Talking of N64, a group of people going by the moniker Retro Fighters have announced a new controller. It'll be compatible with all the relevant Paks, and I can imagine it'll be a great way of getting a new controller without having to trawl the depths of fleaBay. It was mentioned in this month's Retro Gamer, who were a bit sceptical about the potential quality of the product, given the US$20 price tag.



KickStarter has smashed its target, and has 45 hours left at this point.

mk64 crew will lap that up

Liveinadive wrote:

Does it have built in rumble?

I imagine no, but it'll work with the Rumble Pak.

Nintendo will modernise it with the release of the N64 mini next year although that won't work with old N64s.

Do it, I've seen them all as I did an absolute ton of research on it about 10-15 years ago when I was gonna buy one.

Problem was cosmetically they got worse and less reliable but the original only had RF out which wouldn't have worked on UK TVs without modding.

The price ultimately made me decide against it. I've since sold most of my consoles, at its peak I think I had close to 30.

The PC Engine will always be that one I wish I owned but never did.

Blue Swirl wrote:

You should go for it.

Tbh my game collection has almost gone full circle now. I'm back to the ones I had as a kid and have a sentimental attachment to.

I only own 13 consoles now and that includes the contemporary(ish) Wii U, 3DS, Switch, PS3 and PS4.

I owned so much but two things ultimately made me give up:

1. Space

2. I had the best collection of anyone I knew but when youtube really took off and people started doing room tours I realised it wasn't that big after all*. It was a bit of a why bother if your not the best situation.

I'm happy to emulate for the most part these days, the only console I actively collect for still is the SNES but that's got silly expensive now.

* an amusing comparison is being the best kid in your school during the 90s at Street Fighter II, then getting your arse handed to you online years later. The only comfort is telling yourself 12 year old you would wipe the floor against modern you, somehow convincing yourself you could have held your own online in 1993.

retroking1981 wrote:

an amusing comparison is being the best kid in your school during the 90s at Street Fighter II, then getting your arse handed to you online years later. The only comfort is telling yourself 12 year old you would wipe the floor against modern you, somehow convincing yourself you could have held your own online in 1993.

I still reckon, if the internet had progressed faster, me and my mate from school would have been pro GoldenEye players.

davyK wrote:

After experiencing PCE game on he Wii's VC I quickly came to the conclusion that it was a great console and to have owned one when it was contemporary would have been quite something.

I imagine it's similar to the Neo Geo AES - had you been able to afford one at the time, it must have been mind-blowing.

Thing is, the standard really was lower back then. If you compare Ryan Hart's early Tekken 3 abilities to his Tag ones a few years later...

I think I'd have been in with a shout on Gran Turismo (wall-gains banned), but those are all abandoned as soon as a newer one comes out, so there's not much evolution. The newer ones have GT Academy, of course, but I really don't care for 'em.

Ha ha I just came here to post the same. Well worth the money, the Megadrive one is beautiful.

poprock wrote:

New book from Read Only Memory (the guys behind the excellent MegaDrive, Bitmap Brothers and Sensible Soccer books) on the Dreamcast.

Kickstarter link here.

Soooooollllld.

I want that PSO slip cover more than anything I've wanted in a while, but fuck me £150 is a lot.

I can remember ordering a battery case cover from Nintendo for a GB Pocket back in the day.  

I would so go to that if it was on a Friday night!

Snes was technically the superior console hands down but sega's megadrive gave nintendo some good opposition. Not bad for a console released in '88. Sega also broke Nintendo's stranglehold monopoly on 3rd party dev licensing, paving the way for multi platform releases.

Sega made some really sloppy mistakes too, some fatal. The md add-ons should not have left the prototype labs. Mega-Cd and 32x were a waste of time and money and only confused consumers while damaging the sega brand. The 32X especially was a useless expensive stopgap when everyone knew the Saturn would arrive a year later.

In hindsight Sega's md devtools could've and should've been handled better too. As Stephane's sf2 audio mod has shown, the md was perfectly capable of doing clear voice samples. He rewrote the md's audio driver from scratch and it works surprisingly well. Granted, he did use the legacy master system hardware inside every megadrive to achieve this but still, not bad. Why Sega didn't exploit this trick to gain parity against snes is just...sloppy.
The md color pallet was often a bit muddy but modders like Pyron show that the md can shine with a little tlc. Pyron's sf2 and ssf2 color mods really show what the md chipset's capable of.