Emulation

Sushi and Yuzu

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Good Morning Friends! I have no clue how many morning posts I am actually going to make this week. This is the week where I have to do in-person training from 8 am until 5 pm. At least for this morning, I decided to vary my sleep schedule a bit and go back to my 5:30 am wake-up. This honestly isn’t a bad idea given that during the school year this is what I am going to end up doing anyways, and maybe this gives us a month or so of getting back into the swing of it. I had every intent of making it super far into the Guild Wars 2 story progression, but that never really happened. Instead I spent my weekend playing a whole slew of other games. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. As is often the case… this Monday’s post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of different topics. As the week goes on I might drill down into each of them a bit further.

I am continuing to move forward in Honkai Star Rail, and tend to put in 30 mins or so every day to do the assorted daily content. There has been an event that allowed for double rewards from Calyx, and I have honestly been using this to stock up on experience gain items. I am nearing the next break point in adventure level which should allow me to take my characters up to level 80. I know I do not have anywhere near enough materials banked to bring my entire squad up in level, but my goal is to at least get a few of them up, and then grind more materials to pull up the rest. I still have had zero luck pulling Luocha and am rapidly running out of time to snag him before the next banner starts.

Another game that I spent some time playing this weekend was Dave the Diver. This honestly seems like the perfect Steam Deck game, though I’ve only played it on my Gaming Desktop so far. I saw this dumb game all over my feed over the last couple of weeks, and when it showed up on the AggroChat topic list I figured I needed to check it out. It is somewhat hard to describe this game… because it is so many different games rolled into one. You spend your days diving into the ocean gathering resources for various folks… and then you spend your evenings waiting on customers at a seaside sushi bar. While gathering resources you are under constant pressure to make sure you are catching enough fish so that you can open the sushi bar that evening. Instead of a health bar, the game uses your oxygen meter as a single combined resource. If you “die” you only get to keep a single item from your inventory. I definitely want to play more of this, and if you need a charming oceanic game… maybe check it out.

The other revelation that I made this weekend is that Parsec now supports Dual Sense controllers. Right now the Dual Sense is probably my favorite controller, and use it whenever possible. I noticed a few weeks back that Yuzu the Switch Emulator is now smart enough to interpret the gyroscope built into the Dual Sense and map it over as the console gyro. The challenge was that up until this point, Parsec had essentially read every gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, effectively dumbing down the input to only the buttons that allowed. However in my research in how to make a Dual Sense work… I found that it is just now natively supported, pending you download the parsec USB Driver for it. It works shockingly well and even the gyro has next to no latency.

So that means that I am way more interested in emulating Switch games than I was previously. If I could play them over parsec, it means I can hang out and play them on my laptop or even figure out some shenanigans that also let me play them over a mobile phone maybe. I get that making a thing that is already portable… portable by jumping through a bunch of hoops sounds dumb but I am who I am. I finally got around to trying out Pokemon Arceus, and I gotta say… I already like this FAR better than the traditional mainline Pokemon model. I have a weird relationship with Pokemon given that I was an adult when they came out and I played Blue for the first time on a Gameboy Emulator. I don’t have the built-up nostalgia for the game that so many folks are roughly a decade younger than me do. I hope we see more of this formula because I really dig it so far.

I also spent a bit more time playing Tears of the Kingdom, and honestly… this is the game that I mainlined yesterday. The main reason why I am playing it on Yuzu is that I can apply cheats that remove weapon durability from the game. This honestly ruins the entire game experience for me, and I didn’t really love Breath of the Wild until I played through on Cemu the Wii Emulator with a durability patch to just remove that system from the game. I get for some of you fine folks out there, the durability system is way more important to your experience… but I hated that aspect of Halo… needing to constantly swap weapons, and I hated it in Zelda as well. I already really like this game far more than I did Breath of the Wild. I will probably talk more about it later this week, but essentially I got far enough yesterday to get off the initial “tutorial island”.

The extremely astute might have already noticed that there are a couple of new additions to my masthead of nonsense. Either that or you might have been around the fediverse this weekend when I talked about it. For a bit, I have wanted some of the cute critters from Guild Wars 2 to fill in a few gaps. I’ve had my set of “Streamer Moogles” for a while, that have stolen my keyboard, mouse, headset, etc. I love my Choya Pinata miniature and I have a deep adoration of the Quaggan… and the cutest version is the one with the Turtle shell hat. So when Ammo wrapped up my Path of Exile commission, I threw out another one for her to work on whenever she got a chance. Over the weekend she wrapped them up and then of course I immediately incorporated them into the banner. Some people get Tattoos… and apparently, I just keep adding stuff to the masthead of my blog.

Anyways! It is time for me to go get ready. I hope to be able to knock out blog posts each morning… but just in case that doesn’t actually happen… I wish you all an amazing week and I am hoping to survive mine.

All Over the Map

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Good Morning Friends! I was a bit all over the place when it came to gaming this weekend. I did not make nearly as much progress as I thought I would in Guild Wars 2. Essentially I wrapped up Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric, which now plants me firmly in the middle of Draconis Mons. I have some bad memories of this section of Living World 3. Specifically I remember there was a quest chain where I had to change up my keybindings in order to get through it. By default I have an option turned on that makes my ground target effects center on whatever I happen to be targetting. This is super useful when it comes to not having to fiddle with aiming them. However there was a sequence I can remember when I was flying up in the air and having to target specific things on the ground which required me to turn this all off. So I will have to figure how HOW I do that… by the time I get to that part of the quest.

I am still playing a bit of Honkai Star Rail every day, and still slowly working on trying to get Coffin Guy aka Luocha. It is not necessarily that I even like him as a character, but I want access to a second healer. In my travels of trying to pull for him, I did manage to pick up Pela which is cool. I bonded with her as a character during the whole Museum event. Speaking of events there is a new one starting today that gives you double Calyx rewards. Like as far as events go it is boring… but it is a decent time to stock up on resources. Unfortunately only the first 12 Calyx battles count towards the double rewards, so I guess I know what I will be doing for the next few days at least… stockpiling resources.

One of the cool things about Mastodon in general is that it has a heavy indie dev presence. The other day the very awesome Megan Fox (the game dev one) was doing a thing where she was boosting indie devs that had less than 100 followers. One of these was Craig, who works on a game that recently hit early access on Steam called Trinity Fusion. So I picked it up and have played quite a bit of it over the weekend. Essentially it has a lot in common with Dead Cells and Hades, and there are some really interesting options. I think maybe the difficulty curve might be a bit overtuned especially if you choose the “easy” mode because there isn’t really much of a difference from the normal mode. The art style reminds me a bit of Flashback for reasons I can’t fully explain. There are a lot of interesting weapon options, some of them clearly better than others but that is always going to happen. I will be interested to see how this one evolves over time.

I also spent some time this weekend screwing around with Yuzu the Nintendo Switch emulator. It had been quite awhile since I last touched it, and lord has it improved during that time. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the emulator is capable of latching onto the gyro sense in my Dual Sense PS5 controller. I remember when I was playing through Breath of the Wild on Cemu I had to use some monstrocity where I latched into the gyro in my android phone to complete those puzzles. I mean I could just play all of these games on my switch, but I know with Cemu the ability to remove weapon durability from Breath of the Wild made that game infinitely more enjoyable. I need to dive into the mods for Yuzu and see if I can find something similar for Tears of the Kingdom. I have to say playing on my 3080 equipped PC… is so much prettier and smoother than playing on a native Switch.

Lastly I spent some time this weekend screwing around on the Mage in Last Epoch. I’ve decided to follow a build guide and go all in on lightning damage. So far it is just immensely fun to shock everything to death and watch the lightning damage arc between oncoming monsters. I am not sure how far I will make it with this character. I spent the entire podcast on Saturday playing it and am now around level 21 ish. I’ve chosen my specialization and went Sorc but am still picking up basics from the Mage tree. I am curious to see how this character feels once I get a decent amount of ward preservation on it, because at the moment it feels a wee bit squishy.

