Emulators

I went through a lot of trouble to be able to play Ogre Battle 64 on the original hardware with today’s high resolution, digital monitors. Was it worth it? Intro from original hardware Most older consoles were designed around the old cathode ray tube televisions – one to three electron beams use electromagnets to shine on variously colored phosphors. The whole thing was high voltage and prone to interference from anything else going on electrically in the area. ...

I was looking for a game to keep me occupied during the long holiday weekend, and my partner handed me an old RPG from the original PlayStation days – Dark Stone. It didn’t run super well on my usual PSX emulator, so I was forced to try something different – RetroArch, now on Steam. Dark Stone questing Dark Stone is an action RPG. A necromancer, Draak, has resurrected himself as a dragon and is terrorizing the world. Seven crystals scattered across seven dungeons in seven lands are required to reform the Time Stone and allow you to put a final end to him. You take on the role of one of eight different classes (male and female versions of warrior, mage, thief and priest), go out, explore, hunt, get levels and gear, and then take on a dungeon. ...

So, there, it’s done. 62 hours and 22 minutes from the start to the end of the game, LucasArt’s near forgotten cinematic tactical strategy gladiatorial combat RPG defied all my expectations. The last time I blogged about Gladius, I’d just left Imperia for the Windward Steppes. That gave us the last group member, Eiji, an archer, who was more than she first appeared. But who didn’t know that? Continuing on to the Southern Expanse brought us a cutscene where one of the many evil villains dogging our steps said she would be sending someone to us who would bring us right to her, followed by a new character joining us immediately afterward. ...

After adding another hero and a minotaur to their motley crew, the Viking twins conquer the fighting pits of Imperia and set their sights windward. I just spent an hour writing a shell script to take the PNG files that PCSX2 generates for screenshots into resized, blog-friendly JPG files. I do and do and do for you all :-) (…and now I just rewrote it in Python) (…and now I asked GitHub Copilot to rewrite it for me, which it did.) (and now I just rearranged my Github folders). ...

It’s hard to get your main characters killed, but not impossible. I did it :-) Gladius trades plot for deep strategical game play, and I’m there for it. Given Gladius is from LucasArts, known for deeply cinematic games, I expected there to be a little more plot in the twin stories of two Vikings, or an Imperial gladiator, who build their gladiator schools from scratch until they are large enough to challenge the emperor’s best fighters. ...

Welcome to the start of my playthrough of LucasArts’ “Gladius”, a tactical arena fighting game for the PlayStation 2. Wow. What to say about this game? I first heard about this game only a couple of weeks ago – I guess I’d entirely missed it when it came out in 2003. I ordered a copy from eBay. It arrived yesterday; popped it into the PCSX2 emulator and it came right up. ...

Welcome to Blaugust 2nd and the first day of our Final Fantasy 1 playthrough! Garland is the first boss the Warriors of Light meet in Final Fantasy 1. Once a hero, he has kidnapped Princess Sarah and taken her to the Chaos Shrine, there to do evil things. What happened to make him this way? Our Final Fantasy playthrough starts with our party meeting this fallen angel… (The featured image is Garland as he appears in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a mobile game with its own story that nonetheless pulls in visions of heroes and villains from other Final Fantasy games.) ...

I hate to be hyperbolic about this. But… I just can’t. Imagine… a marketplace, backed by the “blockchain” and “non-fungible tokens”, where you could buy gacha packs that contain random gifs of old Atari 2600 cartridge boxes. Some just stand there, doing nothing. Some are colored gold. Some spin. If you are very, very lucky, and spend a lot of money on gacha packs, you might find yourself in the possession of a gif of a box that opens up to show the game being played for a couple of seconds. ...

I was so excited when I saw a video on the Polymega this morning. The Polymega is a sort of uber-emulator console that can take your PS1, Sega Saturn, Sega TurboGrafx 16, and Neo Geo CD games, rip them to internal storage to keep them safe forever, and from then you can play them on a cool looking console while your original games are stored safely away. I’ve got an original copy of Panzer Dragoon for the Sega Saturn, which (last time I looked) was worth over $600. I want that kept safe. ...

We’ve been getting into EverQuest a little here, and some perfect storm of the new version of the best PS2 emulator out there, PCSX2, EverQuest nostalgia (BF and I spent some time making new EQ characters on various servers and checking up on our older characters) got me wondering how the EverQuest Online Adventures fans were doing with their reboot, Project: Return Home. I’d never played EQOA when it was live for the PlayStation 2 – I was already playing actual EverQuest, and there was no way I would have the money or the time to play two of them. But when I saw the PS2 disk for sale in the local used game store, what the heck, I bought it. ...