MaximRecoil

Your attached demo looks awesome... when did you make that? Its staggered row-by-row movement isn't exactly like the staggered one-by-one movement in arcade SI, but it creates a very similar effect (especially since the arcade movement looks like row-by-row movement when viewed at full 60 FPS speed), and is a huge improvement over the all-at-once movement in the official 2600 SI cartridge. I'm not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. If you watch the arcade movement in slow motion, like in the animated GIF I posted (which is a screen capture from MAME), it shows the aliens moving one at a time, and sometimes two at a time.

In the 2600 port of Space Invaders all the aliens move together like they're joined at the hip. In the original arcade version, the aliens' movement is staggered; one alien moves, followed by the next alien, followed by the next alien, and so on, like falling dominoes, which looks more organic to me (and more visually interesting) than the all-at-once movement in the 2600 port: Was the staggered movement not included in the 2600 port because it couldn't be done or was it an oversight or intentional omission? If it couldn't be done back then, could it be done now?

It doesn't matter how much current the power supply is rated for, as long as it's at least 500mA (which is what the factory one is rated for). It could be rated for 1,000 amps, or a "zillion" amps, and it wouldn't make a difference, because the Atari 2600 draws less than 500mA of current regardless of how much current the power supply is capable of delivering. Power supplies don't shove current down the wires. The device being powered by a power supply draws the current it needs. Think of what goes on in a car. A car battery can deliver hundreds of amps; some of them over 1,000 amps; enough to arc weld fairly thick steel plate. Yet the tiny little lights in your dash, the small dome and other interior lights, and lots of delicate electronics are powered by the battery and the alternator; the alternator is often rated for over 100 amps by itself. You can do an experiment to illustrate how it works. Connect a small 12v light bulb directly to your car battery. It will light up to its normal brightness and only draw a tiny amount of current, which you could measure with an ammeter. Then take that same light bulb and connect it inline between the positive post and the positive battery cable that goes to the starter (or between the negative post and negative battery cable that goes to the engine block) and try to start the car. The bulb will blow quickly, because now the starter is drawing hundreds of amps and the only path is through that small light bulb.

448p wouldn't make sense on an SNES, since it would require a "VGA" monitor (~31 KHz) to sync to it. The SNES was designed only to sync to a standard CRT (~15 kHz). Consoles with 480p output didn't become a thing until ~31 kHz TVs started becoming available in the late 1990s. The TVs were marketed as "progressive scan," and coincided with the availability of "progressive scan" DVD players. They all had component (YPbPr) inputs because composite and S-video only support up to ~15 kHz video signals. And yes, 512x448i on an SNES would always be 30 frames / 60 fields per second. 60 frames per second is inherently/mathematically limited to around 240 lines if you want it to sync to a ~15 kHz TV/monitor. The Sega Dreamcast is the first major console I know of that definitely had a 480p mode, though only some games implemented it. I've heard that the Sega Saturn could do 480p, but no official games implemented it. Also, in reality, the SNES has no "high-res" mode. 512x448i is a little lower than 480i, which is 15 kHz, which is standard resolution. It's not even as "high-res" as an ordinary NTSC TV broadcast (1941 until analog TV broadcasts were largely discontinued in 2009), which are full 480i (480 visible lines; 525i if you count the lines you can't see). Nearly all SNES games are entirely ~240p, which, like ~480i, is standard resolution (~15 kHz). Hardly any games used the 512x448i mode.

He tacitly conceded near the end of page one, which is the very definition of "backing down." The SNES's display aspect ratio is 4:3, and that was intentional. What he, and you, are doing is tantamount to telling the director of a classic 2.35:1 movie that 2.35:1 is the wrong aspect ratio to watch his movie in, because the original frames of film are 1.375:1.

