FrozenCell's forum posts
[QUOTE="propyro"][QUOTE="dwellerofrhymes"]I'd like to see how good Rondo of Blood is.dwellerofrhymesHey, what do you know ... that makes two of us ... but i don't want to pay $499 for a bloody PC engine to play it on.
Makes that Famicom I want to play Akumajou Densetsu on sound like a real bargain at $400.
it surprises me that so many Castlevania fans haven't played those games yet, especially Chi no Rondo (mostly gets sold for few hundred bucks on eBay) but you also need the machine to play it on - now emulation and retrogaming don't appeal to many (tho you can use real game CDs) because it really doesn't feel good to sit in front of tiny PC monitor and use keyboard for controls - there are of course emulators for todays consoles but PC has the best ones and much wider selection (like one for NEC PC-Engine)
if you care about old Castlevania plus other classic games and consider retrogaming on PC but think that it doesn't quite feel good then there are ways to make it better: first thing to consider tweaking is controls - you can buy:
- cheap PC joypad
- adapter to use real console controllers
- arcade stick
once you've experienced how sweet retrogaming feels with a good controller, it's time to take it one step further by going for TV screen because PC monitor is too small and too high resolution - so low res games will look pixellated up to the point where each pixel looks like a huge square, which looks bad and is really not how those games were developed to look - surely you can counter it with graphical filters built into emulators or even use scanlines but it really looks crap compared to TV screen, especially when displayed in RGB - what is RGB?
most PC videocards have S-Video out and come bundled with S-Video-to-Composite dongle and S-Video or Composite (yellow) cable or both (those cables are fairly cheap to buy) connecting PC to TV is really nothing hard - if your TV has S-Video input then you should use S-Video cable for better quality, otherwise you're most likely stuck with Composite - to get the best picture quality you should go for RGB video which can only be gotten from VGA port of your graphics card, however RGB Scart input is almost exclusive for European PAL TV sets so it's rare in US, plus VGA-to-RGB Scart cables are rare even for specialist shops - of course you can build one yourself if you can solder.
later consoles in Europe output RGB and with a cable sold in shops, you could get the best picture on your PAL TV set, but NES and older systems outputted mostly only that not so sweet Composite video, so there was no way to make the picture look better even with Scart cable if there was one - luckily with emulation and TVs that accept RGB (or arcade monitors) ppl can now enjoy the pure RGB quality of those older consoles, here's a nice example i found on the difference between Composite and RGB - pictures taken from TV screen:
i started out cheap by buying this adapter and connecting my PC to my PAL TV with S-Video cable but replaying all those great games both in single- and 2-player left me seeking out even greater retrogaming experience so i built myself the VGA-to-RGB Scart cable - it was pretty painful operation and i didn't get it right the first time but there was light at the end of the tunnel when i finally reached it :)
now i own many old consoles along with numerous games, but there are always much more cool stuff available, also for rare and obsolete systems - of course you can buy those games and systems so i don't encourage you to go nuts on ROMz & ISOz or even discuss their legality here (like shouting "but teh illegal") - what you do in you home is nobody's business.
the point of this topic is that emulation as an alternative can be made convenient and authentic - how many of you fellow Castlevania fans would have played the wonderful Sharp X68000 version if Konami hadn't released Castlevania Chronicles? who here has experienced the arcade machine game Haunted Castle or knows what the first Castlevania game called Vampire Killer on the japanese home computer MSX played like?
Succubus
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