Koopa64

The games aren't that bad though. What are you comparing CD-i games to?

A console with a worse library? Honestly the WonderSwan is pretty terrible. It's full of licensed schlock based on anime, manga and toy properties. The good games are far and few between. If you took the Game Boy Color, removed all the Nintendo and big name third party titles and changed the region on the licensed garbage from USA to Japan, you'd have a WonderSwan.

I've been a CD-i owner for a grand total of two days now. I've tried a few games including Hotel Mario and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Honestly they're not terrible games, pretty good actually. Zelda has a fair bit of challenge to it, but it's nothing compared to the worst examples on the NES like Battletoads. The in-game graphics in Zelda are quite impressive, they scanned in what look like watercolor painted backgrounds. The cutscenes are goofy and a bit frightening but I like stuff that's unintentionally funny. It's still cool seeing what a 16-bit Zelda II: The Adventure of Link game would be like.

Maybe it was underwhelming when it first came out, maybe people have oddly high expectations of what is essentially just an upgraded CD player. I don't think it's that bad at all.

49 minutes ago, the_wizard_666 said:

It's not that weird.  Sega made a few NES/Famicom games.

http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/search.php?developer=Sega

And that's assuming they're NES chips.  They appear to be 1mb EPROMs, which is more than any NES game uses.  Metal Slader Glory used a total of 1 MB, but that was split into the PRG and CHR - to my knowledge, no NES/Famicom game used 1 MB for either side on it's own.

The one clearly labeled Sega chip is on a Fujitsu MBM27C1024. EPROMs are always measured in bits, not bytes. That chip is 1 Megabit or 128KB. Tons of NES games are 1Mbit.

The best 2600 system is the Coleco Gemini 

Just because Fujitsu chips from back then are known to fail, doesn’t mean they’re fake 

Take it apart and wash the separate parts (shell, board) in hot water with detergent. Use a soft brush. 
 

After that you can assess for corrosion damage. 

I guess I’m in the minority here, I don’t believe the PS3 (or the 360) will ever see an extreme price hike. Even the PS2, despite having a few $500+ games, still has tons of cheap ones. It’ll be the same or worse for PS3, a select few expensive games and the rest staying at rock bottom. 

If it really bugs you, sell it and put the money towards an intact original box 

I don’t like sandbox or online games in general 

Yes it is worth it 

This is the game Jack Nicklaus Golf. The board says both Nintendo and Konami, I don’t see it written with UNROM anywhere, Konami usually labeled their boards differently.

Notice the PRG ROM chip, it only says Konami, not Nintendo. The parts number is exactly like the numbers Konami uses on their self-manufactured Famicom carts. 

someone above speculated Konami recycled Famicom rom chips for nes games and got Nintendo’s permission to make their own NES boards. That’s possible, but there are lots of Konami games that would have needed translation and localization, they also made quite a few NES-only games, along with Famicom-only games. Their Famicom boards do accept EPROM compatible chips, but I don’t remember ever seeing a Konami made NES game that wasn’t the UNROM-type mapper. Those always used cheaper 28pin 128KB nonstandard roms. 

Thomas the Tank Engine for NES is in most ways very similar to the SNES and Genesis versions with various mini games and story read-alongs, no voiceover though. One thing I find very interesting is you get three different stories in the NES version, but only two in the SNES and Genesis versions. The graphics are a bit ugly in places on the NES but the music is stunningly phenomenal. It makes me wonder who composed the music for the NES prototype.

Sure, it may be a game for kids, but I like it a lot, the pipedream-style track builder mini-game is a lot of fun just seeing how many track pieces you can get to fit and have it all still connect.

@Mydogsrule That's good news to hear there maybe a vidpro card out there for Thomas NES. Maybe one day it will be found. Very nice prototype cartridge too.

Does your NTSC list include Rabbids Go Home and Rabbids Travel in Time for Wii?

Thing is there's "Rabbids Party Collection" and that title doesn't actually contain Rayman

21 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Sure it's not capacitor liquid rot?  Mind you it is the Duo-R which is supposedly better than everything before it from NEC but they were king even over Sega for using shitty caps that blow and dribble rot onto the board.  I consider their integrity quite so-called, NEC just didn't do it well with those things at all.

The section of the board with eaten traces isn't near any capacitors, it's by the card slot. The affected area took out some traces between the HuC6270 and HuC6280 chips. Something could have dripped in through the card slot. My point still stands though, Duo-Rs aren't immune to failure.

I currently have a Duo-R system that isn't working, can't load cards or the internal CD BIOS. The board had some damaged traces from some sort of liquid damage, could potentially have a bad chip I'm not aware of.

Everyone says the Duo-R and RX are highly desirable and always work, but they can be broken and non-functioning like any other PC Engine or TG16 system. There's YouTube videos about TG16 and SuperGrafx systems with cracked boards, cutting through dozens of traces.

Let’s see 

a loose earthbound SNES cart for $230 USD.

and this isn’t a game but I paid $845 USD for a 64DD console, included was an N64 console, power adapter, genuine S-Video cable and genuine expansion pak. 

I purchased the digital version off Vimeo and finished watching it. As a big fan of Earth Bound for NES, I really enjoyed it. All the interviews were fantastic, especially Phil Sandhop, he is evidently a very spirited guy, the script in the game reflects that. I'm surprised so many people involved with the various prototype cartridges were found.

It makes me happy to see so many people who love specifically the unreleased NES game, not just the SNES sequel or the series as a whole. I've never agreed with the 20+ year consensus that this game is bad, anachronistic feeling and extremely hard. Yes, it does have a few ancient-feeling things like if Ninten and friends all attack one enemy and it dies early, everyone will continue to attack thin air instead of auto-targeting another enemy. It does have a lot of walking but honestly the giant open landscapes are what make it impressive, who cares if it takes a bit longer to get around.