You already said that, and I already addressed it. You already said that too, and I've already shown that it's wrong. As I said, softness/blur is caused by using a filter in combination with scaling, and if you do that it's your own fault. You can scale to any dimensions / aspect ratio you want with no change in sharpness whatsoever (see the SMW screenshots in my previous post). This seems to be a product of your imagination. Can you provide an example of someone who is spreading such a narrative? Also, 4:3 isn't "stretched and distorted" in the first place, since it's the SNES's intended DAR. In reality, 8:7 is squeezed/distorted, because it's narrower than the SNES's intended DAR. It depends on how you define "legit." But regardless of that, the objectively best performance comes from playing SNES games on the original hardware connected directly to a 15 kHz CRT display. And yes, they can look stunning, especially if you have a 15 kHz RGB CRT monitor and a "1-chip" SNES. Displaying them on a high-resolution monitor is the opposite of "stunning;" that's the old highly pixelated, textureless emulator-on-a-PC-monitor look that sucks just as hard today as it did a couple of decades ago. It being 2022, as you're so fond of pointing out, is irrelevant because you could do the same thing in 2002 as well, and even earlier. You seem to think this "pixel perfect" thing is fairly new, but it's far from it. I've been using a wide variety of emulators since 2001 and I've never liked the way that old standard-resolution video games look on a high-resolution monitor.

Correctly proportioned in comparison to what? The real-life Starfox ship? The real-life Yoshi? The real-life island? By your own tacit admission, they weren't intended to be perfect squares and circles if they didn't display as perfect squares and circles when output from an SNES, i.e., you said: "Every SNES developer new about this, but the fact is the vast majority of them didn't account for it when creating their art for the system, for whatever reasons." If you know for a fact that the circles and squares you're drawing will become ovals and rectangles when played on an SNES, and you do it that way anyway, then that's intentional, unless it's impossible to compensate for it, which it isn't. Again, perfectly proportioned in comparison to what? If you want the game to look how the programmers intended the finished game to look when played on an SNES then play it in 4:3. If you want it to look like it's still in the design stage on some programmer's workstation, play it in 8:7. Also, playing SNES games on a 3DS, Switch, SNES Classic Edition, and some clone consoles, is done via software emulation, the same as the "or you can do so via emulation" option you mentioned. It's not distorted if it's intended to look that way. Every official SNES cartridge was designed to run on an SNES, and only on an SNES, which means the "pixel art" was designed to be viewed, as part of a game, at 4:3. "Stuck"? In terms of performance, original hardware + a CRT is superior to an emulator + a digital display. Even if an emulator has no accuracy errors, they all add a certain degree of input lag, and all digital displays have display lag, so by using those two things in combination you get added lag on top of added lag. The display lag of even the best digital "gaming monitors" on the market today is 1.x milliseconds, which is literally a ~million times more lag than the ~1 nanosecond from a standard CRT. That's because a digital video signal has to be processed by the digital display before it can be displayed, while an analog video signal drives the electron guns in a CRT directly; the only lag comes from the speed limit of electricity. In other words, effectively zero lag. This is a picture from a recent Super Mario Bros. speedrunning event: Do you think they are using old, heavy, bulky CRTs and old original NESes in 2022 because they are "stuck" with them? Obviously not. Anyone is free to bring e.g., a NES Classic Edition and an LCD monitor to such an event, if he doesn't mind handicapping himself. You should probably be asking yourself why you're singling out the SNES as the "victim" here, when, like I've already pointed out, the Genesis' native resolution isn't 4:3 either, yet he's displaying both of them in 4:3. So if "stretched," "distorted," "softer," and "more blurry," applies to the SNES games, it also applies to the Genesis games. By the way, "softer" and "more blurry" are caused by scaling with a filter (such as bilinear, which is the most common), not by simply scaling. You can scale any old video game to any aspect ratio you want without losing any sharpness whatsoever. For example, here's a screenshot of SMW fractionally scaled to a drastically wrong size / aspect ratio, and the pixels are still razor sharp, no different than at its native resolution: And if you can't tell from that screenshot that no sharpness has been lost, here's a closeup of it:

I already did "see above," obviously, since I refuted everything you said above. All you've done is repeatedly make the mere assertion that: "[...] the vast majority of them were made with the art drawn looking proportionally correct at an 8:7 display aspect ratio and therefore look distorted in a 4:3 display aspect ratio" Mere assertions ≠ facts. Since you have no further arguments (not that your previous mere assertions were actually arguments to begin with), your tacit concession is noted.

