Personally, I just buy the old carts and run them on my computer. I've been using a Retrode for years to dump games from most of the major consoles. I've also got the appropriate plug ins for most of the old controllers so I can get a reasonably authentic experience. But, I've found that newer controllers are usually good enough.

Part of buying and dumping carts is that I've also got the physical item to appreciate and without the actual console, the games take up a lot less space.


Ah, so you were one of the 12 people who actually bought the console for personal use. As opposed to the other 15 that bought them just to scalp. Nintendo ought to be ashamed of themselves for such a pathetic number of units being shipped.

I probably wouldn't have bought one at the list price, but at the ridiculously overpriced scalper copies, forget about it.

I still have my original Sega Genisis from childhood, and N64. Bought a PSX from a stack at the local used gaming store.

Problems I am having though:

I. N64's "Perfect Dark" is running sluggish on my TV. Why? Can I hack and upgrade the N64's RAM?
II. The PSX is stuttering bad and is also sluggish. Is there an updated PSX console (they made several versions)? Or is the PS2 backwards compatible?

I could always get the Emulators and all, but sure would like the best original experience.

Well having more ram might help, although i think that's via ram expansion packs (that go in the controllers?)

As for the PSX/Playstation 1, there was a more powerful version released later which helped in a few games but otherwise didn't offer much of an improvement.

I haven't tried emulating the PSX, so I've got no clue about that. I believe that at least some of the PS2s are compatible as are some of the PS3s, unfortunately, they dropped some of the chips from the PS3 to properly emulate PS2 games with the PS3 slim.

But, I've been using Higan for the Genesis and most of the Nintendo systems. For N64, I've using Project64 and that's worked pretty well. I don't have many games, but both Gex and San Francisco rush have been playing perfectly well.

If the game is running too slowly, that's usually either not enough processing power/ RAM in the computer system doing the emulating or for some reason the emulator hasn't been optimized to handle the game. I've rarely encountered that. Although, right now Higan is doing that a bit with Mario allstars. Ran fine at first, but now it's slow as hell.

The add on memory is for saved games, not for the actual game itself. If a game is running sluggishly, that's kind of weird and points more to some sort of problem with the rest of the hardware or possible mismatch between the refresh rate that the cart expects and the TV.

I never owned a N64.

Hmm... Pretty sure Golden Eye and another game (A Donkey Kong game???) were so unstable unless there was more memory, so an expansion card was included with those.

As for refreshrates... There's differences in CPU speed to help match refresh rates, as usually Europe consoles are a hair weaker, and some glitches/speed issues show up, like comparing the sonic games on the Genesis.

That shouldn't be true. The expansion pack memory is supposed to be used for saving games, not for use by the game's performance. Any extra memory or processing power should be in the game cart itself. That's one of the reasons why carts are so awesome.

That being said, if they included an expansion card, they may have been using it for something that would affect stability. But, that would be highly unusual.

That's likely true. At the time that these consoles were produced, the European market had a lower refresh rate and higher resolution, which would require some adjustments in order to make things look right versus the standard used in the US.

So, it's a tad more complicated than that, but essentially right. The timing of most consoles was based upon the refresh rate of the screen and certain effects depend upon having the right timing in order to get it right. A different resolution and refresh rate would need to be accounted for somewhere.

There's also the issue of power frequency that can effect hardware that's using it for the clock rate.

Not so sure on this one. Keep in mind power is converted from AC to DC, and would be a fixed volt/amp for the hardware, which is not going to be that much. Power fluctuations should be reduced/removed via capacitors and regulators.

But i'm not an engineer...

It was paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 23, was hospitalized for 2 months, probably the most worse experience in life.Was never hospitalized again only finding a job was impossible especially since on rehabilatation i couldn't reach 30% work efficency or something and was then deemed unemployable but the way i work and what i work in social inclusion i doubt that i am actually unemployable i only can't stand working for 8 hours all the time i sometimes work 7 or mostly 6 hours there.
And there are a lot of people unemployable once getting seriously sick, i think the country is just pushing us away and won't have available work force if they don't stop this which is already happening in some categories. The only real problem with schizophrenia i had was in those 2 months of hospitalization and before when i didn't realize it. The pills truly helped to stop my thought rush when it came which i couldn't sleep because of it. The pills did have some negative effects though, but i did get different pills once and those really don't have negative effects like my first pills.

Yeah I bought it for personal use :) It was one of my favorite purchases, despite not playing it a ton since I've gotten it. Of course, I used hakchi and have all the NES and SNES games on it I want, as well.

I love console gaming, it brings variety to this hobby, I started playing on Sony consoles in 2011 and wish I done it at least 5 years sooner

It depends how the unit is set up. Just recently there was some sort of weird power grid problem that caused certain kinds of clocks in parts of the EU to be off by a significant degree over a relatively short period of time.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/european-clocks-lose-six-minutes-dispute-power-electricity-grid

Interesting... Well that would cause some problems...

I do know electronics are built to work within 10% range of the expected voltage/power usage. So if you have a 110v hardware, it will work within 100v and 120v. Above that threshold and it might fry, under... don't know...

This is a different issue. This is the frequency at which the direction of the current changes. In some places it happens at a rate of 50hz and in others it's 60hz. Because so many electronics are made in China, most of them can handle either 50 or 60hz and either 115 or 230v, as it's easier to just create one wallwart with different plugs rather than worry about that.

In this case, it shouldn't really affect the gameplay much, but if you're trying to use a 60hz game on a 50hz TV or the other way around, it would affect the way it plays back.

But, these things really shouldn't be problems. But, then again, Mario shouldn't want to jump in the nearest hole when somebody is using a keyboard withing 30ft and yet, I've seen that happen too.

As mentioned all power is converted to DC so it doesn't matter what frequency it's delivered to the house, unless you have a bad/poor PSU or transformer that converts the power.

Definitely. Differences in assembly programming could be present specifically to handle timing differences, and different CPU speeds.

Although on a computer, that problem goes away (through the power of emulation!); There are some noted glitches between versions of the same game, mostly in sound/speed...

Sort of, it depends where that's done. I can't recall what type of a power lead those old consoles had, but if they had a wall wart, then the frequency wouldn't make a difference as the clock isn't going to be in the wallwart as there'd be no way to send the signal into the unit.

The equipment affected by this sort of thing has to have AC at least as far as the point where the clock is powered.

Theoretically, this is something that should be handled in hardware in some respect. I saw a video of somebody reviewing a retro console that was made for the EU market in the US and it behaved kind of funny because it wasn't the right frequency. In general though, consoles tend to base a lot of the timing on what the expected output is for historical reasons. Although, that's unlikely to be true in recent systems. The newer systems are basically just computers that can handle different refresh rates without caring as they're likely variable rate.