The retro thread

[emptyvessel]

Might have a point there Seraph, the 16 bit generation almost perfectly aligned with me being in High School, which meant I had enough free time to play games but was old enough to understand and appreciate them.

Then the N64 came out when I was in first year uni, which was perfect timing for endless drunken Goldeneye on a tiny tv.

[GameHED]

People in the old days were so easy to please.

Of course they were because no one counted pixels and frame rates back then. It's a different generation of gamers now.

You know the SNES had more colours than the MD, yeah? But then again, MD had blast processing...

SNES = better overall design thanks to the controllers. Things like airbrake turning with the shoulder buttons in f-zero are what made the snes cooler.

Seriously shoulder buttons are things that enhance games like contra 4 so that you can select stuff quickly and do alternate fire as well as rotate camera properly are standout things. MD had the better shooters, snes was superior in colour. Sonic fans do not like accepting that nintendo were the king of the platform genre too. Sonic might have had speed, but mario games had a pseudo adventure game feeling to them with puzzles and shit. Sega are too used to fast-paced games for kids on ADHD tablets due to their arcade background while nintendo are better at the slow-burn experiences because they care. People think it is pointless to make these distinctions but it is not. The home console crowd and the "arcade conversion" crowd (too poor to buy the arcade cabinet) are two different species of gamer. Home console gamers want custom experiences whereas the arcade conversion people are just buying hardware to play cheap versions of the games they liked in the arcades.

The main time sega shined was when they made home console games for the home console audience that did not appear in arcades. For instance outrun and after burner on MD was ok but it was just a shameless port. Streets Of rage on the other hand showed sega can make old school experiences on MD taking into account the weaknesses of the platform and maxing out the hardware. They are at their best when they do that. But nintendo do this ALL THE TIME, making them superior.

[GameHED]

For me, the NES(/FC) is generally one step too far back, when it comes to reliving old gems.
I could probably count on one hand, the number of NES games I'd be able to sit down, play, and actually enjoy as much as I used to as a kid.
The SNES(/SFC) era is my personal favourite, and it's still something I regularly go back to.

As an aside, I do wonder if most people's favourite "retro" generation is simply the generation that was in its prime when they were 12-16 years old.

For me the best gen was GBA.

GBA had the graphics of something rivaling neogeo but the games were deep and refined.

It could do a proper version of final fight with 3 characters, a decent port of street fighter alpha 3, some licensed games like teenage mutant ninja turtles, x-men and astroboy, and along with that it was a way to play yoshis island and super mario world portably.
This is the gen before the touchscreen gimmicks came along. A time when old ideas can be perfected and refined without the need to worry about fancy 3d polygons getting in the way. You could play platformers like ninja cop, shooters like gradius, beat em ups like double dragon, and all kinds of other titles like turn based rpg games or even arcade perfect conversions like Galaga. It's the 16 bit era in your pocket with decent battery life and affordable carts that can give you decent enough animation and sprites. But on top of that you get updates of stuff from that era. (eg megaman zero game, remixes of snes ghouls n ghosts, a new mario kart that feels like the snes game)

When I go back to the actual 16 bit era, you can see imperfections from then. Sure you have a higher resolution but missing levels in final fight? Slowdown in gradius on snes? borders to make characters look fat in 50hz? People who think 16 bit era is better than gba era are kidding themselves. Whatever you could do on home console 16 bit you could do on gba but with extra. The only bad side is shit sound fx and less screen space. (ie a port of rayman from the playstation 1 required you to pan the camera up to see further above or below you)
But overall gba is the 16 bit era with better choice and enhancements. Eg Doom on snes had a shit framerate and no textures on the ceiling or floor. GBA had smooth framerates and textures onf ceiling and floor and it is portable. 16-bit era was not flawless.

[Candy Arse]

GBA was fantastic.

Also I am now, finally, a Virtual Boy owner.

[emptyvessel]

Welcome to the club! Unfortunately it's an awkward bloody thing to play. Also I left it on the top of a bookcase for years and the fabric and rubber bit around your eyes got hideously dusty. When I finally get around to setting up the retro room I'll need to work out how to give it a good clean.

