Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2018 - 2020]


Hahaha, amazing. A distribution method that I had been speculating about in the alternative distribution methods thread...and here it is from 1984. :D I imagine a rewritable cartridge of the time was probably a lot more expensive (adjusting for inflation) than today's SD or MicroSD cards. Although it does get relatively expensive when going above 100 GB.

Regards,
SB
 
I cant believe this was released in 1984.
Have they actually paid for an aircraft with a camera to fly on these areas to make this game?
Sounds extremely expensive
had I played this back in the day I'd be hallucinating if I saw that. How did they make that? FMV in the background? I've seen a few games doing something similar on youtube videos from people playing classic arcade games, very boring to watch and play, from animated series where you had to press a key in a given moment and depending on the input, correct or incorrect, the scene would change accordingly
 
Yup saw it in the theaters and played the game in the arcades. It was a gloriously bad movie. :) I'm still wondering how they got Clint Eastwood to act in it. He was still a popular and sought after actor during that time period.

He directed it, so guess it was easy enough for him to persuade himself to be in it.

Firefox is responsible for my childhood love of canard foreplanes and low flying jets. I won't hear a bad word said against it!
 
He directed it, so guess it was easy enough for him to persuade himself to be in it.

Oh, I had completely forgotten that he'd directed it. That would certainly do it. He's certainly directed a lot more good movies than bad. I was going to speculate if maybe a production company had somehow pushed him into it...but...the production company was owned by Clint Eastwood as well. :D

Firefox is responsible for my childhood love of canard foreplanes and low flying jets. I won't hear a bad word said against it!

Absolutely, I loved the movie when I saw it. Hence gloriously bad and not train wreck bad. :D

Regards,
SB
 
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Let's not forget the home game
 
Let's not forget the home game
1980s toys were the best. I had something very similar to this but it was a Galaga knock-off and 4 AA batteries would run it for weeks. My parents insta-regretted buying it for my birthday because mine had no mute and it was loud as hell. :LOL:
 
these DF Retro videos lead me to a few questions..

Does John have ALL the original machines at home? Is he the guy playing -for instance- the DOS version with a 4 button gamepad? (back then in the late 90s from what I remember, playing with controllers meant using the MIDI port and calibration was a hit and a miss)

When does he use emulators and when he does not? I am sure he uses emulators for the most obscure ports, but when the gameplay stops during the morphing of the final boss, is it perfect emulation or the original machine? I am curious....
So, to finally answer this, I try to use original hardware whenever possible (I own roughly 150 or so consoles - though that includes duplicates). I try my best to use emulation only when absolutely necessary.

In the MK video, I had to rely on Mame for the arcade version as I couldn't get my hands on a board (original MK boards are rather uncommon here in Germany) and the Lynx homebrew port (I own a Lynx but mine doesn't have TV out and I don't have a flash cart for homebrew either). All the other versions are captured or filmed from real hardware (hence why I do those filmed shots). That includes the PC version which was played in real mode DOS on an old 90s PC - that was me playing it on the CRT monitor with the Gravis pad.

So, yeah, for most consoles and PC, I use original hardware in videos but for arcade games, I often have to rely on Mame. Not always but usually. Arcade boards are often too expensive to obtain for a video and take up so much space (those PCBs are massive).
 
So, to finally answer this, I try to use original hardware whenever possible (I own roughly 150 or so consoles - though that includes duplicates). I try my best to use emulation only when absolutely necessary.

In the MK video, I had to rely on Mame for the arcade version as I couldn't get my hands on a board (original MK boards are rather uncommon here in Germany) and the Lynx homebrew port (I own a Lynx but mine doesn't have TV out and I don't have a flash cart for homebrew either). All the other versions are captured or filmed from real hardware (hence why I do those filmed shots). That includes the PC version which was played in real mode DOS on an old 90s PC - that was me playing it on the CRT monitor with the Gravis pad.

So, yeah, for most consoles and PC, I use original hardware in videos but for arcade games, I often have to rely on Mame. Not always but usually. Arcade boards are often too expensive to obtain for a video and take up so much space (those PCBs are massive).
wow, 150 different models of consoles is....otherwordly! Wish I had those when I was a kid, I enjoyed reading magazines and imagined having the system to play those beautiful games, yet I didnt have one, just a computer in the late 90s, being Microsoft Golf and the original Need for Speed my first games.

How many of those 150 consoles -or the base models at least- did you actually have when you were a kid? Did you regret buying any of those? When have you played a game -or several- an extensive amount of time at once?

Are you afraid of playing some games you loved back in the day because you are thinking "I don't want to erase all the good memories I have about this game"?

