#sega System 32

[gamemories]

[viciogame]

🎮 Arabian Fight (Arcade)

Complete Gameplay: https://youtu.be/oICOiyiXj6A

#ArabianFight #Arcade #Sega #BeatEmUp #StreetsOfRage #FinalFight #GoldenAxe #Medieval #Arabian #アラビアンファイト #SegaSystem32 #AstroCityMini #SegaAM2 #princess #Viciogame #Gameplay #Walkthrough #Playthrough #Longplay #LetsPlay #Game #Videogames #Games

[sertimusthechao]

That Game Which Sonic First Appeared In

No, I'm not talking about the first Sonic The Hedgehog video game for the Sega Genesis. I'm talking about that one game where he appeared as an air freshener inside the cockpit of a race car! Yeah, that game! So, apparently there was another version of this game that was demonstrated at AOU Show 1991 and was also being location-tested at an arcade in Shibuya.

A YouTube member who goes by the name 'Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon' uploaded a video of their walkabout from Harajuku to Shibuya in Tokyo in 1991, who also happened to come across this game. I've clipped the moment this game appears in the video. Enjoy~

[videogamesskies]

Chuck Rock 2: Son of Chuck (1993) (Amiga, CD32, Game Gear, Master System, Mega-CD, Mega Drive)

[smbhax]

Sonic’s first video game appearance was NOT in 1991′s Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis; he’d already appeared in 1990′s Sega arcade racer Rad Mobile--as a dangling cockpit ornament!

Wikipedia says of his surprising early appearance in a non-Sonic game:

Interested in getting their new character visible to the public, Sonic Team approved of his appearance in the game.

Wikipedia also mentions that Rad Mobile was apparently by Sega AM3, not the usual sprite-scaley Yu Suzuki and his Sega AM2.

Video: https://youtu.be/gphGnm-lrwI?t=141 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rad_Mobile Blog article that tipped me off: https://lunaticobscurity.blogspot.com/2022/11/gale-racer-saturn.html

The 1994 Saturn port, Gale Racer, redrew Sonic to look more like his Genesis version, and also threw in more dangly ornaments: Tails, Knuckles, Robotnik, Metal Sonic, etc etc.

[babylonburningmadiacenter]

Golden Axe - The Revenge of Death Adder (JP, USA) (1992) (Beat Em Up) (Arcade)

Golden Axe – The Revenge of Death Adder (JP, USA) (1992) (Beat Em Up) (Arcade)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Axe:_The_Revenge_of_Death_Adder ROM (JP) : Golden Axe – The Revenge of Death Adder (JP, USA) (1992) (Beat Em Up) (Arcade) ROM (USA) : Golden Axe – The Revenge of Death Adder (JP, USA) (1992) (Beat Em Up) (Arcade) PLAY ONLINE : https://archive.org/details/arcade_ga2 VIDEO LONGPLAY : https://archive.org/details/goldenaxedeathadder2players CONVERSION MANUAL…

[unadulteratedpiratepizza]

The "Wait no, the PS3 isn't retro" List

Have you ever said "The Wii isn't old, that came out when I was in High School"? Do you remember getting an N64 for Christmas? Did you play Halo 3 on Xbox Live with your friends while complaining about your math class? Then get ready to be destroyed by the ages of your childhood game systems (As of 2023)! Just remember that an age of 15 years makes it retro.

Famicom/NES: 1983(JP)/1985(US) Age: 40/38

Mega Drive/Genesis: 1988(JP)/1989(US) Age: 35/34

Super Famicom/SNES: 1990(JP)/1991(US) Age: 33/32

Sega Saturn: 1994(JP)/1995(US) Age: 29/28

PlayStation: 1994(JP)/1995(US) Age: 29/28

Nintendo 64: 1996 Age: 27

Sega Dreamcast: 1998(JP)/1999(US) Age: 25/24

PlayStation 2: 2000 Age: 23

GameCube: 2001 Age: 22

Xbox: 2001(US)/2002(JP,EU) Age: 22/21

Xbox 360: 2005 Age: 18

PlayStation 3: 2006 Age: 17

Nintendo Wii: 2006 Age: 17

Nintendo Wii U: 2012 Age: 11

PlayStation 4: 2013 Age: 10

Xbox One: 2013 Age: 10

[foone]

Fucking Gorgeous FM-Towns model 2F on craigslist near me. I don't have money or the knowledge to use this thing, but god it's amazing.

