Great little mod showing off of how far the md hw can be pushed.
Much improved over Capcom's own final release build and what capcom should've delivered in the first place.

The modders also did a ssf2 patch which from a technical standpoint is equaly impressive if slightly less polished than the sf2 sce mod. Still worth a playthrough as the audio visual improvements are still massive over the original release.

Pyron (the guy who did the recoloring) also did a recoloring patch for Final Fight cd. Also well worth a download if scrolling beat'm ups are your thing.

I recall reading a pretty mindblowing piece aboutr DigDug how it used memory buffer to generate levels and why the final level was impossible. Some of the stuff they had to do when they were closer to the silicone are proper wow. Great tools are bloody useful, but if you give every one a set square you'll never see a mortice joint

edit: mitre not mortice, oops

There is still a hell of a lot of innovation going on but it tends to sit behind the scenes rather than being front and centre and noticeable to the end user.

The focus has been heavily moved to removing barriers to creativity. The whole idea around being able to make a game almost start to finish without knowing any coding is fantastic (asset flips being an unfortunate by product).
The tools are also homogenizing more and more with other industries like film and animation.

Will there be another Mario 64? Almost certainly not but it is because innovation is now a constant stream of updates and annual software releases. That leap won't be seen in a single game again because the innovation has been democratised rather than being locked to in-house.

Anyone can download Unity or Unreal, Blender and Gimp then go and make a game. The barrier is skill and creativity.

In some ways it has gone full circle back to the early computers in that respect.

I agree that removing technical barriers allows creative types to make new games. Who knows what will come up from that.

I was just referring to how amazing techs can be at squeezing stuff out of hardware - and that it's something we are unlikely to see in gaming any more. Not a bad thing. Just saying.

Back in the day getting anything going was incredibly tough and at one time there were only a handful of engineers in the world who could get the 2600 to do anything. It's a minor miracle that there were engineers who had enough creativity to actually come up with something playable.

Going back to stuff like Asteroids and space invaders - even the sound effects had to be implemented in hardware and discrete logic. Huge barriers to the creative process.

The plus point was a game was a creation of a single person albeit created in a sharing environment with feedback. So games weren't built to a plan or hampered by committee. Sure there was a load of old shit created but there was brilliance too. Of course one could claim that being in on the ground floor is creatively easier as practically any idea had a good chance of being new. In fact at Atari, only new types of game were given the green light at one time.

And some more pirate scene nostalgia: The same guy used to have a PO box for fan letters to his latter-day cracking group, Cynix. He’s scanned a pile of the old letters received and posted them up online here:
https://gotpapers.scene.org/?p=3421

I'll have to read that. I was an ST kid too - The Pompey Pirates were my local lot!

I actually had at least one of those cracks pictured in the article! I remember a lot of them taking the piss out of Birdy. Nice to read about the people behind the names.

At our school we used to get a lot from Medway Boys, Pompey Pirates and Automation. In latter years I got a lot of stuff from Persistence of Vision, through a game shop owner in Blackpool. No idea why, since we were over in the countryside around Hull …

Was never an ST or Amiga bod - didn't have the cash. Would like to have been involved - probably ST as Atari was my first love.

But this is top work.

Neochrome and then Dpaint ST for me. Certainly worked out in the end.

I had a chance to pick up a console version of the Amiga but let it go as I didn't know how good an experience it gave.  I'm a Bitmap Bros fanboy but don't know how many of their games made it to the console.

An Amiga or ST mini would be a thing.

Never heard of it. Will investigate.

regmcfly wrote:

It's not quite my area of games but interesting anyways

This. Always interested in handhelds though, was clearing out the graveyard just now, I was a wee bit obsessed with the portable emulation scene for a while.

Seems like that Evercade would be of most interest to people that just really feel they gotta have games on carts.

I feel like Switch obviates my need for this, would rather splash out on the Analogue Pocket and have emulation perfection or one of those crazy little things that are a PC in 3DS-style clamshell format.

Time_on_my_hands wrote:

davyK wrote:

I had a chance to pick up a console version of the Amiga but let it go as I didn't know how good an experience it gave.  I'm a Bitmap Bros fanboy but don't know how many of their games made it to the console. An Amiga or ST mini would be a thing.

I got my first ever rejection letter from the Bitmaps age 11 or 12. I actually wrote to them and asked if I could send them designs for some games. The reply was on BB logo- embossed paper, too. I've still got it somewhere. Cadaver is still one of my favourite games.

Gods and Chaos engine are both in my top 100 list.

davyK wrote:

Why did I not know Sega Rally Championship was on the PS2? JP only but that isn't a problem for me.

It's been on my wish list for ages but feel like the Ebay prices are way too high.