Last week was a bit of a slog, in spite of only being three days long. I am hoping this week will be a little less compacted and stressful. I know I essentially have to prepare for being in training all week the week after next. I’ve not done anything in person for that many days in a row for awhile, so that will be its own sort of stress. I hope you all have a pheomenal week, and I hope that maybe I can pick one of the many things I have been doing to actually focus on.

Fire Soldiers and Elf Beards

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Death Stranding - Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire
Death Stranding – Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire

When in doubt folks, lead with the coolest screenshot that you have. This is one of those weekends when I spent a truly phenomenal amount of time playing a specific game… that I absolutely cannot talk about because reasons. I believe I clocked in around twenty hours playing the thing that I can’t talk about over the course of primarily Friday and Saturday. I look forward to seeing more of the thing that I can’t talk about seeing. Instead this morning you are going to get one of those general rundown type posts talking about where I am in various games.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Blood Elf Character Creator
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Blood Elf Character Creator

I got into Shadowlands Beta out of the magnanimous nature of a friend of mine, so huge props to them for helping me out there. I’ve been piddling around over the last week and I am having a lot of fun. The most important thing to talk about however is the changes to the character creator. I can have a beard as a Blood Elf, which is phenomenal since that was not a thing you could really do well. The best you could do previously was a weak assed chinstrip. The undead models look amazing as well and are pretty much everything I have ever wanted in a rotting corpse. The big thing is it seems like they have expanded the options and decoupled them so whereas things used to be locked to specific sets of choices, but for example Tauren horn and hair and face are no longer combined in weird forced sets.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Intro Quest
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Intro Quest

As far as the Story itself… I am getting DEEP Wrath of the Lich King vibes here and it is more than just the fact that the Ebon Blade are factoring significantly in everything we are doing right now. I am also greatly enjoying that there has been no faction based bullshit yet, and it is all a big team pulling together to save Azeroth sort of feel. The intro quest reminds me of the storming of the Dark Portal in Warlords, if that even were less on-rails. It has a “we did a thing and we were absolutely not prepared for the ramifications” type feeling to it. As far as the zone content, it reminds me of the best parts of Legion and Burning Crusade in that we are exploring a world that works NOTHING like the one we came from and it is a “stranger in a strange land” sort of feel.

Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server
Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server

In more of my usual nonsense, I for some reason decided to reinstall Return of Reckoning which is a thing. I’ve not really done much but I did create a Dwarven Iron Breaker which was my class of choice back when this thing was a live game. I have to say that the quest advisement is not super amazing. Sure this was the first game to do the whole highlight an area of the map, which was cool… but I still cannot for the life of me find a damned book that is supposed to be on a nearby bench. I got in for a bit, played through a few quests and then got frustrated. Hopefully when I am in a different mindset I can pop back in and play some more.

Sega Saturn Bluetooth Retro Controller
Sega Saturn Bluetooth Retro Controller

In other random news I have settled on what I feel is the perfect controller for my Retro Freak. I greatly prefer the layout of the 6 button genesis and saturn controllers, especially when it comes to fighting games. I never got used to hitting the shoulder buttons in place of attack keys and spent a lot of my time on SNES playing with the Capcom Soldier Pad. Ultimately I was looking for something that would facilitate my preferred layout but also offer a bunch of buttons for mapping things to. Enter the line of officially licensed Sega Saturn controllers from Retro-Bit. The only negative is the home button appears to be unique to the Switch and is not mappable, but it gives me A, B, C, X, Y, Z, Start, Select, Left bumper and Right bumper to map inputs to which neatly fits all of the systems that are playable on the Retro Freak. I have to use it wired, but I went ahead and got the Bluetooth model for future options.

Death Stranding - The Final Run
Death Stranding – The Final Run

Lastly I have been trying to wrap up Death Stranding, and spent most of the day yesterday working my towards the eventual conclusion of the game. My grand plan had been to be finished with it by the time Horizon Zero Dawn lands next week, and I think that is well within reach… at the very least finishing the story. There are a bunch of miscellaneous side quests that I could be doing, but I have to say the mountain region really killed my joy for running random fetch quests. Hideo Kojima really loves sending you completely out of your way… because there have been three times so far when I have been asked to more or less traverse the entirety of what was then my game map. Yesterday I was asked yet again to traverse from the furthest possible point on the west coast of the map, all the way to the east coast of the map while dealing with extremely ramped up versions of everything I had encountered before.

Death Stranding - Corpse in a Cart
Death Stranding – Corpse in a Cart

At this point… I am ready to be done. I have greatly enjoyed this game and the storyline has wound its way through some deeply interesting lore and world building bits, but I am ready to say goodbye to Sam Porter Bridges. It is a phenomenal game, and pending you have the time to really spend exploring it then I would highly suggest giving it a go. There is a lot that you have to get used to early in the game, but it really is a masterpiece as far as games go. What has been surprising is how much of the stuff I considered to be complete nonsense on day one, has been fully explained and has paid off in a significant way. Extremely impressive.

Retro Freak Console

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My CAST Ranger character from Phantasy Star Online 2
PSO2 Robo Belghast by @AmmosArt

Yesterday was a pretty brilliant day in spite of being fairly stressful. First off we need to talk about how amazing this artwork is of my Cast Ranger from Phantasy Star 2. Some time back I had commissioned my friend Ammo to draw yet another character portrait, and she has truly outdone herself. I more or less expected it to be fairly flat shaded and she went above and beyond to capture the metallic nature of the armor and its reflections. Basically every image you see in the header of this website and the header of AggroChat.com were created by Ammo and represent years worth of projects. I cannot recommend her enough for whatever projects that you might have coming down the pipe.

Eight Original Super Famicom Cartridges
Eight Original Super Famicom Cartridges

Next up I got in a package I had been waiting on from ebay. I’ve always wanted to own original copies of the various JRPGs that I played growing up, and some that I didn’t get to play because they never released in the United States. The other day out of curiosity I did some searching and stumbled onto an auction that included eight different cartridges for $50 and I could not pass that up. The titles included are:

  • Final Fantasy IV
  • Final Fantasy V
  • Final Fantasy VI
  • Dragon Quest I + II
  • Dragon Quest III
  • Dragon Quest V
  • Chrono Trigger
  • Seiken Densetsu 3

Of these titles, I of course had the United States release of both FFIV which came out here as Final Fantasy II, and FFVI which released as Final Fantasy III. I also have an english version of Chrono Trigger, but the others I did not have in any form and had always wanted to own copies of the Dragon Quest series, Final Fantasy V and Seiken Densetsu 3 which recently released here as Trials of Mana.

So “Retro” gaming right now is super hot and a big business, but I was into these game systems before it was really a thing. This is an image that I have salvaged from an old version of one of my websites. This used to be part of an image map that allowed folks to see what everything in that image, but I used to have this complicated sequence of A/B switches that would allow all of those game systems to be played on that RGB monitor. I still technically have everything listed there, but it has been packed away in my closet for awhile now because as we moved into the era of HDMI it just became a pain in the ass to get anything working. If I can remember it all off the top of my head… what you are looking at is:

  • Original Red/White Nintendo Famicom
  • Sega Dreamcast
  • Nintendo 64
  • PlayStation 2
  • Neo Geo CD
  • PlayStation 1
  • Sega Saturn
  • Genesis model 1 with model 2 CD system and a 32X (also had the power base converter somewhere)
  • Nintendo Gamecube
  • Panasonic 3DO
  • Sega Master System
  • Atari Jaguar
  • somewhere there is an Intellvision and an Atari but I don’t think they are hooked up.

For me it was far less about the glory of retro gaming, and more about me reliving bits of my childhood. My first console was an Atari 2600, and as a result I lived through the heyday of all of these systems but couldn’t own most of them. Once I graduated from college, got a job, and with it got my first disposable income… I went through a period of trying to snap systems up that I never got to play so I could experience them. There have been many times I have contemplated just getting rid of everything, but here lately… maybe another sign of a digital midlife crisis… I have been thinking more and more about these original systems.

