Posted on June 2, 2021
GPU June
A fun event spearheaded by the Youtuber PixelPipes is taking place in June. That’d be #GPUJune.
I was asked a few months ago to participate which I’m excited to do. While I’ve made videos for other events I have never been asked directly to produce a video. The focus is on videos around old school GPUs from the older era before things started taking off so we are looking at about 1996-2006 or so.
The video one I’m working on should be done soon going live in a few days and I have some special livestreams coming up for the month as well accordingly. Stay tuned for those!
Here is a link to the official playlist of videos participating if you want to check them out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC-GPEYjsF-jvOQHeJBY5JzL7_cxatBW1
Posted on May 28, 2021
Livestream 5/27/2021 – Ion Fury
I wanted again to try something different again for the stream this week. Ion Fury is a retro revival shooter using the build engine that underpins classic games such as Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior. 3D Realms did a great job creating a modern interpretation of a Duke Nukem game this time featuring the protagonist Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison. The game plays super tight and squeezes everything out the engine normally requiring a more modern system. It wouldn’t run on something that ran Duke 3D back in the day such as a Pentium class machine.
But Ion Fury utilizes a modern wrapper for the build engine called eDuke32 which allows build based games to run on fully modern systems with support for widescreen resolution, modern rendering techniques and more. Some kind soul specifically compiled a version that works with Ion Fury allowing this to run natively on Windows XP which helped me get off the ground on this one. Normally Ion Fury needs a 64 bit operating system but this particular version even allows it to be played on Windows XP 32 bit.
As for the machine itself it’s generally from the 2007 era (Core 2 Quad and 8800 GTS) so a late XP or early Vista era. I attempted to get this to run on Pentium 4 as well as Athlon XP machines but unfortunately other problems prevented that from happening. So the stream was playing Ion Fury on that XP machine quite well. It was a fun stream despite some technical issues up front so check out the replay.
Posted on May 27, 2021
Metal Gear ported to the Amiga
Many I think are familiar with the Metal Gear series either from how over the top it’s gotten via the Solid games or perhaps they have fond memories (frustrating ones) of playing it on the NES originally. Interesting note that the creator Hideo Kojima didn’t care much for the NES port as it didn’t stay true to his original vision. That vision was from the original game Metal Gear that released on the home computer MSX2 in 1987.
It was a sales success on that platform and while there were many ports like the aforementioned NES one and also for the C64 among others, one missing was for the Amiga. There were screenshots and articles suggesting one was coming but it never materialized. Well thanks to modern coding wizard and stellar musician h0ffman that is now a reality. He worked hard to port the original MSX2 game directly to the Amiga attempting to stay true to the original game.
I’m going to give it a whirl for sure most likely on the MiSTer but I love that passionate developers from all over spend time and resources bringing things like this for everyone to enjoy.
You can check out his page on the project here with a link to download it for free as well! https://hoffman.home.blog/metal-gear/
Posted on May 25, 2021
Happy 5.25 day!
That is all. Hope you all had a nice 5.25 day. Get it? Because 5… and… yes. See 5.25″ floppy disks and because. Yes. Enjoy!
Posted on May 24, 2021
Sega Saturn core for MiSTer
As the device that keeps on giving I think the MiSTer project may be the one that immediately comes to mind these days. While the project has supported an extremely wide variety of classic computers and consoles the current development is shifting into overdrive. Originally thought to be impossible due to the limitations of the underlying DE-10 platform (the board that underpins the entire MiSTer project) one of the developers going by name of Sergey or srg320 is getting close to having a working Sega Saturn core.
In a nutshell what this means is that what previously was thought near impossible due to the complex nature of the Saturn and how “modern” it is we may soon be able to run it on the MiSTer. I should mention that Sergey was the primary developer of the Sega CD core. One that also was thought to be unlikely to work. Personally I’m excited because I didn’t get a chance to explore much of the Saturn library so my next step would have been to purchase an Optical Drive Emulator, or ODE, to be able to play games on my original console. Considering the price it’s been on the back burner but if it truly comes to the MiSTer that’s just icing on top of the already delicious FPGA cake. What an awsome platform and awesome group of developers!
