The dark tone of KotOR II's story has the hand of Chris Avellone all over it, similar themes were explored more in depth in Planescape Torment and even Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, but with a recognizably similar style. If you're not into that kind thing you might as well bail, its very much trying to bend Star Wars to its own ends rather than reproduce the feel of the OT.
That said I'm guessing you haven't met HK-47 yet because I don't see how you can not love that bag of bolts.
Well, that copy of "Wet" works. For some reason, my XBOX 360's disc drive is being noisy.
Gee, the previous owner did such a swell job taking care of this game.
The case is all dinged up, the disc was covered in white stuff, and the back of the disc has two scratches.
They must have been a really classy person.
Also, I forgot my Microsoft password and so did the 360. Oh, and Chrome did not save it.
After thinking for a while I finally remembered it.
I really get tired of this bullshit where devices "forget" passwords as a security measure.
Considering the content of this game, the white stuff is especially disturbing.
Oh, and to be honest, Mega Man 8 has really grown on me over the years. Definitely one of, if not the most unique entry in the Classic series. Just a shame about the voice acting. Would love a redub, but not the Symphony of the Night way, where they take out the old -- gotta preserver the cringe.
They can redub everything but that soul damaging mega man scream. Thats gotta stay. It wouldn't be the same game otherwise.
Oh, come now, you have to at least let the new voice try to top it...
And when/if they don't, you use the other one, and feature footage of the new attempts as part of a bonus feature.
It's been years since I played either, but I remember enjoying Mega Man & Bass more than Mega Man 8. Like, they borrowed all these assets from MM8, brought it over to an older/weaker system, and managed to make a better game out of it.
MM&B has been the hardest for me to get into: I'm not huge on playing on PC, I want to play in English, and the GBA is too zoomed in.
I think my wife hacked the SNES Classic, though, so maybe that will be an option when we get there in Mega Man Mayhem.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
In another "Yo dawg! We heard you like retro games..." moment, MVG demonstrates using a Xbox Series S as a Windows 95 game machine machine on top of DOS-BOX.
(This would work with Series X, of course, and even Xbox One to a much more limited degree given the hardware's age; but the big sticking point for me, personally, is the reliance on software rendering, which rules out using these things as MechWarrior Titanium Trilogy or TIE Fighter '95 solutions more or less.)
My HDMI video issue came back with the MiSTer. I sprayed some contact cleaner on it. That stuff goes everywhere. I will have to let the Mister dry off. I dabbed it off with a tissue.
It is supposed to be safe for electronics, but it is oily.
Think you said you had two. I'd be inclined to just reserve that one for permanent analog out to a CRT (assuming you have the analog board.) Even a small one can be fun at a desk.
Also good timing because composite/s-video support is now official, opening up a lot more options for usable CRTs. Especially annoying trying to find component on small consumer CRTs in the US.
In another "Yo dawg! We heard you like retro games..." moment, MVG demonstrates using a Xbox Series S as a Windows 95 game machine machine on top of DOS-BOX.
(This would work with Series X, of course, and even Xbox One to a much more limited degree given the hardware's age; but the big sticking point for me, personally, is the reliance on software rendering, which rules out using these things as MechWarrior Titanium Trilogy or TIE Fighter '95 solutions more or less.)
Pretty interesting, as getting Win98, Win95, and Win3.1 to work in something like VirtualBox is a bit tougher and the support not too great.
For some reason, those lines on the video disappeared for a while. So, I am not 100% this is a hardware issue with the MiSTer. I wish it had some kind of video diagnostic program.
Buying (what Microsoft's marketing department claims to be) the most powerful gaming console on the planet, and then using it to run games like Unreal and Interstate '76 is pretty hilarious, I'm not going to lie. If I didn't have a Steam Link that can pump video from my desktop I would be very tempted to buy whichever Xbox One-X1-X-Xtreme-Class-X-Model-XXX is the cheaper/older one specifically for use as an emulation/media box under the TV. UWP is a cancer on the PC, but it has been a pretty nice feature for modern Xbox consoles.
Also, the English fan translation of Tactics Ogre for the Sega Saturn has released. It looks like it supports the 4MB RAM cart for reducing loadtimes, which is nice. I don't know enough about the game to know what if any benefits the Saturn version has over the PS1 or SNES original, but I've been jonesing for an SRPG lately so it might be worth checking out.
