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
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.
The post Retro Freak Console appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I have to warn you at the beginning of this post, that I may in fact be going through some sort of a digital midlife crisis. I am not exactly sure how I have ended up here, but over the last few weeks I have found myself missing the “forum age” of the internet. For those who did not cut your teeth in that era, it seemed like every group and community had some sort of forum as their primary internet presence. I am not exactly sure what my first forum was, but I can recall being part of one for every major guild that I was in starting with Everquest. It was often times the core social hub of the group and where all of the plans got made.
The forum that I remember practically living on however was the Argent Dawn US Server forums. So many of the people that I still hang out with to this day came from interactions with this site, and the IRC server that eventually sprung up connected to it. Ynubet my horde side guild leader was a good natured forum troll, and to be honest I probably could have been described in that manner as well. Whatever the case this era is what ultimately lead me to start blogging. I was pretty prolific in posting long winded threads that dissected an issue and tried to sway individuals to my point of view. At some point I realized that effort would probably better spent in a blog post rather than as yet another forum rat.
As new technologies arrived, we tried to adapt that same sort of function to other tools. Slack was the first thing that I can recall trying to make work as a viable forum replacement. For the most part it does, except for the fact that no one actually pays money for their guild slack. That means you are limited to 10,000 comments and as a result you are constantly losing any semblance of history. In my experience this seems to be responsible for the feeling that you are having the same conversation over and over, since there is no consistent thread that you can return to when you want to add fresh thoughts to it.
Discord came along as well, and it has more or less been widely adopted because it is “free” and as a result doesn’t have the issue of constantly losing your history. The challenge with both of these however is there is a sense of immediacy to conversations. Yes you can rattle on about something at length, but it is often times miserable to come in hours or days later and have to perform thread necromancy in order to interject your thoughts into an existing conversation. The organization is also very rough for anything other than random live chat, and the fact that it is so easy to spawn one… means that as I have talked about before we are dealing with a deluge of them available for us to join.
I am as guilty as anyone, in that I kept looking for something better than the forum. I got wrapped up in twitter and google+ and what seems like a myriad of other things all the while not quite understanding what I had lost in the process. There was a specific niche that forums filled, of providing asynchronous communication on topics that could carry out over a number of days rather than a number of minutes or at most hours. During the forum era we used to crave that immediate communication that we have everywhere, but now that we have it… I find myself longing for a slower pace. This is probably just me getting old, but yesterday I followed this madness and created a forum attached to this blog.
It is live and effectively “open for business”. I researched a few options but ended up falling back on the technology that we used to use back in the day for that old school feel. You can reach the forum through a new “Chat” menu, where I have also included the Blaugust and Bel Stream Time discord… even though the later rarely gets used because I don’t really stream much anymore. This might be a horrible idea and it might be the case that no one else feels nostalgic about this era of the internet. The alternative however is one I am willing to take a risk on, that folks miss this sort of interaction and are just needing a place to have it. I spent about two hours last night cobbling this all together, and I am sure there will be changes as we go. However for now I am throwing this project to you my readers to see if you have any interest in it.
The post Forum Nostalgia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning everyone! We are nearing the beginning of August and with that comes the beginning of a Blaugust event. This year has not exactly gone as planned and in an attempt to raise spirits back in April, we celebrated what is traditionally the “Blaugust” event. However there had been some rumblings within the community of wanting to do something in August. It was too soon to do a proper “thirty one days of posting challenge”, but we still wanted to do something to mark the traditional time period.
What we are doing instead is something that I am calling “Promptapalooza” and it is effectively a blogging relay. I’ve gathered up a number of volunteers and each day during the event a new blogger will be sharing a prompt with the community and writing about it. For everyone participating in the festivities, be it a prompt bearer or just a content creator watching from the sidelines, this should in theory give us thirty one days worth of prompts to hopefully inspire some interesting topics. Most of the prompts are designed to be fairly general since as we expand our community it is less specifically “gaming focused”.
Participant Blogs and Dates
To kick things off here is a list of the various “Prompt Bearers” and their blogs, along with the days that they will be posting a prompt. For those who want to cheat, you can see the full list of participants along with tentative topics here, but be warned some of these topics may change as we get closer to the actual date of posting. The idea being that this event will also serve as a “parade of homes” as we call it here, as each new post will identify who will be posting the next days prompt.
