Best Home Console For Arcade Ports?

[NE146]

Yeah for a while you could download entire sets off websites but that got smacked down not that long ago. It's possible you may still be able to find it on torrents or usenet, but I don't know. 

 

Anyway, it's mostly just a no-intro set at the end of the day, with the roms duped multiple times as needed into the category folders. 

[Austin]

8 hours ago, VectorGamer said:

My opinion now is this thread sucks donkey dinks and should be deleted.

I think there's still a lot of validity in this thread depending on what one wants to do. While I'm mostly about MAME these days when it comes to arcade stuff, there's still a lot of good reasons to go for console ports.

 

For mid '90s stuff, the Saturn and PS1 are excellent for shoot 'em ups, with many games featuring extra options and arrange modes that you can't get in the arcade originals. You've got lots of Sega's Super Scaler stuff finally done justice, lots of light gun games that are difficult to enjoy properly in MAME (Virtua Cop, Time Crisis, Lethal Enforcers, etc), lots of great Namco compilations and other obscure Atari ports (like Race Drivin' on the Saturn). You then have platforms like the Neo-Geo AES or Neo-Geo CD, which do excellent jobs with that library. The list goes on.

 

Even the Golden Age era console stuff can be interesting. Emulation might be the best route to go for those, but there are some unique conversions that I think are still fun to mess around with.

[+FujiSkunk]

Call it nostalgia (it is), but I think some of us still like the idea of pulling out a console, surrounding ourselves with mountains of cartridges, and playing the games we had fun playing at the arcade.  Or maybe it's that we like the idea of our shelves and wall displays dedicated to a particular console also spotlighting our favorite old arcade games.  Yes, a PC decked out with the latest MAME collection will trump any such library or mountain range, both in variety and in faithful game play, but some of us will still like to demonstrate how well home systems managed to capture the arcade experience.

 

I added my vote the first time around, and reading back what I wrote... sheesh, 10 years later, my thoughts are largely the same, with one big exception.  Thanks to the tireless work of CollectorVision and Opcode, the ColecoVision has become a contender.  Between the 5200 and the ColecoVision, it's hard to say which I would recommend more for their existing libraries, but for future work, it's no contest: the 5200 hasn't received any new arcade ports for a while now, while the Coleco seems to get more and more classics every new year.

[ToddL]

The 8-Bit Guy did a video on this topic just under 3 years ago: