Nintendo Is Launching a New, Tiny NES For $60 With 30 Games (engadget.com) 195
Nintendo, which has been in the news a lot lately thanks to Pokemon Go, has announced a new console. It's called the Nintendo Classic Mini, and it will ship pre-loaded with 30 games. The upcoming Nintendo Classic Mini will be priced at $60, and an extra NES controller will set you back by $10. The controller can be attached to a Wii remote for use and the Virtual Console on the Wii or Wii U. The console, which comes with an HDMI and USB cable (for power) will ship on November 11. Engadget reports about the titles: The full list includes Balloon Fight, Bubble Bobble, Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Double Dragon II: The Revenge, Dr. Mario, Excitebike, Final Fantasy, Galaga, Ghosts' N Ghoblins, Gradius, Ice Climber, Kid Icarus, Kirby's Adventure, Mario Bros., Mega Man 2, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, Pac-Man, Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream, StarTropics, SUPER C, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Tecmo Bowl, The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.HotHardware has more details.
Is it April 1st again already? (Score:5, Funny)
The wife is going to hate me for it but I am definitely buying this for my kids... yeah, yeah, you got me, it's really for me.
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Some of us though have parents who gave away our NES and game collections during that year in college that we lived in the dorms before grouping up and getting our own apartments off-campus where we could have brought our old Nintendos.
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did you ever wonder, what is a breadbox? I have always wondered.
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As a kid I was too broke to have a collection of games. I borrowed from friends and rented occasionally. The console its self was pretty sketchy as I bought it used from a family that had used the hell out of it. In the mid 2k's I bought a very nice used NES and a few games, but ended up leaving them with an ex. This looks like a very good value for the money especially since it's new hardware.
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I *don't* own a collection of NES games, and even though I have way more PS2 & PS3 (and likely this Black Friday, a PS4) games than I have time to play.. have always thought of "eventually" getting a Wii or Wii U or something like that -- MOSTLY to play the old games.
This is a good way for them to get a bunch of money out of me when it comes out.. I'm definitely interested in at least 15 of the games (though I guess I have one of them on the PS2 Mega Man collection).
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No, you need to show this to the kids and encourage them to play it so they'll appreciate some of the best video games ever made, since all the modern ones suck.
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Yep, it's little wonder more and more people aren't bothering with it.
They forgot an S (Score:2)
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Somewhere buried in my garage are two modded xbox consoles which...should one go download the "omg so illegal" ROMS, would play NES, SNES, GB, GBA, GBC, MAME, and a bunch of older 1st and 2nd gen console and handheld games.
And hey...all 20,000-30,000 game ROMs happily fit in something like 25GB. I mean, of course, if you were the type of person who would posess said ROMs without proper licensing agreements from all the companies. Of course.
It's a cute idea though and for the price I might just get one mys
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Hopefully there's a uSD slot so we can add more ROMs.
I would be very surprised for an item with this price point to have any kind of scalability, especially considering they already have a platform for monetizing old content. But if it's popular enough then I bet once it has been out for a while someone will post instructions for modding.
M is for Mortal Kombat (Score:2)
Introducing fewer products at once allows a company to gauge customer interest and not have to waste as much R&D and marketing money on products that customers are likely to reject. It also shortens the time to negotiate with third-party game publishers for permission to include the game. Finally, including Mortal Kombat would cause the whole collection to be rated M by ESRB, which shuts out the market of high school underclassmen.
Booo...new controller port? (Score:2)
I realize Nintendo wanted to update the unit for easy connection to modern TVs (HDMI), but they could have at least made the controllers backward-compatible. So much for using an NES Advantage on this thing...
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I should add not "new", but new to the NES. Same connector used by the Wii.
Wii U network (Score:2)
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I'm not sure about other games, but, we have all of the NES/SNES/Nintendo 64 Mario games on our original Wii (they are the only games my wife plays, and she's very good at them).
NES-on-chip (Score:3)
So Nintendo is doing officially what the Chinese have been doing for more than a decade illegally.
They go by the name "Power Player" or "Super Joy" and contain dozens of NES games preloaded. The entire system is typically contained within the controller and the quality is very poor.
Castlevania III (Score:2)
I have some thoughts about this NES re-release but I'll ponder it some more before I make a comment I'll later regret.