Have you ever played a game you loved and all the good memories disappeared 'cos you didn't expect it would feel or look so bad nowadays? (this actually happened to me with Forza 1, I loved that game, but then..., I played it on a HD screen via X360 emulation and all I could see was a mess of polygons and blurry pixels galore).

Do you prefer playing games with a friend irl or playing online?

Thanks for replying all my previous questions. Love your work.
 
new DF Retro video. That MS-DOS prompt terminal at the beginning is quite the teaser for things to come. I've never played that game. The game is played under DosBox, I guess? Watching both friends playing the game reminds of myself playing games with my best friend -and best childhood friend- irl. He was the cool kid who had many consoles back in the day, I was once the one having a PC, the only one.

Dunno if John plays a lot of games with his friend in the video. Believe it or not, the other day, a couple of weeks ago, we played games on my PC 8 hours straight. :mrgreen: -from 9pm to 5AM- Now we dont have time, maybe til summer so..., perhaps the odd game here and there but it was fun.

 
I purchased Resident Evil 2 Remake a week ago and I broke every single record I have on videogames, since I spent 45 hours playing the game 'cos it became one of my favourite games ever. It got me so hooked for whatever reason that I completed the game 4 times already, Claire part A, Leon part A, Claire part B, Leon part B.

So I wanted to go further and I remember watching my best friend playing the game on his PS1 -I had (and still have) the original on PC, but didn't have the money to buy RE2-, so I wanted to give the game a retro touch, and I decreased the resolution from 1440p to 640x480, and this is the result (with HDR metadata):

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The 60 at the top right is because I limited the max framerate of ALL my games to 60 fps on nVidia's Control Panel to get re-accustomed to it. Two more reasons:

- Save energy in this dark times of coronavirus
- The GPU runs very very silent 'cos it's not working hard, so it's even nicer.

Look at how flat the pistol's ammunition looks on the couch.
 
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Without HDR metadata -game looks a lot darker with SDR-. Btw, at 640x480 the speed of the input's response feels like....so sharp and crisp, so soft, super super super lightning fast. It feels as if internally the GPU was moving the game at 2000fps, so to speak.

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Should have gone 240p with a 6x integer scale
how do you do that and why that resolution exactly? (I played the original RE on a Monster 3D at 640x480) The images were taken on 1440p 165Hz monitor and the lower I could go is 640x480.

New DF Retro video. Darn, I wanted that game back in the day, but I was into Age of Empires 2 and had no money. Nice landscape at the start. Also, I have the same 3DFX graphics card at home as the one shown in the first minute of the video. :mrgreen:

 
how do you do that and why that resolution exactly? (I played the original RE on a Monster 3D at 640x480) The images were taken on 1440p 165Hz monitor and the lower I could go is 640x480.
The PS1 version (and maybe N64) ran at 240p. According to the internet (I don't own RE2 remake) you can set a custom resolution by editing the re2_config.ini in the install directory. You may have to turn on integer scaling and set a custom resolution in your graphics cards control panel. 640*360 would give a perfect 4x scale and 16:9 aspect ratio as well. 720*480 would give you widecreen 480p at a 3x scale
 
how do you do that and why that resolution exactly? (I played the original RE on a Monster 3D at 640x480) The images were taken on 1440p 165Hz monitor and the lower I could go is 640x480.

New DF Retro video. Darn, I wanted that game back in the day, but I was into Age of Empires 2 and had no money. Nice landscape at the start. Also, I have the same 3DFX graphics card at home as the one shown in the first minute of the video. :mrgreen:

Hours I ve spent trying o download it in pieces on a 56k modem pirated :mrgreen: But maybe I spent as much on the internet trying to download as I would have bought it original.

I think this game deserved a lot more than what it got. I am sure it got some downgrade in the final release but the tech was pretty awesome. The atmosphere and visuals were very nice.
 
Hours I ve spent trying o download it in pieces on a 56k modem pirated :mrgreen: But maybe I spent as much on the internet trying to download as I would have bought it original.

I think this game deserved a lot more than what it got. I am sure it got some downgrade in the final release but the tech was pretty awesome. The atmosphere and visuals were very nice.
hahahah, sounds familiar. That's what I did with Age of Empires 2 The Conquerors. I had the original but not the money to buy the Conquerors expansion, so I downloaded it from a pirate source, with great patience and the software of teh day to download stuff -cant recall the name, it started with g something, and there were others-.

However, one day, one of the developers of the game, Cptn_Kidd (which I knew 'cos he was active in my favourite forums at the time, Mr. Fixit forums -great interface they had, a gaming site dedicated to AoE that later became F-Zero centered and one day disappeared), mrfixitonline.com) joined our session of Age of Empires 2 in the great MS Zone.

I felt bad and thought he had caught me in the Southern Seas, I left the session, and a couple weeks later I purchased the full game.
 
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