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NES PC
Malicious sent us to a little tutorial about transforming that old
Nintendo into a PC. This guide will even make your controllers work, although it seems to me that a nintendo that has survived this long might be a cherished heirloom tho. Does anyone else think that Super Mario 3 might have been the best game ever? Course very few people make good sidescroller/jumpers in the era of the 3D console.
There is a resurgence of 2D games, sort of. Contra for PS2 is a good example.
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/ for more info and http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/ for many more like it.
moo
Most of the used, old box-style NES consoles are completely useless nowadays and can be had for a few dollars at any random junk sale, as about 98% will hardly play any old NES cartridges without a lot of fiddling around and resetting, and many will go to a blue screen or pop up random garbage during the game.
Turning them into a NESticle machine is their only salvation -- though the only problem is getting TV out, which the article does not cover.
Don't mod this up, because it's reallt not /.ed. The Eds would never do that to us... ;)
More interesting than the article itself is the motherboard. You can pick up a micro ITX board for $90 here. I think you could gut out an old CDROM drive, pop in this board, put a laptop HD and CDROm inside, and have your very own LittlePC. LittlePCs run around $900, you could probably build one a lot cheaper (and have a lot more fun doing it).
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
You're thinking Super Mario World, the first Mario game for the Super Nintendo.
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At Mini-ITX.com.
There was a even a company selling converted NES-to-PCs or kits or something. Ah! Here's the link.
They also do Atari 2600s and Amiga 1000s (I would never defile my A1000!).
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Course very few people make good sidescroller/jumpers in the era of the 3D console.
:-)
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Correct: the launch title for the SNES. And a most excellent game it is too.
and the special game pack you're talking about was "Super Mario All Stars", which had SMB 1, 2, 3, SMW, and the "Lost Levels"
Technically not true. Super Mario All-Stars had SMB 1, 2 and 3 and Lost Levels, not SMW. However, later SNES bundles had a cartridge including Super Mario World as well - making it undoubtedly the greatest single cartridge ever manufactured.
As for the character of the various games: SMB 1 was a simple left-to-right affair consisting of eight worlds of four levels each, in which Mario and Luigi were identical and the only special power was the ability to throw fireballs. Lost Levels was almost identical technically, except that it was much harder; they also made Luigi jump higher, but move about more slowly. SMB 2 was an oddball game in which you picked up monsters and threw them at each other, or picked up vegetables and threw them, in which you played Mario, Luigi, the Princess or Toad, each with distinct abilities - it has now been released on GBA as Super Mario Advance. SMB 3 introduced the map screen, the ability to fly (using a raccoon tail - why? why? why?), the various weird costumes (frog, Tanooki, hammer brother), and a whole lot of odd stuff. It's been ten years and I'm still discovering new things in this game. SMW brought in Yoshi, overhauled the flight mechanism (it's a very different technique using the cape) and had millions on a futile wild-goose chase for the legendary 97th exit hidden in the sunken ghost ship. Argh.
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Turning them into a NESticle machine is their only salvation
NESticle is a disgustingly inaccurate emulator. FCE Ultra is much more accurate.
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http://www.knosp.com/projects/nespc/index.html
The vast majority of NES systems need little work to get past the problems you are talking about, and for what it's worth, those problems show up on every cart-based system.
First of all, the easiest and most successful thing to do would be to replace the cartridge connector. These are all pretty cheap on eBay, right around $10, just search for "NES 72".
Secondly, the blinking red light problem is a result of the NES not finding the on-game security chip. Really annoying when the game title screen pops up just for a second over and over again. There's an easy workaround: Disable the NES security chip. Basicly, you'll break pin 4 of the CIC chip, and that's it. http://nintendope.iodized.net/thisoldnes/lock.txt
If you don't have a Game Genie, another thing that works far better than blowing on carts (what is blowing supposed to accomplish, anyway?), is to just slightly jiggle the cart left and right while it's still in the NES so that the pins make contact. I've never had a game not boot up properly after doing this, at most, 2 or 3 times. And as an owner of over 350 NES carts (mostly 2nd hand, so cart condition varies wildly), that's a big statement.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Or forget buying a new pin cartridge connector. Take your NES apart and fix the connector yourself. It's amazingly easy (I have ZERO skills at stuff like this, and I found it to be really easy).
There's a tutorial at www.classicgaming.com/features/articles/nesrepair
My NES now works perfectly.
The latest several versions of NesterDC do not suffer this problem. It plays games flawlessly as far as I can tell (I'm sure it's not falwless, but nearly so). It also supports state saving and other goodies (turbo controller emulation, game genie, etc.). My NesterDC disc is by far my favorite dreamcast game; it is a fantastic emulator.
See DCEmulation for more emulators for DC.
Well, not a trick really - it was just the coolest bonus for winning a game ever, IMHO... when you won the game, if you started over without reseting the machine you would find yourself with a full inventory (27 items) of "p-wings" ... these are very rare items in the game up to that point, and allow you to fly continuously through a whole level, provided you don't get hit.
You could then explore all sorts of stuff that would have been impossible before... lots of hidden things to find, etc. What a blast!
For a while my friends and I would start an SMB3 session by winning the game (we got it down to a 30 minute process using both warp whistles) and then we'd go to some of the more difficult worlds with our p-wing collection and have a ball.
Damn those were good times... I don't think there's any game out there that's been more fun, or had more replay value for my dollar.
Cheers!
Hell ya, I totally agree with everything that articles says. I was looking for a controller for my dreamcast a couple years back and wasn't happy with anything on the market at the time. The NES Advantage was a joystick that acted like joystick when you need it to, but didn't have the DISadvantage that some joysticks have over gamepads with certain games.
THE most durable, intuitive, and easiest to use joystick use ever. The weight and size was perfect for almost all hands of all sizes.
Forget the max, I want a joystick, not a pad.
Heh, I got that game with the power pad, so I spent that time 'running' (where you soon discovered that it was bad to lift your feet up very high) as well as learning to 'jump' (you jumped off the pad, then back on--you couldn't stay off *too* long, though, because it had some kind of built in maximum & your character would fall down, not giving you any points if you jumped too 'high' or 'far')
:]
Seanbaby has an amusing write-up of the best NES peripherals, including that one, BTW