Also I'm not sure how to display stuff like that and the Vectrex. I intend on having regularly used consoles permanently connected to the CRT, but I'm unsure how to do that and have shelving space for displays without building in. How have you got it set up Candy?

[emptyvessel]

Btw, my massive collecting gap is a Neo Geo (cart version). I have a CD but the power supply has shit itself unfortunately. Just when I managed to buy Viewpoint when I was in Hong Kong too

When I was really into collecting you used to see cart Neo Geos on eBay all the time. Now they seem to be hard to find.

However I did find this mob who put the arcade board in a wooden case!

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[Candy Arse]

I use shelving and bookcases like what you'd find at places such as Sam's Warehouse. So on each side of the TV are two 3-level shelving stands with no backing boards with consoles on all shelves.

The games and console accessories are kept in the various bookshelves I have in the room. Cheap and effective.

[emptyvessel]

Yeah, the shelves with no backing is what I was thinking of for my active consoles. For the games I was going to get a large DVD bookcase for proper display purposes. Have made do with a regular bookcase but then you get multiple layers of games and it just looks shit.

I don't have much wall space in the room I'm using so I'm going to kit out inside the wardrobe with baskets and shelves to store the rest of my non-active consoles and loose games

[Candy Arse]

Just saw this on Facebook -



I want to know how that is all wired at the back. Absolutely love it.

[Cardsy]

That's fantastic!

[GreyWizzard]

wow! I love that. Would love to be able to do a set up like that.

[emptyvessel]

Oh that is incredible. Seeing as though he's using a LCD/Plasma though I'm wondering what upscaler he uses and how he goes tuning in stuff like the famicom.

Must be either some pretty incredible cable management behind that thing, or a complete rats nest...

[Candy Arse]

Couldn't the Famicom do composite like the NES?

I want to see behind the curtain with that setup either way. I suspect that unless the owner has small cutouts behind each console, none of them are actually wired up.

[Candy Arse]

Also EV what do you do for cable management? I'm dying here...

[Seraph]

The Famicom and the toploading NES don't have AV out. They can be modded, though.

[emptyvessel]

Yeah I suspect they're just for show and he'll individually hook them up to be played. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as good presentation of a retro collection is hard to do and he's nailed it.

My previous two places I only had about four consoles hooked up at a time and put them all through a component switch box and jammed the cords behind the tv. No cable management at all. In the new place I can't manage a massive setup like the one in the photo, but I'm looking at bundling the power and av in separate plastic conduits (got some split plastic tubing from Ikea I'm giving a try) and then feeding the power into a board mounted horizontally on the side of my tv stand. This may be more visible but it allows for more flexible swapping and changing. Av can go straight into my old switcher, but I may have to get some cable extensions depending on how I lay it out.

Then again, after looking at that photo, I'm tempted to go purely for aesthetics as every time I try to make it functional it looks like a games shop threw up.

[Candy Arse]

The Famicom and the toploading NES don't have AV out. They can be modded, though.

I'm thinking specifically of the front-loading NES. I'm sure it did composite...?

EV we absolutely must have a meeting of the minds at both our places once you're all settled in over here! I want to get a fellow collector's thoughts/input on how to improve my setup in terms of functionality. It's really shitting me.

In collecting news, I got beat on a boxed/unused Jaguar the other day on Ebay. Some fucker sniped me by 5 bucks with a few seconds on the clock. That stung.

[Candy Arse]

I've changed the name of the thread to make it all-encompassing for the discussion. Retro games we're playing, buying, selling, crazy Ebay auctions etc

[Yoshi Sonic]

Welcome to the club! Unfortunately it's an awkward bloody thing to play. Also I left it on the top of a bookcase for years and the fabric and rubber bit around your eyes got hideously dusty. When I finally get around to setting up the retro room I'll need to work out how to give it a good clean.

Also I'm not sure how to display stuff like that and the Vectrex. I intend on having regularly used consoles permanently connected to the CRT, but I'm unsure how to do that and have shelving space for displays without building in. How have you got it set up Candy?

I found that a lightly moistened good quality chux did the trick with the VB

Another dilemma I have generally - display consoles and computers boxed or unboxed? Or both? I dig mint boxes.

