Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: nintendo

New and Better Controller for Mobile Video Gaming

Posted on by Viljami

I just got this piece of joy by mail. It is Turtle Beach Atom which is a controller for mobile devices. Actually it’s for smart phones. It cost me only 70 euros. I have seen this model being sold for about 100 euros. So, I got some discount.

I have been thinking about bringing my retro gaming to a zone of emulation. You know that you can fit every released NES game to a 237 MB of disk space. And all SNES games would take 1,7 GB. If you consider it you can probably get a micro SD card that has 128 GB of space for maybe 20 euros. That should hold a lot of games.

Of course only the required disk space isn’t the only matter that comes to consideration. You would certainly like to have a system setup that can handle as many high quality retro games on as many consoles as is possible. I figured that you need at least 512 MB of RAM, about a half of a GB, for running a Dreamcast emulation. I started to think about getting a new phone. It would cost me about 200 euros. I checked some smart phone models. They all seemed to have 2 or 3 GB of RAM. Then I remembered that I have an old phone laying around. So, I decided to use that.

Of course only the RAM that is available is not everything that an emulator needs. My old phone has decent level of performance. The model is Huawei P10 Lite. It is an old phone from 2017. I haven’t used it since the beginning of 2021. That is when I bought a new phone. Let’s consider some specs of my P10 Lite. It is capable of displaying Full HD quality video. That’s 1080 x 1920 pixels. It has 3 GB of RAM. It has a processor that is octa-core which translates to “4×2.1 GHz Cortex-A53 & 4×1.7 GHz Cortex-A53”. I am not a big specialist on multiple core processors. The phone only has 32 GB of space so it definitely needs a memory card. I did have one laying around so I decided to put it to good use.

I set up some emulators. Duckstation was one that I installed. I also installed Retroarch which can handle many systems. I aimed for being able to play at least systems including GameCube, Dreamcast, PS1 and Nintendo 64. You don’t actually need a lot of power for playing games on systems that are older than SNES. I didn’t think to play newer systems like PS3 or Xbox 360. Some might want to play also PS4 on an emulator. That would require a higher permance personal computer. I am not saying it’s not possible.

So I am currently charging the battery of my Turtle Beach Atom controller. I have installed already some games. I picked one game from here and another game from there. PS1 emulation seems to be running fine and I am able to play N64 games also. Even only this is very satisfying. I remember having some tough luck trying to set up a Lakka OS based system some years ago and then I struggled with PS1 and Dreamcast games. I had an old PC that could quite handle the performance.

I am ready, soon, to try to test some games. At this time things seem to be working fine. I have to wait for about 2,5 hours for the battery to charge. It was then promised that the controller would be functional for 20 hours. This is a huge upgrade to the controller that I used with smart phones earlier. I have written a blog post about it in this blog earlier. I have broken the glass of my screen of my P10 Lite. I didn’t want to show it. That was the reason why I didn’t include ít to this blog posts featured image.

I hope this blog post gave you inspiration. There is a very good guide for someone that wants to build or assemble a system like this for retro gaming. Here is the link:

Android Emulation Starter Guide

 

A Retro Gaming Book About Nintendo GameCube

Posted on by Viljami

Yesterday I got to add a new retro game book to my collection of books. It is the book about GameCube, “GameCube Anthology”. This book is published by Geeks Line Publishing. I was very content when I found out that this book was available very easily from a well-known Finnish web shop. Now, I am not going to advertise here. Let’s just say that it was easily available. The price was 42 euros with the shipping.

There has been a lot of conversation about GameCube lately. It is a very popular console among collectors. This anthology consists of 360 pages. It is written in English. Through these pages the book tells the reader about technology and how the process of developing the console formed. There are games presented. Actually ALL games that were released, that makes the total of 647 games. It includes games that were exclusively released in Japan, USA or Europe. So, this is all good information for a GameCube collector.

I am not so familiar with Geeks Line Publishing. I did find also a book about Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short, and a book about Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES. These both are available from the same web shop. I figured I am most interested currently in GameCube, so I picked this one up. Although a book about NES or SNES would sound interesting to me, also. As I browse through this publishers website I find that they have published similar books about other retro game consoles like PlayStation. All these books seem to be targeted for a collector.

