Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Tag: ps1

Some Undisputed Classics Released Again

Posted on by Viljami

There is no excuse for not knowing what these two amazing titles are: Asteroids and Space Invaders. These two games were very popular firstly in arcades back in the late 70s and early 80s. They were published by Activision and were later ported to consoles like Atari 2600.

You can only admire the quality of game design. As these games were meant to be played on machines that weren’t so powerful you had this certain style that you had to apply to the game. Another good game of that era is Arkanoid. Also Pong has to be mentioned here.

These games had only this one screen where the whole game took place. There were no scrolling screens like we could see later on in games like Nintendos Super Mario Bros, which came out a a bit later. There were also not so many colors as graphical capability was limited. I propably don’t have to mention anything about sound effects, music or audio at all. They were meaningless.

These games are classics. In twenty years designing games goes some steps further. This is unavoidable. The first PlayStation was capable of producing some very high quality graphics already. So it is comfortable to say that these games deserved to be re-made to a more modern system.

I bought these games for my PS1. I thought they are a fun addittion to my video game collection. They offer some re-designed graphics, sound effects, music and also methods to control the objects in the game.

The idea behind Asteroids is that you have a space ship that can shoot. Your mission is to cut a huge rock, asteroid, to small pieces by shooting it. You can turn your ship to any direction, like 360 degrees and give your ship a boost so it moves. It keeps moving, since we are in space, there is no gravity, to the direction that it has had a boost to unless you turn your ship to another direction and give it a boost again. The game ends if you hit a piece of an asteroid. You get to next level if you succeed in shooting the asteroid to tiny bits.

The other game here in this picture is Space Invaders. In this game you face a group of aliens. Your mission is to shoot all of them. So this is definitely a shooter. An alien disappears when you shoot it. You start from the bottom of the screen. You have some obstacles that you can use for cover if you like. Enemies keep moving towards you step by step. You win the level if you can shoot every alien enemy and you lose if they reach the botttom of the screen.

These games are not so expensive. I thought they were a fun addition to my collection. You can probably get one these like under 20 euros from your favorite retro game dealer. These kinds of classic games are an important part of gaming history. You can probably also find copios of these released for even newer systems. You can also try them out if you an emulator. I don’t know if it is possible to play these games’s original arcade version but maybe this would be possible in some kind of a gaming museum.

Also if you are into programming it could be a nice idea for a project to program a clone of Asteroids for example. You could use maybe JavaScript with some image editing software or something like that. Just keep in mind that while these games seem simple there is a lot going on in them and it isn’t an easy task to just remake one.

Xbox Series X Has a Nice Backwards Compatibility (But Far From Full)

Posted on by Viljami

My Xbox 360 has been suffering. It doesn’t read game discs anymore. Otherwise it is fully functional. I tried opening it a bit through the disc unit as was insturcted on an official guideline I found from internet. I read from the guide that you should first power the device off, remove all cables and then try to push the wheel of the disc unit so that it opens up a bit. This was instructed to do with paper clip that has been straightened. Then you should bloww some compressed air to it.

I did mangae to do this and it fixed the problem. I was able to start a game once again. Then some weeks went by. I wasn’t playing anything with my Xbox 360. I played my other game conmsoles. As you might know Xbox 360 has a backwards compatiblity with original Xbox games. 463 games out of all 996 published are backwards compatible. We can make a quick calculation and find out that this makes 46,5 % of all games that were published for original Xbox.

If you think about PS3 and PS4 and their backwards compatibility you can propably figure how differently Microsoft and Sony deal with this issue. PS4 wasn’t at any moment backwards compatible at all. This pissed off some people. You were able to play PS1 games on PS3. Some PS3 models you are able to play also PS2 games with. PS5 however has limited backwards compatibility for PS4 games.

Xbox Series X, the latest Xbox, is fully compatible with older Xbox consoles’s games. However every game is not supported. There are 63 original Xbox games out of 996 and 633 out of 2155 Xbox 360 games compatible with the latest Xbox console. Xbox Series S doesn’t even have a disc drive so apparently it doesn’t support older consoles’s game discs. All Xbox One games are compatible with Series X.

With this information available I decided to remove my oddly acting Xbox 360 from my current setup. This meant actually that I had to remove also tens of games from my lineup. I like to keep every game that I am able to play with any console in my setup in this huge shelf. I had to remove many Xbox and Xbox 360 games.

I have now only six original Xbox games left in that shelf. The picture related to this post shows my current games that I am able to play with my Xbox Series X. I didn’t count the games that I removed so carefully. I think I set aside maybe 70 games in total. I had to put games like Halo 1 and 2, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4 and many others to storage. These were games that I haven’t had time to get into thoroughly.

I would like to be able to play every game that has ever been released for any Xbox system. This is just the way that things go. You are updating your setup and getting into some new or retro consoles. You don’t actually play every game that you own. Some games and systems you just have to set aside at least for a while. Xbox 360 is an old gaming console. It was first released in 2005. I bought my Xbox 360 as a used copy. This was about six years ago. So maybe it was time for me to move on.

Games do get old. Systems do get old. There are many games that you just can’t play, buy or enjoy in any way no more. I think there should be something that could be done to this issue of great games just disappearing somewhere. We seem to be still moving so fast forward that we can easily completely forget a nice old game.

I don’t know the exact answer to this question. Will there be in the future some websites or collectins of old games. Are we going to be able to finally play these games with an emulator? Would it be nice to have a museum that could hold many old games? I know that there are already some websites that are dedicated to old Commodre 64 games. They have archived thousands of games which are also available as downloads.

There cetainly is some knowledge about gaming that also I as a gamer have been able to develop in myself. From the moment when I first gazed at a video game in some arcade I have been curious to find out more about games. I went as far as studying the field. I dreamed I would be able to make a game or something similar. And I think I am not alone with my knowledge and I think this is an interesting topic all in all.

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