Japanese Import Retro Freak Console

For awhile now I have been enthralled by the notion of the various systems that allow you to play multiple systems on one modern console with HDMI output. I was aware of three systems, the Polymega, the Retron 5 and the Super RetroTRIO Plus. The Polymega is this complicated system that involves buying a bunch of hot-swapmodules to play various cartridge based games and the base unit with no cartridge support clocks in around $400. The Retro 5 is a system that as its name states supports 5 systems, but based on my research has issues with compatiblity and audio output while also clocking in around $150. The Super RetroTRIO Plus claims is a SOC (system on a chip) based console with extremely high compatiblity and is the cheapest of the three at $80.

In my process of consuming reviews and thrashing about on the interwebs, I discovered that apparently there was a fourth option that I was unaware of. The Retro Freak is a Japanese emulation console, that out of the box supports Famicom, Super Nintendo, Super Famicom, Genesis, Mega Drive, Turbografx 16, PCE Engine, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance titles and the prices vary but you can pick it up from Play Asia for $230. With adapters you can play American Nintendo games as well as Game Gear and Sega Master System. This covers a broad range of the game systems that I would actually like to play and it also has the added benefit of being able to dump rom images from your cartridges to an SD Card allowing you to play the games without having to break out the original cartridges each time.

Now we are swinging back around to why exactly I decided to purchase all of those Japanese games. One of the features of both the Retron and the Retro Freak is the ability to apply game patches when you load a game. So within a few minutes I was able to gather up a few translation patches from RomHacking.net, load them onto the SD Card and now I can play each of these games in English. There are a truly staggering number of these cartridges that have been translated by fan groups, and when you combine this with the fact that there is almost no retail value for the Japanese import cartridges on the open market, it becomes a very reasonable way to play these classic titles. I found another auction for the original 3 Final Fantasy games on the Famicom for right at $20 shipped, and I plan on playing them through translations as well.

So last night I spent a good chunk of my evening playing through various games and putting the console through its paces. I have it running through my Elgato HD60 Pro capture card with the scanlines option turned on. Since I played most of these games on a television growing up, it just looks weird to me not to have artificial scanlines enabled. I am super impressed with both the quality of the emulation and the sound output, because effectively everything sounds like I remember it sounding. Castlevania Bloodlines is a cartridge that a lot of emulation systems butcher, and it played exactly like I remember it.

The only negative that I have run into is some weirdness with the controllers. The default one that it comes with is not amazing, and through the course of the night stopped registering some of the inputs. I had read online that the system had wide support for all XInput and DirectInput controllers. However in practice this does not seem to be the case and it appears that everything you use with it needs to be able to operate in the DirectInput scheme. This rules out any Xbox style controllers that are not capable of specifically switching to D Input. PlayStation controllers appear to work, but the Hori Fight Commander that I was hoping to use has some button switching capabilities and this appears to completely throw the console off.

The controller I finally settled on is my 8BitDo 3N30 pro+ bluetooth controller, connected with a USB Cable to the console. I had to manually switch this to D Input mode, but after doing so it largely worked as intended. I did encounter some weirdness, but it was manageable. I was having trouble remapping the controls however, so at some point I will likely swap out to another controller. I ordered one of the RetroBit official Sega Saturn controllers that I am hoping will fill the need perfectly. I greatly prefer the two rows of three face buttons configuration that the second Genesis and Saturn controller had. This specific Saturn style controller was designed for the Nintendo Switch and as a result has more buttons which should come in handy as the Retro Freak requires you to make keybinds for its in game menu and return to the main menu buttons.

All in all I am having a freaking blast and enjoyed playing a whole slew of games last night on various platforms. I am super happy for example to have a console that I can play digital pinball classics like Alien Crush from the PC Engine. I wish the Retro Freak had support for the Super CD games like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood… but I guess for those I will just have to play emulators on my computer. I mean that has always been an option, but there is just something about playing games on a console, even when that console is just running emulation. The Retro Freak also appears to have a thriving community and folks developing custom firmware that I might explore at a later date once I figure out the limitations of the official one. For now I am just super happy to have a system that outputs to HDMI and can play all of my original cartridges.