MMC5 Curse (Score:4, Informative)
Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse is also a much more complicated game to emulate because it uses the MMC5 mapper to expand the NES's graphical capability. (I'll admit that CV3 underuses the MMC5 compared to some other games though. It was originally designed for the somewhat less complex VRC6 mapper, but Konami probably found it cheaper to use the MMC5 than to get the VRC6 certified.)
Controller (Score:2)
Too bad they're releasing the square controller instead of the better, redesigned NES-039 controller [wikipedia.org].
Use RVL-005 (Score:2)
The connector is the same as that of a Wii Classic Controller (RVL-005), which is shaped somewhat similarly to the NES-039.
Winner (Score:4, Interesting)
Powered by standard USB: Win
Controllers are usable with Wii and Wii U: Win
Controllers are dirt cheap: Win
Games are automatically saved at certain points allowing resuming after power off: Win
NES styling: Win
HDMI: Win
Two player support: Win
Ability to play additional games via cartridge or download: ???
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Games are automatically saved at certain points allowing resuming after power off: Win
While I agree with the rest of your points, I have to disagree with this one. I find the all-or-nothing approach of most NES games to be preferable. Games like Super Mario Bros. got it right with the ability to have extra lives, but forcing you to start from the very beginning if you run out. The ability to keep reloading a save state until you finally get past a certain challenge spoils the achievement, IMO. By making you start from the very beginning, it also forces you to take a break from beating yo
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Games like Super Mario Bros. got it right with the ability to have extra lives, but forcing you to start from the very beginning if you run out.
While it is not in the Super Mario Bros. NES manual, anyone who owned an NES in the 1980's knew that pressing A+start on the start screen let you continue from the same world you last reached. (ex. died in level 8-2; continue in level 8-1). These secrets were sold in Nintendo Power and strategy guides, but most kids would share them with each other in class or when they went to there friend's home. Even without GameFAQs back then, everybody knew about A+start, the Konami code, and Justin Bailey just from wo
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Here you could leave it on, hopefully it blanks the screen and sits there eating 0.5 watt.
Better yet, have the option for save/load state to be used automatically on start up and shut down, but with no backtracking (in that mode) and when you're dead and game over, you're dead. Start over or get lost.
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Powered by standard USB: Win
Controllers are usable with Wii and Wii U: Win
Controllers are dirt cheap: Win
Games are automatically saved at certain points allowing resuming after power off: Win
NES styling: Win
HDMI: Win
Two player support: Win
I agree, except for HDMI, which for me is a big Lose: it's a standard designed around DRM and not with consumer's interests in mind. There are many things wrong with HDMI. And personally, it makes the console unusable for me, since I have sworn not to have any HDMI devices in our home.
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Doesn't DVI actually support DRM mostly as well?
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Considering I was playing a fully functional NES emulator (NESticle, I think it was called) some 15 years ago if not more, I really don't think there is that much work involved today. Especially not if you have a Wii (U) and access to the Retro section of the game store.
You don't need to buy a Kazzo (Score:2)
Obtaining the ROMs legally is a bit more difficult. You can't just buy the loose Game Pak and then download the GoodNES set off some torrent site (UMG v. MP3.com). Instead, to qualify under the "essential step" exception of 17 USC 117 and foreign counterparts, you have to buy a Kazzo board, hook it up to a computer, and find the appropriate dumping script for the mapper that each game uses.
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In a world where roms and emulators exist, and it's simple to have EVERY game on your computer or a Raspberry Pi, this thing costs 60 bucks for 30 games.
By the time you buy a pi, an enclosure (which won't look nearly as cool as the Nintendo designed mini-NES), power supply, HDMI cable, SD card AND a controller, you will have spent far more than $60. Then you'd have to pirate and have unlicensed copies of the games. So it's actually a very good price when you factor everything in.
Overpriced (Score:2, Insightful)
$60 for what's basically a Raspberry Pi (i.e some custom ARM board) and only 30 games?! The knock-off fake NES consoles from the early 90s they sold in India had like 200 games and cost less than that.
They should be like $40 and come with 60 ~ 80 roms. The price doesn't seem worth it.
Re:Overpriced (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't the hardware you're paying for, it is the software licensing rights to the 3rd party companies that made several of the games on this system.
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I don't think the official NES catalog (including region and language variants) is anywhere NEAR 7 GB total.