Well, I tried the analog video on the MiSTer and the same line problem showed up. So, the hardware is damaged. I blame eBay. I have been having bad luck with used electronics.
The scaler chip is part of the DE-10 nano itself to be clear, not the I/O board. If you're seeing the same stuff on the HDMI port and VGA with vga_scaler, its probably that.
If you use original analog timings (vga_scaler=0), it should sidestep that broken scaler, in theory. But you're going to get something more like the original standard definition (240p) console resolutions, although you could easily up that to 480p with forced_scandoubler=1. That can look great either through some sort of CRT, or else a solid external upscaler like the retrotink.
Yes. I tried forced_scandoubler and the lines were gone. My monitor would not show it in 4:3. So, it is the scaler chip. I tried different scaling, but it didn't fix it. My TV may put it in 4:3. It has component and S video inputs. I could use the S video. I got the WiiU on component. Either that or bump the WiiU up to HDMI.
S-video is limited to standard definition (240p/480i), and 240p is usually interpreted weirdly by non-CRTs. 480p/scandoubled over component will work and be very playable, albeit blurry. Its not particularly ideal way to experience 240p games on an LCD.
If you don't already have a Retrotink 5x it may not be worth investing, when it costs more than even replacement de-10 nanos do these days. (Although its pretty sweet for your real hardware too, like the Wii.) CRTs meanwhile can often be picked up pretty cheap locally in the U.S. via facebook marketplace of craigslist, but it can take weeks of watching to find something, and even then it often leans that the obnoxiously large ones are the cheap/free. Its still a pretty cool experience seeing 240p graphics that way, I recommend trying it at least at some point, give some life to your defective de-10 if you can't get a return on ebay.
Using windows 98 without mouse support feels like a gimmick.
Also he's got the Series S exhaust vent jammed right up against that CRT...
Considering the state of RetroArch updates on UWP, I would expect mouse support to come next (and then the real gimmick will be using one of those older mice; someone already pointed out you can't use said PS/2 adapters because they're passive devices, whereas the console itself already supports KBAM provided you're in software supporting them).
Buying (what Microsoft's marketing department claims to be) the most powerful gaming console on the planet, and then using it to run games like Unreal and Interstate '76 is pretty hilarious, I'm not going to lie.
It is the most powerful video game console by virtue of the only way we can measure these things: the maximum ceiling of processing ability. "Practically" is something different, and even then, it only means it's the most powerful until it's replaced. It's the same way Sony informed us the PSFro was "the most powerful video game console in the world" at the time of its launch--it was in a measurable way, but it also relied on Sony (and publishers) patching software to actually use said hardware (and then inevitably more powerful hardware was released).
EDIT: Put in another way--Sony also called the PS5 "the fastest loading console on the planet", and it is measurably so. But there are games with slower loading, and thus longer load times, on PS5 than Xbox Series, so in actual practical terms, the fastest console on the planet doesn't always work as we'd expect. This is why studios like Digital Foundry have carved themselves out a very successful niche in technical analysis.
RetroArch is, of course, taking that hardware and deciding, "Actually, we're going to do literally all the work" instead of waiting for Sony (or Microsoft), in order to actually make use of the hardware SKU, and on Xbox (for the last ten years), there's a weird setting for it: no one's actually "hacked" an Xbox One or Xbox Series console, the way the Xbox 360 and all PlayStation consoles have been, and Microsoft opened up any console owner to basic development tools for a negligible fee, so long as they have a sufficiently modern Windows PC, which isn't a coincidence. MVG only commented on it briefly in that video, but we've seen Playstation emulation make better use of hardware acceleration via RetroArch, which specifically allows you to address classic Playstation things like floating point problems and wiggly textures--so you can potentially have a much better performing, but less authentic, emulation experience. An interesting trade-off, depending on what you're trying to do with PS1 and PS2 games.
I'm hoping we'll get something comparable for the DOS-BOX/Windows side. But 3D accelerator support is kind of a mess in that era; MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries literally doesn't work on all period PCs, much less in a Windows OS running on top of a distribution of DOS-BOX on a home console. The Titanium Trilogy is my own personal white whale for that reason, in that window where brute forcing solutions isn't ideal and the actual solutions isn't well represented in legacy support.