What "couple" games are you talking about, and what "minor elements" are you talking about? What's laughable is your status as a Blatant Reality Denier. Again, the SNES can only generate a 4:3 video signal, and it was intentionally designed that way. That means that the SNES's intended DAR is 4:3. I didn't "ignore" it, conveniently or otherwise, but rather, you never established any such thing. You simply made a mere assertion, and mere assertions can legitimately be dismissed out of hand. Also, "pixel perfect mode" has nothing at all to do with PAR. You seeing square pixels (1:1 PAR) when you enable it is your TV's fault, because it has square pixels, obviously. If it had pixels with a 1.066:1 PAR you would see SNES games in their correct 4:3 DAR when you enabled "pixel perfect mode." Comical Irony Alert: Part II, you know, coming from the Blatant Reality Denier. How they were drawn is utterly irrelevant to the fact that the SNES's intended DAR is 4:3. If the programmers of any games didn't take the 1.066:1 PAR into account when drawing the pixel designs, then that's their own failing, because they were programming games for hardware with a known DAR of 4:3. Also, in most cases there's nothing to compare the graphical elements to in order to say for sure what the programmer had in mind. I posted a screenshot of the SNES SFII port because there is something to compare it to, i.e., the original arcade version, so we know the characters and other graphical elements aren't supposed to look as narrow as they do at 1.14:1. You don't seem to understand what the SNES's 4:3 DAR means. It means that Nintendo intended for SNES games to be viewed at 4:3, obviously. Anyone programming for a hardware platform without taking into account its DAR is obviously not doing his job properly. No, it's not a matter of fact. Again, you haven't established any such thing. That's true, though, ironically, you're the one who has no grounds for a debate. "Pixel perfect mode" is not a function of the SNES, it's a function of emulators, which they did by default for many years before Nintendo started releasing their own emulators. And as I've already said, it has nothing to do with PAR. You see them as square pixels only because your TV has a fixed grid of square pixels. Who is doing that? People have been able to see SNES games in 1.14:1 for as long as SNES emulators have existed (circa 1997). That sentence doesn't even make sense, since it followed from another sentence that doesn't make sense until you can say exactly who is "acting like that's the only way people will see SNES visuals." No one would be acting like that unless they are completely unaware that some people use SNES emulators without correcting the aspect ratio of the raw pixel dump. Here are the facts: - The SNES's DAR is 4:3, which means SNES games are meant to be displayed at 4:3. - Nintendo obviously endorsed the 4:3 DAR that they chose for the SNES since they didn't do anything to negate it, such as pillar-boxing their games and/or adjusting the included 4:3 monitor in their Super System arcade machine to squeeze the picture down to 1.14:1. Also, they published 4:3 screenshots of SNES games, such as on game cartridge boxes, in advertisements, and in their magazine, Nintendo Power. On the other hand, your assertion that... "[...] the vast majority of them were made with the art drawn looking proportionally correct at an 8:7 display aspect ratio and therefore look distorted in a 4:3 display aspect ratio" ... is just that, a mere assertion, not a fact.