Despite those things, I don't find the game hard. I suspect the instruction booklet / great grandfather's diary were meant to point out things that make the game much easier. For example, buying Ninten some AsthmaSpray in Marysville so he doesn't get destroyed by Maniac Trucks and Cars, it's not immediately obvious if you aren't always checking shops. It's also extremely important to buy Pendants, Gold Coins and Magic Rings in Magicant as soon as you can afford them, so your party's Defense can be buffed which is 100% necessary if you don't want to die or level grind a lot. It's also not fully clear you must keep Lloyd alive inside Duncan's Factory to complete the objective there. If these things were meant to be fully explained in the manual/guide, or Nintendo Power coverage, then that is a huge tragedy and it makes me sad the game suffered as a result, to the point someone felt the need to make an Easy patch for the rom.

Back to the documentary, I do have perhaps one constructive criticism. It leaves out some background information that I guess was too obvious to point out for longtime fans, like what exactly happened to the game post-cancellation. It was canned at NOA in 1991, then considered for a Canadian release by NOCL in 1994, then sadly was canned a second time. It's also really important to note that Nintendo did do bilingual English-French localization for other games in Canada during this time, the most notable being Kirby's Adventure. Both that game and Earth Bound used battery backed saving, MMC3 and fairly large ROM chips. Both pricey to manufacture, but one was an already successful platformer and the other was an untried RPG.

I also notice this documentary is actually more about the afterlife of Earth Bound as a series of prototype cartridges than the game itself. I can understand if that was the only goal, but often during the documentary everyone says it's a great game but hardly say why. After years and years of people saying it's a bad game, it would have been nice if some positives were mentioned, like the excellent graphics, creative enemies, fun writing and dialog, excellent sound effects and music work, along with the game featuring technical feats like massive 8-way scrolling world environments with no screen transitions at all, except for going inside buildings, or to Magicant or using PSI Teleport. I find that extremely impressive even today. Also, armed with better knowledge of the items, PSI powers and strategies, I feel the game offers a solid but not unfair challenge. It's only truly hard at the very beginning and end. It's still more accessible than the Dragon Quests and Final Fantasies of the day, in my opinion. Again, I bet the game being cryptic at times was meant to be filled in by the extra paper packaging the game was intended to come with, which we don't have. It would be like complaining Zelda 1 is too cryptic while ignoring the big paper map and Nintendo Power coverage.

All that said, I really enjoyed this documentary as a longtime fan of the game. It's great to see Earth Bound getting some recognition and love, a very much overlooked game that really should have been released. Maybe in another parallel universe, it could have happened. I'll still play it though, for the sake of everyone at NOA who worked hard to complete it and give it the polish of a future smash hit.

Also, thank you Phil Sandhop for the run button.

EDIT: One last thing, I'd love to see a documentary like this done for SimCity NES as well.

The cracked yellow gear looks a lot like the "middle gear" used in the PC Engine CD-ROM2 system.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/US-Seller-PC-Engine-CD-Rom-Middle-Gear-CDROM2-Turbografx-16-US-SELLER-IN-CT/124335729285?hash=item1cf2fcaa85:g:pTUAAOSwjDZYeR6l

13 hours ago, ChickenTendas said:

This is actually how I first played the game, except it was a hacked Vita Anyway, I absolutely love this game. The puzzles felt like the perfect difficulty, everything just clicked. I still remember eating through the Captain Crunch box to find the prize key inside. That and the magnet puzzle on LeChuck's ship were definitely highlights for me. Although I wouldn't give it a 10/10, it's still one of my favorite games of all time and that qualifies as a 10/10 under Reed's explanations. It also amazes me how the sequel was still able to take everything that SoMI did well and make it better.

The puzzles are all classic. This is a bit of a spoiler but I love how Guybrush forgets his whole crew, you never hear from them again until the sequels. 
 

I also enjoy playing secret of monkey island on my custom AMD K6-2 desktop PC running DOS 6.22. Yes I have to disable the L2 CPU cache to get the speed down to a suitable level for dos. I have a Sound Blaster 16 ISA card and a real Roland MT-32 to use with it. There’s nothing quite like a real hardware dos setup. 
 

the iPads, Wii’s and other newer devices are for when I’m not at home. 

10/10 one of my all time most favourite DOS games. I love it so much, I keep a jail broken iPad with me so I can run ScummVM to play Monkey Island. 

2 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

If you are patient, you can still get a Core Grafx for around $100.  

Considering Japan Post isn't shipping to USA currently, good luck getting a Core Grafx for that little.

13 minutes ago, phart010 said:

What happens if you play a expansion sound game on the North American NES anyways? Does the sound glitch out??

I was thinking maybe it was like master system FM sound. On master system some games have the FM sound available but if your system can’t play the extra sounds, then it just sounds like normal sound without the extra sound channels.

On the NES, the regular sound from the 2A03 CPU will still work, but you won't hear any expansion audio if it's not routed through the cartridge slot somehow. Some games will sound really empty, but it's less noticeable with Gimmick as the 2A03 does the heavy lifting in that game. Honestly the unreleased USA prototype sounds fine, it would be way less headache to just use that version.

Well, not everyone has an NES with the expansion audio modification and it seems wrong to make a licensed print run for an unreleased game and not use the actual unreleased rom. 

1 minute ago, Tulpa said:

So use the Japanese one like the repro makers do.

But if we’re talking about iam8bit doing a Mr Gimmick release, shouldn’t they use the proper USA unreleased version? 

20 minutes ago, Tulpa said:

I dunno, reproduction makers usually include it, so it's not a huge technical obstacle. 

The proper USA unreleased version doesn’t have expansion audio though.