Crap. I need to get my repurposed Dell Office PC/MechWarrior 2 machine up and running again, I completely dismantled in preparation to move to my house. Maybe I could set it up next to my Neo Geo MVSX cabinet with the still missing plastic screen replacement.
But for everyone else, it's very nice that you can effectively just turn this one, play SimCity 2000 or TIE Fighter or Alpha Centauri, then turn it off and use it as an actual online 9th generation home console. So the buy in is a lot less intimidating than it could be.
It is the most powerful video game console by virtue of the only way we can measure these things: the maximum ceiling of processing ability. "Practically" is something different
Exactly. Series X is the most powerful, but optimization is important, so we've got some third-party games running better on the weaker PS5 because optimization for that platform is a higher priority.
It's the same way Sony informed us the PS4Pro was "the most powerful video game console in the world" at the time of its launch--it was in a measurable way, but it also relied on Sony (and publishers) patching software to actually use said hardware (and then inevitably more powerful hardware was released).
I mean, ... that's how mid-gen refreshes work? Just like the One X only truly shone when games were patched with enhancements for the One X.
Mid gen refreshes (in terms of increased horsepower) are a very new phenomenon with consoles. Before the PS4/Xbox One the closest thing we ever got to a console refresh (that made a console more powerful instead of just making it cheaper to manufacture) was probably the Sega CDX, or the Neptune (had the Neptune actually launched). Even that is arguable, since Genesis games played on a CDX didn't see any changes unless you specifically bought a Sega CD version of the same game. Even then a lot of the time the upgrade consisted of "It's still a Genesis game, only now it has CD quality music".
We had the PSX later on, but that was still just a PS2 at heart. It would have been interesting to have seen something like a "PS2 Pro" that added progressive scan to all games, or could do some sort of upscaling (you can force this with GSM now, but its not compatible with a lot of games). I bought a 40" HDTV toward the end of that generation and it was pretty wild seeing the differences between PS2 games that only supported interlaced video versus Xbox versions that generally supported progressive scan at a minimum, with some supporting 720p. That ended up being a huge determining factor in which version of a multiplatform game to get.
Re: The PS2 in general, I'm still amazed that Polyphony Digital managed to get GT4 running at 1080i on a device that only had 4MB of VRAM. It's rendering at a lower resolution and scaling it up instead of rendering at "true" 1080i, but still, it was pretty impressive to see in motion at the time.
I have been messing around with the 486 core on the MiSTer. I also setup the Amiga core.
I am installing Win98 right now. It gave me an error about not having the math co-processor, but there was a way to bypass it.
They really need to emulate that. I guess there is a reason for not doing it.
I tried Ripper and The Dig on MS-DOS. I wish that you could map the mouse to the controller on the core.
ScummVM kind of wins out on emulating the adventure games. It lets you use the controller for the mouse.
If you are going to mess around with old PC games on the MiSTer, you definitely need a 1TB SD card or hook up a hard drive.
Hrrm. The 486 core doesn't seem to run win98 right. It is garbling the text up.
The 486 core isn't going to change the output resolution like a real computer would. If you use direct_video with scandoubler its going to default to something like 480p., when 800x600 is more the usable minimum for win95/98. You really need to use the scaler (video_mode) for this core since it lacks any real native analog output. Also mind what resolution you set in windows.
Hrrm. The 486 core doesn't seem to run win98 right. It is garbling the text up.
If my experience with my real 486 back in the day is anything to go by, it's going to struggle with Win95 and I can't see Win98 being any better. On my real one (a DX2/66MHz) I downgraded back to MS-DOS 6.22 and Win3.11, and waited until I got a Pentium machine before going to 95. The 9x OSes were far more demanding on the hardware.
Hrrm. The 486 core doesn't seem to run win98 right. It is garbling the text up.
If my experience with my real 486 back in the day is anything to go by, it's going to struggle with Win95 and I can't see Win98 being any better. On my real one (a DX2/66MHz) I downgraded back to MS-DOS 6.22 and Win3.11, and waited until I got a Pentium machine before going to 95. The 9x OSes were far more demanding on the hardware.
I felt like my 486DX2 performed better, but that might have been rose colored glasses. I noticed that video played like crap on the 486 core. That may be how it always was.
Running "actual" games in even win95 on the 486 core is kind of a bad idea. Like Diablo 1 baaarely works. Its basically a minesweeper and space cadet pinball environment.