Zelda is about 128 KB, Castlevania 3 is about 512 KB and it's on the large size.
It's going to take a LOT of ROMs to get anywhere near 7GB.
In 2016 Nintendo is 1 decade behind cheesy rips (Score:2)
I am shocked its taken them so long. Cheesy, probably illegal, 3rd party knock offs sold in malls and flea markets have been doing this for at least a decade now....and cheaper. Nintendo is honestly coming to market with a knock off of the knock offs for 6+ times the price of what I saw people buying them for 10 years ago?
I can't help but laugh.
Stand Alone (No Wifi) (Score:2)
Well one might argue about exclusion of various games as favorites, however three things seem evident:
1) No mention of Wifi for loading new games, which probably means:
A) It doesn't have it
B) You won't be able to
2) The front cartridge bay at least from the pictures is fake, and considering not mentioned, doubly so.
3) It has 3 sets of ports: HDMI, USB, and Controllers. Only the USB might be used to load games, but it is being used for power.
So all of
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Might and Magic is a better WRPG on the NES than Wizardry and Ultima.
Slot? (Score:2)
I hope it's as good at the C64DTV (Score:2)
Jeri Ellsworth's C64-in-a-joystick that came out about 10 years ago was one of the first times I found one of these retro consoles to be accurate enough to run the games. What was especially fun is there werer some hidden pads on the C64DTV to attached external keyboard and floppy drive, making the toy joystick into a fairly functional classic computer.
So here's hoping that Nintendo's attention to detail has led them to putting the right people (probably a contractor) on this project and good testers who wi
Going to be modded/cracked really fast (Score:2)
It will only take a few weeks before someone figures out how to mod it and load custom software on it. It's going to do a lot more than play those 30 selected games.
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It will only take a few weeks before someone figures out how to mod it and load custom software on it. It's going to do a lot more than play those 30 selected games.
And I'm guessing some time after X-mas they will start appearing on ebay & craigslist for cheap.
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You can buy a NES for $20 pretty much everywhere go do that ya whiny ass bitch
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and then add a flash card and Hi-Def NES HDM
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For significantly more for $60.
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Im not sure if thats true anymore. It was certainly true when they were sitting in water, rusting at peoples garage sales in the 90s and you couldnt give them away. However time, even a short amount like 20 years, does funny things.
On craigslist, a bare bones NES console seems to go for $60+ with no games.
i was at a retro gaming convention recently and the average price was about $100 for a NES console (controllers extra). A BNIB boxed one i saw selling for
Re:video games are for children (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry that all the joy got sucked out of your life. I hope someday you find it again.
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That same AC probably thinks bicycles should only be for children too young to drive, and that they should be outlawed from public roa
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One of my favorite quotes, from C.S. Lewis
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
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While proposed as a Troll, the NES games were more targeted toward children/teenagers as the main demographics.
Kids today will not appreciate these games as the new ones are far superior in most aspects. This is only targeted towards those late 30's early 40's with a nostalgic love for these games.
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By far most of the new games today only have superior graphics and sound. Many don't surpass the stories that were written and very few surpass the size that many of those NES games had, especially when jammed into that little ROM chip. Keep in mind that the vast majority of today's games also handhold you all the way through. One of the reasons why games like Dark Souls or FTL are so popular is because even if you do everything right, you can still fail and that's the end of the line.
The big draw for a
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Guess you missed the article on the benefits of many games to the human brain. It is the cover article in the July Scientific American. Many are very beneficial to cognitive capabilities in adults, especially older adults.
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i missed that issue. i was playing mario kart.
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Those ports are the same as the accessory ports on Wiimotes; you can use the existing Wii Classic Controller Pro with the mini-NES, and you can use the new NES controllers (which, as the article says, looks like the original NES controller) with a Wiimote to play Virtual Console games. You should also be able to connect the Wiimote to a PC and use the NES controller that way, too.
You can see what the controllers look like on the images of the boxes, and it's been reported elsewhere that the controllers wil
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Those ports are the same as the accessory ports on Wiimotes
It's still a kick in the nuts that you can't use your classic controllers if you have them lying around. Do not want. Will stick with emulation. I have yet to find a NES game that doesn't run at least as well on ye olde Xbox as the real thing, sometimes better.