It's very simple. The SNES outputs a 4:3 video signal, and only a 4:3 video signal, and it was intentionally designed to do so, i.e., it didn't happen by accident. That means that 4:3 is the intended display aspect ratio (DAR) for the SNES, by definition. Why do you think they would have drawn out SNES game pixel designs using square pixels, since that's not going to look like how it will look when playing the game? It should be designed using a pixel aspect ratio (PAR) of 1.066:1, which is what you get when you fill a 4:3 rectangle with 57,344 equally-sized pixels. Are you even aware that pixels aren't inherently square? Square pixels are, for the most part, a fairly recent thing. For example, VCDs didn't have a PAR of 1:1, and neither did/do DVDs. And if you look at the native resolutions of old video games in general, they rarely matched their 4:3 DAR, which means their PARs were nearly always something other than 1:1. The Capcom CPS-1 arcade hardware (e.g., Street Fighter II) had a native resolution of 384 x 224, which is 1.71:1 if you make the unwarranted assumption of square pixels, which is nearly 16:9. So I guess you think this is how the game was intended to look: Of course, anyone who's ever played an original Street Fighter II arcade machine knows that they had a 4:3 monitor, which makes the picture look like this: Speaking of SFII, this is what the SNES port looks like at its native resolution with square pixels (1.14:1 AR): Looking kind of skinny, there Ryu and Blanka. But that's the "correct" aspect ratio, right? You're apparently living in the Twilight Zone, considering there's conclusive, by definition, proof that the SNES's intended DAR is 4:3. The most obvious proof is that the SNES only generates a 4:3 video signal. And then there's the fact that the Nintendo Super System arcade machine came with a 4:3 monitor. And how about the 4:3 screenshots from Nintendo themselves, such as on the box for Super Mario World, which was an SNES pack-in game? I suppose Nintendo didn't know what they were doing. How could they have? After all, they didn't have you, nor anyone else who has misinterpreted the "pixel perfect" lingo used in modern emulators and thinks that pixels are inherently square, to tell them that 1.14:1 is the correct DAR for the SNES, not 4:3.

Your non sequitur is dismissed. Also, Comical Irony Alert. There's no "may" about it. They were intended to be viewed on a 4:3 display. Only if the programmer screwed up. Yes, that's what you're supposed to do, obviously. It's like when shooting a movie on 35mm film, like nearly all movies were shot on until fairly recently. 35mm film has an aspect ratio of 1.375:1, but most movies have been intended to be viewed in a "widescreen" aspect ratio since about the 1950s. One way of doing that is to film with an anamorphic lens, which squeezes a ~2.35:1 image onto a 1.375:1 frame of film, and then another anamorphic lens is used on the film projector to "unsqueeze" it to its intended 2.35:1 AR. According to your "logic," the correct way to view such a movie is at 1.375:1, with everything looking ridiculously tall and skinny. First, says who? And second, if that's the case, then they screwed up, by definition. Video or film source material is always supposed to be created so that it looks correct on the intended display, obviously. What's the point of making something that only looks correct on a display that ~no one has? No, that's not a fact. Also, like I already said, the Nintendo Super System arcade machine came with a 4:3 monitor and the raster filled the screen. That alone proves that Nintendo intended for SNES games to be viewed at 4:3, since they could have adjusted the monitor's horizontal width coil to make the raster only fill a 1.14:1 area of the 1.33:1 screen, resulting in a pillar-boxed picture, had they wanted to. The same goes for the rest of their classic arcade games that had the same 256 x 224 resolution that the SNES has. "Pixel perfect" just means that you don't get any fractional scaling when you're using a glorified calculator screen rather than the type of display that these games were originally intended to be displayed on. It doesn't mean it's the correct display aspect ratio. And even then, it's not really "pixel perfect." If it were, the picture would look like a postage stamp surrounded by a sea of black on a modern "4K," or even 1080p, display, i.e., a tiny 256 x 224 picture in the middle of a 3840 x 2160 or 1920 x 1080 pixel grid. No, they don't. They look how they were intended to look. When you connect an SNES via the official Nintendo cables to a standard 15 kHz 4:3 CRT TV, the raster automatically fills the screen, therefore it's doing what it's designed to do. They could have pillar-boxed the games if they'd wanted to, so that the picture area displayed at 1.14:1, but they didn't. You have that backwards. If you're viewing SNES games in 1.14:1 then you're seeing distortion relative to the intended DAR, which is 4:3. 4:3 is the correct DAR for all of the old consoles, and why are you singling out the SNES? By your "logic," the Genesis is all stretched/squeezed and distorted too, because its native aspect ratio is 1.43:1, not 1.33:1 (4:3). Displaying them on a 15 kHz CRT is the only way that looks good, and it's also the only way to avoid display lag. As for "ancient," the SNES itself is also ancient, as are all of the official games for it. It's not going to look good on a modern digital display no matter how you slice, for reasons that have nothing to do with aspect ratio. If you display it in its native resolution it looks pixelated and tiny. If you make it mostly fill the screen by using an exact multiple of its native resolution, then it exaggerates the pixelated look because now each of its original pixels are occupying 15 pixels on your "4K" screen. If you make it fill the screen using a filter combined with the scaling, it mostly eliminates the pixelated look but it has an ugly Gaussian blur or some other unnatural smoothing effect instead, which is even worse.

That doesn't even make sense. The SNES, like all other classic consoles, was intended for use with a 4:3 TV/monitor. Even when Nintendo themselves included the monitor with the SNES hardware, such as with the "Super System" arcade machine, it was a 4:3 monitor. If there are SNES games that don't look right when displayed at 4:3 then whoever programmed them screwed up, i.e., making a game's aspect ratio look wrong on the intended video display device is inherently a screwup, by definition. It would be like a company making a DVD containing, e.g., an old 4:3 TV show, not look right unless it's displayed at 1.5:1 (DVDs have a native digital resolution of 720 x 480, which = 1.5:1 AR with square pixels). The primary resolution of the SNES is 256 x 224, which is a 1.14:1 AR (8:7), but that has nothing to do with it's intended DAR. The SNES only has analog video outputs, which means it was intended to be displayed on a CRT TV/monitor, which makes sense, because that's what ~everyone had when the SNES was released. CRTs don't have pixels. When digital video is converted to an analog video signal, there is no more pixel information. Instead there are just continuously variable voltages which drive the electron guns to varying levels of intensity, along with sync information. The CRT TV/monitor, when properly adjusted, will completely fill its 4:3 screen with the raster, regardless of what the AR of the original digital video may have been. When you display an SNES or other classic console's video on a device it wasn't originally intended to be seen on (i.e., LCDs and other types of digital displays) you run into problems, because those have a fixed pixel grid, and the only way you can avoid scaling errors/artifacts is to display it in its native resolution or an exact multiple thereof, which in the case of the SNES results in a 1.14:1 AR. With a Genesis you'd get a 1.43:1 AR. With an NES you'd get a 1.07:1 resolution (nearly square). It's all over the board with the old consoles, but they all had an intended DAR of 4:3 (1.33:1), because that's the aspect ratio of the CRT TVs that they were designed to connect to. The same thing applies to old arcade machines in general by the way. Most of them had a digital resolution that was something other than 4:3, yet they all came with 4:3 monitors. For example, nearly all of Nintendo's classic arcade games were 256 x 224, the same as the SNES's primary resolution (Popeye is the most notable exception, which was 512 x 448 [interlaced], which is also 1.14:1 because it's an exact multiple of 256 x 224, and is the same as the SNES's "high res" mode resolution), and they all came with 4:3 monitors which were adjusted from the factory to fill the screen.

