I finally reached Megalopolis on Sim City for snes! I used my emulator because my original console and games are in storage. My brother and I used to play this for hours trying to get that damn mario statue 😂 we bought the snes and games with our combined paper route money. I still have that console as well as the sega gensis we bought together.

Yes he’s super jealous. Almost as jealous as the time I had a cooler slammer than him for our Pogs games

A very hard and very good Halloween game!

For me, it's the early 3D titles, like GoldenEye 007, any of the classic Resident Evil games, etc. Historical importance is massive, yes. But the tank controls make it a chore for me to revisit now. What's yours?

My old ass only used 4 continues, too. Woot woot!

​(Sorry for any awkward phrasing, I'm posting this from Japan using a translator!)

I have no experience with running vintage games, or really gaming in general, but I recently got my hands on Iron Maiden’s 1999 CD ROM game Ed Hunter.

And yes, I heard already heard that it’s total garbage, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to play it. My copy is missing the manual/CD book with the instructions, so I have no clue where to start.

From what I know it is a 3D Point and shoot game and had 3 CDs, Disc 1 is music, Disc 2 is Music/ game setup and 3 is the game.
When I place CD2 into my external USB CD/DVD drive it launches Synthetic Dimension Wizard when I click on the file in File Explorer and completes some kind of download sequence before closing the window with no trace after successfully completing the download to I don’t know where?

I heard that there are ways to emulate windows 98 or other ways to play such games, but I just can’t seem to figure out how to get there or how to successfully install it. I would like to learn how to do this since I collect a lot of vintage media and also intend to collect the Beavis and Butthead CD ROM games if this works.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated:)

I wanted to STRONGLY recommend M.A.X. Mechanized Assult & Exploration.

It's a 30 year old DOS game (has a windows .exe github mod) but to this day there still isn't a strategy game that can quite do what this game does.

Over 50 land, sea, and air vehicles, each can be upgraded. Any unit can have tbeir armor, weapons, speed, cost, upgraded allowing for unlimited different strategies with each new game.

To win you have to build colony buildings to reach a determined score. Each turn that a colony building is active you get a point but if that colony building gets distroyed you lose all the points it accumulated.

Avoid M.A.X 2, the sequel was never completed. And I've never actually played the campaign, I play custom games or "hottest games". Meaning you and up to three other players take turns on a single PC or pass around a android phone (magicDosBox).

Available on Steam, GOG, and Epic. And there is a mod available that fixes most of the bugs

I recently pulled this 27" JVC I'art out of storage to finally get a proper retro setup going. I'd really appreciate recommendations on cable systems (switcher boxes, upscalers, etc) that anyone personally uses so that I can best take advantage of the hookups I'm working with.

TV has 1 S-Video, 1 Component, 1 Rf Coaxial, and 1 Front side Composite

The systems I'd be looking to connect are Atari 2600, NES (Front Loader), Snes, N64, Gamecube (DOL-001), Wii, and PS1 (First Model not PSone)

Edit: Didn't know upscalers are a modern tv thing, and I added more specific model info for the console where it matters.

If so, how did it feel like when the system was discontinued and Sega pushed the $399 Saturn? Did you know the PlayStation was going to be the clear winner and when?

When I was 8 years old my dad bought our first home computer - a Sony HitBit MSX1. And with the computer he brought home 2 joysticks of type Panasonic CF-2211. Unfortunately the directional actuator of this model is made from weak plastic, so both sticks broke after a while. And at that point the MSX had all but vanished from the German market. So there was nowhere to buy actual MSX joysticks (remember, back then you needed to go to a physical store to buy stuff).

And that's when my odyssey started. I bought a Quickshot II, of course. It was everywhere. But I hated it. The grip was uncomfortably big for my small hands, I didn't like the clicking sound made by the microswitches (the CF-2211, by contrast, uses rubber domes); and of course its triggers aren't independent, so when playing Metal Gear you had to use the M key to punch, playing Chack'n'Pop with it was basically impossible and so on. I later bought a Quickjoy V and manually wired some of its buttons to be MSX compatible trigger Bs, but obviously the QJV shares the other things I dislike with the QSII.

But of course, things can always get worse. Me and my brother got a Super Nintendo and a Mega Drive. And with them came the bane of my gaming existence: the gamepad. While the SNES pad was barely serviceable, I find it a mystery to this day how someone can walk straight left or right in Streets of Rage with a stock Sega Mega Drive gamepad. Meanwhile, on the computer side, my new machine was a PC. There weren't many games that required a game controller, probably because the only ones available were horrible analog joysticks like the Quickshot 113, which was the one I bought. Still, I played California Games with it. When you're starving you don't care if the bread is moldy.

I kept looking for (and buying) more sticks, always hoping that one of them could compete with technology from the 1980s. For the Mega Drive I got the Arcade Power Stick. It made the console usable for me but with no thumb trigger and left handed operation it still felt like I had to play with one hand tied behind my back. On the PC side I experimented with building my own, by soldering wires from the microswitches of a multi-systen arcade stick to a PC keyboard. It was never a satisfactory solution.

Then came the age of USB and the modern gamepad. I've bought a whole bunch of them over the years, but I grudgingly had to accept that I am simply physically incapable of actuating clean cardinal directions on a d-pad, regardless of its shape or switch technology. But fortunately most games and emulators do allow you to use the thumbstick instead which I found worked reasonably well for me.

