Category: Classic

Hyperkin Announces Turbo HD

Hyperkin Has Announced Development of Portable TurboGrafx-16

March 31st, 2016 (LOS ANGELES, Calif.) On March 31st, Hyperkin, a video game hardware developer from Los Angeles, has announced they will be developing the Turbo HD, a handheld console compatible with Turbograx-16 (PC Engine in Japan) games – otherwise known as HuCards.

Sporting a 4-inch AMOLED screen and 1080p output to HDTV, the Turbo HD will bring the TurboGrafx-16 love back to its glory days of the early 90s. Originally the third wheel to the SNES and Genesis well after its 1989 U.S. launch, NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 console was, in its own right, a graphical powerhouse, even if it technically utilized an 8-bit CPU.

“This is a big fan favor we are happy to finally announce,” said Hyperkin Product Developer, Chris Gallizzi. “The Turbo HD has been a small passion project that was our R&D team’s best kept secret from the world. Well…second best.”

The TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine’s lush sprites and unique titles were enough to keep retro gaming fans interested for more than 20 years. Amidst hip-hop artist, Kanye West’s TurboGrafx-16 album announcement this year and popular indie-rock band, The World is a Beautiful Place, recently mentioning buying a TurboGrafx-16 while on tour, the TurboGrafx-16 is in fact entering its renaissance period.

The Turbo HD is currently in development with a projected $100 price point. It will include features like the HDTV Tuner to allow full access to television, 3.5mm headphone jack and turbo switches. Release date is yet to be determined.

Anyone who grew up with a Nintendo NES will no doubt be able to work their way through the early areas of Super Mario Bros 3’s Grass Land – but could you beat all 90 of the game’s levels at the same time? Although impossible in theory, one retro gamer has stitched together a mosaic of every level of the 1988 classic being beaten simultaneously.

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As far as Role Playing Games go the much loved classic formula of turn based battles have taken somewhat of a backseat in the last few years. With the likes of Final Fantasy opting for more action-based combat, the days of battling through menus are numbered. That said, one of the most significant releases in the last decade that isn’t afraid to let go of the past has just seen an English fan translation patch released.

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If you’re not yet sick of Flappy Bird, the averian adventures continue on with another outing on a classic console. Unlike the prior ports we’ve covered, the newest Flappy Bird recreation on retro gaming hardware programs the game on the fly within Super Mario World using nothing but Super Nintendo hardware.

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Wrestling games have been seen as marmite for gamers for years, but love them or hate them, there are loads! This episode Paul, Phil, Chris and special guest Maffew Gregg of popular YouTube channel Botchamania sit down to discuss some of their favourite games.

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If there’s one complaint about the N64 that doesn’t centre around its trident-shaped control pad, it’s the visual output of the console. Most games on the console operate using a very aggressive form of anti-aliasing which results in a major loss of visual clarity, particularly on 2D objects.

For some users, this simple bugbear has been enough to put them off the console altogether, which is a great shame – but intrepid modders have recently managed to modify the anti-aliasing settings for a variety of games, thus restoring clarity to the system’s display.

In order to take advantage of these hacks, you’ll need to own either a Gameshark or an Everdrive 64. Here’s the Assembler Games thread offering Gameshark codes, and here’s a site offering patches for Everdrive owners. For now, here’s a comparison from Duke Nukem 64 – check out how much clearer that wood texture is!

(Story via RetroCollect)

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WG Labs has announced Master Of Orion’s sponsorship of Sci-Fi London, the annual film festival taking place in our fair capital from 27th April – 6th May 2016. Players will be able to get their hands on the revival of the classic 4X series, originally released in 1993, which features a huge cast of revered sci-fi voice actors including Mark Hamill (Star Wars), Dwight Shultz (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Alan Tudyk (Firefly) and many more.

“I was a player of the original title and was blown away with this redux; it echoes the changes in game-playing style yet retains the deep immersive joy the game offers,” said Louis Savy festival director. “We are delighted to be showcasing the game at the festival and hope our audience get a taste of just how great this kind of sci-fi game can be.”

