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schnitzelstoat
The SNES version is one of the first games I ever remember playing. And I played it a lot.

I really love these articles.

flatiron
They really are the best. So I’m depth but at the same time very accessible.
lostgame
I still regularly play the insanely solid Saturn port practically every other day. What a solid title.
zyemuzu
The Saturn was a powerhouse for sprite based games, it's a console I'll keep playing as long as I'm able to buy the capacitors to repair them!
corysama
Saturn support is in progress for FPGA gaming. Not the real thing. But, a good second place fallback plan. https://www.reddit.com/r/MiSTerFPGA/comments/pmw6ld/saturn_m...
lostgame
It’s a shame the proprietary nature of the Dreamcast’s GD-ROMs makes it impractical for us to actually have a disc-based solution for Dreamcast support with official games.

As far as I can see, there’s no real solution to this?

0xcde4c3db
It's been ages since I've looked into this, so my memory is probably bad on the details, but my understanding is that GD-ROM is very close to standard CDs in most respects, and can even be read in some PC optical drives with the right procedure (which I think involved either hacked firmware or hot-swapping between a specially crafted CD-R and the GD-ROM, to trick the drive into reading the high-density area). The main CD interface that Sega used is an off-the-shelf Oak Technology chip, but not driven by stock firmware. The high-density area was in a second session that was not linked in the first session, but rather was at a fixed offset that the firmware knew to look for. The high-density area basically worked by spinning the disc at half the speed that would normally be used for the interface chip. Since the disc was recorded the same way, the signal coming off of it looks exactly like a regular CD signal (maybe with a bit worse SNR).
vernie
Just wondering why that's preferable to a flash-based optical disc emulator like the GDEMU?
markus_zhang
Love this Fabien guy. Every piece in in depth research on curious topics. Very entertaining.
nsxwolf
I always thought this effect looked janky, even on a CRT.
skhr0680
I think it shows how much raw computing power we have now and how much we take it for granted. “What do you mean it couldn’t rotate sprites? Why didn’t they just rotate the sprites?”
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peanut_worm
With how much work went into the sprites and animations for SF2 you would think the title screen would have got more scrutiny
skhr0680
The guy punching the other guy out is pretty iconic IMO
G3rn0ti
I must admit I did not know MAME is able to emulate the SNES. Does it run Genesis games, too? I only used MAME to run Neo Geo and other arcade games.
fredoralive
The MESS emulator was merged into MAME a few years ago so it gained non-arcade emulation.
Keyframe
My sweet dude, MAME can run IRIX even! For years i longed for an IRIX emulator and it was there all along. It's not oerfect of course, but MAME overall is just plain great.
eb0la
Thanks for the tip! I have somewhere in the basement Irix 5.x CDs and I would like to play a bit before trying to resurrect an old SGI Indigo
G3rn0ti
It works!

> mame megadrij -cart thunderforce_iv.md

I can finally play Thunderforce IV on my laptop. Seems to be the only emulator I know that is actually accurate enough. Kudos!

alberth
UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT A B START.

I miss unlock codes (and can’t believe I still remember this one).

alblue
It’s known as the Konami code, although it’s got BA Start at the end :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code

alberth
BA start, doh! My elementary age self will never forgive myself.
toast0
The SNES SF2 games have a similar-ish code for various things. I think the first release lets you enter a code to play the same character as both players, or disable special moves. Turbo has a special code to increase the turbo stars and you can also disable special codes.
reassembled
Before the Capcom logo and song finish playing on boot, enter the code: Down, R, Up, L, Y, B.

This enables both players in World Warrior to pick the same character.

Entering the same code in SF2 Turbo on the TURBO logo screen unlocks more game speed stars in the options.

737min
This was a great read. I highly recommend that “newer” programmers (used to multi-GHz, multi-GB, multi-core) read this and really try to understand the lessons of low-resource optimization.
kaidon
I love these so much. The attention to the detail. Digging in as deep as possible - but making the content accessible. Fantastic stuff. Evokes a lot of "Captain Dissillusion" vibes to me (which is a really, really good thing).