NE146

Ok found it.. they're labelled "soldering practice kits" https://gikfun.com/collections/frontpage

My kid had to do this at school and now he's pretty good at soldering now due to the sheer amount of points to practice on (he says it's obvious which points are his earlier ones ) . I'm not sure exactly where the best place to buy it though.. e.g. https://www.amazon.com/WELLVEUS-Electronic-Flashing-Soldering-Practice/dp/B08YCY439Q but that's a pack of 10.

I bought it at launch and beat it pretty easily, but that's because I enjoyed it. It was the first NES RPG that I thought was up to par with my experience with SMS Phantasy Star, especially after Dragon Warrior 1 was so underwhelming. RE: Grinding. NES Final Fantasy 1 has an area early on often referred to as "The Peninsula of Power" where the grid overlaps to an area with later monsters that reward more exp/money than you're supposed to get at that point. Just go to the top of the peninsula (top 4 squares?) then survive some initial encounters and you can level up fairly quickly early on. Also a fun way to play the game is with everyone being a Black Belt. They don't have need for weapons (best to go bare handed) and barely any armor and they just go around punching and beating everyone to a pulp once you level up.

I always considered Moon Cresta to be a very popular/big hit kind of game.. at least it was where I'm from. And heck Qix got a 5200 port. I guess one of the more obscure arcade games I liked to play back in the day was Port Man. It's just a simple game that's fun in small doses. Also when I was a kid I was very intrigued with Round-Up/Fitter.. especially since Rubik's Cube was the hot toy at the time. It turns out it's just an ok game.. I could never get the cube right btw Last but not least I liked Space Chaser a lot. This to me was really the first "Pac-Man" style eat-the-dot game where you had free movement to go anywhere you wanted (as opposed to the Head-On style games), and you were chased around by enemies. Like Pac-Man you can learn patterns to beat each stage pretty much indefinitely. This guy plays it horribly btw

Unzip and shove these in your /BIOS/ folder. I also added the general readme for more info. sms.zip SMS Release Notes.txt

I mean you asked for semi recently and mine is not, but I had an issue with my NT Mini (original) where it stopped powering on, and they fixed it pretty quick after contacting them via email.

Well I finally put together the Tempest / Atari Legacy 12-in-1 (my only previous arcade1up being the original 12-1). While assembling I thought the materials still felt as cheap as the initial batch.. But hey for me it's all good at $200. 😜 Once I actually played it.. the trackball and spinner are definitely improved upon the original arcade1up cabs, where Crystal Castles and Tempest are actually playable without having to upgrade the hardware. I still have the Glenn's retro-show spinner on my old cab (which I don't know if it's compatible with this generation) but so far the stock hardware is fine enough that I don't really feel the need to do any replacing. The Missile Command button layout has been well talked about already, but one other minor nitpick I have is Major Havoc is controlled only with the trackball. They should have allowed the choice of either the trackball or the spinner because as we know, Major Havoc was a roller controller game, and often the MH conversion kits for Tempest machines just ended up using the spinner controller as well. So why limit it to trackball? 🤷‍♂️ All that said, I still am leaning towards modding this thing and putting in an emulation box with ONLY trackball/spinner/button arcade games.. i.e. so I can bring back stuff like Liberator and Quantum, but then also have stuff like Breakout/Arkanoid, Marine Date, or Reactor and other stuff I can't easily play on my regular barcade. Maybe 2023 I'll finally do it.

Nah man I'm from Guam/Saipan.

Yeah actually I guess that counts for me as well.. I forgot we bought a VCS specifically for Space Invaders! Back in 1980 when I was 11 and my family travelled to the states on vacation, while we had a Coleco Telstar pong game for the TV, I really had no idea about "Atari" or the VCS, or even that there was a Space Invaders for it. Back then you could only speculate what kind of new stuff would be for sale out there in the world. I simply was looking for "SPACE INVADERS" whether it was to play it in the arcades (which is ridiculous since we had arcades back home), or an electronic toy version of it of some kind..anything. Anyway, I thought if there was a place I could find a Space Invaders to buy, it would be in the stores in the states! My clueless mom and clueless me went around asking stores if they sold Space Invaders for a couple days until we ended up at Sears in their TV/electronics department and asked if they had it, and lo and behold they had a tv with a VCS playing "Space Invaders"! There were a bunch of kids playing it, but the salesman asked them to step aside for a while and let this potential buyer mom let her kid try it out. It looked nothing like the arcade game I knew.. it was totally different. But hey it said "Space Invaders" and the basic idea was there and that was probably the best it was going to get, so I was sold. My family bought me the Sears version of the VCS and took it to the hotel. I read the manual every day until we finally flew home and anyway, that's exactly why I ended up with that Sears heavy sixer console and the beginning of my 2600 gaming.

I buy the majority of consoles by default. So for this question, it'd have to be a console I would typically have NOT been interested in, and then bought because of a single game, and for me that's got to be the Playstation 3 and 3D Dot Game Heroes.

"Back in the day" I was a senior in high school and had a Famicom (clone) then went off to college in the states and there I bought a US NES console. And that's where I first started seeing 7800 games for sale on the shelves along with the NES stuff. Suffice to say, the offerings of Joust, Ms. Pacman, etc. I mean.. Only a few years earlier those were 'wow' titles, but by 1987 there was just no more appeal, for me at least. I took a hard pass on any 7800 stuff until decades later.

