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A Review of the RGB Blaster: No Mod, No Problem
It seems like I’m covering krikzz’s products a bunch now, with the Turbo EverDrive Pro and now this. But it’s not my fault he keeps making interesting things! Here, we see something particularly interesting: the RGB Blaster, an affordable device that promises Famicom users RGB video directly from the cartridge slot. How is this possible? How does it work? And I’ll say in advance, this one surprised me: things I expected to work didn’t, and things I didn’t expect to work did.
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Loading screens? On my Super Nintendo? It's more likely than you think!
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was, in many ways, the most advanced game console of its era, featuring 128kiB of work RAM, tilemap scaling and rotation, a massive color palette of 15-bit colors, translucency, flexible graphics modes, DMA, HDMA, and many other acronyms. But SNES gamers also know that it had an Achilles’ heel: speed. The pokey S-CPU wasn’t always the fastest kid on the block, and with SlowROM, it can be even slower than that. Let’s take a look at one particular game that runs slowly, Fatal Fury, and see if we can speed it up a tad.
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All Power to the HuCard Slot: The Turbo Everdrive Pro
The NEC PC Engine is an amazing console with an excellent library. It’s also a bit of a mess, with many different models, different capabilities, and different graphical specs; all of which are in fairly high demand. So I’m all for the release of tools that make the system more comprehensible and make its library more accessible: krikzz’s Turbo EverDrive Pro promises to do just that. How does it hold up to the weirdest stuff in my PC Engine collection?
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Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?
Most people have two eyes, allowing for a stereoscopic view of reality.[citation needed]. Nevertheless, video games are generally designed to run on monitors with a single screen, viewed from a distance, so three-dimensional effects have to be done with perspective and other techniques. But of course, many ways have been made to give a true stereoscopic view; from the 3DTV fad of the early 2010s, to the Nintendo 3DS’ glasses-free parallax barrier. But how did systems in the primitive days of 8-bit consoles do it? Let’s ask Sega!
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Another Weird Cartridge! Why doesn't it have a label?
So one thing I like to do on this blog is take a look at weird unlicensed cartridges. Who can forget the game-bending Ranma 1/2 cartridge? And of course the arcade bootlegs are just as weird. Let’s take a look at another weird one I’ve found! Surely there’s no dark secrets here! Don’t look at the date!
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RGB Modding the SG-1000 II! Is it worth it?
The SG-1000 II is often just considered the SG-1000 in a different box. And that is somewhat true! There are no games exclusive to the SG-1000 II. No graphics modes. No sound features. But yet, this variant of Sega’s first console features huge changes, and its DNA probably continued to echo down the Sega lineage to the Genesis. How so? And will an RGB mod always solve your problems?
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Can Pachinko be Skill-based? Taking a look at Hanemono
When I looked at vintage pachinko, I speculated that pachinko isn’t as popular in the United States now as it was in the 1970’s because the automatic shooter made it too distant from pinball. But that’s just speculation; I have to try things for myself. And I’ve decided to look at a type of pachinko that doesn’t get as much attention in the west: the hanemono, or wing-type. But as for the question in the title, well, remember Betteridge’s Law. BONUS: The robot apocalypse!
