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unintentionally awesome things about your favorite system


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companion thread to the "annoying things" thread:

 

Atari 2600 - Frying games with the power switch. Always thought it was cool that you could do this and get a *new game* out of an old one...

 

Sega Master System - accidentally discovering the hidden snail maze game built into BIOS.

 

Sony Playstation - learning how to do the disc swap trick with burned games.

 

PS3 - Custom Firmware. Not so much for the piracy angle of it, but the fact that my PS3 has fully functional emulators for every system I owned growing up is just...awesome.

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I'm going with "unappreciated" rather than a strict reading of "unintentionally awesome," just to be even more positive.

 

Atari Jaguar CD: Llamasoft's VLM

Atari Jaguar Defender 2000: Plazma Pong!

Sega Saturn: Love that CD music player with the spaceship.

PSP, Vita: All the Wipeout games

Mac SE: pick it up by the handle and lug it around in a padded backpack (I still can't believe I actually did this on a semi-frequent basis)

candy iMac: Apeiron! (noisy Centipede clone)

just about any PC: all the friggin' emulators, man!!! and Lakka too!! as well as a zillion flavors of Linux, all for free.

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C64 tape loading times were ridiculously long in case of some games - up to 30 mins (Pirates! or Defender Of The Crown being main culprits). I've often used that time to do my homework, benefitting my school life.

 

Before that, Spectrum games loaded in 5 mins on average. Too short a time to bother with school stuff...

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Apparently some audiophiles really like the original Sony Playstation as a CD player.

My understanding was that internally it had one of their best audio engines internally and that was output in the rear from normal red/white cable jacks and not the proprietary mess they replaced it with. Sony around that time and before made some of the absolute best CD audio quality output devices using those 2 little jacks primarily with that and their early discman players which would rival some far far more expensive full size audio kits.

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Amiga 500 Sound Filter - When the filter was on, the power light was switched off, so you always knew when the filter was active. The filter was like turning the treble up on your amp, making the sound a lot more clearer.

 

ZX Spectrum - increasing the baud rate of tape-loading games to around 19k, means you can load (Not all) most games in seconds, down from minutes. I managed to take a tape that normally loads around 2mins 30 seconds, to just 10 seconds. It's awesome to see in real time.

 

PC - I always find overclocking awesome. To take the classic Intel I5 2500k, and overclock it to a easy 4.5Ghz, up from 3.30Ghz, with relative ease and a decent air cooler, was awesome. No longer were you required to upgrade every 6 months, this awesome CPU put a end to that.

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ZX Spectrum - increasing the baud rate of tape-loading games to around 19k, means you can load (Not all) most games in seconds, down from minutes. I managed to take a tape that normally loads around 2mins 30 seconds, to just 10 seconds. It's awesome to see in real time.

How was that done? Was it a software switch or what?

 

I had a TS-1000 (ZX-81 Yank version) as my first and only tape-powered computer, and it was never fast enough ... even though none of that stuff was more than 16KB in size.

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PC - I always find overclocking awesome. To take the classic Intel I5 2500k, and overclock it to a easy 4.5Ghz, up from 3.30Ghz, with relative ease and a decent air cooler, was awesome. No longer were you required to upgrade every 6 months, this awesome CPU put a end to that.

 

Folks that got in on Sandy Bridge haven't really had to upgrade their CPU every six years, which is bad news for Intel. They now have to compete against their own older hardware. :lol:

 

An unintentionally awesome thing about the Nintendo classic mini consoles is just how hackable they are.

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That's true about the sandy bridge processors. I've still got my old i5 laptop with the intel hd3000 built in to work with it,and the capabilities of it are still pretty admirable. The only thing holding it back would be an aging HDD and less than ideal memory from being very useful for every day use outside of higher end gaming. Civ 5 could run on mostly medium and a few lower end settings to max it out which isn't all that bad. I keep the thing around in a pinch if my main machine ever goes down, though I could use another battery as that ate it.

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Folks that got in on Sandy Bridge haven't really had to upgrade their CPU every six years, which is bad news for Intel. They now have to compete against their own older hardware. :lol:

 

 

My old 2500k lasted until the equally awesome 6700k CPU came out, so roughly 4 years. I ran the 6700k under a corsair water cooler at 4.8Ghz for just 2.5 years before the itch to get a 8700k just got too much. I now run the 8700k, cooled by the same corsair water cooler, at 5Ghz 1.35 volts. The I7, is a decent upgrade to the I5, especially this 8700k. Although, not all games stretch a I7. The biggest game to bog-down a 8700k is Windows 10 :-D

Edited by 80s_Atari_Guy
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I love that both the Sega Saturn and original PlayStation had ports whose most common use was to soft-mod the system. They practically built in soft-mod capability.

 

People are still finding new ways to exploit the Saturn's cartridge slot.

 

I love that the Dreamcast required nothing but a boot disk to play imported games. (Yeah, it could also be used to play burned games, but I was big into Japanese games on the DC so I was happy to be able to put away my second Dreamcast.)

 

On the PC, I think it's awesome that you can run other types of apps besides games :) That's gotta be unintentional, right?

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For me I think it's safe to say I can cluster 3 systems into one, all Nintendo: NES, Gameboy(including Color) and SNES. Why? That one awesome thing about them was they were forward thinking in design and open ended. Each had a hard limit the base guts of the system alone would allow it to do. Others at the time in the 80s didn't really design consoles to be more than the total sum of their internal parts without some hardware add-on accessory (like a PCE/Sega CD.) Nintendo did it too with the FDS (and 64 DD too.)

 

But the NES had the NROM through MMC5 + Japanese and misc mappers, GB had the MBC1-5 setup to do more, and the SNES had the ever popular expansion chips of all sorts.

 

Each drove where a hard limit should have existed into directions no one would have conceived of at the time allowing the hardware to surpass its own abilities and that of others too. That was always the most awesome thing to me as they just weren't stuck like other systems I've had (PCE, SMS, Master System, etc.)

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Virtual Boy - In the '90s, being able to play it with the lights off, well after my bedtime without my parents knowing (no light shining from my bedroom via a TV or my Game Gear's screen).

 

Various classic systems (3DO, Neo Geo CD, Sega CD, Turbo CD, etc) - No copy protection makes it easier to enjoy the best of these platforms in the current day and age.

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...

 

Various classic systems (3DO, Neo Geo CD, Sega CD, Turbo CD, etc) - No copy protection makes it easier to enjoy the best of these platforms in the current day and age.

To be fair the NeoGeo CD had copy protected games, 2 kind of protection were devised, one ingame the second only affecting CDZ:

https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=Copy_protection

So told it's easy to remove the copy protection being in the image itself, still.

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How was that done? Was it a software switch or what?

 

I had a TS-1000 (ZX-81 Yank version) as my first and only tape-powered computer, and it was never fast enough ... even though none of that stuff was more than 16KB in size.

 

We had external "Turbo" add ons...these were very popular at some point. I'm not sure about technical side of it though, perhaps it was software in hardware form. It was not even as much about shortening the loading times but the fact that you could squeeze 2-3 times as much programs on a tape, thus extending your library (we were poor and more quality tapes rather dear)

I remember this method being hit and miss though, rather unreliable.

 

As for Sandybridge, my i7 2600k (overclocked to 4.2 Ghz with a simple BIOS value change and a basic Coolermaster) was a source of endless glee when compared to the newer, much more pricey processors since it still managed to stay ridiculously close to them in benchmarks. The money saved allowed me to combine it with a GTX 1080 and handle anything in 1080p >60fps.

That's what I love about PC building - if you look well enough there always seems to be some superb component with decent price and killer performance - the Sandy line, 780 Ti, some Gigabyte MBs, AOC G-sync monitors and so on.

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For me I think it's safe to say I can cluster 3 systems into one, all Nintendo: NES, Gameboy(including Color) and SNES. Why? That one awesome thing about them was they were forward thinking in design and open ended. Each had a hard limit the base guts of the system alone would allow it to do. Others at the time in the 80s didn't really design consoles to be more than the total sum of their internal parts without some hardware add-on accessory (like a PCE/Sega CD.) Nintendo did it too with the FDS (and 64 DD too.)

 

But the NES had the NROM through MMC5 + Japanese and misc mappers, GB had the MBC1-5 setup to do more, and the SNES had the ever popular expansion chips of all sorts.

 

Each drove where a hard limit should have existed into directions no one would have conceived of at the time allowing the hardware to surpass its own abilities and that of others too. That was always the most awesome thing to me as they just weren't stuck like other systems I've had (PCE, SMS, Master System, etc.)

They weren't uniquely forward thinking in design. They all supported and received addons just like other consoles and all other consoles were just as capable of supporting methods to gouge end users like in-cart addons. Both the Mega Drive and PC Engine actually received games with in-cart upgrades.

 

When Nintendo's already expensive carts increased in price further with in-cart upgrades and still underperformed compared to competitors' hardware, that is an absolute failure in "forward thinking".

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They weren't uniquely forward thinking in design. They all supported and received addons just like other consoles and all other consoles were just as capable of supporting methods to gouge end users like in-cart addons. Both the Mega Drive and PC Engine actually received games with in-cart upgrades.

 

When Nintendo's already expensive carts increased in price further with in-cart upgrades and still underperformed compared to competitors' hardware, that is an absolute failure in "forward thinking".

 

Nintendo was unique in relying on extra chips to such an extent. I don't know about PC Engine, but what Mega Drive examples are there besides Virtua Racing?

 

Considering that the NES came out in 1983, one year after the Colecovision, it continued to hold its own, IMO. Some technically impressive NES games came out in the late 80s and early 90s.

 

And SNES games with special chips certainly did not underperform compared to competitors' hardware, at least not until the 3DO, PSX and Saturn.

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Racing the Beam

 

It was just meant as a RAM saver, but it let the 2600 do so much more.

It's possible to race the beam on other systems. It's common for Demoscene and some newer games on systems like the C64 and Vic-20 to create effects that "normal" programming can't accomplish.

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What PCEngine HuCard got a cart based upgrade? SF2CE had a bigger chip and a couple games had a battery but i don't remember them expanding features, and Sega did a $100 mistake of a price with that SVP chip within Virtua Racing that sold poorly due to that. I'm not saying Nintendo alone did it, but they normalized it and to the betterment of the systems. I can't add more than mdb30 though.

 

I'm serious about the HuCard question as the only old console I still buy games for still is that system which I never got the optical drive for. I'd research it and see if it's worth picking up.

Edited by Tanooki
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