Weird that that's happening.. so you now have 2 monitors and 2 control boards and no combinations of either work? Try them outside of the cab to make sure. I bought that Tempest $199 cab at Walmart too and just assembled it this week. I had no sound at first but then found it was just because I didn't plug the audio cable all the way in

I probably said the same thing years ago, but yeah when it comes to VCS Asteroids, the game variation is important! I try to at least make it "match" the arcade game as much as possible, so: 1) UFOs turned on; 2) 'Fast' asteroids; 3) Hyperspace; and 4) Extra life every 10k.

What?? Geeze.. maybe I should sell mine lol. Same for any of my other TG16 games. I never touch any of them at this point once I got the Everdrive in there. It's the same ROM contents, so why bother with the swapping hucards in and out when you can just turn on the machine and boom.. they're all already there.

I was in college when the Neo Geo came out, and knew all about it. I also spent the majority of my money buying video games having a NES & SMS, then later a TG16, Genesis, and SNES all in the same tv, as well as Lynx, GB, etc. That said, I totally took a pass on the Neo Geo because it was simply too expensive. I was a pretty big fan of Ninja Combat at the school arcade pumping quarters into it, but it did not register in my mind to pay $200 for a single cartridge no matter how good the game was

Yes. I bought NES Ninja Gaiden at launch after waiting for it after reading the preview in Nintendo Power. I was in college at the time and could not stop playing it (while my ex watched me the whole time annoyed. ). I believe I beat it that very first week. Anyway because of all those hours I got pretty good to the point I could finish it (and later NG2) anytime I wanted to. It's funny because I don't remember the thing about going all the way back with the final 3 bosses at all. I guess at the time I just rolled with it... It probably just gave me more hours of practice anyway. But yeah I thought I was 'good' but of course not to the level the crazy speed runners are today, but they have the benefit of all these decades of people analyzing the game etc. vs I was just kicking back in 1988 enjoying a state of the art video game for a home console trying to get to the end

Interesting! Who knew that stuff made a difference (I certainly didn't ) Yes it's a DSi XL, and launching via SD cart. I definitely would have preferred to run on the New 3DS XL (I pretty much have every DS model for the most part) but it's always a hassle for me to figure out how to get .nds files on there. 😛 So I stick to 3DS games on the 3DSs, and DS games on the DSs/DSis whether it's jailbreak or flashcart.

This kind of flew under my radar so this the first I've tried it out. Pretty awesome! I've been digging the FPGA 2600 core on the Analogue Pocket as of late, but I really dig the touchscreen interface in here for the console switches, paddle control, game info etc. 'Course I don't have any of the newer ROMs you guys have.. so I'm playing Atari Pacman and the other usual VCS fare. It plays them great

Welp.. just tried it, and so much for that. It appears that the GB/GBC/GBA cores used when you launch from the cart slot, and the GB/GBC/GBA cores when using OpenFPGA, use separate locations for their save states/'memories'. So one doesn't see the other's library of them, at least that I can figure out. I didn't have an issue swapping saves states between original carts and ROMS launched via the Everdrives since I guess they both ran from the cart slot. Anyway.. pretty interesting! Maybe someone else smarter than me can figure out more.

Oh it can.. and I know because I accidentally wiped my decades-old save on Zelda: Oracle of Ages (or was it Seasons?) and replaced it with the one I had been playing on the Everdrive. Long story short I was playing through them on the GB Everdrive using save states. One day I decided to check out my original Ages/Seasons carts to see what the differences were (what animal I got back then, what rings, etc.).. then completely forgot I had done that, and later started the pocket with the original cart inserted, loaded my save-state, which worked great! But of course it wiped out the old save on the cart and replaced it with my current game.

I don't know but in the games I've played I typically always use the in-game saves AND save states (in the cores that support it obviously). I use the save states more often of course, but I make sure to do a regular in-game save now and then. This has saved me a few times especially back when you could only have one save state on the Pocket... where I lost the save state for whatever reason (e.g. save stating another game) so loading up the saved game brought me not too far back. And Pokemon may be an exception, but I've had a lot of success transferring save files using save states (e.g. from an Everdrive to an actual cart, or more useful, taking my old game saves from my regular carts to the everdrive). I haven't tried it on the OpenFPGA stuff yet though.. but maybe I'll try it now. For example I unlocked everything in GBA G&W Gallery 4 (which takes forever) and was able to put it on the Everdrive using this technique. Now I'd want to see if it will work on the Rom on the OpenFPGA GBA core.

I'm tempted really.. Taito Space Invaders 1 & 2 were the cabinets I grew up with. There was confusion for a LONG TIME on the internet on what the background of a Taito Space Invaders Part 2 was as most people were only familiar with the US based Midway SI Part 2 (which is different), or the european release which typically didn't have any, or the color monitor cocktail. The one I grew up with had the red-sky background and b&w graphics with color overlay (which only recently finally made it into MAME) and at first glance it looks like that's what they put in there as well. MAN! Maybe I'll ask for it for Christmas I hear you man, but the way the original SI cabinets were with the lit background, mirror, bezel graphics, etc. don't exactly make them easy homebrew projects.. and they'd only be good for Space Invaders anyway. My guess is the complexity of it is why they've been working on this thing for a number of years now since they first originally announced it.

'Course the gates that each key opens will change (and get more "odd") as you progress in the game.. that's one of the ways it gets harder. I really liked Super Pac-Man when it first came out and could get relatively far. But in recent playthroughs now decades later, I just don't have that mojo anymore lol

I don't know what the romset is on my MiSTer, so I just used mame. First round of tries: