I played a bunch of old NES games on an emulator in the early '00s. Two things stood out: (1) the graphics really were pretty lame, and (2) games I was addicted to as a kid seemed a lot more tedious as an adult.
Not saying the classics don't stand the test of time, but some of those old games are better as a memory.
I did the same thing when a bunch of emulators were coming out in the late 90's and early 00's and my big takeaway was that the majority of games from my childhood were not very good, but a few games such as Galaga and Ms Pacman and a handful of other arcade games have stood the test of time very well.
I was just cheesing out, getting excited about playing Final Fantasy again, and then I remembered the process of buying 99 health potions, and how exceedingly tedious it was. I'm not sure that I'd have the patience to do that again as an adult.
Pro tip for Final Fantasy that I still remember:
One of the easiest parties to play through the game with is 3 Fighters and 1 Red Mage. You can get through most of the fights with minimal damage, and the Red Mage has what you need for boss fights and the occasional enemy that is strong against physical damage but weak against certain magic. You'll find yourself never needing to buy 99 potions.
I mostly agree with you, but I wonder if it feels worse because of the emulation and controller/keyboard. If I can get my hands on one I definitely will though if it's less than $100 (AU tax).
For me there has been huge leap between the NES and the SNES in terms of graphics and game complexity.
Most of SNES games have aged much better than their NES counterparts, Super Metroid, Zelda, Chrono Trigger are still terrific games that I could play even today, while I agree that most NES games feel too old.
Probably because the SNES was where I'd say "modern" games came into being. By this I mean games with complex plot and/or diverse game mechanics etc. The NES had games where we started to see that, like Final Fantasy or Super Mario 3, but the hardware was super limited and the NES was in a lot of ways more like an extension of the old arcade systems, while IMO the SNES was where Nintendo had something that was powerful enough to make games that were substantially different from arcade games.
Yes, I've thought that the SNES, and to some degree, the Genesis, is where you can go back and find a lot of stuff in the "normal" line to play that holds up pretty well. I've gotten my kids (7 & 5) to respond to some SNES stuff, but anything earlier they find uncompelling.
I can't entirely disagree.
For context, my first console was an Intellivision, so, no, this is not because my first console was a SNES. I did own one for a while... in the early 21st century, long after the PS2 was established.
I think some of it is just that the limitations of the medium were just so shocking prior to that. The Atari era basically couldn't have text; every text you see on the 2600 is freakishly expensive. The Nintendo era was still counting every letter. The SNES era may still be terribly constrained by modern standards, but at least you could make pictures that were recognizable, play recognizable sounds, use text without too much fear, include more variations in play without too much effort, etc. There's a handful of games prior to that that work miracles with the resources they have (Super Mario 3 isn't "just" a classic, it's legitimately amazing for the hardware).
I'd point out that even the people putatively writing Indie games with "old school aesthetics" almost never hold themselves to the limitations of the Nintendo era or before. There are some games that come reasonably close to SNES aesthetics, though.
I've noticed this too with a lot of games - nostalgia filters are a real thing. The original Deus Ex is a good example. The story is amazing, but pretty much everything else has aged like milk.
> Sadly you can't use your original NES carts with the console - something even the most basic "Famiclone" offers - and there doesn't seem to be any means of getting new games onto it.
Would it really have been that much extra effort to make the console backwards compatible?
Including a compatible cartridge reader? Of course that's a lot of effort and costs, making the price point untenable.
The beautiful thing about his console is that for the price of a new Nintendo game you're getting the console and 30 games, without any hassle (swapping cartridges etc.).
It's certainly a compromise, but a very enticing one.
The NES cartridge's pin pitch is nonstandard, and making a new slot for it is actually a very expensive endeavor. You can get "close" with standard parts, but the resulting tolerance is extremely low.
They do pretty well if you keep both the carts and the console clean. I have an original that works as well as it did when it was new. You had to blow on the games then too. :-) (By keep them clean I mean that you have to actively clean them periodically.)
The ZIF connector on the original NES was unreliable. The carts are perfectly reliable. The NES 2 does not have the ZIF connector and doesn't have issues.
Depends on the cartridge. Any of the ones with a battery save (like Zelda or Final Fantasy) need to be opened up, have the welded in battery clipped off the board, have a CR2032 socket soldered on instead, and then put a new battery in and reassemble.
It's a LOT of pain to get a NES cart with a dead battery working again. That's probably why they opted not to put a slot in this thing -- many people's dusty old carts are dead, and not knowing any better, they'd blame the new console.
Replacing the battery takes a couple minutes. Many of those carts are still running. The number of decent NES games that used battery saving can be counted on your hands, so to call it a LOT of pain might be exaggerating a little.
And while overall most NES games didn't use a battery, many of the most popular ones (many of the ones included in this thing, in fact) do need a working battery. Final Fantasy, both zeldas, startropics, tecmo bowl, crystallis, kirby's adventure...
Crystalis absolutely has a save/continue system. You can see some guy demonstrating the save system in crystalis in this video, complete with save functionality: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=73za3LHWzwk
Incredible. I owned the game for years, played it a lot, beat it once, and never noticed a way to save, so I assumed you couldn't. I even had the manual!
Yeah, I was hoping this tiny emulator would play SNES and N64 carts as well as GameCube discs. I mean seriously how much extra effort would it have been?
> Would it really have been that much extra effort to make the console backwards compatible?
Depends if it's a NES on a chip type system like most clones, or if it's something like an ARM SoC device running an emulator[1]. If it's the former it would be possible with just space issues for the slot, the latter would be quite hard, certainly more trouble than worth for a cheap novelty device.
[1] It uses Wii controllers and has save states so it seems a bit more than the average clone at least.
I would bet that the people who still have original NES cartridges are people who still have a working NES, or one of many HD-compatible clones. This is not a product for them. This is a product for people who played NES games when they were young and now will buy this to get a gust of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with that, of course.
Emulators/knock-offs is probably a large reason why Nintendo is releasing this. Just wished they had went a little step further and released a version that came preloaded with every NES/SNES game. They probably could have gotten away with charging $150+ for something like that while simultaneously killing the knock off market.
Please have Super Sprint, please have Super Sprint......nooooooooooooooo!
Oh well, I'll probably buy one to play games with my kids, most mainstream games today are too complicated to learn and I don't really find them fun despite how technically amazing they are.
I have an NES and SNES emulator on my PC, and a wireless XBox controller. My kids have been mainlining Mega Man 2 (my 5 year old beat it last week), SMB, and they are strangely hooked on Pac Man and Galaga, which my 3 year old loves now!
The 3 and 5 year old also love newer games like Minecraft (the 5 Y/O is finally starting to enjoy building, instead of just flying around with a diamond sword and a bucket of lava f'in shit up), and my 7 year old plays a lot of NBA 2k16, but they are in love with the classics right now.
Used to play Super Sprint with a friend for hours and hours. To keep racing, only one player had to come in first, so we'd take turns, with one player trying to win the race, and the other running interference. Fun times.
I can't believe there hasn't been a good modernized design of a light gun. The lag and inaccuracy with the Wii style sensor bar stuff kills the experience. I used to have the Captain Power Powerjet XT-7 [1] and even that was a better than anything of late.
It seems to me that it should be possible to mount an actual camera in the gun now and have the system simply compare what it sees on the gun camera vs. what it is displaying on the screen. We have the computer power to do stuff like that now.
It won't work for retro-gaming, but it's a possible path forward for gun games on modern consoles.
I own an NES and quite a few games but this seems like an instabuy for me. Solid list of games. Metroid, Castlevania 1+2 and both Zeldas. Tecomo, the Mario games, and Ghost 'n' Goblins to keep you frustrated.
Pretty cool actually that they chose to go with the small form factor.
HDMI ports can work that way, if the software is in place to support that kind of functionality. However piracy concerns or laziness seem to have trumped that option on the market today.
Yes you should be able to, but no you probably can't
I own about half of these too. Been on a little collecting spree lately. But this is a definite buy. Can keep my other Nintendo hooked up to the projector, and put this one in the arcade cabinet.
The power supply is USB. I'm more than okay with not getting yet another USB brick with every new device.
Not getting the controllers to me is a separate issue, but it does include one, and as far as I can tell, only the original NES, 30 years ago, ever came with more than one controller.
> and as far as I can tell, only the original NES, 30 years ago, ever came with more than one controller.
If my memory serves me correctly, my SNES came with two, but I certainly believe that was the last offering from Nintendo that did. Later bundles might not have included the additional controller, though.
Personally, I'm glad to see less devices ship with a USB AC adapter. I've got too many to count. I've slowly started giving them away to friends and family when someone's breaks, but I've still got a few ranging from 0.7A to 2A. For many things, it's not one adapter to one device - most of the time, my phone, Kindle, PS4 controllers and camera all share a single charger (and a single USB A to micro B cable).
I was frustrated that some Nintendo portable consoles don't come with an AC adapter, until a few years in, I had bought a couple of special edition consoles and realised I've got three Nintendo DS chargers. Their adapter design has been stable for many years, so only first-timers actually need to buy a charger.
I suspect the NES mini will ship with a bundle via the official Nintendo store that will include an AC adapter for those in need of one. They'll also likely do a two-controller option too. Their bundles are really appealing for the portable consoles.
I don't think any console ships with two controllers unless it's part of a bundle or special edition these days.
HDMI out? I wonder if they're going to simulate NTSC TV artifacts such as colour bleed and dot crawl. These artifacts are important for correctly rendering NES games according to their original design [0].
They probably have an emulator already built, given that they sell NES Virtual Console games & have quite a history having ported their games to various platforms (goes as far back as the Game Boy Color I believe with having ported Super Mario Bros. - that is over 16 years ago).
Reimplemented, not ported. They wrote it from scratch, using innovative techniques to get the smooth side scrolling that was supported by hardware in consoles.
Back in the day nearly every "port" was a full reimplementation, from the code to custom graphics and sound. Such are the perils of writing to bare metal.
There are lots of ports from the 8-bit home computer era which don't have this problem. See for example, the number of ZX Spectrum ports to the Amstrad CPC machines.
Commander Keen was an impressive achievement for the time, but it did not have console quality smooth scrolling. It ran at only 35fps, not the 60fps of the NES Mario games.
The earliest (better than) console smooth scrolling PC game I can think of is Monster Bash, which runs at 70fps.
They're releasing with 30 games, and although they don't say it explicitly reading between the lines there's no mention of being able to install more, so they don't need a generic emulation for the 700-ish NES games that were released.
The traditional game console solution for PAL consoles was to just have letterboxing with the extra 100 lines blank, with everything vertically squashed a little. Games usually didn't compensate for the lower framerate, so just ran slower.
PAL console gaming was a GREAT experience, as you can imagine.
Things got better from the Dreamcast onwards as they could software switch to 525 line / 60Hz modes (usually with PAL encoded colour for composite video, except for the PS2 which used pure NTSC), and it's all now moot with HD.
The NES (and most early consoles) ran at 50/60fps, not 25/30fps. It achieved this by ignoring the PAL/NTSC spec and sending all the fields at the same polarity instead of alternating odd/even fields. This halves the resolution but gives you double framerate progressive scan video, which is a good tradeoff for games.
Those video flaws are not important, as proven by the existence of the PlayChoice-10, an arcade machine which played NES games with high quality RGB video.
Most younger persons might not care about this, but some are buying dedicated video hardware like the XRGB Framemeister to emulate the picture that you had back then on old CRT TV sets. (scanlines etc)
I don't like the sharp and blocky video you see today on modern LCDs when using old consoles. I also don't like the video filters that some emulators use to make the games not look too pixelated.
I just want it to look approximately (emulating it perfectly is probably out of scope for this price) as it did back in the 80ties. Hope Nintendo provides an option for scanlines.
I know, I use it myself. It's just isn't that user friendly especially if you use many different consoles because you'll often require different settings.
For some consoles that output different types of resolutions depending on the game you'll also need to change the settings on a per game basis.
Slight rant, but I wish these CRT simulators could simulate decent CRTs, they always seem to emulate really shit ones with huge curvature and really exaggerated scanlines etc, can't they emulate a nice Trinitron TV or something. They always just look fake to me.
(Yeah, I know there is possibly a bit of memory cheating, plus I used RGB SCART for the later period of CRT use that avoided the composite problems).
The ones I've seen included with MAME (or maybe it was a MAME front end) are pretty easy to configure to get the look of a nice CRT display. Maybe because of the focus on emulating high-end arcade hardware instead of the sort of television set that the typical NES was plugged into.
The whole frame, no. But due to the persistence of phosphors, any pixel which weren't re-excited in a replacement frame would have some amount of "ghosting" while the phosphors "cool down" from the previous frame. The effect is more pronounced on black backgrounds, and nonexistent on white backgrounds, with other colors being heavily dependent on the contents of previous frames. Higher-quality CRTs also tended to have less persistence (my VT 520, for example, has virtually no visible persistence).
It's been a while, but IIRC higan has a filter that just simulates NTSC composite effects without simulating the whole CRT. It's especially useful for things like SNES pseudo-alpha transparency (which relies on exploiting NTSC composite artifacting).
Honestly most (if not all) retro gamers don't feel that way. We prefer to see the actual pixels. The XRGB Framemeister upscaler is the most popular way to play retro games on modern TVs, and it provides a visual experience about equivalent to an emulator on a PC. The other popular way is to use an RGB monitor. Both provide pretty darn close to pixel perfect rendering.
I've never met a single gamer into old games that prefers the artifacts the old, cruddy CRTs we used to use had. We're all quite relieved they're gone, to be honest.
Speak for yourself. I prefer to have accurate rendering, especially for something like pseudo transparency which straight pixel displays always get wrong.
But I challenge the notion of "accurate rendering". Only America had crappy TVs. Europe had SCART and Japan had RGB21. While America was suffering through a blurry mess, everyone else had beautiful RGB output. I strongly contest the idea that developers "intended" games to look that way.
And my arcade monitor is not a good CRT at all (sadly...). Good CRTs look like this: http://imgur.com/a/Ad0pe In the last photo of the fighting game, that "grid" pattern in the back of the meters would look like the Sonic waterfall on bad CRTs, but is clearly defined on good ones
There are some CRT specific effects. For example the black shadow under the ninja in this video should be rapidly moving back and forth between each character to accomplish a transparency effect. But most modern TVs can't do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYsa8NQICnY
(For the record good upscalers fix that shadow effect.)
My point is that the article that started this thread that claims old games are supposed to look like this http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png is just utterly not true. It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.
It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.
You didn't actually read the article, did you? Look at the image right after it [0]. Look at the shading on Samus and the pillar nearby. This image clearly demonstrates that the original artwork was designed to achieve a dithering-like effect due to the presence of colour bleeding in the signal. This effect occurs even on higher-end CRTs. What you are complaining about is the bloom effect of the phosphors, a separate phenomenon.
Yes I read the article and many, many more like it. This myth has been perpetuated for decades now. It's like the NASA pen and the Cosmonaut pencil or we only use 10% of our brain. A myth that people commonly believe because it just sort of feels true based on their own experience.
The article specifically talks about CRT televisions with NTSC signals. So he's clearly an American. He also talks about how his shader was created to recreate what games looked like in his youth. That's fine. But that's his youth (and incidentally, my youth too). The problem is to suggest that how the typical American saw video games at home in the 80s and 90s is somehow representative and correct and what the developers were shooting for.
Have you ever seen an old video game on a very good CRT? Perhaps a Sony PVM or BVM? Even some of the nicer consumer Trinitrons will do. Color bleed is practically nonexistent, and it's very easy to clearly make out every single pixel the artist laid down. I included several examples in my previous reply. This would be true of 80s and 90s arcade games, most of which got ported to home consoles. It's also true of 80s Commodore 64 and Atari computer games, 90s PC, Mac and Amiga games, and basically every game played in the 90s in Europe, as they've had proper SCART with analog RGB since the 70s.
Now to be fair, the NES natively outputs composite video straight from the PPU. So you could maybe argue the case for this specific console. But every console since in the SD generation output s-video, RGB and/or component.
In your original comment you said "these artifacts are important for correctly rendering NES games according to their original design." But Nintendo released an arcade version of the NES called the PlayChoice 10 which completely lacked any of those artifacts. Metroid was released on the PlayChoice 10, and so in that environment there would be no "shading" caused by dot crawl and bleed in the background tiles.
EDIT: and to credit the article, he does state he is trying to recreate the look of his 80s TV. So I was a little harsh on this particular article. But these articles still bug me, because they lead to comments like yours where things like "according to their original design" get said.
Now to be fair, the NES natively outputs composite video straight from the PPU
The NES is the only console I have been talking about. It is the topic of the original article. I am well aware that this is not how any other console works.
Given the relatively poor screen quality of the Gameboy (my memory is foggy, but seems to remember ghosting and generally bad refresh), I wonder about creating an E-Ink Gameboy Classic...
While it's a GBA clone instead of the original Game Boy, there's the K1 GBA that can play original carts and has a cartridge that will accept a microSD for roms. I was really interested in them a couple of years ago but then I found emulators for my PSP.
I'm amazed at the ridiculous pricing for these games. On Wii U, all of these classic games would cost $5 each. $60 for a physical device and 30 games is extremely generous by Nintendo standards.
TBH 5$ is pretty fair pricing- average user is only going to buy one, maybe two NES ports, and serious retro buy-all-700 games people already have it all. It's only overpriced by maybe a dollar or two.
I've always found the virtual console a place where Nintendo could do better. I want to buy a license to a game and have it follow me as I upgrade to new (Nintendo-made) hardware.
For example, I have Kid Icarus via the Wii Virtual Console, and Mega Man on the 3DS Virtual Console. Why can't I play those in both places? Why do I have to pay _another_ $5 to play Mega Man on the Wii U? Especially now that Nintendo's online account stuff has shaped up to be pretty good. I'm not even sure if I can play the Wii-purchased Kid Icarus through my Wii U… or do I have to load up the Wii virtual console and then download it onto there? (That I haven't checked.)
I don't need all 700 games to be happy, but for $5 per game — for something that we know is basically just an emulator/ROM, I feel like I shouldn't get penalized for continuing up the upgrade path within the company.
The Wii U shop knows what VC games you've already purchased for Wii, because it offers upgrade pricing for most of them. And there are a few games out there that do cross-buy between the Wii U and 3DS shops.
The multiple purchase issue is a strategic/marketing issue, not a technical one.
Weird. I thought it was ridiculously high. But I also think $5 per game is crazy high. Especially considering how easy/cheap it is to make something like a retro-pi
Maybe digital-as-the-status-quo has made me think that creating physical items is so extraordinary that they command a premium price. I'm not even one of those people who cares about owning a physical copy of a game (in the sense of how Kickstarter projects will promise physical media as a stretch goal). And apparently, Nintendo has made a killing with their Amiibo toys, which is even more bizarre to me than the recent Pokemon Go craze.
But a cute little Nintendo replica? I would never buy one just as a nostalgic paperweight. But if it plays games, even if it may not have much expandability or interoperability with Internet systems? That's very appealing to the kid in me, even though my Wii U has been collecting dust for the past year now.
I didn't even think about the actual physical cost to create one of these. I was just thinking that it's mostly IP.
When I order something off Kickstarter, I don't care at all about physical copies, because I just won't use them. If I get a book/comic/etc that's not readable on my tablet, I just won't end up reading it. It's not that I'm against physical media, but it's so convenient for me to go digital that I just won't end up using physical
That was my first thought too. They're trying to get the long tail on these games that have essentially made back their cost over the past few decades. If it wasn't for this effort, they'd all be abandonware. I wonder if Nintendo will try to pull off the same crap Disney does when copyright expires on their games and iconic characters.
Huh. I think many of us just consider $60 to be "impulse buy, plug into my display at work in case I need a break" territory, where the last thing I need is another PROJECT. I'd never even consider building an emulator.
The Wii Classic Controller is most certainly wired, just it's wired to the wireless Wii Remote. You may be thinking of the Wii U Pro Controller which is fully wireless.
I wouldn't mind if it were just the fact that the Wii Classic Controller is wired. What bugs me is that the cable is really, really short: only long enough to run into something that you'd be expected to hold in your lap. Of course, that's exactly the use case it was designed for, so it made sense in that context. But it causes problems when you then want to plug it into something several feet away, like, say, the console.
The Wii Classic Controller is wired. The port on the front of this console is the same port on the bottom of a Wii Remote, which makes it pseudo-wireless in a way, but there's no Wii Remote in this case so it is just wired.
Yup, it's I2C with a 1394-ish connector (which makers have taken advantage of before), so it is very easy to implement... with the added side benefit of selling a few of the standalone controllers for Wii[U] virtual console use.
The console itself is probably a simple ARM chip - the BCM2835 in the first-gen Raspberry Pi would work perfectly, among tons of other possible SoC's. It will probably be under a plastic blob, but someone will find out sooner or later ;)
I'm really interested in the architecture of this thing. I'm guessing ARM running a NES emulator (rather than ports of the games), since they've got such great experience doing that on the 3DS.
If it's hackable, this would be a fantastic gadget. As a project box alone, it looks really pretty. HDMI out, USB power, and controller inputs make it really appealing. Depending on headers and connectivity inside, hacking a USB port or SD slot for expansion would be a fun project.
There are already Wii controller accessory to USB adapters available. And at $9.99 for the controllers, those could be fun too (to be used separately on other platforms, like the RPi).
That's not to say I won't be getting one purely to play as intended, but I would be interested in picking one up to hack.
I'm leaning towards ARM just because Nintendo already has a huge supply chain and manufacturing complex geared towards this architecture.
They're extensively bought into the ARM ecosystem. They already have a NES emulator on ARM (3DS NES Virtual Console). ARM SoCs are so incredibly cheap (look at the low volume RasPI with its HDMI output and now WiFI). The Nintendo hardware engineering teams have extensive ARM experience. There will undoubtedly be a business requirement for platform security (wrt the bundled games). This is, from Nintendo's perspective, a solved problem on their portable console platform.
Over a long period and at high volumes, sure - a NES hardware clone might make for a cheaper BoM. But that's not where the cost is here. It's in the engineering, initial supply chain and manufacturing startup. Sticking with ARM keeps all of those costs down.
Build a lightweight OS (based on the 3DS/2DS OS), able to run the same the same binaries, with the same libraries and you've cut out a massive amount of software engineering work and expense.
Ship some stripped down 2DS/3DS hardware, and you've saved a lot of hardware engineering work and expense.
I'd actually be surprised if it wasn't extremely close to the 3DS/2DS in terms of architecture, minus the IO, battery and secondary ARM CPU.
15 years ago at a dodgy trade show booth in Vegas, I bought a $25 Nintendo clone controller that had been retrofitted to contain the guts needed to play a few dozen classic NES games that were pre-loaded.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't emulation, but actual miniaturized Nintendo-clone hardware running the original (pirated) ROMs. I have a hunch this isn't emulating, but is instead playing "on the metal." The hardware (as the article mentions) is easy to clone, and as such should be insanely cheap to produce in volume.
The profit margins on these consoles is going to be great.
Eh, these things are hit and miss. I have one of those $20 clones that accepts the original cartridges. Performance is pretty bad; the sound is miserable.
This video talks about the different approaches that existing mini-retrogame systems have used. Some use emulation, some actually have the NES hardware on a chip.
Get yourself a Pi3[0] + nes30 controller[1]. If you're really going for an authentic look you can get a NES-style case for the Pi too[2]. Pi3 even has built in-bluetooth so it should work wirelessly with the Nes30 controller out of the box.
Castlevania III in the US uses the MMC-5 mapper[0] which is relatively complicated as far as mappers go. Most modern emulators have no issue with it, but many cheap Nintendo-on-a-Chip clones have it[1]. Castlevania III in Japan used expansion audio through connectors that were not available in the US, and thus has enhanced sound compared to the US counterpart.
Emulation systems, such as the Retron 5, deal with Castlevania III with no issue.
[1] To see a common NES clone struggle and die in the process of playing Castlevania III, see this video from Satoshi Matrix: https://youtu.be/OnPv1xHsbvg?t=13m56s
I'm amazed noone here has mentioned RetroPie[1]. A model B Raspberry Pi or even a Zero (if you can get one) should play NES games perfectly fine. You can get USB NES controller adapters pretty cheap or some knock-off USB NES controllers instead. I have a SNES-USB adapter for my setup that takes two SNES controllers.
I was thinking the same thing! Have this setup at home and it's awesome. I went ahead and paired a wireless PS3 controller to it and it really is great for NES, SNES, and PlayStation games especially.
> A model B Raspberry Pi or even a Zero (if you can get one) should play NES games perfectly fine
Last time I tried this, some of my favorite games were super laggy (Yoshi's Island, Super Mario RPG) presumably due to having to emulate additional processors (Super FX, SA-1, etc.)
edit: Oh wait, this is NES we are talking about. Nevermind, I'm sure NES runs fine. I'll leave my comment up for anyone wanting to talk about SNES emulation.
Is there anything particularly special about this? There are hundreds of different ways to play emulated games for free. I burned a disk with an NES emulator and roms for my Dreamcast 15 years ago and it was great. However the big deal about this is that Nintendo is finally making a legitiment way to buy/play the old games at a reasonable price which they have never done before.
I'd personally recommend Lakka[1] (Kodi's distro modded to boot straight to Retroarch) over it, having used both. Worth it for fewer problems with controller mappings, if nothing else. Boots to a usable GUI in ~3-4s on a Pi2, which is nice. If you're using a Pi it's easy to try both before deciding, so may as well check it out.
Anyone in the market for hardware, I've found that the abilities of various devices tend to be overstated. Pi2 was in fact good enough for close-to-perfect NES, almost good enough for perfect SNES (fine for many games if you can tolerate the occasional slowdown or audio glitches), could play Mario64 acceptably but pretty much no other N64 games. Bizarrely decent at Playstation.
I'd imagine the Pi3 is pulls off SNES very well, just judging from the specs, though I don't have one yet. Be aware that these games will not look right without beefier hardware that can handle CRT shaders to (sort-of) correctly fuzzy-up the image. So, not a Pi. I now run Lakka on an Asus chromebox, which was about double the price of a Pi with a decent power adapter and not-hideous case, but can do the CRT shader thing and handles later consoles much, much better. Emulation on x86 tends to be more stable and better supported (faster) in general, so know you'll be on second-class (though rapidly improving!) platform if you go ARM.
Try out several controllers before settling. I found that the easiest solution (XBox360) failed my usual test of Punch Out and Super Mario. Couldn't block or dodge worth a damn in Punch Out (unsurprising given the 360's Dpad's reputation) and kept running into bottomless pits in Mario (I found switching between the "A" and "B" face buttons to be too slow). The 360 controller made it feel like the emulator input was lagging, but it in fact wasn't. PS3 controller works well for me. Wii Classic Controller Pro is even better, but I have yet to find a to-USB adapter that isn't messed up in one way or another—last one I tried would periodically register a bunch of wild analog stick input for no obvious reason, making it useless for N64 and Playstation. A big Retroarch-specific benefit of a PS3 or Wii Classic Controller is that you can use their home/menu buttons to bounce to the Retroarch menu, saving you from configuring a button combo for that—IIRC the 360 controller wouldn't let me use its home button for that purpose.
Biggest hurdle you're likely to run into is that it expects "correct" roms/discs and won't auto-generate game lists with its Scan functionality if the hash doesn't match what it wants. You may find you've got some impure dumps. Also, said scanning isn't working for all systems yet, though for most of the biggies it's fine. You can manually create "playlists" but it's kind of a pain. Likely you'll be OK, but if you scan, say, your N64 directory with 20 roms in it and only 3 show up... well, that's why. Get correct roms or make the list manually.
Getting wireless set up on it is a PITA, unfortunately. You can plug in a USB stick full of games but you won't have access to its online cores (=system emulators) updating functionality. I'd recommend Ethernet if you can manage it.
The best parts are the above-average, very responsive menu and that all the cores speak to a unified I/O API (libretro) which smooths out most of the usual problems with multi-emulator systems.
> (Kodi's distro modded to boot straight to Retroarch)
A little pedantic, but Lakka is based on OpenELEC (and may have switched to LibreELEC by now). OpenELEC/LibreELEC are buildroot based OSs that boot straight into Kodi. Neither are affiliated with the Kodi project - but the devs get along and communicate.
100% correct, my mistake. I've not run Kodi, but I used a mix of Kodi and OpenELEC docs/forums setting up my Chromebox for Lakka, so I tend to confuse the two. I should have googled it first.
> could play Mario64 acceptably but pretty much no other N64 games
That's a problem with the emulator, not the hardware. I have a work-in-progress Mupen64Plus fork that can play all N64 games at full speed or better on the Pi 2 with only minor occasional slowdowns (that should all be fixable). The problem is that the emulator plugins were all designed for GL 1.x era fixed function hardware, which is very different from what you need to make software run well on tiled architectures like the VideoCore IV. It's not easy to get them running—I had to add an SSA-based optimizing shader compiler, for example—but it all ends up working out fine in the end.
I would like to try running N64 games on even cheaper hardware like the C.H.I.P. at some point. I think they have a good chance at running at full speed.
The biggest problem with the Raspberry Pi for this kind of stuff is that the software, which mostly consists of lightly optimized ports of old emulators written for Windows, holds the hardware back. If you compare instructions-per-clock of CPUs and fill rates of console GPUs from that era with the relevant hardware on even cheap modern mobile SoCs, the latter blow the former away. It's just that the games of that era pushed the hardware to its limits, while the emulators on the Pi don't even come close.
Yes, there are a bunch of ways to play emulated NES games. Retropie is great. A PSP and emulator is great if you want portable, or "8 bit video game consoles" are available for less than $10 with many games. (And varying build quality of the devices).
But this is official, with licenced legit games from Nintendo, so some people prefer that.
The default RetroPie installation is notoriously laggy[1] when it comes to NES/SNES games. Some of the issues have only very recently been patched by enthusiasts:
the snes emulator on retropie, last time i used it, didnt render music properly, in that every time there was a glissando or vibrato, it would get stuck on the flat tone, making final fantasy vi sound awful. i ended up using another setup for my playthrough but i was disappointed, i sill havent found a decent use case for my rpi. anyway hope they updated that emulator.
This would probably work great as a Raspberry Pi case. Too bad the connectors on the front aren't USB, although I'd probably use Bluetooth for controllers anyway.
267 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadNot saying the classics don't stand the test of time, but some of those old games are better as a memory.
But my cousin got Herzog Zwei (1989, Sega Genesis) working on an emulator, and we have a little duel when I visit. Best game ever. :)
https://youtu.be/C19GSXp246M
https://twitter.com/NintendoAUNZ/status/753560206760484864/p...
Most of SNES games have aged much better than their NES counterparts, Super Metroid, Zelda, Chrono Trigger are still terrific games that I could play even today, while I agree that most NES games feel too old.
I can't entirely disagree.
For context, my first console was an Intellivision, so, no, this is not because my first console was a SNES. I did own one for a while... in the early 21st century, long after the PS2 was established.
I think some of it is just that the limitations of the medium were just so shocking prior to that. The Atari era basically couldn't have text; every text you see on the 2600 is freakishly expensive. The Nintendo era was still counting every letter. The SNES era may still be terribly constrained by modern standards, but at least you could make pictures that were recognizable, play recognizable sounds, use text without too much fear, include more variations in play without too much effort, etc. There's a handful of games prior to that that work miracles with the resources they have (Super Mario 3 isn't "just" a classic, it's legitimately amazing for the hardware).
I'd point out that even the people putatively writing Indie games with "old school aesthetics" almost never hold themselves to the limitations of the Nintendo era or before. There are some games that come reasonably close to SNES aesthetics, though.
Would it really have been that much extra effort to make the console backwards compatible?
The beautiful thing about his console is that for the price of a new Nintendo game you're getting the console and 30 games, without any hassle (swapping cartridges etc.).
It's certainly a compromise, but a very enticing one.
I hope (and assume) it could be updated somehow though e.g. usb or micro sd
http://nerdist.com/we-blow-into-video-game-cartridges-becaus...
http://mentalfloss.com/article/12589/did-blowing-nintendo-ca...
Depends on the cartridge. Any of the ones with a battery save (like Zelda or Final Fantasy) need to be opened up, have the welded in battery clipped off the board, have a CR2032 socket soldered on instead, and then put a new battery in and reassemble.
It's a LOT of pain to get a NES cart with a dead battery working again. That's probably why they opted not to put a slot in this thing -- many people's dusty old carts are dead, and not knowing any better, they'd blame the new console.
Then again, when I was 12, my elders we're a very different set of folks.
And while overall most NES games didn't use a battery, many of the most popular ones (many of the ones included in this thing, in fact) do need a working battery. Final Fantasy, both zeldas, startropics, tecmo bowl, crystallis, kirby's adventure...
Are you thinking of some other game?
Depends if it's a NES on a chip type system like most clones, or if it's something like an ARM SoC device running an emulator[1]. If it's the former it would be possible with just space issues for the slot, the latter would be quite hard, certainly more trouble than worth for a cheap novelty device.
[1] It uses Wii controllers and has save states so it seems a bit more than the average clone at least.
Oh well, I'll probably buy one to play games with my kids, most mainstream games today are too complicated to learn and I don't really find them fun despite how technically amazing they are.
The 3 and 5 year old also love newer games like Minecraft (the 5 Y/O is finally starting to enjoy building, instead of just flying around with a diamond sword and a bucket of lava f'in shit up), and my 7 year old plays a lot of NBA 2k16, but they are in love with the classics right now.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR2emUs-Fj8
It won't work for retro-gaming, but it's a possible path forward for gun games on modern consoles.
Yes you should be able to, but no you probably can't
It should include everything needed - two controllers and a power supply FFS.
Not getting the controllers to me is a separate issue, but it does include one, and as far as I can tell, only the original NES, 30 years ago, ever came with more than one controller.
If my memory serves me correctly, my SNES came with two, but I certainly believe that was the last offering from Nintendo that did. Later bundles might not have included the additional controller, though.
I was frustrated that some Nintendo portable consoles don't come with an AC adapter, until a few years in, I had bought a couple of special edition consoles and realised I've got three Nintendo DS chargers. Their adapter design has been stable for many years, so only first-timers actually need to buy a charger.
I suspect the NES mini will ship with a bundle via the official Nintendo store that will include an AC adapter for those in need of one. They'll also likely do a two-controller option too. Their bundles are really appealing for the portable consoles.
I don't think any console ships with two controllers unless it's part of a bundle or special edition these days.
Shame they used Tecmo Bowl - is far inferior to Super Bowl.
[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...
The earliest (better than) console smooth scrolling PC game I can think of is Monster Bash, which runs at 70fps.
(PAL tvs had 100 more lines and refreshed a little lower 25, vs NTSC's 30 frames per second)
Seems like it would be a pain to make that work. Knowing the pain of PAL <-> NTSC tv conversion.
PAL console gaming was a GREAT experience, as you can imagine.
Things got better from the Dreamcast onwards as they could software switch to 525 line / 60Hz modes (usually with PAL encoded colour for composite video, except for the PS2 which used pure NTSC), and it's all now moot with HD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUI5xFEW_tg
They show more graphics at the top and bottom, probably nothing that affects actual gameplay, but it's nice it's not just black regions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayChoice-10
I don't like the sharp and blocky video you see today on modern LCDs when using old consoles. I also don't like the video filters that some emulators use to make the games not look too pixelated.
I just want it to look approximately (emulating it perfectly is probably out of scope for this price) as it did back in the 80ties. Hope Nintendo provides an option for scanlines.
The built in upscalers in these TVs aren't designed for consoles and will mangle the video output into garbage.
For some consoles that output different types of resolutions depending on the game you'll also need to change the settings on a per game basis.
So it's only something for enthusiasts.
(Yeah, I know there is possibly a bit of memory cheating, plus I used RGB SCART for the later period of CRT use that avoided the composite problems).
I've never met a single gamer into old games that prefers the artifacts the old, cruddy CRTs we used to use had. We're all quite relieved they're gone, to be honest.
Of course, that was most certainly intended, and the effect could be seen on any CRT (afaik).
And my arcade monitor is not a good CRT at all (sadly...). Good CRTs look like this: http://imgur.com/a/Ad0pe In the last photo of the fighting game, that "grid" pattern in the back of the meters would look like the Sonic waterfall on bad CRTs, but is clearly defined on good ones
There are some CRT specific effects. For example the black shadow under the ninja in this video should be rapidly moving back and forth between each character to accomplish a transparency effect. But most modern TVs can't do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYsa8NQICnY
(For the record good upscalers fix that shadow effect.)
My point is that the article that started this thread that claims old games are supposed to look like this http://i.imgur.com/Pq2Yra4.png is just utterly not true. It's a terrible myth that someone who is misinformed started.
You didn't actually read the article, did you? Look at the image right after it [0]. Look at the shading on Samus and the pillar nearby. This image clearly demonstrates that the original artwork was designed to achieve a dithering-like effect due to the presence of colour bleeding in the signal. This effect occurs even on higher-end CRTs. What you are complaining about is the bloom effect of the phosphors, a separate phenomenon.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/TpAc9Cn.png
The article specifically talks about CRT televisions with NTSC signals. So he's clearly an American. He also talks about how his shader was created to recreate what games looked like in his youth. That's fine. But that's his youth (and incidentally, my youth too). The problem is to suggest that how the typical American saw video games at home in the 80s and 90s is somehow representative and correct and what the developers were shooting for.
Have you ever seen an old video game on a very good CRT? Perhaps a Sony PVM or BVM? Even some of the nicer consumer Trinitrons will do. Color bleed is practically nonexistent, and it's very easy to clearly make out every single pixel the artist laid down. I included several examples in my previous reply. This would be true of 80s and 90s arcade games, most of which got ported to home consoles. It's also true of 80s Commodore 64 and Atari computer games, 90s PC, Mac and Amiga games, and basically every game played in the 90s in Europe, as they've had proper SCART with analog RGB since the 70s.
Now to be fair, the NES natively outputs composite video straight from the PPU. So you could maybe argue the case for this specific console. But every console since in the SD generation output s-video, RGB and/or component.
In your original comment you said "these artifacts are important for correctly rendering NES games according to their original design." But Nintendo released an arcade version of the NES called the PlayChoice 10 which completely lacked any of those artifacts. Metroid was released on the PlayChoice 10, and so in that environment there would be no "shading" caused by dot crawl and bleed in the background tiles.
EDIT: and to credit the article, he does state he is trying to recreate the look of his 80s TV. So I was a little harsh on this particular article. But these articles still bug me, because they lead to comments like yours where things like "according to their original design" get said.
The NES is the only console I have been talking about. It is the topic of the original article. I am well aware that this is not how any other console works.
Also I want to see a Nintendo Classic Gameboy once. Please!
Edit: if only it had River City Ransom...
But yeah, 60$ for the kit? Crike that's cheap.
For example, I have Kid Icarus via the Wii Virtual Console, and Mega Man on the 3DS Virtual Console. Why can't I play those in both places? Why do I have to pay _another_ $5 to play Mega Man on the Wii U? Especially now that Nintendo's online account stuff has shaped up to be pretty good. I'm not even sure if I can play the Wii-purchased Kid Icarus through my Wii U… or do I have to load up the Wii virtual console and then download it onto there? (That I haven't checked.)
I don't need all 700 games to be happy, but for $5 per game — for something that we know is basically just an emulator/ROM, I feel like I shouldn't get penalized for continuing up the upgrade path within the company.
The multiple purchase issue is a strategic/marketing issue, not a technical one.
But a cute little Nintendo replica? I would never buy one just as a nostalgic paperweight. But if it plays games, even if it may not have much expandability or interoperability with Internet systems? That's very appealing to the kid in me, even though my Wii U has been collecting dust for the past year now.
When I order something off Kickstarter, I don't care at all about physical copies, because I just won't use them. If I get a book/comic/etc that's not readable on my tablet, I just won't end up reading it. It's not that I'm against physical media, but it's so convenient for me to go digital that I just won't end up using physical
The console itself is probably a simple ARM chip - the BCM2835 in the first-gen Raspberry Pi would work perfectly, among tons of other possible SoC's. It will probably be under a plastic blob, but someone will find out sooner or later ;)
If it's hackable, this would be a fantastic gadget. As a project box alone, it looks really pretty. HDMI out, USB power, and controller inputs make it really appealing. Depending on headers and connectivity inside, hacking a USB port or SD slot for expansion would be a fun project.
There are already Wii controller accessory to USB adapters available. And at $9.99 for the controllers, those could be fun too (to be used separately on other platforms, like the RPi).
That's not to say I won't be getting one purely to play as intended, but I would be interested in picking one up to hack.
Really surprised people expect it's anything more than one of these but with official licensing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System_...
Simple ARM chip + software emulator means you could just do everything one one chip without headaches. Plus it'll likely be cheaper.
It could be software emulation, but that's slightly less reliable, and has a boot time which may not be negligible.
They're extensively bought into the ARM ecosystem. They already have a NES emulator on ARM (3DS NES Virtual Console). ARM SoCs are so incredibly cheap (look at the low volume RasPI with its HDMI output and now WiFI). The Nintendo hardware engineering teams have extensive ARM experience. There will undoubtedly be a business requirement for platform security (wrt the bundled games). This is, from Nintendo's perspective, a solved problem on their portable console platform.
Over a long period and at high volumes, sure - a NES hardware clone might make for a cheaper BoM. But that's not where the cost is here. It's in the engineering, initial supply chain and manufacturing startup. Sticking with ARM keeps all of those costs down.
Build a lightweight OS (based on the 3DS/2DS OS), able to run the same the same binaries, with the same libraries and you've cut out a massive amount of software engineering work and expense.
Ship some stripped down 2DS/3DS hardware, and you've saved a lot of hardware engineering work and expense.
I'd actually be surprised if it wasn't extremely close to the 3DS/2DS in terms of architecture, minus the IO, battery and secondary ARM CPU.
Raspberry Pi passed 6 million last year.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't emulation, but actual miniaturized Nintendo-clone hardware running the original (pirated) ROMs. I have a hunch this isn't emulating, but is instead playing "on the metal." The hardware (as the article mentions) is easy to clone, and as such should be insanely cheap to produce in volume.
The profit margins on these consoles is going to be great.
That would be true if it was an emulator or "bare metal". The beauty of IP!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQNEvcHVuM
[0]https://www.pi-supply.com/product/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-new...
[1]http://www.nes30.com/
[2]https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/lego-nespi-case/
Im also thinking might be able to use authentic controller but cut of the connector and instead wire directly to the Pi's GPIO.
All the games listed with it are available to buy for the 3DS, and the 3DS already supports the "save state" feature.
One notable missing game is Castlevania III which apparently gives emulators trouble.
Emulation systems, such as the Retron 5, deal with Castlevania III with no issue.
[0] http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/MMC5
[1] To see a common NES clone struggle and die in the process of playing Castlevania III, see this video from Satoshi Matrix: https://youtu.be/OnPv1xHsbvg?t=13m56s
[1] - https://retropie.org.uk/
Last time I tried this, some of my favorite games were super laggy (Yoshi's Island, Super Mario RPG) presumably due to having to emulate additional processors (Super FX, SA-1, etc.)
edit: Oh wait, this is NES we are talking about. Nevermind, I'm sure NES runs fine. I'll leave my comment up for anyone wanting to talk about SNES emulation.
Retropie is amazing, but there are a lot of emulator options available, and some don't seem to work out of the box.
http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5428
Anyone in the market for hardware, I've found that the abilities of various devices tend to be overstated. Pi2 was in fact good enough for close-to-perfect NES, almost good enough for perfect SNES (fine for many games if you can tolerate the occasional slowdown or audio glitches), could play Mario64 acceptably but pretty much no other N64 games. Bizarrely decent at Playstation.
I'd imagine the Pi3 is pulls off SNES very well, just judging from the specs, though I don't have one yet. Be aware that these games will not look right without beefier hardware that can handle CRT shaders to (sort-of) correctly fuzzy-up the image. So, not a Pi. I now run Lakka on an Asus chromebox, which was about double the price of a Pi with a decent power adapter and not-hideous case, but can do the CRT shader thing and handles later consoles much, much better. Emulation on x86 tends to be more stable and better supported (faster) in general, so know you'll be on second-class (though rapidly improving!) platform if you go ARM.
Try out several controllers before settling. I found that the easiest solution (XBox360) failed my usual test of Punch Out and Super Mario. Couldn't block or dodge worth a damn in Punch Out (unsurprising given the 360's Dpad's reputation) and kept running into bottomless pits in Mario (I found switching between the "A" and "B" face buttons to be too slow). The 360 controller made it feel like the emulator input was lagging, but it in fact wasn't. PS3 controller works well for me. Wii Classic Controller Pro is even better, but I have yet to find a to-USB adapter that isn't messed up in one way or another—last one I tried would periodically register a bunch of wild analog stick input for no obvious reason, making it useless for N64 and Playstation. A big Retroarch-specific benefit of a PS3 or Wii Classic Controller is that you can use their home/menu buttons to bounce to the Retroarch menu, saving you from configuring a button combo for that—IIRC the 360 controller wouldn't let me use its home button for that purpose.
[1] http://www.lakka.tv
Getting wireless set up on it is a PITA, unfortunately. You can plug in a USB stick full of games but you won't have access to its online cores (=system emulators) updating functionality. I'd recommend Ethernet if you can manage it.
The best parts are the above-average, very responsive menu and that all the cores speak to a unified I/O API (libretro) which smooths out most of the usual problems with multi-emulator systems.
A little pedantic, but Lakka is based on OpenELEC (and may have switched to LibreELEC by now). OpenELEC/LibreELEC are buildroot based OSs that boot straight into Kodi. Neither are affiliated with the Kodi project - but the devs get along and communicate.
That's a problem with the emulator, not the hardware. I have a work-in-progress Mupen64Plus fork that can play all N64 games at full speed or better on the Pi 2 with only minor occasional slowdowns (that should all be fixable). The problem is that the emulator plugins were all designed for GL 1.x era fixed function hardware, which is very different from what you need to make software run well on tiled architectures like the VideoCore IV. It's not easy to get them running—I had to add an SSA-based optimizing shader compiler, for example—but it all ends up working out fine in the end.
I would like to try running N64 games on even cheaper hardware like the C.H.I.P. at some point. I think they have a good chance at running at full speed.
The biggest problem with the Raspberry Pi for this kind of stuff is that the software, which mostly consists of lightly optimized ports of old emulators written for Windows, holds the hardware back. If you compare instructions-per-clock of CPUs and fill rates of console GPUs from that era with the relevant hardware on even cheap modern mobile SoCs, the latter blow the former away. It's just that the games of that era pushed the hardware to its limits, while the emulators on the Pi don't even come close.
But this is official, with licenced legit games from Nintendo, so some people prefer that.
http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5428
[1] I guess it depends on how sensitive you are to lag in the first place...
That said, I'd buy this thing from Nintendo if you could add games to it. I'd give them an extra $1 or $2 per game. Gotta have Tetris & RCR!
ps: no cartridge, no blow. sad ;)