[(Original) Final Fantasy]

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.

[Cult Classic Arcade Games]

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

 

 

 

 

 

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

3 hours ago, funkwad said:

Hey folks - I have an NT Mini I've been running for awhile and it's pretty good on NES only by way of an Everdrive add on.

 

I was trying to load up the SMS core - to run "zillion" on the SMS.  I keep getting the "File not found" error.  I believe this is due to the core needing a Sega Master System BIOS file.

 

Well - I grabbed a BIOS file titled 'hshbios.sms' and placed it into the BIOS folder on the SD card and...it's still not working, or referencing this BIOS file to enable loading of the Zillion game.

 

This issue is not specific to zillion...no other games will load.

 

Do I need to rename the BIOS file?  If so  - to what??

 

Any information appreciated.  Thank you!

Unzip and shove these in your /BIOS/ folder. I also added the general readme for more info.

sms.zip SMS Release Notes.txt

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

4 hours ago, Atariboy said:

Have any of you encountered an issue semi recently and actually been helped? I hope this is an isolated incident and not an example of ineptitude that sounds more in line with what you'd expect to hear in the Amico thread for instance instead of the Analogue thread.

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. 

[Budget Atari and Capcom arcade cabinets to see release this fall!]

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. 

 

[Ever buy a game console, just to play a certain game?]

8 hours ago, Max_Chatsworth said:

Are you Canadian?

Nah man I'm from Guam/Saipan.  

[Ever buy a game console, just to play a certain game?]

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. 

 

[Ever buy a game console, just to play a certain game?]

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. 

 

[Anyone grew up with both an NES & 7800 Back in The Day?]

"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. 

[Do any of you mess with the Arcade1up Machines?]

On 12/29/2022 at 4:01 PM, Cousin Vinnie said:

Do any of you mess with the Arcade1up Machines?

I waited to pull the trigger on these things until Wal Mart had the Tempest one for $199. I decided to grab it at this price, but its been a disaster so far. You get what you pay for.

 

The LCD screen will not come on- but the sound works and it sounds like the controls work. They sent me a new monitor and a new control board, I have installed both, switched it around,  flip flopped parts, and still- no screen... the sound effects work, and the controls sound like they are working. The customer service guys do not really seem to care... and they are not interested in taking it back for a refund. 

 

Im not sure what else could be wrong with it. It seems pretty basic. Do you guys have any thoughts?

 

 

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  

[Have you ever reset the score on Asteroids?]

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. 

[The Official Turbografx 16 Thread!]

13 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

 I recently got Bloody Wolf for $60 during a retrogaming convention, while it usually costs around $200 on eBay.

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. 

[What does Neo Geo mean for you?]

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

 

[Have you ever beaten Ninja Gaiden?]

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

[Any info on StellaDS?]

9 minutes ago, llabnip said:

If you're running from a flash cart (back slot), you will be running in DS-mode which is only 67MHz CPU and that's fine for most classic games. If you're running from the SD card (side slot) via something like Unlaunch or Twilight Menu++, then you will have unlocked the 2X CPU (and 4X RAM - though that's less critical) and you should be able to run the ARM-Assisted games and the larger/complex homebrews of the past decade. Be sure to check out John's Champ Games website for some awesome demos (which are really quite generous in not having too many limitations). 

 

 

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. 

[Any info on StellaDS?]

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  

 

 

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

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.

 

 

 

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

2 hours ago, Kaide said:

I’ve just not tried using the Pocket to write save memory back to a cartridge, as it seems a bit riskier. I should maybe try with something I can stand to lose sometime?

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. 

[FPGA Based Videogame System]

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. 

[Mini Arcade Alert!]

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

 

 

  

6 hours ago, PacManPlus said:

EDIT - it's actually *more* in other places.  I'll make my own like I did with my Pac-man cabinet long before these idiots started making them: 

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.

 

[Budget Atari and Capcom arcade cabinets to see release this fall!]

'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  

[MAME HSC - Round 2/10 - 1944 The Loop Master / Robotron 2084]

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

 

[Last 3 games you played?]

1. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - playing on Analogue Pocket.. near the end, and it can't come soon enough.  
2. Castlevania - Switch - Finished the game using the spear guy, fully using save states and rewind to cheese my way through. 
3. Pacman 99 - Switch

 

[MAME HSC - Round 2/10 - 1944 The Loop Master / Robotron 2084]

I'd like to play Robotron.  Is it ok if I use MiSTer? Or do I have to use MAME.

[NES games that disappointed you]

14 minutes ago, bubufubu said:

To be clear, Ninja Gaiden (Arcade, 1988) has absolutely nothing to do with the 8-bit game released the same year.  Completely separate games.  They were made, simultaneously, by different teams at Tecmo.  Ninja Gaiden was released in October of 1988 while Ninja Ryūkenden was released two months later.  The former didn't receive a port until many, many years later.  To my knowledge, there is no 8-bit version of the former nor is there an arcade version of the latter.

Interesting! 'Course though in 1988 no one here knew that, especially me. 😜   I just knew I liked Ninja Gaiden and was pretty excited to see it was coming to the NES. I would squint at the preview maps in Nintendo Power and would be dubious with all the extra stuff, but hopeful it would have at least a proximity of the arcade gameplay. It didn't.. but ended up being its own awesome game (which I eventually mastered). 

 

It's funny though that by the time the Lynx port came out, I had pretty much moved on from my obsession with the arcade game and never bothered getting it until decades later.