Jagasian

Kevtris re-did the NES core because the NES is his first console core and clearly the console that Kevtris knows better than anybody else in all of existence. He made his first NES core as a hobby. He enjoys making it, enjoys completely knowing the console, and creating the best version of the NES ever... even better than the real NES, better than any NES made by Nintendo. It would be a mistake to miss out on collecting this console.

Do the angry tolls here get this upset when other companies add new features to their products in firmware updates or OS updates?

If a company provides additional functionality in their product than what they advertised, it is not bait and switch. Instead, it is called going above and beyond. People are letting their jealousy get the better of them. Kevtris has spent more of his life reverse engineering the Famicom and NES, than any other console. Having a single person like him design a new Famicom from scratch is just something you do not pass up if you are a Nintendo fan. My regret is that I only bought one NT Noir. I bought 2 Super NTs. One to play, the other to hoard. I should have done the same with the NT Noir.

NT Noir will be the best Famicom ever made. The people upset about the newly announced features are cry babies that should have pre-ordered when they had the chance. Now they will have to buy it on Ebay. Pro tip for Analogue’s products: always, without exception, pre-order the second they start taking pre-orders. Otherwise you can spend 4x the original price on Ebay.

Scanlines were a thing, and I still have two of my CRTs and every game console from the 1980s and 1990s, so I can compare emulated scanlines to the real thing to see how accurate emulated scanlines look. Both of my CRT TVs are consumer shadowmask CRTs, which is what was used in arcade machines and most households in the 1980s and 1990s. That Darius picture has very little blooming, which means it was taken on a professional CRT and not a consumer CRT. In other words, the scanlines are much more consistently thicker than the typical CRT in arcades and homes. Here is my still functioning consumer CRT from 1997 playing Symphony of the Night on PS1 over composite video. Scanlines are clearly visible, and more importantly, very intense blooming causing the dark scanlines to be thinner near brighter parts of the screen such as Alucard’s white hair. Scanlines combined with blooming gave CRTs a very distinctive look that rounded the edges of sharp pixel art.

Larger consumer CRTs had very subtle scanlines and smaller consumer CRTs had no visible scanlines. I like the subtle scanline look of a 32-inch JVC D-Series.

PVMs and BVMs should not be used as the standard for what old 8-bit and 16-bit games looked like on a typical CRT TV back in the 1980s and 1990s. 99% of gamers played on consumer grade CRTs, which have very different looking scanlines than PVMs and emulated scanlines. The thickness of the illuminated lines on a consumer CRT dramatically varies in thickness from left to right on each line because in regions of brighter pixels, the illuminated scanline gets thicker causing the non-illuminated scanlines above and below that region to be thinner. This expanding and contracting of the thickness of the scanlines smooths out jaggies of 240p and gives 8-bit and 16-bit games a very distinctive look that is not the same as blacking out every other row.

2020, where people fall over themselves to pay $500 for an 8-bit game console... myself included ?

Controller extension cords for NES and SNES are inexpensive and allow for enough freedom of movement while gaming.

Six face buttons is something I wish the OEM SNES controller had. Makes fighting games much better. The HORI Fighting Commander for the Super Famicom added this improvement... but I haven’t tried its Dpad. Why is it so hard to make a good dpad anyway?

I am the same, for all game systems PlayStation 2 generation and earlier, purely wired controllers on a CRT for no added lag. Sometimes I play on my OLED, but again, only wired controllers. Note that USB based controllers, while wired, do add lag because their polling is not synchronized with the rest of the game system. So USB on a Mister or on a PC, if tuned to minimize lag, will still add 2 ms lag. Not bad, but since controller lag and display lag add up, you have to keep count. Hopefully some day, Mister gets a proper controller board that allows for true zero controller lag. 2 ms is small, but the entire point of FPGA game reproductions is to strive for perfection.

It is lag. If you measure display lag on a CRT at 60 hz the same way you measure display lag on an LCD or OLED, you see that there is non-zero display lag. This way of measuring also shows the benefit of a higher refresh rate. A CRT running at 120 hz takes half the time to draw the top half of a frame (around 4 ms). The same applies to the LG E9 OLED: at 120 hz the top half of the frame takes only around 2.5 ms longer than a CRT at 120 hz.

For games that do not require an analogue stick, the SNES controller is better than any other console controller. For fighting games, a fightstick made using real arcade components is better... but only for foghting games. The PlayStation D-Pad is a step backward. The original NES and Famicom controllers are close, and the dogbone NES controller is even closer to the SNES controller... the lack of buttons on the dogbone makes it inferior to the SNES controller.

I own a 65-inch LG E9 OLED TV. Regarding burn-in worries, I bought the TV from Best Buy since they offer an extended warranty that covers burn-in. That way I don’t have to worry about burn-in. Regardless, the TV gets heavy use since I have a wife and 3 boys. Wife is heavy on the cable TV and Netflix, whereas my boys are heavy console gamers. With all that use, my TV has not suffered burn-in... and if it ever does, Best Buy replaces it. In my opinion, the burn-in worries are over hyped, and the huge benefits of the TV should be a big draw for gamers. Ultra low input lag, 4k resolution, HDR, and colors and contrast that make everything else look washed-out and faded in comparison. CRTs have better contrast than LCDs, but this OLED beats my CRTs in every way, except input lag... where it gets very close. The LG E9’s input lag is 13.1 ms at 60 hz, i.e., it takes 13.1 ms for the top half of a frame to draw as it is sent to the TV. A CRT at 60 hz takes about 8 ms to draw the top half of a frame as it is sent to the TV, so that means the OLED only adds 5 ms of lag relative to playing on a CRT.

If you want a SNES controller with a good dpad, the Cirka S91 uses the exact same mold as the OEM Nintendo SNES controller. Is it pirated? Sort of. If Nintendo still manufactured SNES controllers, I’d buy them. But since they don’t, the Cirka fits my needs because I want the exact same feel as an OEM SNES controller. It is wired, but wireless adds lag, so there is that.