I’m glad you guys are having good luck with your floppies, personally Ive only experienced 1 failure with Zelda 2, but it’s absolutely a real problem and it will continue to get worse.
The Commodore 64 was always excruciatingly slow at loading disk based games, hence the fast load carts. Even with the fast load carts it was slow.
If you feel the need for speed; Atari XL/XE line with the 1050 or XF551 disk drives for the win!
Yeah man. I never knew the C64 was so slow until I was able to see games I already had on my 800XL with 1050 disk drive loaded up on a friend’s C64. There’s a blast from the past… imagine if companies shipped double-sided games nowadays for PS4/Xbox One like they did back then with Atari on one side and C64 on the other!
People who live in climates that are more extreme in temperature are always going to have things go bad quicker. Hot to Cold to Hot. High Humidity isn’t the best. People who live in the subtropics generally have it better where the temperatures rarely vary and especially if the humidity stays relatively low.
Heaven knows where your floppies could have been. Did they get scanned by an EDS & Xrays in customs, were they exposed to extreme temperatures, was the owner a smoker, did someone throw them in the garage next to a huge speaker?
I don’t expect anything on tape or cd to last very long so I am always looking for a better long term solution. Especially if the media can be replaced periodically like flash carts and burned back ups of my games. I usually replace my hard drives every 4-6 years too. I try to store as much things as I feel safe with on the cloud as well. Once you’ve lost data everything looks like a future loss.
I’ve had microSD regularly crap on me. Like even the one I put in the Everdrive and never wrote on except the first time failed me earlier this month. I had one that prevented my phone from powering up, and plugging in the power cable made it burning hot. A bunch of others just ended up being unusable. Curiously I’ve never had any problem with normal-sized SD cards.
MicroSD cards are notoriously bad quality when not manufactured by the top brands. Not only that, there are tons of ripoffs out there claiming to be a top brand.
Stick with Samsung or SanDisk and you’ll be fine… But make sure they’re actually the real deal.
Toshiba (same manufacturing as Sandisk) and Lexar are good too.
It also helps to not stuff them full. Keep them under 75% full and also larger cards tend to be more reliable due the ability to spread out small writes across more cells.
Finally got all of the pieces together for a complete English package of Tengai Makyou Zero.
Really happy with how everything came out.
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Did someone figure out how to translate a real cart for that game?
Edit: i see someone selling them on ebay for a LOT but the last time I looked into it the only method found was complicated, messy, described as the most difficult SuFami cart to translate, and they didn’t think anyone would sell repros unless an easier method was devised.
Got another box full of swag. I love these Rainbird releases, they always come with a novella describing more off the game world. 64 pages in addition to the manual proper.
I’ll throw in a copy of the DOS version if it runs smoothly (VGA looks terrible though), and definitely an Amiga disc too. The Amiga original release was developed by Argonaut Software and was their first attempt at making a polygonal shooter; this is their first attempt at Starfox!
I love these early attempts at doing 3D on slow 8bit processors. It’s bound to be flawed, but the effort is very commendable and often impressive!
CPC
Amiga
[Edit] Bonus pic
Getting there!
Looking at the board, it definitely looks like the modding was extensive.
Original here: https://snescentral.com/pcbboards.php?chip=SHVC-LDH3C-01
Nice Rainbird collection. I only have Starglider, Starglider II and The Pawn (Atari ST versions).
Looks like the Amstrad version of Starglider is missing the awesome and very Daytona USA:star_struck: intro music.
Indeed! That’s a mighty sample you have here haha!
Playing it a bit, the game puts you in the pilot seat with enemies firing at you right as you press Enter to quit the initial settings menu. No introduction of any sort, it’s very arcade in that regard. The content of the box is very much needed to know how to play, what to actually do in the game and how your actions matter. I’d say it’s a very intelligent way to counteract piracy as no one in their right mind would photocopy the about 80 pages of manual and novella it came with.
As for the game itself, its a fun shooter, if a bit difficult to control at first. The very low framerate doesn’t help (I’d say it’s about 10ish fps), but there is no slowdowns as such, just a lot of frameskips. It’s something I want to experience on a 16bit computer at some point.
Control-wise you very much need a joystick, as keyboard controls are old-school QAOP that I have never been able to grasp. You control a pointer, which in turn moves the ship towards it, with some delay, and shoot lasers at stuff with the joystick button, while your other hand is on the keyboard controlling speed and missiles.
Everything considered, it’s a fun game! I’ll spend more time reading the manual and novella to get more immersed in the world, but I can see myself enjoying it.
Got a small JP PS1 lot, most of them RPG and one of my favorites Blood of Zeon.
Kinda impressed with Kuro no Ken (Blade of the Darkness. A no-name 2D RPG with nice sprites and illustrations.
I know almost nothing about Earthbound. I found the website selling those, along with some others that stock Earthbound Zero or Mother 25th anniversary edition. Which one should I want to play?
Of all of the different versions of Mother 1/Earthbound Zero, I think the GBA version with Tomato’s translation patch is by far the best way to do it. It has the best translation, and it also has the easy ring which you can choose to equip to halve encounters/double exp. The one that I just got is based on the Mother 1 25th Anniversary patch, which changes some graphics around and forces the double exp/half encounter rate on you, but it does have the same translation as GBA. I guess if you don’t mind edited graphics, it’s probably just fine. Basically it seems like they took the 25th Anniversary Edition and changed the title screen for this particular package.