GameCube is a very interesting system. It brings me closer to the feel of 2000s retro games that have this particular combination of game play and 3D graphics. I don’t have so many games currently for this system. I have all in all about maybe 15 or 20 games for GameCube. I have the remake of the first Resident Evil and RE zero, Super Mario Sunshine, Need For Speed Underground and Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4, just to name some games. There were several kind of “new” and “wild” ideas concerning the design of GameCube. First of all the controller was something other than those Dual Shock or original Xbox controllers we were used to. It was also something different to have these small 1,4 GB game discs instead of DVD game discs that had 4,7 GB of space for the game. There was no hard disk. You had to use a memory card. There were also four spots for a controller, so, you could play multiplayer on only one screen.

Why Nintendo did these decisions with the design? I think they probably wanted to stand out and create something unique that gaming fans would love. In my thinking this was a success. How otherwise would you still be playing these GameCube’s games after over 20 years since its release. GameCube sold almost 22 million units. It was manufactured between 2001 and 2007. GameCube was facing tough competition from Sony’s PlayStation 2, original Xbox and of course from Sega’s Dreamcast, that sold “only” 9 million units worldwide. PS2 was  the greatest gaming system back then when it comes to sold units. It sold over 150 million units.

I am hoping to read this book soon. I am currently reading some other stuff also. It definitely seems promising. Maybe I even figure some new games that I would like to add to my collection. It’s just that these games prices are a bit high right now. So, it’s not a good idea to spend all your money to GameCube games. Maybe we will get a GameCube mini console, soon, who knows?

Could This Be The Answer?

Posted on by Viljami

With all these hardware consoles you get a sense that there could be an easier solution. This answer would be in this case one single personal computer connected to the 4K telly with a single HDMI cord. It would take only one HDMI port. This isn’t a hallucination. There already are several computers available for this task. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the power that one modern PC today holds can handle almost any gaming console emulator from NES to PS4.

You would need one PC. This would cost something from 300 euros to several thousands of euros. You would also need a controller. I prefer Xbox Series S/X controller when it comes to emulator gaming. If you would like to change a controller between systems you would need to assign keys over and over again. You could be able to make a profile for every controller of every system. However it would be easier to play all systems with only one controller.

The first thing you need with this kind of setup is a reliable Linux operating system dedicated to emulation. At first it seems I would choose Lakka OS. It is a nice emulator that allows you to run several different emulators of different gaming systems. After setting up you don’t need to actually unplug your controller or get to your keyboard at all. So, I prefer Lakka OS. There are other operating systems available, like Retropie, Recalbox and Batocera. The last mentioned can be run from inserted USB stick without any other kind of installation.

If you want to play emulated games on systems like GameCube, PS2, original Xbox and Sega Dreamcast, you will need a powerful computer. I would say that you need more than a Raspberry Pi 4 can provide. I am not going to give you detailed specifications here. We can of course check what are the recommended requirements for an emulator like PCSX2. We can get to a conclusion that you would need at least 8 GB of RAM and a GPU with something like 4 GB of VRAM and capability to run DirectX 11 or OpenGL 4.5. Well, what about the processor? The processor would need to support AVX2, have a rating of 2600 and have four cores with or without hyper threading.

This kind of an emulation station could be your solution to this very interesting question. As prices of games are ricing this would make your wallet heavier at least for a while and enable you to play lots of retro game content. There is of course also the question about breaking every copyright law that exists. This is a difficult matter. Let’s just say that it is not legal to load hundreds of games from internet for free. While this is illegal there seems to be very few choices. You can pay hundreds of euros of games that cannot or are very hard to rip to ROM file and play with your emulator. Some emulators need also the BIOS of the system they are emulating.

Nintendo has been busy bringing its retro content available for those that have an online Nintendo account. You can probably figure how popular retro games currently are. It must be stated that it would be nice, for us game hobbyists, to be able to somehow get our hands to this content for a reasonable price. Playing original games on original hardware is becoming more and more expensive. And it must be said that game consoles don’t last for several decades and must be at some point at least repaired.