Re:Turbo gamepad (Score:2)
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My kick in the nuts is that it doesn't come with TWO controllers like the NES did.
Too bad for leaving out Teenage Mutant (Hero/Ninja) Turtles, it was a great game (well, we mocked it in 16bit days) and would have gone well with the few other hard ones on the list.
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It's still a kick in the nuts that you can't use your classic controllers if you have them lying around. Do not want. Will stick with emulation. I have yet to find a NES game that doesn't run at least as well on ye olde Xbox as the real thing, sometimes better.
You can use the classic controllers on an Xbox?
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You can use the classic controllers on an Xbox?
No. But I can't use mine on this either
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Even tiny computers these days are powerful enough that they could run these games in an emulator running inside another emulator. As long as it's a quality presentation, it shouldn't matter to the end-user what's happening under the hood. Given that this is Nintendo with many beloved first-party titles, I'll bet it will be quality emulation.
Or, just wait until the reviews come in before plunking down $60. We'll find out quickly enough.
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Even tiny computers these days are powerful enough that they could run these games in an emulator running inside another emulator.
I can confirm that that's possible on any system capable of emulating Game Boy Advance, all the way back to an 866 MHz Pentium III PC running PocketNES in VisualBoyAdvance (VBA). But I haven't had a chance to confirm PocketNES in VBA GX in Dolphin.
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I ran PocketNES in VBA for a couple reasons. One was to verify that games work in PocketNES without having to burn them onto my GBA flash cart every time. (They never did get Big Bird working.) Another was that around 2005, VisualBoyAdvance supported lossless video codecs, and NES emulators didn't. Many would crash soon after I started recording if I chose Huffyuv from the VFW codec selection dialog. (Huffyuv was what we had before Lagarith.)
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> Even tiny computers these days are powerful enough that they could run these games in an emulator running inside another emulator.
ninception.
Re:Emulation or real hardware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shitty ass emulation.
You kidding me? The hardware for the NES was so minimal to start with, they probably put it all, with the exception of one big EPROM for the game software, onto one FPGA, including the 6502 processor (which was, as I recall, labeled '2A03', a 40-pin DIP IC). Remember, NES was only 8-bit.
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I'm imagining something like Raspberry Pi 1 in terms of CPU power, but with less RAM and cheaper.
Heck, with 8MB RAM and 4MB flash maybe you've got enough (assuming you need one 1920x1080 24bit buffer plus something neglectable for the rest), 16MB if you need some double buffering or whatever, or 128 MB if that's the smallest and cheapest chip with enough bandwith for the frame buffer (more than 100MB RAM stays unused).
could be MIPS as well as Cortex-A5 single core etc.
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They don't need FPGAs for this by now, there are now ready-made ASICs including all of that, with even their own established acronym among the retro-gamers: NOAC (Nintendo On A Chip).
Quality of the actual output produced by those may vary though, especially in the audio department.
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For a production run it will be an ASIC, but same principle applies - almost all that functionality could be hardware emulated on a single chip today, very easily.
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If you implemented "real" hardware on FPGA you would also need a scaler, after transforming that NTSC composite signal to something else.
French NES had some hardware to convert composite (PAL?) to RGB so that it could play on TVs of the day that only supported RGB and RF. That's a NES with RGB output, but not really (real RGB was on SNES, Megadrive, Master System). It was some kind of high quality composite with some crawling artefacts when scrolling (that perhaps are the same on all NES, I don't know).
Well
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Set up us both the BOM and the royalties (Score:2)
That sounds about right: $20 for the BOM, $20 for royalties payable to third-party publishers, and $20 for retailer markup.
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why by 320?
at least, the screen is 256 pixel wide.
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Confusion with Commodore 64 is why.
The NES picture is 256x240 pixels in size. (The video signal also includes 12 pixels of border on each side, for a total of 280x240 pixels that are stretched to a 4:3 frame. This makes each pixel slightly wider than it is tall, for an 8:7 pixel aspect ratio [pineight.com].)
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Needs to run fucking like a normal console.
Why? The Nintendo back catalogue plays through just fine on Wii Virtual Console. About the only thing you can't do is exploit timing bugs in the hardware to e.g. make Mario move through a wall. Otherwise their existing emulator works really well and there's no reason to believe that another effort of emulating won't either.
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Needs to run fucking like a normal console.
