Zombeaver

Their stable builds subsection has 1.3.5 listed now... but it doesn't have Windows - just Android, Apple, Nintendo, and Playstation.

I would assume it's just because it's not 1.3.5 official yet. I'm looking through their forums but I don't even see any mention of the missing 1.3.5 download. Weird... Surely to god I'm not the only guy who spends a Friday night working on emulators...right?

bundangdon said SentaiBrad said This right here: http://www.libretro.com/index.php/first-ever-revolutionary-n64-vulkan-emulator-coming-soon-only-for-libretro-parallei/ I am excited! If you go to the retroarch nightly builds webpage, you can download the latest (nightly) version and in the latest cores you can find this new n64 'parallel' core. However, when I tried loading the core and loading a game, the program crashes on me every time. I'm not sure if it's just me, but perhaps this is an unstable build or I need to make some adjustments to my original settings. Anyone else tried this out yet? Do your video card and current drivers support Vulkan? Nvidia page AMD page

Yeah all I'm seeing in their download section is 1.3.4 currently.

Beatlemaniac19 I think that's the right approach. I try to keep things in a historical context but also keeping in mind what preceded and followed it and seeing the lasting (or not) legacy of that game. Part of the reason I really like PSX is because it's kindof a treasure trove of experimental titles given that 3D was so new. A lot of what we take for granted today hadn't been established at that point and developers tried things that might leave some people scratching their heads. Some of it worked and, of course, some of it didn't. But I appreciate it when games do (or at least attempt) something unique and take chances. Take the game Sentient, for example. The game, even by the standards of the time, is completely hideous. It's also extremely unique, with one of the most expansive conversation/interaction systems I've ever seen in a game (you can even choose your facial expression for conveying your dialogue) and some really interesting storytelling methods. It's an outer-space-social-sim-survival-game...thing... It's by no stretch of the imagination a perfect game, in fact, it tries a number of things that simply don't work well, but I appreciate how much it just does its own thing in its own way, conventions be damned. I feel like outside of the indie scene so many of today's games are just so formulaic; scrambled and regurgitated stories and gameplay tropes. It all just seems too safe these days. I guess that's to be expected when you have shareholders to report to. There are exceptions, sure, but by and large most of my hopes for the future of gaming are in the quirky, off-kilter indie games we've seen explode over the last 5 years or so.

To each their own, but I don't think I could possibly disagree more haha. I thought the bit about Quake was particularly amusing because I think hardware mode Quake looks like completely dog-shit; a bunch of smeary awful bilinear filtering sucking the life out of the visuals. Yay! I'll take software mode any day of the week. Quake 2 was just as bad in that regard. I'm also not sure in what dimension FF7 was ugly as hell, within the confines of the period. Feel free to read literally any gaming magazine from 1997 and they'll all disagree with you. Primitive by today's standards? Sure. I wasn't aware anyone was making the argument that old games look as graphically impressive as current ones. I certainly wasn't. What I'm saying is that the broad assertion that "3D games were really awful" is a pretty huge overstatement. Nobody's saying that 32-bit era games look amazing by today's standards. Saying that those games were "awful" or "ruined" because they look primitive by today's standards is another matter. One that I just can't agree with. There are just way too many examples to the contrary. Primitive doesn't equal broken, unplayable, and bad, which is what you're making it sound like. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so there's nothing saying you have to like the way they look (though I actually do, even now; I think there's a certain charm to their aesthetics), but I think saying the games themselves were awful because they look archaic now is a pretty odd stance. I agree there were awful broken games that were 3D. So what? There are broken awful 2D games too; and there are many examples of good games in both styles. Again, to each their own. Wasn't trying to start a flame war, just voicing dissent.

lordmonkus said but the 3D games really were awful at that time Ehhh... I don't know about all that. Ape Escape, Brave Fencer Musashi, Crash Bandicoot, Twisted Metal, Dino Crisis, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Jumping Flash, Gex 2, Ghost in the Shell, Vagrant Story... I could go on for quite a while. There's plenty of awesome 3D stuff on PSX that's still completely playable today (because I still go back to them regularly). Were there terrible games that were 3D? Sure. There were terrible 2D games too. I just think that's a pretty big overstatement/oversimplification.