I forgot there's a 100% legal freeware/shareware pack for ao486, which is pretty cool. Had more shareware than retail/registered games back in the day so its kind of nostalgic in its own right
Ok. The exoconverter does not work that well. You have to update the LDH that it uses to the latest version. Also, the start bat files for the games have to be edited to have the path to the imgset exe.
I used this program to update the path in all of the batch files because that is bullshit. http://findandreplace.io/
After you do that, you may still need to adjust some individual games. Also, each game has it's quirks. This is why eXoDOS works much better than the MiSTer. It has already ironed out those issues.
Posts
That said I'm guessing you haven't met HK-47 yet because I don't see how you can not love that bag of bolts.
Considering the content of this game, the white stuff is especially disturbing.
Oh, come now, you have to at least let the new voice try to top it...
And when/if they don't, you use the other one, and feature footage of the new attempts as part of a bonus feature.
MM&B has been the hardest for me to get into: I'm not huge on playing on PC, I want to play in English, and the GBA is too zoomed in.
I think my wife hacked the SNES Classic, though, so maybe that will be an option when we get there in Mega Man Mayhem.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
Also known as Rockman & Forte.
(This would work with Series X, of course, and even Xbox One to a much more limited degree given the hardware's age; but the big sticking point for me, personally, is the reliance on software rendering, which rules out using these things as MechWarrior Titanium Trilogy or TIE Fighter '95 solutions more or less.)
Also he's got the Series S exhaust vent jammed right up against that CRT...
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
It is supposed to be safe for electronics, but it is oily.
Also good timing because composite/s-video support is now official, opening up a lot more options for usable CRTs. Especially annoying trying to find component on small consumer CRTs in the US.
Pretty interesting, as getting Win98, Win95, and Win3.1 to work in something like VirtualBox is a bit tougher and the support not too great.
Also, the English fan translation of Tactics Ogre for the Sega Saturn has released. It looks like it supports the 4MB RAM cart for reducing loadtimes, which is nice. I don't know enough about the game to know what if any benefits the Saturn version has over the PS1 or SNES original, but I've been jonesing for an SRPG lately so it might be worth checking out.
I think it's pretty cut and dry that the Series X is currently the most powerful console. It's just not by very much, so it doesn't really matter.
Yeah. I switched vga_scaler on. I think it is broke. It may have been just a bad chip.
The other MiSTer is still working great. It better. It has the new board.
My MiSTer cases are making their way through the mail. They are in customs at Chicago.
If you use original analog timings (vga_scaler=0), it should sidestep that broken scaler, in theory. But you're going to get something more like the original standard definition (240p) console resolutions, although you could easily up that to 480p with forced_scandoubler=1. That can look great either through some sort of CRT, or else a solid external upscaler like the retrotink.
If you don't already have a Retrotink 5x it may not be worth investing, when it costs more than even replacement de-10 nanos do these days. (Although its pretty sweet for your real hardware too, like the Wii.) CRTs meanwhile can often be picked up pretty cheap locally in the U.S. via facebook marketplace of craigslist, but it can take weeks of watching to find something, and even then it often leans that the obnoxiously large ones are the cheap/free. Its still a pretty cool experience seeing 240p graphics that way, I recommend trying it at least at some point, give some life to your defective de-10 if you can't get a return on ebay.
And then, if I can, I'm going to turn right around and apply the patch that lets you swap characters, if that'll work on the Classic.
Like Mega Man Legends? Then check out my story, Legends of the Halcyon Era - An Adventure in the World of Mega Man Legends on TMMN and AO3!
Considering the state of RetroArch updates on UWP, I would expect mouse support to come next (and then the real gimmick will be using one of those older mice; someone already pointed out you can't use said PS/2 adapters because they're passive devices, whereas the console itself already supports KBAM provided you're in software supporting them).
It is the most powerful video game console by virtue of the only way we can measure these things: the maximum ceiling of processing ability. "Practically" is something different, and even then, it only means it's the most powerful until it's replaced. It's the same way Sony informed us the PSFro was "the most powerful video game console in the world" at the time of its launch--it was in a measurable way, but it also relied on Sony (and publishers) patching software to actually use said hardware (and then inevitably more powerful hardware was released).
