I just can't get into this era of gaming. I really need it to be NES/MSX2 or newer, with PCE/SNES/GEN being my favorite era.

What about the Atari Lynx.
Nobody ever talks about that one.

The Vetrex is based around a vector display and this makes it totally unique and very hard to effectively emulate. It even has two or three decent games. I think the Vectrex is way better than a Laseractive.

The Neo Geo wasn’t for rich kids. It wasn’t for kids at all. The kids just played the arcade version for a coin or two. The Neo was for the young bubble economy Japanese professional with a mountain of disposable income. People who would buy a $1000 JAMMA board if the $290 home cart didn’t exist. For the target customer the Neo was a cheap alternative, kind of like how a Lotus is a cheap Ferrari but few can afford either.

The Neo was the last system I got from that era. I have an MVS and a dozen or so games, the most expensive of which was Pulsar for like $110. I usually don’t buy anything more than $40 shipped.

I had that too. First the large Mk I, which was a bit annoying to get the cartridges in and out of,
later the Mk II which I kept until my blowout sale in 2008. Really amazing handheld. Had some really
nice games, and is still in high collectors demand these days. Sometimes I would just switch it on to
listen to game music on it while doing other things on the side

Oh, and not to forget the ComLynx option where you could chain up several Lynx units to play games together.
Always used to laugh at the folks with their Gameboys playing in monochrome

I guess it's a matter of perspective. As I said, if you pay $1000 for an arcade board, then $100-200 for an more convenient form that is arcade quality is a steal. I'm just talking about from my perspective, who was in junior high at the time the Neo Geo was out. If you were an adult at the time, and you want arcade quality, then I admit it would be smart, if you like Neo Geo games. Neo Geo WAS the arcade at home.

The CD console was the "budget version" of the Neo Geo 100 Meg Shock, for those who have more time than money.

I never found a Lynx in a thrift store in the wild. Maybe that's a testament to people liking the games and not outgrowing them. I'd rather buy Lynx stuff than an Emerson Arcadia 2001 in terms of gameplay value. And it's probably a lot cheaper than a Laseractive for much better games.

A Lynx is a WAY more defendable choice than an Emerson Arcadia 2001 (at least the US version of the 2001) or a LaserActive. (DId Laseractive have Dragon's Lair, the number 1 definitive Laser disc game? If not, that shows how pathetic it was.)

Me too on my Sega Game Gear, and later, a Nomad. .) They didn't make a true color version until the Neo Geo Pocket Color came out in the US in 1998. The original Game Boy Color going against the Game Gear had colored shells, but the monochrome game screen.

Yeah, dumb Gameboy fans, with their huge piles of awesome software.

The Lynx was the best thing Atari ever made by a mile. It was extremely good. The best system to actually own and play all through that era was still the Gameboy. There is no contest. Gameboy has Mario and Final Fantasy and Metroid and Castlevania and Kirby and Zelda and like...unplayably huge mountains of A+ software. There have to be 100 GB games better than any Lynx game.

And color or not, it’s not like it’s easy to see anything on these old handhelds. Puzzle Bobble on Gamegear is just like...a smear.

Most Nintendo and some third party games were cool, but quite a bit of it was either "strike while the iron is hot" license-ware (good at the time, but may not hold up today) , or shovelware. The NES had about 800 game cartridges released, about 100 are worth playing still today. The Sega Master system had a far lower collection of games,and Sega was doing 90% of the game releasing themselves (only SMS 3rd parties I know of are Activision and Parker Bros.), and the Master system has about a similar 100 games worth playing today. That's why there's WAY more NES games made fun of on Angry Video Game Nerd than Master System. LJN is a favorite target of AVGN. SO if you're collecting random titles at thrift stores and want something with good play value, the percentages say, when both titles are unknown to you, get the Maater System game.

Heck, when the 7800 was failing, Atari released their games under the Tengen banner, I don't know whether Nintendo WOOULDN'T accept a Tengen license because they were basically Atari, or whether Tengen didn't want to feed the beast. Sega also licensed a couple SMS games to Tengen for the NES.

And about half the good games were "reskins" of games for the other system. 3D World Runner was Space Harrier 3D, one Golden Axe derivative was basically Legend of Zelda, They imitated each other quite a bit. Of course, NES third parties can imitate Sega without painting Nintendo as a copycat, whereas Sega had to do it themselves.