I would imagine this sort of implementation is a long ways off, if ever, but I actually think it'd be awesome should it ever materialize. I would personally be less interested in the potential multiplayer component (emulation and multiplayer have always been a bit of a tricky mix, in my experience) than I would be in simply having a friends list where we could see what each other was playing. It's kinda silly and fluffy I guess but I still think it'd be cool haha. It's probably unlikely that there would be a way to bridge between Launchbox and Steam, but Steam has basically all of those features built-in, including video streaming, so there might be something there - I wouldn't have a clue how to even attempt such a thing though. I think it's a cool idea regardless! It'd get my vote haha.

SentaiBrad said Both consoles are nostalgic for me. I was very fortunate to have both growing up and loved their games. I had them both as a kid as well, but it was pretty much no competition for me. The PSX is my favorite console of all time. Like I said, I wholeheartedly agree that there are totally awesome games on the N64, but I think they're a drop in the bucket compared to the PSX library. Beatlemaniac19 said it's my first console so I'm incredibly biased :) I totally understand that. I recognize that it's part of the reason I love the C64 so much (I do think it has a genuinely great library though). Nostalgia can be a pretty potent force, and that's okay; though it can sometimes lead to disappointment when you try revisiting something many many years later and it's not nearly as good as you remember it being in your starry-eyed childhood. To me that's always been a bigger issue with movies than video games though. I think most games have held up pretty well, regardless of generation - I think that's because even something extremely simple like Pong is immediately understandable and completely playable to anyone, even today. I know Pong is a pretty generic example but my point is that good design is good design, regardless of the limitations in technology in any given period. If you enjoy N64 more than any other console, nothing wrong with that! Just don't let it stop you from broadening your horizons! There's an immense amount of awesome stuff out there.

I'm not saying N64 didn't have good games, because it certainly did. I just think that when people talk about how "amazing" the N64 was, they're actually talking about a handful of games. Games that I don't debate are good. There are about 50 games on the console that are good, with about 10 that are really really good. I love Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye, Banjo Kazooie and Starfox 64 as much as anyone... but when you look at the library as a whole, in terms of total number of genuinely good games, I just don't think it's anything too spectacular, and is, in my opinion, massively overrated. Outside of a key group of 1st party games you've got a bunch of multi-platform stuff that are often inferior to alternate versions due to a lack of storage space (though no load time is admittedly nice). The N64 also had a complete abomination of a controller... I'm not saying it's a terrible console, by any means, I just think it's super overrated.

Jason Carr said You can now turn on video backgrounds under Options > Filters Images > Use Background Videos. This should now work for all the platforms views sans for the boring text list view. @Jason can you please add this functionality to the "boring text list view"? I'm probably in the minority but I really don't like the clear logo view. I prefer the text view because if looks less mish-mash and is nice and clean. Background videos work for the games list text view - I'd love to have it for platforms as well.

Awesome. I'm all for getting away from the patchwork garbage they talk about in that announcement. That's the kind of thing that's gotten PCSX2 into the convoluted mess that it's in. It's functional, just like current Mupen is functional, but there's so much game-by-game hacky crap going on that it's kindof a mess. I'm glad to see this is happening and I'm excited to check it out (which sounds like should be fairly soon). I just hope their next endeavor is on a better console (hate bait, I know ).

@GonjaT I've finished some Gameboy banners. Sorry it took so long - been working on other projects recently. My first thought was to do one for Link's Awakening as that's my favorite Gameboy game, but I didn't really want to have two banners with Zelda (with Ocarina of Time being on the N64 one) so I decided to go for another iconic (and appropriate given the current craze) Gameboy game - Pokemon (Red, in this case). I think it's...okay; but maybe a bit boring. So I said to hell with it and made one for Link's Awakening anyway. I figured I might as well include both versions here. For me it's no competition, but I know some people love their Pokemon haha.

@eXo I just wanted to thank you for all your hard work! You've done a great service for the community! eXo said Lately I've been knee deep in working on Win98 emulation... ...and good lord if you release a collection for this it will be amazing. 90's PC gamers the world over would thank you for it. I probably don't want to know how large something like this would be though haha. I have to imagine it would be orders of magnitude larger than the DOS and 3Xo collections, which are already massive. It would probably need to be released as modules per genre. I managed to get my issue with Heavy Gear sorted out - Windows decided that it needed to turn on DEP for all programs rather than just "essential" ones, for no apparent reason... But this era of games is consistently the most annoying to get running properly by a mile, in my experience.

