Steam Deck is the best emulation machine out there right now for me.
I’ve been thinking about getting the new pixel fold or the Samsung z
flipfold. When you open them to tablet mode they’re a big square screen. When you clip on a controller it looks like a sick retro gaming handheld because of the screen ratio.That’s a $2000 gaming setup! ($1900 for z fold, $100 for gamesir controller.)
I think I’ll just get a Powkiddy RGB30 with a square screen for $80.
I mean, it’s a phone + tablet first. The gaming is a nice bonus. Plus you really don’t need the fold 6 when the 5 will do just fine.
Fold 5 is still like $1000 refurbished. Again compared to $80 Powkiddy. Plus a few hours of gaming doesn’t take away from your phone battery life.
Why do you enjoy denigrating people’s choices? You’re not the only one capable of rationality. It might make total sense from their perspective and financial situation.
Suggesting a much cheaper alternative that has some benefits isn’t degrading anyone.
I didn’t say degrading, that wouldn’t even work grammatically. I said denigrating, “to criticise unfairly, disparage”.
Learn something. And stop putting other people’s ideas down.
We’ve literally just recreated the meme here in the comments.
“It’d be pretty cool to have a flip phone to double as a big emulation handhel…”
Tuba on face
“A PEWKITTY IS $80 AND YOU GET TO CARRY MULTIPLE DEVICES AND A MUCH SMALLER SCREEN AND…”
I worked for a phone manufacturer that makes foldable for a while. I really got the strong feeling that those foldable displays make them extremely sensitive to any drops or abuse that a traditional chocolate bar would easily survive. And I’ve heard similar feedback from early adopters as well
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stick to original hardware, if you already have it or can afford to buy it.
Setting up a Pi or other single-board system as a dedicated retro game emulator is also an absolutely valid choice IMO. It’s a fun, generally affordable little project that you can tinker with forever, e.g. changing cases and controllers, UI tweaks, ROM file organization, per-game settings optimization. But I don’t think that it’s ever been the “best” emulation option for anyone who didn’t already have their heart set on “doing something fun and interesting with a Pi”.
The smartphone you already have, dedicated retro gaming handhelds, Android TV boxes or sticks, and cheap/secondhand/already-owned PCs (desktop, notebook, or kiosk) all arguably match or exceed the performance and value-for-money of any Pi-based system.
Yet in any thread where someone new to emulation is asking for advice, there’s always a flock of folks who suggest getting a Pi like it’s the only game in town. It honestly baffles me a little. Especially because almost all of them are just running a pretty frontend over Retroarch, and Retroarch is available for virtually every modern consumer computing platform (and so are a lot of pretty frontends, if that’s a selling point).
For context, I’ve got a dozen or so retro systems, but I prefer to emulate as much as possible.
Emulation is nice because it removes a lot of the friction between deciding I feel like playing a given game and actually playing it. Dealing with worn out controllers, dead parts, wonky connections just to squint at a fuzzy screen. I much prefer seeing it upscaled on my modern screen and grabbing whatever controller is convenient to play with
Get a mister.
It IS the original hardware; its an FPGA
Where is the raspberry pi at 30$??? it is more than that nowadays
Yeah I’m a huge Raspberry Pi fan but not only is it practically impossible to find a pi at that price, pi’s also can’t reliably emulate games past the 32 bit era
They’re inflated right now, depending on where you buy them. I got one for MSRP (around 30 bucks) last year at my local electronics store, but I had to give them my info to deter scalping.
An official raspberry pi isn’t worth gettin imo. Especially after their artificial availability issues during the pandemic.
Plenty of alternatives out there, which is what I’d recommend. OrangePi is much more reasonable price wise.
And if you don’t need arm, a used thin client will do the same job, cost a lot less, and have more compatibility.
I’m hoping risc-v can join soon at reasonable speeds.
“Right now” for Pi inflation has been since like 2016. This is just their price now.
Well that sucks. I’ve heard the competitors are pretty good now though.
Yeah, there’s a lot of competition in SBC these days. People seem to like the OrangePi lineup and some others.
Or for anything where a miniPC would do the same job, there’s tons of miniPCs running 7th gen and older processors available for peanuts since Microsoft arbitrarily declared them to be incompatible with Windows 11, and Windows 10 goes EOL in just 13 months.
HP prodesks for example are down to $100ish on eBay
As someone who owns most of the consoles, has Pvm etc don’t play the scalpers game just emulate. Thankfully the bubble has burst on a lot of markets, and we’re seeing more reasonable prices, but the OG hardware can only last so long. If anything grab a controller for each system you love, even saying that, 8bitdo have really stepped up, and I would say surpassed a lot of the old first party ones.
This is a CD vs FLAC discussion.
Aren’t they kinda of hard to get a hold of still? During the pandemic they were going for 100$ and up
you can at least get them directly instead of paying scalpers now, but yeah it’s still $80 for an 8GB board.
I tell you something that will make a big difference for titles pre-2005 or so: playing on a CRT television.
Especially on SNES titles which I played a lot as a kid, the extremely sharp look you get from emulators on flat panel displays just looks wrong.