[Seraph]

The front-loading NES had mono-AV out via a yellow and a red plug on the side of the unit. The Famicom didn't, and the toploading NES didn't either.
There were some later versions of the toploading NES (as well as the remodeled Famicom) that had AV out via the same socket design used for the SNES/N64/GC.

[emptyvessel]

Depends on how much space you have Yoshi. Even with a big new house I'm constrained to a smallish double bedroom for retro stuff, so I'll probably be having consoles set up for use as well as display. Personally I think they look more interesting out of the packaging, but I've never been one to fight for truly mint console boxes (games on the other hand I'm going to move towards boxed in good to excellent condition from now on).

Stuff like the VB, Vectrex, Famicom and Disk System pairing etc look far better sitting out ready to play. Unfortunately that makes cleaning harder.

Candy - absolutely. Although reading this thread has made me want to take a step back and think about how I want to display things before I start just buying shelves. That display case pic in particular had given me some good ideas (unfortunately a bit constrained as its hard to get something that supports the weight of a CRT nowadays)

[Candy Arse]

Yeah dude taking into account the weight of a CRT, I'd rather go down the route of having shelving on either side of the TV.

My setup next to the TV currently looks like this -

[ObSoLeTe]

James's AVGN room

unbelievable the amount of retro stuff this guy has

[GameHED]

Like his comment on the master system.
I was not a big fan of Mastersystem to be honest. Accept for Psycho Fox, Wonder Boy and alex kidd I didn't really play it that much. I was a c64 guy.

Megadrive was when sega became a threat to nintendo. Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, Strider etc all looking almost arcade perfect is what really got them the attention. Truxton, Port of outrun, after burner, and many others (like alien storm) made me love it. I remember also renting a ton of games (back when games could be finished in like 1-2 hours lol) from videostores. (remember them?) Some of the most memorable stuff for me was not ports of arcade games like altered beast (although that game featured prominently in ads) but stuff like Sword of Vermillion.

Game consoles were best for action games since you had multiple button game controllers. Anytime a platform game came out on amiga I always felt awkward having to push up on a joystick to jump. If you didn't have a megadrive or SNES you had to put up with shit ports of action games on computer.

Computers had the mouse though so you saw more cerebral games with icons. Dungeon crawl type games and isometric view games were where computer game shined over their console game brothers.

I think it is time future consoles started to add in the features that computers had: programming your own homebrew games, saving to disk all the levels your created, uploading them to the internet to share etc
We are already in the infancy stages of that now with games like LBP, Mod nation racer, the level edit things for far cry 2 etc but what I mean is standardise this for all console games just like almost every game has multiplayer modes in them. (even for shit that doesn't really need it) A simple 2d platformer-shooter with basic 8-bit c64 graphics (something like a robotron clone) should be built into it and you make levels from content you gather from pictures and art you made in paint prgram. (ie like bangai-o on the nintendo DS but with the freedom to create textures and draw objects) We had all that stuff in the c64 days (shoot em up contruction kit) and it is time consoles had these things so people can make 8-bit style games they remember from the past when things were only a few KB large. I mean let's say you were a huge fan of "Bruce Lee" on the c64 and want to see more levels with the same basic graphics? They should have a free platformer/shooter construction kit built into the dashboard of today's game consoles for us old guys who just want basic games like pitfall, donkey kong, space invader clones etc. which would not require fancy graphics. (most sprites were basic shapes with 2-3 animation frames) Maybe someone could do a remake of ET on the Atari 2600 but with better gameplay, animation, and more interesting graphics? Or something like Ultima-inspired 2d rpg? Pressure to include programming functions in game consoles should be applied. And it all should be free right out of the box. PC has this shit for ages.

[Yoshi Sonic]

I've just put in an insulated 6x9x2.7x20 degrees pitch Titan shed, with 6x6 of it dedicated to man-cave - bar, beer brewing, arcade cocktails and lowboys, micros and consoles.

I'd like to mount all of my vintage micros on the 6m wall in a grid using some kind of angled cantilevered bracket, but I haven't found anything suitable yet.

Really looking forward to pulling the collection out of the boxes it's been in the last 10+ years.

A very good friend just came back from Super Potato in Akihabara with a suitcase of Famicom, Super Famicom, Vb and Pc engine gear - including new Famicom Disk system drive belts!