Be Excellent To Each Other

Ok, being the gaming gurus you all are, you have probably already seen this...but one which also lets you can play any region cartridge in is a first for me. I grew up on the Mega Drive so I have pretty much played all its games to death, my question is, is there anything similar to this for any of the other consoles which I never had the joy of owning such as the SNES, or even the Atari Jaguar?

I'd love to properly play Super Mario or Super Mario as I never really did as a kid.

http://www.firebox.com/product/2331/SEG ... src_id=244

Is it as shit as I imagine it to be? The joypads look grim and it looks like it only has composite out. A megadrive viewed through proper RGB is a wonderful beast.

Yes you can play any region, but meh, there's no soul there. No soul.

+ You can pickup a Megadrive on Ebay for free like me. I purchased a Master System on Ebay and a Megadrive came in the box as well! Result!

I know what youre saying Chinny, I actually have 2 Mega Drives kicking around the house somewhere, but I just like the idea of a no hassle, plug in and go system.

The Mega Drive (even the MkII) is pretty large and not very pretty...I certainly wouldnt want it under my TV next to my other stuff.

Hopefully you'd be able to use an actual pad if you wanted to...I had a 6 button Mega Drive II pad somewhere, and that was ace for playing Mortal Kombat and the likes.

It's also not a megadrive, it's an emulator running on a single chip fake. So it gets sound wrong, has some visual bugs and won't run all games (Virtua Racing being the obvious one iirc).

It's also considerably uglier than an MD2, outputs only in hideous, has crap joypads and costs 2-3 times as much as an MD2.

Nice try but no.

So back to my question, is do you know if there are any other similar devices for the other old consoles?

You mean its a PS3? (60gb of course)

I'm proud to have my MD2 under my TV alongside the Dreamcast. Hopefully will add my 7800 sometime as well.

I got a new Quickshot MD joypad the other week. And I mean NEW. You cannot believe how wonderful it was to open the box and then throw it away knowing some nerd would be weeping at my act of vandalism. The new pad is so clicky and new as well.

TBH I thought the six button MD pad was one of the best ever. Loved it.

There are similar devices for the NES , and the CDTV thingy is basically a C64 in a joystick which you could hack to put other games in there.

The problem with them all (as mentioned above) is they are not the real hardware and are running emulated on a chip without the full instruction set.

So some games dont work / some do odd things / etc etc - if you really want to play these on your tv plug a pc into it and play it on there - even an original xbox with the emulators would give you a better experience than these.

As far as i'm aware no-one has done the SNES in a similar way (although its only a matter of time) if you seach for something called an "FCTWIN" you'll find its a box which does both SNES and NES together and is not using the original chipsets but does not come with any roms pre-loaded (or any multi carts)

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-enterta ... 234080.php

At least one of Atari's new 2600's can at least be cut open to reveal a cart slot.



Not quite, the 60gb PS3 does still have half a real PS2 in there. It's more like a copy of Kega but one from a half decade ago.

I think it's even got the classic "Sonic in front of the words" Sonic 1 bug.

I thought it was only the Japs that got the ps2 chip in their ps3's? Thought the European one was purely software driven?

Cheers Zaphod.

So it looks like I need to find a decent SNES emulator for my pc then. To save me time does anyone here have one they recommend? Preferably with a safe download linky.

Not from Nintendo though. Still, there's already (Super) Famiclone out there called FC Twin which plays US Super NES games, admittedly not with decent compatibility according to reports. The Super NES had more custom hardware than the off-the-shelf NES and MegaDrive, so it's never been as widely cloned.

(Err, are there any working homebrew Super NES emulators for the DS, incidentally?)

I'd say get a usb/ps2 pad connector and get emulators and roms and sort the controls yourself. I even managed to make a PS2 pad do dual analogue for goldeneye rom which was pretty good, only took half an hour and Im useless with that sort of stuff.

The US and JDM PS3s had both the PS2 CPU and GPU.

The 60gb had just the GPU. If it didn't, even Sony wouldn't have removed software only emulation.

Actually software only emulation of the PS2 in a PS3 is almost certainly impossible.



Snes9x, get it from zophar.net. The best alternative is zsnes but it has the interface from hell.

I quite like Zsnes

Bizarrely, the PS3's GPU has considerably lower memory bandwidth than the PS2's GPU (at least that's my understanding of it) - which means that emulation of the PS2 with standard PS3 hardware is nigh on impossible.

Ironically, so I gather, it should technically be possible to emulate the PS2 on Xbox 360 hardware.

To summarise: Sony really fucked up when they designed the PS3.

That's my understanding too, which is why I made the impossible comment. I think it was one of the Pickfords that explained this to me once.