i just like playin games
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Getting rid of all these cathode ray tubes and just having one PC and thatās it, itās alluring.
But playing 4:3 games on a 16:9 screen just feels wrong. Maybe I should play windowed.
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get yourself a little set of curtains to draw when the image is pillarboxed, like movie theaters do when screening films with thinner aspect ratios
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just buy an OLED
itās that easy
(several paragraphs about the different kinds of masking theaters do)
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look i started going on too long about it and deleted a lot of words and capped it at that simplified statement
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The trick is to hunt down that one model of Dell LCD monitor from 20 years ago that weighs a ton but has a nice 4:3 screenā¦I drove way out into the ritzy boonies of Austin to find one, and it works pretty well. The Ultrasharp 2007FP.
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I have a couple 4:3 LCD monitors. Ughā¦ yeah. I was astonished how much worse that Dreamcast Daisenryaku game looked on them. Looked a lot better on the CRT monitor I connected it too afterwards. Not sure if it would look even better on a CRT TV. Maybe not?
Thereās actually a point where I prefer an LCD over a CRT (shocking). When itās a lot of detailed static images, like in tactics or strategy games, Iād much rather stare at something moreā¦ uhmā¦ stable?
CRTs are great for action games. What do you call it, motion resolution? I did play Control on my Viewsonic Graphics Series G90fB. But Iām not gonna play Picross or Berwick Saga on a tube.
I dunno, I think Iām starting to care less (shocking). Do I really need to own a Dreamcast?
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buy
an
OLED
Do they make them in 4:3?
This is not really related but I put Xubuntu on an old Dell PC and was pleasantly surprised. It boots so fast. Iām only running Mednafen because the integrated GPU is too old for PCSX2, but I hooked up a Saturn USB pad to make myself feel better.
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Turn the lights off an youll never know the rest of the OLED is even there. Its wild.
Emulation still feels like I am getting away with something cool so Im a lot less fussy than I could be about shaders. I love crts but I donāt feel like they should be fussed over either as long as the geometry is OK and you can clear off any big discolored spots. Get a CRT out of the trash I say. Go racoon style.
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Thereās currently a āframe stutteringā bug in mGBA that has been bedeviling the developer for a while now: Visual stuttering and frame drops regardless of settings Ā· Issue #2199 Ā· mgba-emu/mgba Ā· GitHub
I was getting stuttery framerate too; most of it went away after I lowered āSettings - Audio/Video - Audio bufferā to the minimum setting, 512āwhich is also supposed to minimize input lag.
Another work around for the stuttering issue is to set āDisplay driverā on that same page to āOpenGL (force version 1.x)ā; this eliminated the last of the stuttering for meāit wasnāt really detectable in Sonic Advance, but was pretty obvious in F-Zero Maximum Velocity.
So, this is good! It fixes the janky feeling Iād associated with GBA emulation to this pointābecause Visual Boy Advance-M has itāor something very like itāas well.
Unrelated, in mGBA Iāve set āSettings - Enhancements - OpenGL enhancements - High-resolution scaleā to the max, 16x (ā3840x2560ā); this makes Mode 7-style FX, like the ground in FZMV, render in high resolution rather than GBA base resolution, which makes a big difference; does not work in the āforceā renderer though, and thereās no āforceā renderer in the Enhancements pageās drop-down selection list (so Enhancements run through a separate renderer, interesting = o).
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Dumping the Neo Geo Pocket Color cartridge SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium (JP) using an open source Sanni Cart Reader V5 ( GitHub - sanni/cartreader: A shield for the Arduino Mega that can back up video game cartridges. ) and custom NGP adapter board, both made by the builder fullcircleembedded ( fullcircleembedded on eBay )āwho does great workāand running the freshly dumped MotM ROM in Mednafen.
The board goes in the readerās SNES cartridge slot, on the 3V setting (since the NGPC takes two AA batteries, and theyāre 1.5V each!).
I had to flash the Sanniās firmware first with a setting to enable the NGP adapter board, and I updated the game image descriptions as well; the directions for doing that stuff is on the Wiki:
ā How to flash the Arduino Ā· sanni/cartreader Wiki Ā· GitHub
ā Preparing the SD Card Ā· sanni/cartreader Wiki Ā· GitHub
Looked scary but wasnāt actually too bad.
There arenāt very many of these NGP adapter boards out there because nobody makes a part compatible with NGP/NGPC cartridgesāso pretty much the cartridge slot has to be taken out of an actual NGP or NGPC! I ordered a beat-up NGPC off eBay to sacrifice.