Here's half the reason why NES's game percentage quality rate was low: All LJN was was an Acclaim company who went under another name because Acclaim produces more games than the NES license allows, so they rented another office space next door and called it LJN. And because of exclusivity clauses, they license out certain games that were under an NES exclusive contract to companies like Flying Edge, and Arena to release Genesis versions, both of which are ALSO Acclaim companies AND held in the same office building but under a different subunit. For some companies, NES games were more about quantity than quality.

It's kind of like reviewing fly-by-night Atari 2600 companies' games. Journey Escape... good luck figuring that one out without an instruction book.

Or ET, too ambitious of a design with too many bugs ruining the effect. The designer said it was supposed to be a 3D world.

Speaking of ambitious design, Pitfall had to pack a lot of elements in a game, so instead of designing each level, David Crane did an automatic level design based on a number pattern where obstacles were represented by bits, and their combination was a binomial expansion. (He just did an (A+B)^N expansion, took the numeric values in the formula, and saved space, which was in short supply because about half of the 4096 bits was dedicated to Pitfall Harry's running animation. That's how you store hundreds of screens in a world without taking up that many bits)

Nintendo and Sega took 2 different paths in the NES/SMS/Game Boy days. Nintendo's best games were when they were making games that were meant for home audiences, whereas Sega asa first party, their best games were when they brought the arcade experience home. Metroid and Legend of Zelda would suck as arcade games, but were the perfect home games. Sega always had an arcade mentality up to the day the Dreamcast died, and was always chasing Nintnedo for the made-for-home mentality. When the acrade died, Sega as a system maker died.

The reason why the Game boy had a bigger quanity of cool games was because visuals being only 2-bit monochrome freed up more bits for more complex elements. Sega was an arcade company foremost, and the Game Gear was supposed to wow with more arcade visual. if you wanted to make a Game Gear streamer cartridge for a modern TV,you couldn't use a Master System cartridge. Even a Genesis had too few colors to display Game Gear graphics. The problem with all those colored pixels was too big of a pixel (What was Game Boy versus Game Gear dots on a screen? I think Game Boy beat it on resolution, even though it lost the color depth war 4 shades of monochrome vs thousands of colors. And resolution won out over color palate.)

So if any retro appliance makers are listening, make a 32X GameGear cartridge accepter, sort of like the Game Boy Advance (and by extension previous Game Boy) Player for the Game Cube. Lets us play on a big screen, and lets us broadcast those games on Twitch without either jerryrigging a game gear with a video and audio out or using a Hyperkin, which loses because it only has HDMI out, and ping time is horrible on modern displays. So a real 32X Game Gear cartridge accepter would be cool for twithcing Game Gear games.

Gameboy is very good, then Gameboy Advance amps it all up to 11.

Just like when multiple people enter a conversation. It's funny how this topic started as a request for a LD Game section on the LASER DISC database, and everyoone throws off the conversation, and people are responding to every comment, (I"m just as guilty as others), even though the tangential topic was hijacked.

Bringing it back to the original topic, if the Video Game Crash didn't happen, Coleco's original plans of a home Dragon's Lair was to release a Selectavision player adapter, play the cartoon scenes off a Selectivision disc, and let a Coleco cartridge deal with the video game portions, (direction, timing, randomization, and branching).

Coleco did a cheaper version of that technology with the 2600 Kid Vid. Instead of speech synthesis, Coleco had an audio tape controlled by joyport #2 of a 2600 (or what they were hoping you'd buy, a Coleco Gemini, a 99% Atari 2600 Clone, that needed an adapter to play Supercharger games.) The game itself was handled by the 2600 cartridge, but the games were just randomized scenarios in an edutainment title featuring the Smurfs or the Berenstain Bears ( can't get AVGN's Bloodstain Bears skit out of my mind) with real voice actors to give complex instructions. The tape told you what to do, but the ROM judged whether you were right or wrong.

(That prevents memorization present in modern learning titles like Rayman Bran Games, if you want to call PS1 modern, and actually makes you learn the skill involved. That's for making us learn! By the way, if done right, it could have been a cool game where educational elements helped you along, but due to the memorization problem, (no randomization) it just becomes an easy, simplistic platformer once you know the route.)

The GBA software selection is so great. I %100 Astro Boy every year or so. Advance Wars and Super Robot Wars J are probably my two favorite strategy games. Mother 1-3? Come on. The thing is unbeatable.