The FM Towns was a Fujitsu computer introduced in 1989 in Japan. It's built around an Intel 386, but it's not a fully PC compatible system. It ran Windows 3.x and Towns OS, which was built on top of MS-DOS and ran in 32-bit mode using an extender.

It didn't require a hard drive, booting the OS off the CD-ROM drive. It uses a custom graphics chip that's not VGA compatible, supporting sprites and overlays, with full kanji in ROM.

Audio-wise, it used a Yamaha OPN2, so it sounds much like a Sega Megadrive/Genesis.

Later systems added DOS/V (a version of MS-DOS designed for Japanese users) support, making it more like a MS-DOS computer.

There was also the FM Towns Marty, which made it into more of a console, looking less like a PC. This kept compatibility, however.

(This is, by the way, the only console to ship with a floppy drive standard)

Anyway these machines are neat and rare, but part of why they're rare is that they didn't sell very well. They're full computers so they're pretty expensive, and the FM Towns series was getting beaten by NEC's PC98 at first and then DOS/V clones later. They just didn't have the compatibility with DOS/V software to really justify them being a viable choice over the much cheaper DOS/V clones, and they had a smaller library than the much more popular PC98 series.

Still, they're very nifty machines.

Fun fact: They're called "FM Towns", right? FM is Fujitsu Micro, but "Towns" is the codename. They were named after the physicist Charles H. Townes, who did some of the fundamental work in the development of the maser, a predecessor to the laser, for which he shared a Nobel Prize in 1964.

You'll note his name is "Townes", but the system is "Towns". Futjitsu changed the spelling so that people would pronounce it correctly, rather than potentially pronounce it "tow-nes".

[archoneddzs15]

Sonic 30th Anniversary Symphony (2021) - My reaction 3 years later

I am going to admit one thing. I am a Sonic fan, and it has always been this way since 2006 when I got my hands on Sonic Advance 3 for my Game Boy Advance SP. At the time I was one year away from starting elementary school and my family was not well off at the time, so I had to make do with what I could play. Little did I know that my first encounter with the blue hedgehog would change my life forever as I know it today.

Then as I grew older I was able to get some extra games for the systems I did own, such as my childhood 32 bit console, the Sega Saturn. I got Sonic Jam which was my first gateway drug to the classic 16-bit Sonic games, and I even got to roam around in the Sonic World for a bit, doing tasks like collecting rings and such. The Sonic series has its ups and downs, sure, but there is one thing that the Sonic series never fails on, and it became even more apparent when I saw this comment on one particular live-stream where a music teacher was gob-smacked by how fuckin' awesome the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack was!

Anyway, this little long-winded intro out of the way, though it still rings true as the picture says. Let's get right into it. As a 30th anniversary birthday present to Sega's premier franchise Sonic the Hedgehog in 2021, Sega decided "Why not make it bigger and better?" They got some Czech Republic philharmonic orchestra to do the orchestrated medleys for many a Sonic game under the sun, all of which remain one of my favorites. Keep in mind, this Symphony came out before Sonic Frontiers and Superstars. Also, I am not the best in terms of being a music critic unlike the Anthony Fantano types so my reviews of them are going to be relatively brief.

Part 1: Countdown

The music playing during the first 15 minutes of countdown is nothing short of spectacular. The track list is as follows:

A New Journey - Sonic Unleashed

Comfort Zone (Main Menu) - Sonic Mania/Plus

Sonic Goes U.G. Mix - Sonic Gems Collection

Fist Bump (Piano Version - Theater Room) - Sonic Forces

Mission (theme of Sonic 3D Blast) - Sonic Generations

Tropical Resort (Area Theme) - Sonic Colours

Part 2: The Orchestra

The Philarmonic Orchestra masterfully conducted a beautiful rearrangement of almost every Sonic game's soundtrack out there. I say "almost every" because for the Orchestra portion it's missing Sonic CD, the GBA and DS Sonic games and Sonic Boom. But that's minor substitutions in favor of something a lot grander, and I appreciate it. I mean, they even represented games like Sonic Drift 2 and Tails Adventures! Even NiGHTS got a shoutout. How about that for cool?

Part 3: Tomoya Ohtani

Tomoya Ohtani Band. Oh man, what can I say? Well, they played three songs, so let's get right to it.

Reach for the Stars (Re-Colors)

The Re-Colors version of Reach for the Stars as found in Sonic Colours Ultimate, the remaster of the Nintendo Wii game now available on PS4/5, XBOX, Switch and PC. This song absolutely rocked the socks off when I first played the original game on the Wii, and this arrangement is even better still.

Speak with Your Heart (Original + Rainbow Mix)

Things go normal for the first few minutes of this song, which I like, and then Tomoya Ohtani drops a bombshell when it turns into the "Rainbow Mix" which has a trap beat type vibe to it. I love it!

Endless Possibility from Sonic Unleashed (vocals: Nathan Sharp)

Nathan Sharp is the guy who sings covers of Sonic songs under the best name you could ever give, "NateWantsToBattle" under his record label "Give Heart Records". Endless Possibility is a song that people have loved for years and years and years. It's a song which was originally performed by the same people that did the vocal intro for Phineas and Ferb. Nathan Sharp swoops in and delivers the BEST version of the song yet!

Part 4: Crush 40 (Jun Senoue & Johnny Gioeli)

Crush 40 is also a staple among Sonic fans. From hit songs like Open Your Heart, Live and Learn, Sonic Heroes, I Am... All of Me, and so on, their music has touched lives everywhere around the world. Fun fact, they used to be known as Sons of Angels for a short period of time, where some of their Sons of Angels-era songs were used in the Sega arcade game NASCAR Arcade. The songs in NASCAR Arcade would be released in the only music album to bear the Sons of Angels artist name, "Thrill of the Feel". Speaking of which, they sang six songs before adding two more after fans (this was in 2021 and we were still in lockdown so....) "demanded" more from them. Fun fact: Jun Senoue also did some songs for the Game no Kanzume "Sega Games Can" discs for the Sega Mega CD. Johnny Gioeli also provided vocals for another band under his wing called Hardline. The six initial songs are as follows, which all really will rock your sound system off.

Open Your Heart (Sonic Adventure)

Sonic Heroes

Green Light Ride (Team Sonic Racing)

Sonic Boom (Sonic CD) (Crush 40 VS Cash Cash version)

I Am... All of Me (Shadow the Hedgehog)

Knight of the Wind (Sonic and the Black Knight)

Part 5: The Grand Finale Songs

Whooo~!!! Here comes the big ones. Two legendary songs all from one game. All before ending it off with an orchestrated mix of "Friends" by Hyper Potions.

These two songs are all from one of the best Sonic games of all time, Sonic Adventure 2.

Escape from the City (vocals: Nathan Sharp)

No one in their right mind would want to tell you that this song from after Sonic jumps off the helicopter in a bid to escape GUN forces is not legendary.

Yet here is Escape from the City, one of the BEST Sonic songs. And, of course, another spotlight by the King of Sonic song covers, Nathan Sharp. The Philarmonic Orchestra also added to the grand vibe of the song by making it even better still.

Live and Learn

There's nothing I can say. One of the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) Sonic songs just got a whole lot better.

