Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
When it comes to full romsets, less is more. I don't see why, unless you're masochistic or are a YouTuber, you'd want hundreds of games you'd never play or fool around with for 10 minutes or less. In the case of something like the NES, why the fuck would you want to scroll through hundreds of games if you're never going to play them? Yes, I know their covers make you feel like you own something of value, yes, I understand they'll still load quickly but you want to play Wario's Woods, not scroll through hundreds of games you'd never play.

Doubly so for the Everdrive which loads slower and is only text listings. If I want to play WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! on my GBA, I don't want to click through dozens of pages and still be only at The Land Before Time: Into the Mysterious Beyond.
That is why I loved this image for the Retropie 3 that never got updated to newer pi's: Retropie B.A.S.E. Best Amalgamated System Emulation

Its just the top 100 games (and for some less then that) for 11 different systems. As I've gotten more powerful hardware I usually keep the same mindset.
 
I go with the “main folder + fullset” approach and recently did a purge on my main folder. I think my original idea was to include any and all iconic games but I removed anything that I either don’t care about or won’t play for a long time. Like for NES, I’ve never played Ninja Gaiden and don’t plan on it, so I removed the second and third games and just kept the first. I can always add the others later if I feel like it. And I had the Earthbound Halloween Hack in there since it’s iconic, but I removed it since I’ll probably never play it again.
Systems like the NES, PCE and Megadrive don't have that many games in the first place
Extremely wrong
I thought of a really dumb but cool idea. The idea is that I can take a atari emulaction box and make a arcade cabinet out of that emulaction box by just buying some cheap ass at games hardware and building a arcade cabinet around that hardware, I can go further and take a real atari 2600 motherboard and turn that into a arcade cabinet machine that I can insert the game cartridges in.
If you’re going that route, you could also get a MiSTer with an NFC reader+Zaparoo and make “physical” games to boot directly into. That way you’d have accuracy with the original hardware and fast boot times, and a lot more than just Atari to mess around with.
 
As someone who has a GBA (and GBA SP), I'm curious about how GBA emulation is in 2026.
 
Most of my folders are organized like this:
View attachment 8799580
Full romsets for US and JP in subfolders and the main folder has stuff I think I'd be interested in. The full sets are useful if there's something you didn't expect to be into or there's a new fan translation. Also I delete all PAL games and anything related to sports.
There's a really nice, many years old, torrent for the SNES organized like this(I unpacked a couple of archives) that contains probably everything. Compressed it's 6.5GB.
1775311548112.png
 
Thinking about getting a used Xbox one S for cheap so I can play retro Call of Duty at 60FPS. Xbox mogs Playstation with back compatibility but they managed to fuck up too many times for that to matter in the grand scheme of the console war. I'd play old CoD titles on my PC if it weren't for the remote code execution vulnerability that affects all games from WaW to BO2.
Go for a One X over a One S.

Also, Xbox “backward compatibility” is a fucking joke. It isn’t real BC, selected games were recompiled for newer systems, and the list is pretty shitty and a lot of the games don’t work perfectly, or in some cases properly.

Anything from a defunct publisher or that a publisher didn’t feel like approving the recomp and anything licensed, even if it’s on an engine that has a lot of other supported games run on, isn’t on the list, and MS stopped adding to that list years ago.

As someone who has a GBA (and GBA SP), I'm curious about how GBA emulation is in 2026.
It’s the same as it was in 2006, perfectly fine.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Speaking of GBA, does anyone here know of any hidden gems on the system that I should be aware of?
 
Speaking of GBA, does anyone here know of any hidden gems on the system that I should be aware of?
Is this the only website your computer can reach? Google this shit, there's tons of lists and articles about literally EVERY question you asked here and probably every other question you will ever ask here.
 
Go for a One X over a One S.

Also, Xbox “backward compatibility” is a fucking joke. It isn’t real BC, selected games were recompiled for newer systems, and the list is pretty shitty and a lot of the games don’t work perfectly, or in some cases properly.