I've been playing games a long time and have yet to find one with that title. Or are you talking about what the adult industry is going to do with VR?
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There's noticable lag on the gamepad display for NES VC games at least. It's weird that Mario Kart 8 seems to stream flawlessly in realtime to the gamepad, but in Super Mario Bros. or Ninja Gaiden I can always feel the delay between button presses and the game reacting.
Of course, since this is going via direct HDMI, there should be zero lag at all.
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Don't blow. Use alcohol on a cotton swab. (Score:3)
Blowing isn't the answer; cleaning the contacts is. Nintendo once sold a Cleaning Kit that could be used for NES, Game Boy, Super NES, Nintendo 64, and Game Boy Advance Game Paks. Nowadays, you can just buy a small bottle of isopropyl rubbing alcohol and a box of cotton swabs. Wet one end and move it back and forth across both sides of the Game Pak's edge connector. Notice how much dust you picked up. Then do the same with the dry side of the swab.
You can even tell which part of the connector is dirty by ho
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um why not build a Genesis emulation console with an actual Z80 included, then :)
Re:But will it run... (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not quite the same, but if you have a Wii or Wii U, you can connect one of these controllers to a Wii Remote and use it with Virtual Console games or other games that support the Classic Controller and don't need X, Y, or the shoulder buttons.
Tetris is BPS, not Nintendo (Score:2)
You'll have to ask Blue Planet Software [tetris.com] about that. When Nintendo first introduced Virtual Console on the original Wii, it mentioned GoldenEye and Tetris as games that would be unlikely to show up because of licensing difficulties.
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It was once believed that renames would work. This changed in 2012 [slashdot.org]. Instead, you have to change the game's rules too, and that's what Nintendo did by including Dr. Mario in this collection.
Re:No Tetris? (Score:5, Informative)
The Zapper relies on the 15.7 kHz horizontal scan rate of a CRT SDTV to detect light. The vast majority of HDMI displays are LCD, not CRT, and thus lack anything remotely similar for the Zapper to pick up. To work on an HDTV, the system would need to use a system similar to the Wii Remote and Sensor Bar to determine where the barrel is pointed.
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Still charging $35 for a Wii Remote (Score:2)
Nintendo probably doesn't want to cannibalize sales of its current console that uses the pointing technolgy (Wii U). And the controller itself isn't necessarily cheap. Nintendo charges in the neighborhood of $35 for a Wii Remote Plus [amazon.com], plus whatever two clusters of IR LEDs on a stick would cost [amazon.com].
LCD can do it (Score:2)
An LCD with sufficiently low latency can do it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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For one thing, not all backlights flicker at a rate that triggers the Zapper's resonator. For another, those who buy a console with a built-in 30-in-1 multicart (such as this product) are somewhat less likely to be using an ultra-low-delay scaler. And even then, it'll break Operation Wolf, which depends on the Zapper's ability to discern up and down by measuring the exact time from the top of the frame to when it starts to detect light.
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I think the Zapper only had a light filter
The photodiode's output runs through a resonator circuit, similar to that used by remote controls to demodulate pulses, to distinguish 15.7 kHz CRT scanning from other light sources.
and the games then had to make the interesting object bright and everything else on the screen dark during a frame to be able to detect the hit.
Or if the game makes the whole screen bright, it can time from the start of the frame to determine how far up or down it is pointed. A game can use this information in one of two ways: to narrow down how many "interesting objects" it needs to test, or to directly move an object up or down. The Zap Ruder [pineight.com] tech demo shows this, a
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The fact that you need to ask is a bad sign.
I work in technology. I have stopped purchasing consoles and "Exclusive" bits of hardware where ever possible. Console needs to die, not because I am a PC gamer, which I am, but because people should not be asked to shell out $$$ just to play on an exclusive platform. The different in cost and performance are less of the issue compared to vendor lock in with game titles.
Regarding the Retro community. There are many fans like http://byuu.org/ [byuu.org] that focus on 100%
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I agree, without Contra, it is worthless.
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Isn't Super C better than Contra?
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Super C was fun, but like many sequels, was not a replacement for the original.
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You'd probably throw the US wall wart away and get a proper one for your country. I'm curious if it is the typical 5VDC barrel or 5VDC micro-USB, either of those ought to be easy for you to find. Let us hope it is not the 9VAC adapter that the original NES used.
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