Vs. System hardware is just NES architecture. You can play Vs. System ROMs on an actual NES but the colors are screwed up, because the various Vs. games have different PPUs with different palettes (which was done as a sort of anti-piracy thing if I remember right, i.e., it prevented arcade operators from just buying one Vs. kit and then burning their own ROMs to get different games). There are NES emulators that handle them correctly though, and at least one of them (Vs. Super Mario Bros.) has been hacked to display correct colors on an NES. I've run it on my NES from an Everdrive flash cartridge. Yes, that's right. The opponent sprite gets scaled from smaller to larger as he walks from his corner to the center of the ring at the start of the round, and from larger to extra large if he wins (it zooms in even more while he laughs at you and the announcer says, "Come on! Stand up and fight!"). There are only ever two sprites in the game at any one time (unless you count the referee, which is barely animated and is only onscreen for a couple seconds at the start of each fight): the wire-frame boxer and the opponent. The biggest opponent sprite is Bear Hugger in SPO. Some people have speculated that Bear Hugger is the reason SPO only has 5 opponents instead of 6, because his sprite takes up more memory space than the smaller opponent sprites. I can't imagine what the 2A03 does in a PO/SPO boardset other than generate audio. I've had one die on me before and the only symptom was screwed up left-channel sound and then 30 seconds later, mostly no left-channel sound at all. The game still looked and played exactly the same. Here's the thread I made about it back then: https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/super-punch-out-left-sound-channel-stopped-working.391008/ The 2A03 is a combination of a modified 6502-type processor and a programmable sound generator. In the NES for which it was originally developed (as well as the Vs. System and PlayChoice-10 arcade boardsets), it serves as both the main CPU and the sound chip.

I first saw/played an SNES at my neighbor Bill's house in early 1992; Super Mario World, which was the only game he had at the time. I was impressed with the graphics, but it wasn't enough to make me run out and buy an SNES. Not long after that I rented Super Castlevania IV and played it at Bill's house. I thought that was an awesome game but I still didn't buy an SNES. Around the same time I discovered Street Fighter II in the "Action Family Arcade" located in the same plaza where I worked and got hooked on it pretty quickly. There was hardly ever anyone there (it was just a room in the back of a LaVerdiere's drug store), so I started going to Space Port in the Bangor Mall to find people to play against, and that's when someone mentioned to me that SFII was coming out for the SNES soon. That's when I made up my mind to buy one. I still remember driving to the Bangor Toys R Us after work to buy one. For some reason I was wicked drowsy and had trouble staying awake while driving. I bought the most basic set; only one controller, no pack-in game, no A/V cables (it just had the RF adapter), for $99.99. When I got home I borrowed SMW from Bill and waited for SFII to be released. When I finally got the game I was amazed. It was the first time I wasn't disappointed with an arcade-to-console port. Gameplay was practically identical to the arcade version, so I was automatically just as good at it as I was the arcade version, and the graphics and sounds were pretty close. The next thing I bought was another controller (an official Nintendo one, which meant another trip to Toys R Us), because SFII is most fun when playing against someone else, and the only other game I ever bought for it back then was Chessmaster.

I've often wondered where the graphics capabilities came from in those old arcade games, well, specifically Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out, because I'm not familiar with the hardware of the games you mentioned (I did try those Sega games you mentioned in MAME and they are indeed impressive, especially for 1982). PO/SPO hardware didn't have a dedicated graphics chip. It had a plain old Z80A (4 MHz) as its main CPU, plus a 2A03 for music and most of the sound effects, and a VLM5030 for the announcer's voice and a couple of the sound effects. Those latter two processors are irrelevant because they are just for sound; they can both go dead and it doesn't affect the graphics at all. So it's just a Z80-based computer, like a ZX Spectrum, but obviously far more powerful in the graphics department. Is it because it has a ton of TTL chips? I don't know how much RAM it has, but it has close to 200 LS74-series TTL chips.

Nice. The SNES controller is my all-time favorite home console controller, and I think it has a good layout for PO or SPO. My preference is to use Y & B for left and right punch, right shoulder button for KO punch, and left shoulder button for ducking (ducking only applies to SPO).

In my opinion it would be the most impressive arcade port ever created for an 8-bit console if it had the arcade graphics like in Defender_2600's mockup, and had the same gameplay. This was something that the NES couldn't do according to Genyo Takeda: Punch-Out had probably the most impressive graphics of any arcade game when it was released. I can't think of any other arcade game released in 1984 or earlier that had such big sprites, not to mention sprite scaling/zooming effects and a see-through wire-frame character. So if a console that was also finished in 1984, and far smaller and drastically cheaper than the ~$2,000 (at the time) arcade 3-PCB stack, could replicate that, it would be amazing.