I’m probably in the minority, but I love that crisp sharp look with perfect geometry that you get on a modern display with no filters enabled.
I’ve always been a visually nitpicky person. When I was a kid I tweaked the hell out of the whole 3 setting knobs and switches on my crappy old CRT. In Nintendo Power, the screenshots were taken off nice computer monitors or something and looked so much better.
If kid me got a chance to play ActRaiser or Super Mario World or even NES stuff like Simon’s Quest, in perfect clarity on a big colorful OLED and using an Xbox elite controller, it would have blown my mind. So now I live it up!
I’m not against original hardware if people want to use it though, especially for speed running.
How did you take screenshots from a monitor? With a camera?
Usually you just copy the backbuffer, you don’t need a screen to do it.
Nintendo power had tons of images taken directly from photos of CRT‘s. Some of them may have used your Method, but many of them (Especially contests) Specifically asked readers to send in photos to show whether they’ve done certain things.
You can photograph a TV but making a screenshot was usually done by blitting the backbuffer somewhere.
Did screenshots taken with the method you mentioned have bloom, Like you would see from an image taken from a CRT? I associate bloom in screenshots from being directly Photographed from the CRT.
I guess you can do both ofc ! And maybe you had to with say the C64. The PS1 you could do it through the devkit IIRC.
The CRT flicker gives me headache in no time, even with good maintenanced expensive studio monitors. I didn’t had that problem as a kid in the 80s but now as I am older, and used to flicker free flat screen monitors, it is really bad.
What kills me the worst is how piercingly bright some flat panels are. Even through my astigmatism I’m one of those dark mode all the things kind of guys. CRTs never bothered me, I could stare at a bright white blank Word document all day, but my Gigabyte Gaming panel feels like staring into the sun.
Are there CRT filters to blend the pixels?
Sort of. They do add things like blur and scan lines, some even distort the frame to try to simulate the bulbous screen of a CRT. But it’s a bit like that VHS filter that Gen Z is so inordinately fond of; it’s artificially emphasizing the worst qualities of the medium, while still not achieving the benefits.
Plus, input lag is real. A lot of modern games are designed to take the lag between the console and the display into account, retro games aren’t. Playing Donkey Kong Country on an LCD TV made me feel like my reflexes had aged 50 years, hauling out my old CRT fixed that (but made my back feel like it aged 50 years).
I didn’t consider lag. That’s more than aesthetic.
Some filters are better than others for certain tastes. The glow effect on CRT Royale is what gives me the nostalgia buzz, but it looks much better on 4K displays. On my 1080p displays I use a package that adds a bezel for the display to reflect off of which gives me a similar effect.
I’d rather have a native CRT display, but I’m used to larger displays at this point and I couldn’t physically handle anything even in the high 20 inches range.
The artists also took that into account, used it in their favour.
Source: worked with pixel artists early 2000.
The artists did and the engineers did.
For example, the Apple II achieved 16 onscreen colors via NTSC artifacting. The 8-Bit Guy did a great video on this; programmers could choose like 4 colors, but if you put them next to each other in certain combinations they would turn other colors. Which is why white text would turn green and/or purple at the edges.
The IBM CGA card took it to a whole other level; it had a 4-bit digital RGBI video port for computer monitors and a composite port for televisions. When plugged into an RGBI monitor, you got a sharp picture that would display in one of four four-color palettes: black, white, cyan and magenta, or black, yellow, red and green, both in bright and dark. But if the artist dithered the graphics properly, and the card was plugged into a composite TV or monitor, the same graphics would appear softer, but in 16 colors. Text was harder to read, but games looked better, so business customers could buy an RGBI monitor and gamers could use a TV.
In the 16-bit era, I can cite titles on the SNES and Genesis that took advantage of the limitations of the NTSC standard to get graphical tricks done that the console couldn’t actually do. Like transparent water. I think it’s in Emerald Hill Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and in some levels of Super Mario World, where you can enter and exit water that is drawn by rapidly jiggling a dithered pattern back and forth. On a CRT television this blurs into a translucent effect, when viewed on an entirely digital monitor it looks like an opaque checkerboard or grille.
No one is listening to us 😅
A controller that looks like an old SNES with a PS2 form factor is all the retro authenticity I need
Like this?
That’s the bitch
That’s really cool and I’m glad people want to maintain the heritage of gaming, but I’m the exact opposite. I never want to play on old hardware or even use old style controllers again if I don’t have to.
This is kinda sacrilege, but old games kinda suck by modern standards. They lack a lot of quality of life stuff that has long since become standard and tend to be more focused on providing a difficult and frustrating experience.
There seems to be a sweet spot in the early 2000s 2D games and later 00s 3D games, where games started to become more forgiving, included meaningful mechanics, and the graphics were getting good enough that you’re not just squinting to try to figure out what this blob is supposed to be. Plus that’s also the timeframe that a lot of current major franchises were started or at least got perfected so you’re now digging into current franchises backlogs
I like to use controllers that have new tech but the old layout for the beat of both worlds
Some controllers are almost integral to the experience. Intellivision and Colecovision come to mind. Having said that, emulation and modern controls are generally great, and generally my preference.
It’s difficult to play N64 games without an N64 controller.