I had basically given up on joysticks when something major changed in my life: I got a 3D printer. And in 2024 when I was thinking about a gift for my brother's birthday I had the idea of designing and printing a replica of the CF-2211. Unfortunately I vastly underestimated the difficulty of the task and so I did not make it till his birthday or even the following Christmas. But by 2025 I had something that was good enough to serve as a present for someone who'd never actually use it, because my brother is the kind of person who can walk straight even with a Mega Drive d-pad. But now I faced a much bigger challenge: refining the design to the point that I personally would want to use it to play actual games with. And remember, I hate clicky buttons and levers, so I couldn't just use arcade style microswitches. It took me a ridiculous amount of time and I tried some pretty out there ideas like using magnets and hall switches.

Early 2026 I was finally done. Funnily enough, at about the same time Plaion released the USB remake of the Quickshot II. It's as if they waited for me to finish my project before releasing theirs. Which was very nice of them. Had they released a year earlier, I would probably never have finished mine. While I dislike the QuickShot II (see above), it would probably have been enough to finally scratch my itch after all those years. And in 2025 my own design wasn't anywhere near where I would use it myself, so I would probably have been further demotivated by the release of the QS II. But fortunately it did come out in 2026 and not 2025.

So here I am, 40 years after touching a joystick for the first time, and gaming finally feels RIGHT again. It's like I've regrown a limb I had lost in the console wars.

I've played MSX games on emulator, finishing some for the first time (like Penguin Adventure, see image), and I've also played almost 100 hours of UFO 50 exclusively with my CF-2211 replica.

Now before someone says I should make a Kickstarter and sell those: I don't think there's a market for it. I built a couple extra, including a 9-pin one for use with a real MSX, and put them on ebay. Zero interest. No one knows the CF-2211. No one looks for it. I'm probably weird for having this be my favorite stick.

I have no idea if I can even run this on a modern PC but I loved that game and bought it just to put the box on a shelf. Only has the 5.25" floppy disks, but manual and everything else seems to be included.

To hype the add-on, Nintendo went as far as to admit that the "current generation of Super NES video games is limited by the memory capacity of expensive ROM chips", and "developers cannot practically include full-motion video sequences or real voices". Seeing that still affect the N64 but not the competition must've been a pretty bad look. This marketing began as early as late 1993, with the Nintendo 1993 Holiday Demonstration Program Training VHS, then the 1994 Project Reality tech demo , the Nintendo Product Demo 94 Promotion VHS, and then later Nintendo 1995 Holiday Demonstration Program VHS , all of these product demo videos really making a big deal out of CD-ROM being "SLOW." That's some Atari Jaguar-style BS right there. Even worse, though, is the 1994 Project Reality tech demo claiming full camera movement is only possible on cartridge because CD-ROM is too slow. In 1995, when the system's original name, Ultra 64, and design was unveiled, they ran this print ad:

When the N64 came out, the first-party titles and some third-party titles like Turok were impressive, but it was clear that cartridges have negatively impacted the system. It was known that Square left Nintendo for Sony because of the N64 still using cartridges. The third-party support was lacking, and one of the few games shared with CD-based 32-bit systems early on, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, was clearly missing content. How did you feel looking back at the SNES CD hype if you saw it back then?

Great game, but boy did they go a bit overboard with the amount of stairs!

So I was inspired to write this post after looking back at how some game studios sometimes run into a particular effect where despite the developer being prolific, there will be a few games from them that get overlooked.

Like something that suddenly caught my attention was the 1996 PC game Shattered Steel as I cannot remember too many BioWare fans bringing up the game as while I know the studio just recently closed down, I wanted to try the game to see what the studio's first game was like again way before their closure as I am curious to see what the early days of the studio were like when they were in their prime.

Not home atm, but it's a Dell "gaming computer" of some kind bought in like 2016-2017. Has 32GB of RAM. Runs Windows 10, but slow AF.

I used to play Elder Scrolls Online on this thing and it ran great; now, it's slow as molasses. I expect there's a Linux distro that's ideal for what I want.

What I'm hoping to do:

- Basically never open the lid. Just have it hook up to external displays anywhere in the house.

- Have it access my Jellyfin media server like a "channel" to watch movies/TV/whatever

- Read PS1, PS2 (PS3?) discs (Xbox? Wii? Gamecube? Saturn? Any disc-based console, go craaaaazy!), play them, and earn RetroAchievements as I play

- Similarly, use my Gameboy Operator and SNES operator

- Stream playing games from my main PC's library (Steam/GOG/Epic/whatever...is Playnite best for this?)

- Stream video to Twitch, YouTube, on Stoat, wherever

What'd be the best things for me to do?

Was tracking my purchase and saw it cleared Canada customs today but noticed It got hit with a $86 ​duty + gst/HST and handling fee for a total of $127 cdn.

Witho shipping, the morph 2k is about 280 bucks Canadian.

While the gst/hst and handling was expected the duty fee was not.

Has any other Canadian here bought one of these scallers and paid a similar fee.

Even with the trades disputes electronics seem to be exempt from import tariffs unless the morph 2k was made elsewhere and is only shipped from the US.

I guess when I pick it up I will pay but can file a dispute.