SentaiBrad said I never thought to look there. Yeah, when I saw the suggestion in a Steam thread for Gorky 17 I was like "...what the hell is DEP?" I've never seen it before, or changed any of its settings before. I'm sure this is an instance where Windows did an update and saw a "problem" that it felt it needed to fix and changed the setting. I'm just glad there's nothing wrong with my computer... I was seriously sweating bullets for a few moments there thinking "What...have I done?" haha.

I FIXED IT! By god this thing didn't beat me. So, after all that ridiculous SHIT that I went through... it had nothing to do with any of that. I had resigned myself to the fact that it just wasn't going to work and that I would move on. But I noticed that another completely separate game that I had recently installed (and had tested to confirm it was working) suddenly had stopped working too - Odium aka Gorky 17. I tried a couple others that were from the same period - MDK, Deus Ex, a few others... all had stopped working. I got pretty worried at this point that somehow I had messed up something in Windows. So I started doing some googling on Odium to see if anybody else had encountered a similar problem (Heavy Gear is really obscure for whatever reason so I never found help by that route). Odium (Gorky 17), on the other hand, is on Steam. It's a kinda buggy game to begin with, so a couple of suggested fixes didn't help. But then I came across one mentioning that it needed to be added to Windows' DEP (Data Execution Prevention) exception list in order to work. I added it... it worked. I added MDK... it worked. I noticed that there were two main options under DEP - "Turn on DEP for all essential Windows programs" and "Turn on DEP for all programs except the following exceptions" where you could browse and add programs. I switched it to the first option and restarted, reinstalled Heavy Gear... works perfectly. I have *no* idea how it got switched to the exception list mode, as I'd never even heard of DEP before, and certainly didn't change that setting myself. I can only assume that it was the result of some kind of Windows update. So note to others in case that run into a problem with a game from this era - check into your DEP settings! So... it's working now. Thank god... RE-TAR-DED.

Awesome! Thanks! That shouldn't be too bad to remedy. I'd probably just backup my Gameplay - Screenshots folder, import, move the new folder elsewhere (so that the images are still available if needed) and then put the original folder back, scrape the images from scratch, and use the imported (moved) folder to fill in any gaps.

It is a 95 game, yeah. It came out in 97. I noticed in the release notes that he said there were some early 32-bit games though. Well shoot...

JESUS I like how not only do you have that many...but most of them are close to full One of these days they're gonna actually make that DNA storage I've heard about for years. It's gonna be sweet... A gram of DNA can hold about a billion terabytes of data. What does he use it for? DOS games. Ahhh yeah... But... do I have to feed it? Can it get a real virus? How do I reformat my bio-drive? My digital movie and video game collection demand answers. On a serious note, can anybody confirm whether or not the game Heavy Gear is in the Win3Xo collection? I haven't been able to find an actual list. After fighting with it for about 7 hours last night I'm looking for other options.

Hahaha, yeah yeah, I know!

That'd be awesome, if possible! I've still gotta figure out how exactly I'm going to store these massive collections... and then actually download them (I've got a pretty decent connection but I still have the feeling these are gonna take...a bit haha). Welp, I might be buying another external hard drive this weekend :P (that'd put me at 5).

@CriticalCid Is there any risk of doing this with the updated Launchbox folder structure? I don't have eXoDOS/Win3Xo currently but have been considering checking them out. I just wanna make sure the export/import process isn't broken now that the structure is different.

Hell, I wish late 90s games were as easy to deal with as DOSbox. DOSBox is a dream by comparison as far as I'm concerned. I've actually been collecting some CD-era DOS games recently and it's weirdly enjoyable to throw in a 20+ year old CD and install it through DOSbox haha. There really haven't been any DOS games that I haven't been able to get to work with a bit of effort. It's just that awkward period post-DOS but pre-W7-onward (late 90's to early 00's) that are frequently annoying as hell. Things like nglide/dgVoodoo help, but there are other issues at play too. Like I said I've used VirtualBox with a 95 environment in the past and it worked, though it was a bit more unwieldy than DOSbox; more than I'd like, to be honest. I'm not familiar with PCem, I'll definitely check that out. Regarding Heavy Gear, it's really mind-boggling; especially since it WAS working two days ago. But now, for no apparent reason, it invariably just gives me a "one or more DLLs not found" error and then a "unable to configure Heavy Gear parameter file" error and crashes immediately, no matter what I try. I really didn't make any dramatic OS changes during that period - just installing a couple of other older games. I cover most of the steps I tried in the comments here. I usually stick it out on this sort of thing but I think this one's got me beat. Maybe one day GOG will add it to their library; I can hope anyway (and vote for it in the community wishlist haha). SentaiBrad said: ...and even worse on 10. 10 removed backend stuff that specific late 90's and early 2000's (up to mid 2000 I think) used as DRM. Virtualization also doesn't work because there is little to no support when it comes to 3D accelerated anything, or playing games. This is actually my primary reason for not going to 10 on this machine, as dumb as that sounds EDIT: Have you ever used Windows Virtual PC? I've never used it but the videos I've seen look pretty straightforward. I don't recall having issues with 95-98 era stuff on XP, which is the environment that this provides. I'm not sure how it does on 3D accelerated stuff though... might primarily be for business applications, I'm not sure.