If the crowd would need to be eliminated I think it would be best to just replace them with black, which would give the impression that it's too dark in the arena to see them: They used that trick in the original Rocky movie because they didn't have the budget for a huge crowd of extras, so they used low lighting in the spectator area to hide the fact that there weren't many people there: But if the crowd can be included like this... ... that would be awesome. I know nothing about programming, so the only help I could possibly be is play testing. I own arcade Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out boardsets, along with an original cabinet, and can get millions of points on either game, which is well past where they max out in difficulty, so I would notice any gameplay issues in a port of either game. I wonder if the announcer's voice could be included with the help of Covox. If so, that would be the icing on the cake. I don't know if there's a way to extract the original voice samples directly from the arcade ROMs or not. If not, high-quality recordings can be made, such as by recording directly from the soundcard of a PC while playing it in MAME. It's easy to do in this case because the announcer's voice is on a different channel than the music, crowd noises, and most other sound effects. For example: https://voca.ro/14EABdaZDHKZ It's too bad the 7800 controller only has two buttons. You need three for Punch-Out and four for Super Punch-Out. I guess for Punch-Out you could press both buttons at the same time to act as a third button. I don't know how you'd get four buttons though, other than using both controller ports.

Also, Super Dodge Ball. In this case, I think the NES version is more fun than the arcade version (even though I played the arcade version all the time, long before I ever played or even heard of the NES version), but it has a ton of flicker. The 7800 should be able to do it without any flickering at all.

Punch-Out, or especially, Super Punch-Out, if it looked like Defender_2600's mockup... ... and played exactly like the original arcade games. I wanted a home console version of PO or SPO in the worst way when I was a kid in the '80s, and was wicked disappointed when I saw/played Mike Tyson's Punch-Out on the NES. To this day there's never been a port of either game. MTPO wasn't a port but rather a spin-off or sequel, and the same goes for Super Punch-Out (SNES) and Punch-Out (Wii). Also, playing either game on an emulator, such as MAME or Nintendo Switch, sucks because it's not reformatted for a single screen, but even worse than that, is the lag, which makes Dragon Chan 4+ practically impossible.

It was nearly new. Ian was never really into video games so he didn't play it much. He probably got it for Christmas or something without having asked for it. He also had a ColecoVision that he rarely used, and some type of home computer with a cartridge slot on the side (Tandy Color Computer 3 if I remember right) and offered to sell me those too, but I didn't have the money for anything more than the NES. It usually took a couple/few years for a new NES to start blinking if it was used a lot, especially if used with a lot of rental cartridges. The first one I saw it happen to was my cousin Mike's in about 1988 or 1989; he got his NES in the fall of 1986 a week or two after the NES got its full nationwide release in the US. I thought he must have dropped it, punched it, spilled something on it, or whatever, but by 1990 or so it was happening to tons of them, to the point that it started becoming the rule rather than the exception.

I bought an Atari 7800 in 1989 because it was cheaper than an NES (I think it was $60 from the Sears catalog). I didn't know anything about any of the games, so I bought a couple that looked good based on the screenshots and descriptions in the Sears catalog: Karateka and Super Huey. Unfortunately they both sucked. The pack-in game (Pole Position II) wasn't bad. I asked Dad for Donkey Kong for Christmas, and I liked that. I didn't notice anything wrong with the sound because I didn't have anything to compare it to. I only played an actual Donkey Kong arcade machine one time in 1981 when I was 6, so I didn't remember what the sounds were like. I had played the ColecoVision port in 1985 a few times, but again, I didn't remember the sounds. I knew it was definitely better than the 2600 version (which I already owned), and comparable to the ColecoVision version in terms of graphics and having three stages instead of just two. I tried and tried to beat Karateka but I could never make it past the guy in the green uniform. I first beat him, and the rest of the game, decades later as an adult. Later in 1989, or maybe 1990, my friend Ian offered to sell me his NES for $25, which I jumped on. But first I had him prove to me that it worked without blinking and having to mess with it (that was becoming a common problem with NESes around that time, and back then I had no idea how to fix them), which it did. It was practically like new. I don't remember getting any games with it other than SMB/DH, and the only game I bought for it was Ninja Gaiden. Fortunately there were plenty of NES games to rent at the video store, unlike 7800 games. I didn't have the NES for very long, probably less than a year, because it started blinking every once in a while (which is what tends to happen when you feed one a steady diet of rental games that have passed through the grubby fingers of countless kids), and I figured that pretty soon it wouldn't work at all, so when a kid at the hockey rink offered to buy it I sold it to him.

Yes, it is. From watching the video of the guy who did the no-damage run, obviously. What particular broadcaster and community are you talking about? Also, your risible attempt to redefine the word "shilling" is dismissed. Nothing I posted is even remotely related to "shilling." I didn't even mention anyone's name because I don't remember the name of the guy who did the no-damage run without looking through my YouTube history to find the video I watched a while back. What "pack" are you talking about? And what do you imagine that they were typing? No one was typing anything in the gameplay video that I watched. The guy described what he was trying to do and why it hadn't been done before and then showed the gameplay footage of him doing it. Is that a joke? There's no way to even have the Jump & Slash Technique subweapon when you reach the final boss in a no-damage run. You can have it for the first of the last three bosses (by getting it in, and keeping it through, stage 6-3), but it's automatically taken away from you after you beat him, so it's impossible to have it for the second and third (final) boss in a no-damage run. No, because you don't know what you're talking about (see above). Save your risible stab at condescension for a situation where you're actually right. Knowing that something is theoretically possible, and proving that it can be done in actual, legitimate gameplay by a human rather than in a TAS, are two different things. A no-damage TAS has been around for quite a while but it was still believed to be impossible during legitimate gameplay. It was only fairly recently that someone demonstrated killing the head legitimately with no subweapon (which is the only way that matters in the context of a no-damage run), and then someone else incorporated the method into a legitimate no-damage run through the game. If your idea of a "novel" is something like "See Spot Run," then yeah, lots of my posts are "novel" length. In reality though, few, if any, of my posts on this forum would even fill both sides of a single page of a typical novel. If reading something longer than a Twitter post isn't your thing, you know that simply scrolling past a "novel-length" (by your standards) post is an option, right? Mike who?

This is another out-of-left-field comment, and where are you seeing the word "maximum"? No, you haven't, since the dogbone controller didn't exist in the '80s. It was originally included with the top-loader (NES-101), which was introduced in 1993. And I've been using US Nintendo console controllers for nearly as long as anyone; I first used the original NES controller in 1986, the SNES controller in 1992, and the NES dogbone controller in 1994; not that it matters, since it only takes a second after picking up the dogbone controller to notice the awkward angle of the buttons. What are you talking about? Have you even read this thread? So far you're the only one who has defended the angle of the dogbone controller buttons. Also, you didn't answer the question, which was: When you play an SNES game that has the two main buttons set to the Y & B buttons by default, do you change them to the B & A or Y & X buttons? I get why you're avoiding the question, since no matter how you answer it, your answer will contradict things you've already said. Another question: If the angle of the buttons on the dogbone controller is a good design, then why did many SNES games, including some from Nintendo themselves, have Y & B as the main two buttons by default, which are at the opposite angle of the NES dogbone buttons?

That's incredible. You may already know this, but if you don't, there's a guy who recently beat it without taking any damage at all, which had always been thought to be impossible, because the hit you take from the final boss' head rolling onto the floor was thought to be unavoidable. But it turns out that the head can be killed, which makes it disappear before hitting you, but it's very hard to do. If I remember right, you have to hit it 5 more times after it falls off to kill it and you only have about 1/3 of a second to get those 5 hits in.