Further thinking: Now, you could say, considering I donāt have any unique carts that to preserve and share with the world that the world doesnāt already have, this is all a bunch of silly privileged nonsense, and now Iām killing NGPCs for it! = o I donāt know that I have a great come-back for that.
But it IS more fun.
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NGPC emulation fun
Have been able to apply the translation patches for Biomotor Unitron 2 (Kikou Seiki Unitron), Card Fighters Clash 2, and Rockman Battle & Fighters. : )
Dokodemo Mahjong Color only runs in b&w in the older emulators, ie NeoPop and even Mednafenāwhich appears to have cloned NeoPopās emulation, ancient bugs and all. In a fancy new emulator such as ares, DMC does run in color; not sure about MAME, which I guess added NGPC emulation some time back, and shows off color screenshots of DMCābut I couldnāt seem to work out how to run my non-canonical dumped ROMs from the MAME command line; and Iām not sure if MAME requires NGPC BIOS files, but ares definitely does (it emulates the systemās start-up screens, which the older emulators donāt do); I donāt think I have a non-piratical way to get the BIOS from my actual NGPCs, so thatās out.
After also having tried and mostly failed with all the other supposed Windows NGPC emus, Iām down to NeoPop/Mednafen. ; D NeoPop has a GUI, so itās convenient for going through loads of ROMs at once; Mednafen is command-line only, so itās a lot slower for that. NeoPopās input mapping is spottyāI got it working on my DS4, but had to resort to a Frankensteining of DS4Windows and Joy2Key, and trial and error with some of the button IDs, which donāt seem to match their Windows IDs.
The remaining problem with NeoPop so far is that its full screen mode doesnāt workāinvisible, then crashes; at biggest I can run NeoPop at 4x windowed, which is still kinda small on a 1080p screen. Mednafen on the other hand runs full-screen OpenGL.
Back on the plus side, NeoPop can force games into b&w NGP mode, which Mednafen canāt doāso with NeoPop you can play the hidden b&w tree-chopping game āYosakuā in KOF: Battle de Paradise, for instance. So Iāll keep NeoPop for that and checking through lots of ROMs quickly.
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Unlike Mednafen and Mesen, ares can load PCE CD games from compressed .chd.
For SNES, ares is better than Mesen at cropping border areas, at least in Mr. Do, the game I compared in ares and Mesen.
ares doesnāt have Mesenās per-color palette control for GB and border control for NES (which is a huge but NESessary pain as NES games vary wildly in their bordering, and flashing border areas), so Iām going to stick with Mesen for those.
Update: Buuuut ares does leave borders on PCE games, dang. Mednafen doesnāt; guess Iām stuck with uncompressed bin and cue files in Mednafen hrm. Then again there are only like 3 PCE CD-ROM-ROM games I might want to have on hand to play regularly so probably no biggie; also, according to its docs Mednafen has a sprite-flicker reduction option for PCE, that could be real handy.
I just hacked my 3ds and put that new virtual boy emulator on there. My dream of playing Waterworld on my 3ds has finally come to fruition! Never was interested in hacking my 3ds before this, but finally getting the most obvious thing in the world - a virtual boy emulator on the one other 3d-capable nintendo console - was just too much to pass up.
Now I just need to play Dactyl Nightmare somehow and my VR dreams of the 90s will be fully realized.
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Got a PCE/TG-16 adapter board for the Sanni Cart Reader from PCE / TG16 Adapter , so got up to some HuCard dumping so I can be a jerk about it I guess.
PC Denjin 3 dumped and ran fine in ares (think Iāll run PCE in Mednafen in future since itās not leaving borders on PCE games like ares isāand yet theyāre the reverse for SNES games!).
PC Genjin 2 did not dump, but it turned out that card was just deadāwouldnāt run in my PC Engine Duo-R, either. : PP (Iāve got Bonkās Revenge on the Gate of Thunder 3-in-one Turbo Duo Super CD-ROM so no sweat, I guessāit was the one I could lose! ^_ ^ I mean if the Super CD 3.0 BIOS card on its way dumps successfully. = Ppp)
The 16 other cards I wanted to dump were fine, whew. Iāve only had one other HuCard die on me over the years.
Uh well so I got pretty sick of Bonk 2 when playing through the JP PS3 version but maybe if Iād had really fast quicksave/quickload it wouldāa been more pleasant. = o
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itās a shame Nintendo is an evil corporation
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if you have a 4k tv and 2k monitor, retroarchās video settings are stuck on whatever your primary display is. so even if you move it over to the tv, you only get 1440p as your highest resolution. why is the shader treasure trove stuck behind this busted ass program
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okay ngl this was one of the few things keeping me on android
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