Tag: vintage gaming

Throwback Thursdays: Punchout!

Cover of Mike Tyson's Punchout!
It was one of the most popular games for the NES.

By Thomas Holbrook II

One of the most popular games I remember playing was Mike Tyson’s Punchout.  Seeing my older step-brother, my dad, and others play this game made me want to give it a shot.

I wouldn’t get the chance until well after the NES’s popularity started to dwindle in favor of newer consoles.

In either event, Tyson himself was on the cover, and was even featured at the end of the game.  As the final boss, he was aggravating, especially in the first round.

One wrong move, and his uppercut would send Little Mac flying!  Believe it or not, Punchout existed long before Tyson endorsed a port of it to the NES.  Hardcore Gaming 101 has more details about the series, including information on the arcade edition.  So which game did you use to play growing up, and on which console?  Feel free to sound off in the comments section.  😉

Throwback Thursday: SNES Emulation

SNES Console
Image courtesy of Evan-Amos under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Unported 3.0 License.

Thomas Holbrook II | The *Nixed Report

Growing up, we all had our favorite past times.  Some played baseball, while others played video games.  My favorite activity revolved around the latter, and one of my favorite consoles was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Super Castlevania IV were among my favorite games.  The bad news is that the older the hardware becomes, the more likely it is to fail.

This is where emulation comes into play.

As it turns out, most console emulators will only be just accurate enough for the games to be playable.  According to Byuu, who wrote quite an informative piece on Ars Technica:

These days, the most dominant emulators are Nestopia and Nintendulator, requiring 800MHz and 1.6GHz, respectively, to attain full speed. The need for speed isn’t because the emulators aren’t well optimized: it’s because they are a far more faithful recreation of the original NES hardware in software.

Now compare these to the older N64 emulator, UltraHLE, whose system requirements were a meager 350MHz Pentium II system. To the casual observer, it can be quite perplexing to see Mario 64 requiring less processing power than the original Mario Bros.

My experience in emulation is in the SNES field, working on the bsnes emulator. I adored the ideal behind Nestopia, and wanted to recreate this level of accuracy for the Super Nintendo. As it turns out, the same level of dedication to accuracy pushed requirements up into the 2-3GHz range, depending on the title.

 

Considering the hardware inside the SNES, requiring a high end computer makes sense.  After all, one is mimicking an entire system in software.  Byuu has since merged bsnes into a new project.