Anything from a defunct publisher or that a publisher didn’t feel like approving the recomp for and anything licensed, even if it’s on an engine that has a lot of other supported games run on, isn’t on the list, and MS stopped adding to that list years ago.
Not to be confused with the Series X. I forgot the One X even existed and holy shit Microsoft invented the most confusing naming scheme ever for consoles.
 
Not to be confused with the Series X. I forgot the One X even existed and holy shit Microsoft invented the most confusing naming scheme ever for consoles.
Yeah, I laughed for an hour when they announced the Series S and Series X, considering the confusion that One S and One X had already caused for people.

If you hunt, you can get a One X cheap these days, after I bought mine, I saw a Forza limited edition console on Marketplace for $70 Canadian! Beyond the compatible games, it's also a cheap Dolby Vision-capble 4K UHD player, which was a big part of my buying one.

Fuck Dolby Labs and Microsoft for being scumbags and making Dolby Vision disc playback exclusive on consoles!
 
Also, Xbox “backward compatibility” is a fucking joke. It isn’t real BC, selected games were recompiled for newer systems, and the list is pretty shitty and a lot of the games don’t work perfectly, or in some cases properly.
Everything I've played runs perfectly? And they have better framerate and forced to 16XAF which really helps some games for example the detail in the stages in Soul Calibur 2 HD Online is much thanks to the AF. Among the games I own the only ones that aren't back compat are Tales of Vesperia and Eternal Sonata, oh and the Rise of the Tomb Raider port to Xbox 360 but that's kinda unneeded. And on my One X a few games like Oblivion are uprezzed, was a neat way to get enhanced ports for free.

The approach they took to pre-recompile games (I assume from whatever lotcheck code they had? Or maybe from binaries even) and do a download worked well compared to the mess that was emulating Xbox on Xbox 360 -- a LOT of games there are really broken. I was skeptical at first but the experience is really slick, you can even put the console to sleep and come back to the game mid-game which isn't something 360 ever did.
 
Last edited:
Extremely wrong
It's like a 1000 games max for each region(The Jap Famicom and SFC is the exception), and for everything non-nintendo It can be half that. The file sizes are few meg max, and most games take less than a third of that. Plus, it's not like the games are in random order. The Everdrive sorts alphabetically, going down a list takes 10 seconds max. Having everything downloaded isn't that much of an issue, unless you have one of the earlier models of Everdrive like @Baraka Obama has.

Also, Xbox “backward compatibility” is a fucking joke. It isn’t real BC, selected games were recompiled for newer systems, and the list is pretty shitty and a lot of the games don’t work perfectly, or in some cases properly.
It's worth it for Ninja gaiden black and 2.
 
Everything I've pkayed runs perfectly? And they have better framerate and forced to 16XAF which really helps some games for example the detail in the stages in Soul Calibur 2 HD Online is much thanks to the AF. Among the games I own the only ones that aren't back compat are Tales of Vesperia and Eternal Sonata, oh and the Rise of the Tomb Raider port to Xbox 360 but that's kinda unneeded. And on my One X a few games like Oblivion are uprezzed, was a neat way to get enhanced ports for free.

The approach they took to pre-recompile games (I assume from whatever lotcheck code they had? Or maybe from binaries even) and do a download worked well compared to the mess that was emulating Xbox on Xbox 360 -- a LOT of games there are really broken. I was skeptical at first but the experience is really slick, you can even put the console to sleep and come back to the game mid-game which isn't something 360 ever did.
The approach on One and Series is literally the exact same one they took on 360, but increased computing power and years of code development helped, as well as advances in virtualization techniques.

The issue is calling it Backward Compatibility is straight-up false advertising. Backward Compatibility would be allowing you to play ANY old games just by throwing the disc into your One X, and can you do that?
 
Last edited:
What abou the Suda51 games? I am starting with a translated playthrough of Twilight Syndrome.
games where he's actually directing something like Killer 7 and NMH 1 are must plays.

Blood+ was a game that was based off an anime, if you like the Killer 7 aesthetic you'll like the look of it.
other than that it's your basic ps2 era hack and slash.

Samurai champloo is a mixed bag, there's some really stylish ideas with both the combat and music.
but there's some REALLY frustrating levels in some spots, it's interesting but have low expectations.


BEST GAME.png
 
Back
Top Bottom