“SCI-FI-LONDON is a unique opportunity for us to present Master of Orion to an audience who share our passion,” said Keith Anderson, Director of Marketing & Communications Europe at Wargaming.  “A game which invented the pillars of all 4X games, attendees will be able to discover a legend born 25 years ago, redesigned with all the power of today’s technology. We are really delighted and excited to participate at SCI-FI-LONDON.”

To find out more about Sci-Fi London, click here. To visit the official Master Of Orion website, click here.

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The original Dead Or Alive was a pretty successful game, in that it managed to rescue Tecmo from the brink of bankruptcy, but it was never a top-tier fighting game – and thanks to its infamous inclusion of wobbly chests for the female fighters, it was a bit of a punchline. Dead Or Alive 2 was the game that changed all that and launched the series into the upper echelon of fighting franchises.

At its core, Dead Or Alive 2 retains similar gameplay to its predecessor, utilising a three-button system of punch, kick and hold. The holds are the key thing here – if you time it to your opponent’s striking attack and guess the height correctly, you’ll deliver a devastating counter-attack. Of course, holds aren’t a universal licence to be defensive, as throws will ignore them – and as ever, strikes beat throws. It’s a fast, fluid system that emphasises entertainment over technical prowess.

What set Dead Or Alive 2 apart from the competition was its sense of spectacle. The original game’s Danger Zone mechanic was greatly expanded – now you could knock your opponents into walls, smash them into explosive items and even throw them off ledges, only to jump down and continue the fight on a new level. Likewise, tag team battles – a key selling point for the rival Tekken series – were included for the first time and allowed for awesome double team moves. If that wasn’t enough, the game looked truly spectacular, providing a rival to Soul Calibur as the most attractive fighting game on the market.

It was a stunning turnaround for a series that had previously not been taken particularly seriously. Sure, there was still a breast physics engine to satisfy the crowd that the first game attracted, but there was a hell of a game to back up the sex appeal this time around.

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There are too many names to list here – the likes of JAMMA+, Arcade Otaku, the Neo Geo Development Wiki and more have all been helpful – but man, do I love the people who share their expertise about arcade games online.

I recently picked up a Neo Geo MVS motherboard from eBay, with the assurance that it was tested and working (but naturally, the caveat that all sales were final because it was an old board). Well, it might not have been tested too thoroughly, because the first time I tried to boot a game up, I got some pretty annoying graphical glitching. Take a look:

Those lines vertical lines followed every sprite on the screen. Now, I didn’t particularly feel like shipping a fragile PCB around further, nor paying someone else to fix it. However, I didn’t know the first thing about what the problem was or how I’d go about fixing it. Luckily for me, a vast community of people online have shared their knowledge about Neo Geo technical problems, what causes them and how to fix them. In particular, one user by the name of channelmaniac keeps an excellent log of his repair jobs.

With the help of the information I read online, I tracked the problem down to a problem with the graphics data – and specifically, it turned out that a pin on the NEO-ZMC2 chip wasn’t properly soldered to the PCB. I’m no electronics expert, but I’ve got a steady hand with a soldering iron and after a quick refresher on best practice, I figured I might be able to fix the problem myself.

This might seems like a foolhardy course of action – it’s a fine pin to be getting at, and that’s before you consider how long it had been since I’d actually used a soldering iron. Still, between a little bit of manual dexterity and a lot of borrowed knowledge, I managed to wrangle myself a working Neo Geo board in quick fashion and can enjoy my SNK games the way they were intended.

Had this happened to me in the days before such widespread information, I’d have been stuck and definitely would have had to contact a professional engineer for something that turned out to be a pretty simple fix. That’s why I’ll forever owe a debt of gratitude to the arcade community for sharing their knowledge.

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Over the last few years the retro gaming community has been blessed with the creation of box protectors for a wide range of different shaped releases. Long gone are the days where we had to worry about our Super Nintendo classics being accidentally crushed during a gaming session. If you’re the type who invests in these future proof solutions, you’ll be pleased to know that instruction manuals now have their very own security too.

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