Megaman 1) relatively easily, I struggled with the Gameboy game. I actually don't think I ever finished it! So when the later ones came out I kind of passed them over which is too bad as I hear the later GB Megamans were quite good. Ah well.