Since I apparently have a knack for over complicating things, the way this is going to work has changed a little bit after some discussion with the Blaugust community as a whole. Here is an attempt at a straight forward rundown of how the process is going to go, and here is also hoping that we manage to pull this off without someone getting confused along the way.
On the date specified above, a given content creator is going to share a prompt with the community.
The content of the post is in theory going to address that specific prompt.
Content creators have been assigned a prompt, but also have been given leverage to swap these out as they see fit and I will be trying to keep the master list updated to represent this.
Near the bottom of a days post, the content creator will share the name and site link for the next content creator in sequence. This will lead the community to where they can find the next days prompt.
Everyone “playing along at home” should receive thirty one days worth of fresh prompts to pick and choose which ones they wish to create content based on.
The process should also shine the light on the various prompt bearers sites and hopefully drive traffic to them for participating.
When a prompt based topic is shared, please use the Hashtag #Blaugust2020 in order to increase visibility and allow folks to find them easily.
A Low Key Drop In Blaugust
My hope is that this spurs some conversation and inspires folks to write about some of these topics. I greatly appreciate all of the individual content creators who have signed up for this process. I realize it was a bit contorted to get off the ground, but I extremely thankful for all of the support. It has been the strangest year on the books and with it we have each had to adjust to a bunch of challenges along the way. The goal with the “promptapalooza” is to create something that folks will feel fine dropping in and out of as they see topics that inspire them.
As always the discord is open for discussion as we go through this event, and my “inbox” is always open to questions. I will be trying to keep this post with clarifications if they are needed. I hope this goes well and as always I greatly appreciate all of the help that I get from our broader community. Without you all out there cheering me on, there would not be a Blaugust.
The post Blaugust Promptapalooza Guide appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I spent the majority of this weekend in World of Warcraft Retail. I am not exactly sure what prompted this, but I needed something somewhat mindless and grindy. I’ve been in a bit of a weird mental state of late and I always find working away on characters in WoW to be relaxing. I can put something on YouTube or an Audiobook and level away happily, pushing my mind somewhere outside of myself for awhile. A few months back I had been on this kick of trying to level one of everything to 120 before the release of Shadowlands. The next in line was my Monk but I stalled out in the Cataclysm levels after having ground up something like seven characters to 120 in a row.
Yesterday afternoon I managed to push the monk across the line and ding 120. This was not the easiest of characters to level, because there were quite a few points where it seemed weaker than I would have expected the Windwalker to be. The biggest problem I encountered was that the healing of the spheres that you spawn randomly doesn’t seem to make up for the incoming damage. I contemplated swapping over to Brewmaster Monk but managed to stick things out but that last level was a pain in the butt. Really it just seemed like certain mob types dealt way more damage than I could keep up with.
Now I am going through the very familiar long grind, of cherry picking which daily quests reward item level upgrades all with the goal of getting up to somewhere in the vicinity of 430. At this point I managed to push up to the neighborhood of 358 so I am slowly making progress. What is ultimately the problem is the lack of ring, trinket and weapon slots. The first thing I did upon dinging 120 was to purchase a full set of benthic gear, which sorta begins the process and is a seed for getting the world quests up into reasonable levels. I’ve already replaced a number of pieces, which always feels a little bad but I know it is just part of the process.
I’ve already picked out the next character I intend to level, which is my Maghar Shaman. For now I have decided to go elemental, because this is not really something I have ever spent much time with in the past. I’ve spent lots of time leveling enhancement, and I figured it might be an enjoyable break. That leaves Rogue and Priest that are still low levels, but if I can somehow manage to push all of these up I will have a full stable of 120s going into Shadowlands. The next trick would be pushing up some of their tradeskills, though the segmentation mostly makes that useless.
Finally there was one other thing that I was not expecting that happened this weekend. I managed to get a slot in the Perky Pugs lead Friendship Dragon. I had more or less resigned myself that it was not a thing that was going to happen this time. However Saturday night shortly after we had wrapped up the podcast I got pinged to join what was one of the last few runs of the 12 hour N’zoth-a-thon in which the horde team managed to get 455 people their mounts. The really cool thing however is that they managed to raise $10,425 for RAINN at the time of posting this. Still super humbled and shook that I managed to get in and get a purple dargon.
The post Monk Ascension appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