How would you do Puzzle Bobble on the Game Boy. I guess you have to do big patterns of 2 bit monochrome pixels, like checkerboard, vertical stripe, horizontal stripe, etc.). Thankfully with better resolution, you can make a decent Bust a Move on Game Boy Classic. (Said before I looked up Game Boy Bust A Move video footage)

And they did try with Acclaim/Taito's Bust A Move Arcade Edition for Original Game Boy. Here's play footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSb0zUe-e5Y

Dare to compare: Game Gear version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQSFExE4k54 Admittedly on a computer emulator. Otherwise you'd have to get it from a Hyperkin and be high ping, or jerryrig a real Game Gear.

Road games are a smear because you are in the back seat of a car, and the car moves your head and/or screen in different ways, due to some physical law I know is there, but can't fully explain. But in a stationary environment, both look clear.

That's why you should never play a 3D 3DS game on the road with a non-NEW 3DS. New 3DSes have eye tracking and compensate the 3D view on the fly. Otherwise it's a stereoscopic focusing nightmare.

The only reason Lynx was the best Atari ever did was due to the fact that Expy developed it and Atari bought it.

Jamma boards used are very rarely in the 1000 range.
I remember picking up Double Dragon II for a whopping 20 bucks with 10 shipping too.

Was that the price when Doouble Dragon was a hot video game in the 80s? I think the price quoter, SignOfZeta, was giving was vs. a new release JAMMA board, not a retro one. A Neo Geo Arcade was a cheaper alternative to JAMMA boards that took up less room by having 2 or more games share space, and let the player switch between them., A Neo Geo Home was the Arcade in a "more convenient for the home user" form.

I’m talking about a brand new Street Fighter Zero 2 the day it comes out. It was well over $1000. Probably more like $1400. A new MVS cart would be like $700 and a new AES cart like $250.

I bought Metal Slug 4 MVS new for around 450, but then again I had a place to make money off the machine and it paid for itself in about a week.

A Jamma PCB would all depend on whether or not it was a kit, but I believe they would have been close to the same price, or possibly double as Metal Slug 4 was just a cartridge for the MVS.

Also all MVS chassis were Jamma, just read a web site and it was total BS. Neo PCBs would fit into any Jamma but you needed to add the 4th button which wasn't really that hard.

This is sort of like LDs or any home format vs the real projector film, the only reason LDs or any other home format is desirable is due to the fact that its much cheaper and easier to deal with.

As for home game systems, they are pretty easy to swap boards etc. And I have no understanding why anybody would pay more than 50 bucks for a system when
they could pickup an actual arcade machine working for around 300-600 and play the real deal rather than a crappy ported version.

And you could pickup or make any Jamma adapter pretty easily and cheap.

Those Capcom A-B boards were pretty cheap too, around 3-400 but again you had to have the A mother board and a machine to setup, again this was a kit of just the B board, marquee and stickers etc.

I remember picking up SF Alpha for around 100 B board, but it was used, Capcom made me some boards of Cyberbots for around 200 they asked me "how many do I want"

Buying a new full machine is where it really gets crazy, could be 2-4 grand for an entire dedicated cabinet.

Advance Wars and SRW are some premium strategy s**t. The Castlevania games are great on it too, Fire Emblems ain't bad. Solid Metroids. Golden Sun. The list goes on and on.

@rein o: It's cool that you could make some money off it, guessing this was a long time ago. A guy I know that runs a game store had some arcade cabs in there for awhile. He tried to fight the good fight but ultimately they were eating up way more in power than they were taking in so he took them out of the store and back home.

Regardless of whether you play with a Jamma, a Neo Geo, or a more conventional home console, the one thing you need if you want to play the game right is a low-ping monitor. I think BenQs advertise themselves as 1 ms delay from input, which is about good as you can get for an HD monitor. Now the only things you really need a CRT tv for are retro light gun games, and 3D games for the Master System Sega Scope. But hopefully, I've got 2 inventions in the basic theory explanation phase which can solve both these issues and truly make CRT TVs obsolete.

(Except if you like the multicolor blending in between pixels inherent in Analog signals and CRT TVs. I heard to accurately show the simultaneous and possible colors, you need way more than 4kx2k defined pixels, and the color depth is 90 bits, not 36 bits of HDR. A CRT tV can do more colors with less data. And good absolute blacks, because CRTs start with a black screen and you add light, whereas modern TVs start with white lit screens and put pigments in between the source and the viewer. But it's an energy hog, hence why no one makes them any more.)