jbenam

Ah, I see! That makes sense. One of these days I will purchase a cheapo sacrificial AGP GPU (GeForce 2 MX, obviously) and try my hand at BGA desoldering and reballing. Last time I tried attempting so was 15 years ago and, trust me, it didn’t go well 🤡 I had super-cheap equipment back then, though

I really miss being able to drink decent cider. Last time I did so was 10 years ago (dang, was it already 10 years?) while I was living in UK. I should try looking into those fancy beer shops, maybe they carry some

Genuinely curious as I have pretty much all the equipment to start doing BGA work but I can’t be arsed to do so 🤡

Are those torn pads? How does that happen, usually? While desoldering, I guess?

Glad to hear that, hopefully you will be able to finally recover from this for good. Get well soon!

An Ubiquiti Toolless rack and an Etherlightning-capable switch. Fancy cat-heater you’ve got there :-D

Resolution? Benj isn’t working with Ars anymore. Let the man have a break and go back to his regular posting about his hobbies. Hopefully he won’t get more reminders of what happened

I played Duke 3D on my 5x86@160MHz with a CL-GD5128 and I had a really good time with it. Looked it was full speed or very near it

That’s a good way of seeing it. That’s also the reason for my purchase of a MOTHER cartridge for Famicom (along with a Famicom) when a friend went to Japan some months ago. It will stay there on the shelf just to be looked at while I play the game on a flashcard!

Prices for original games are through the roof these days. I just stick to my trusty flashcards and enjoy the games. Would I like to have the physical carts on my shelf? Sure! But IMHO the most important part of the retro experience is the console/controller/screen combo, the carts I can do without

Terranigma is one of my favourite SNES games ever. Really happy that we somehow got a chance to play it in English here in Europe. As for the rest as I was sailing the high seas at the time I didn’t mind much if it was an US/EU release as long as it was in English.

Nintendo was way worse than that. Pokémon Gold/Silver came out in English almost a year later after its Japanese release. As a young impatient kid, I ended playing a half-translated version of the JP release instead of waiting. And that’s for the US one, as the EU release came out even later!

Wow you’re right. The version sold here has those as well. Crap I was thinking of purchasing another bottle but no way I am doing that now. Screw artificial sweeteners (at least sucralose isn’t as foul tasting as aspartame, though)

I would love some Mezzo Mix right now

The Sodastream Pepsi syrup has real sugar in it. I know for sure since I was gifted a bottle of it and I can’t stand aspartame so I would’ve never drank it if it wasn’t real sugar. I think you can find it on Amazon

marge simpson from the simpsons is holding a potato and saying i just think they 're neat Alt: marge simpson from the simpsons is holding a potato and saying i just think they 're neat

I don’t think ANYONE has an use for it (unless there’s some CAD retro nut using only old GL cards), sometimes you just purchase something because it’s neat. But yeah if you need to slim down your collection to fund more useful purchases, this is definitely one of the first things I would get rid of

Yeah, it’s Win3.11 tops for me on a 486. Tomb Raider is a DOS game though, so I think it’s still appropriate for that era. Probably a Pentium 75 would be more correct, though. I need to try Quake on my OC’d 5x86 at 160 MHz…

Yeah, same here. As soon as I discovered SNES emulation I played a lot of JRPGs and that quickly became my favourite genre. I should play some of the CRPGs for DOS that I somehow missed along the way

Even an AMD5x86 at 160MHz? Should pretty much be on par with a Pentium 75 which would be perfect for a Voodoo 1. FPU performance is certainly slower than a real P1, but the Voodoo would help with that. Otherwise I would use the P1 166 MMX, yes

Probably better suited to a Voodoo 2 based system? IMHO Voodoo 1 should either go on late 486 or early Pentiums. Bit too slow for a K6-2 at 550

I think I never bothered with them except the first one. Metroidvanias are more my thing

The worst offenders were the “you have to get X items before the gate at the end of the level opens. Yeah, there’s also a time limit as well. Better start backtracking, asshole” platforming games, of which the Amiga was apparently filled with. Many good games were ruined because of similar mechanics

I think most Amiga coders focused on the technical aspect instead of playability. Yeah sure you have 12 levels of parallax, copper stuff, 60fps scrolling and then the game plays like ASS. Shadow of the Beast anyone?

That’s a big part of why I don’t play Amiga games that much anymore. A lot of games on the Amiga were platformers, but most of them weren’t that good to begin with and they aged horribly. Meanwhile a lot of Nintendo platformers are timeless classics and still play very well after all this time

That said I occasionally do enjoy playing The Great Giana Sisters for what it is, but it definitely wasn’t the SMB killer they wanted to pass off for.

Same here, I had it on Amiga and I didn’t understand what the fuss was about. Yeah, it LOOKED like it, but the original Super Mario Bros. played a hundred times better. I ended getting a Famiclone shortly later and I was very happy with it.

A500 sticks to 1.3 with a real floppy + switchable Gotek on DF0/1 for maximum compatibility. A600 gets 2.05 for CF support, while the A2000 is on 1.3 for the original big box experience with SCSI HD. I don’t have an A3000, but I would have 1.4 with selectable 1.3/2.0 on boot like it should :-D

Dang man. Astonishing how you managed to get the caps values right. How much did they different from what was installed by the previous owner?

I remember reading a review of this game on my usual PC gaming mag and REALLY wanting it. Somehow the concept felt very appealing to me. I can safely bet that I would’ve been very disappointed in it after buying it

That makes sense, yeah. Anyway will give it a spin ASAP, I’ve used imagedisk for years and I’ve found it to be a great help for aligning floppy drives