RetroArch is, of course, taking that hardware and deciding, "Actually, we're going to do literally all the work" instead of waiting for Sony (or Microsoft), in order to actually make use of the hardware SKU, and on Xbox (for the last ten years), there's a weird setting for it: no one's actually "hacked" an Xbox One or Xbox Series console, the way the Xbox 360 and all PlayStation consoles have been, and Microsoft opened up any console owner to basic development tools for a negligible fee, so long as they have a sufficiently modern Windows PC, which isn't a coincidence. MVG only commented on it briefly in that video, but we've seen Playstation emulation make better use of hardware acceleration via RetroArch, which specifically allows you to address classic Playstation things like floating point problems and wiggly textures--so you can potentially have a much better performing, but less authentic, emulation experience. An interesting trade-off, depending on what you're trying to do with PS1 and PS2 games.
I'm hoping we'll get something comparable for the DOS-BOX/Windows side. But 3D accelerator support is kind of a mess in that era; MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries literally doesn't work on all period PCs, much less in a Windows OS running on top of a distribution of DOS-BOX on a home console. The Titanium Trilogy is my own personal white whale for that reason, in that window where brute forcing solutions isn't ideal and the actual solutions isn't well represented in legacy support.
Crap. I need to get my repurposed Dell Office PC/MechWarrior 2 machine up and running again, I completely dismantled in preparation to move to my house. Maybe I could set it up next to my Neo Geo MVSX cabinet with the still missing plastic screen replacement.
But for everyone else, it's very nice that you can effectively just turn this one, play SimCity 2000 or TIE Fighter or Alpha Centauri, then turn it off and use it as an actual online 9th generation home console. So the buy in is a lot less intimidating than it could be.
I mean, ... that's how mid-gen refreshes work? Just like the One X only truly shone when games were patched with enhancements for the One X.
We had the PSX later on, but that was still just a PS2 at heart. It would have been interesting to have seen something like a "PS2 Pro" that added progressive scan to all games, or could do some sort of upscaling (you can force this with GSM now, but its not compatible with a lot of games). I bought a 40" HDTV toward the end of that generation and it was pretty wild seeing the differences between PS2 games that only supported interlaced video versus Xbox versions that generally supported progressive scan at a minimum, with some supporting 720p. That ended up being a huge determining factor in which version of a multiplatform game to get.
Re: The PS2 in general, I'm still amazed that Polyphony Digital managed to get GT4 running at 1080i on a device that only had 4MB of VRAM. It's rendering at a lower resolution and scaling it up instead of rendering at "true" 1080i, but still, it was pretty impressive to see in motion at the time.
I am installing Win98 right now. It gave me an error about not having the math co-processor, but there was a way to bypass it.
They really need to emulate that. I guess there is a reason for not doing it.
I tried Ripper and The Dig on MS-DOS. I wish that you could map the mouse to the controller on the core.
ScummVM kind of wins out on emulating the adventure games. It lets you use the controller for the mouse.
If you are going to mess around with old PC games on the MiSTer, you definitely need a 1TB SD card or hook up a hard drive.
You don't need ExoDOS and I wouldn't recommend it. Flynn's top 300 pack is pretty good at around 80 gig, and actually curated/tweaked for Mister.
I will probably just mess with a few CD games for now. Maybe use the converter.
The 486 core isn't going to change the output resolution like a real computer would. If you use direct_video with scandoubler its going to default to something like 480p., when 800x600 is more the usable minimum for win95/98. You really need to use the scaler (video_mode) for this core since it lacks any real native analog output. Also mind what resolution you set in windows.
If my experience with my real 486 back in the day is anything to go by, it's going to struggle with Win95 and I can't see Win98 being any better. On my real one (a DX2/66MHz) I downgraded back to MS-DOS 6.22 and Win3.11, and waited until I got a Pentium machine before going to 95. The 9x OSes were far more demanding on the hardware.
Steam | XBL
I felt like my 486DX2 performed better, but that might have been rose colored glasses. I noticed that video played like crap on the 486 core. That may be how it always was.
I tried making my own pack with the ExoDOS converter and it did not work.
I used this program to update the path in all of the batch files because that is bullshit.
http://findandreplace.io/
After you do that, you may still need to adjust some individual games. Also, each game has it's quirks. This is why eXoDOS works much better than the MiSTer. It has already ironed out those issues.