I think that at least some part of the reason I enjoy emulation is because I like the process of getting things to work, especially if it's particularly arcane or being used in a way (or on a platform) that wasn't originally intended. "Tinkering" would probably be the most appropriate term. It's fun for me. Testing and then tweaking, testing again, more tweaking... I don't know what it is, it's just enjoyable for me. I'm assuming I'm probably not alone in that regard here, but who knows. And yet, I think everyone has their limits. I think that even the most devoted of tinkerers can only hit a brick wall a finite number of times before eventually saying "Screw this..." I spent about 7 hours last night trying to get a PC game from 1997 to work (Heavy Gear). A game which, the day prior, was working perfectly fine, despite some initial hurdles. You can probably see how that might drive someone a bit nuts. I used ProcMon to monitor the attempted file and registry accesses, edited my registry, uninstalled and reinstalled about a dozen times in varying ways (it evidently doesn't like having an install folder that has spaces in it, i.e. "Heavy Gear" instead of "HeavyGear"), tried patches, tried using replacement files from another person who has the game, tried various compatibility settings, tried dgvoodoo and nglide wrappers, tried everything I could think of. I have some experience with VirtualBox as I used it years ago to run W95 but I no longer have my install/key for 95, so that's out. I briefly considered a system restore (since it was working previously) but ultimately decided "No. Sorry. I am not doing a system restore for a 20 year old game." And so, the night ended in bitter failure and with the entire evening wasted. Annoying. As. Shit. I'm assuming that others here have had this experience in some form at some point. Feel free to vent!

Sure thing! :D I will admit that there's a certain charm to the distinctive, highly synthetic sound of an old fashioned sound blaster, probably in no small part because it's just what I'm so accustomed to for these games - ordinarily I always opt for unaltered aesthetics and try to keep things as close to my childhood recollection as I can get (I'll take chunky-ass software-mode Quake over any other variant, any day of the week); but... my jaw dropped on a few of these. Based on the reading I've been doing, Sierra actually composed nearly all of their soundtracks on the MT-32 from the beginning (it's my understanding that they actually used the hardware as a way to attract professional composers for their games), so it is indeed the "way they intended". Unfortunately, most gamers couldn't afford to drop the $500+ that these went for at the time so most of us grew up only knowing the sound blaster version. Wikipedia: Despite its original purpose as a companion to other professional MIDI equipment, the MT-32 became one of several de facto standards for PC computer game publishers. Sierra On-Line, a leading PC game publisher of the time, took an interest in the sound-design of its PC games. Sierra secured a distribution deal to sell the MT-32 in the US, and invested heavily in giving its game titles (at the time) state-of-the-art sound by hiring professional composers to write in-game music. King's Quest IV, released in 1988, was the first Sierra title with a complete musical soundtrack scored on the MT-32. The MT-32 with a necessary MPU-401 interface cost $550.00 to purchase from Sierra when it first sold the device. Although the MT-32's high price prevented it from dominating the end-user market of gamers, other PC publishers quickly followed Sierra's lead, expanding the role of music in their own game titles with Roland supporting the industry by releasing CM modules for computer users. The MT-32 remained the gold-standard for musical composition well into the early 1990s, when the game-industry began to shift toward General MIDI and later CD Audio. Mobygames has a list of all games that offer MT-32 support that's pretty useful. Just keep in mind that, outside of Sierra stuff, not everything that supports MT-32 was necessarily designed with MT-32 in mind. I think Descent, for example, sounds terrible with non-SB/Adlib OST; so some experimentation is still necessary from game to game. Since yesterday, I've started a spreadsheet for Sound and Music driver settings for all my DOS games so I can keep track of what I'm using for them and note what seems to sound the "best" to me. Yay! Even more things to catalog! I think I have a problem...