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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2154 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So, funny story. Took my family to the beach a week or two ago, got nice and sunburnt, played with my kid in the waves a ton, had a great time. On the way back my wife wants to visit a friend along the way and catch up. Lucky for me, next door to the coffee shop they chose, is a used games store. Like, a nice one, with tons of Nintendo games at a reasonable price. Actual NES shit too, it's back catalog doesn't end at the Xbox 360. So I ended up splurging on a Retron 1 HD. It was only $40, and it has HDMI as well as composite out.

You see, I have two cases of old NES games from my childhood, but I had no system to play them on. Now normally I would have researched the living fuck out of this decision, but it was a snap decision while I was bored, so that happened after the fact.

Turns out the Retron 1 HD is actually a reverse engineered Nintendo on a Chip system, which is part of why it's so cheap. This is superior in some ways to ARM based emulation, but not as good as FPGA emulation. That said, it's got it where it counts, over composite it's input latency is identical to an NES. However it's HDMI scaler is trash and results in a terrible picture, poor colors, and I strongly suspect distorted sound. Because every Youtube video I've watched or listened to in action had color or audio discrepancies my version over composite connected to a CRT does not have, and they all use HDMI on a an HDTV. Supposedly it's also not compatible with a handful of games I never plan on playing, like Castlevania III and Battletoads.

Now I said I have this hooked up to a CRT, but that was an acquisition I only made on Monday. Found some hoarder lady on Facebook ditching a 20" CRT with a built in VCR and DVD player. It works perfectly, and it's been a wild trip to go back and play it all exactly as I remember.

I've only bothered with Super Mario Brothers to start with, because that was the first game I got when my grandmother bought me an NES back in 1987 or whenever it might have been. I actually can't remember the last time I put any serious effort in Super Mario Brothers. After playing a single session for three nights in a row, I was getting to world 5-3. I had largely forgotten most of the secrets I ever used to know, minus the warp pipe in level 1-2. I actually had forgotten there were water levels, or dark levels too!

Anyways, that's been a blast, highly recommend it.

Will you play Zelda?

Probably! I still have an old cart for it. I tested it to see if it still had saves and it did... maybe. Names were there, but I strongly suspect they forgot the actual progress. All had only 3 hearts. So I'll replace the battery I guess.

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