[wirewitchviolet]

Hell is terms like ASIC, FPGA, and PPU

I haven't been doing any public updates on this for a bit, but I am still working on this bizarre rabbit hole quest of designing my own (probably) 16-bit game console. The controller is maybe done now, on a design level. Like I have parts for everything sourced and a layout for the internal PCB. I don't have a fully tested working prototype yet because I am in the middle of a huge financial crisis and don't have the cash laying around to send out to have boards printed and start rapidly iterating design on the 3D printed bits (housing the scroll wheel is going to be a little tricky). I should really spend my creative energy focusing on software development for a nice little demo ROM (or like, short term projects to earn money I desperately need) but my brain's kinda stuck in circuitry gear so I'm thinking more about what's going into the actual console itself. This may get techie.

So... in the broadest sense, and I think I've mentioned this before, I want to make this a 16-bit system (which is a term with a pretty murky definition), maybe 32-bit? And since I'm going to all this trouble I want to give my project here a little something extra the consoles from that era didn't have. And at the same time, I'd like to be able to act as a bridge for the sort of weirdos who are currently actively making new games for those systems to start working on this, on a level of "if you would do this on this console with this code, here's how you would do it on mine." This makes for a hell of a lot of research on my end, but trust me, it gets worse!

So let's talk about the main strengths of the 2D game consoles everyone knows and loves. Oh and just now while looking for some visual aids maybe I stumbled across this site, which is actually great as a sort of mid-level overview of all this stuff. Short version though-

The SNES (or Super Famicom) does what it does by way of a combination of really going all in on direct memory access, and particularly having a dedicated setup for doing so between scanlines, coupled with a bunch of dedicated graphical modes specialized for different use cases, and you know, that you can switch between partway through drawing a screen. And of course the feature everyone knows and loves where you can have one polygon and do all sorts of fun things with it.

The Genesis (or Megadrive) has an actual proper 16-bit processor instead of this weird upgraded 6502 like the SNES had for a scrapped backwards compatibility plan. It also had this frankly wacky design where they just kinda took the guts out of a Sega Master System and had them off to the side as a segregated system whose only real job is managing the sound chip, one of those good good Yamaha synths with that real distinct sound... oh and they also actually did have a backwards compatibility deal that just kinda used the audio side to emulate an SMS, basically.

The TurboGrafix-16 (or PC Engine) really just kinda went all-in on making its own custom CPU from scratch which...we'll get to that, and otherwise uh... it had some interesting stuff going on sound wise? I feel like the main thing it had going was getting in on CDs early but I'm not messing with optical drives and they're no longer a really great storage option anyway.

Then there's the Neo Geo... where what's going on under the good is just kind of A LOT. I don't have the same handy analysis ready to go on this one, but my understanding is it didn't really go in for a lot of nice streamlining tricks and just kinda powered through. Like it has no separation of background layers and sprites. It's just all sprites. Shove those raw numbers.

So what's the best of all worlds option here? I'd like to go with one of them nice speedy Motorolla processors. The 68000 the Genesis used is no longer manufactured though. The closest still-in-production equivalent would be the 68SEC000 family. Seems like they go for about $15 a pop, have a full 32-bit bus, low voltage, some support clock speeds like... three times what the Genesis did. It's overkill, but should remove any concerns I have about having a way higher resolution than the systems I'm jumping off from. I can also easily throw in some beefy RAM chips where I need.

I was also planning to just directly replicate the Genesis sound setup, weird as it is, but hit the slight hiccup that the Z80 was JUST discontinued, like a month or two ago. Pretty sure someone already has a clone of it, might use that.

Here's where everything comes to a screeching halt though. While the makers of all these systems were making contracts for custom processors to add a couple extra features in that I should be able to work around by just using newer descendant chips that have that built in, there really just is no off the shelf PPU that I'm aware of. EVERYONE back in the day had some custom ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chip made to assemble every frame of video before throwing it at the TV. Especially the SNES, with all its modes changing the logic there and the HDMA getting all up in those mode 7 effects. Which are again, something I definitely want to replicate here.

So one option here is... I design and order my own ASIC chips. I can probably just fit the entire system in one even? This however comes with two big problems. It's pricy. Real pricy. Don't think it's really practical if I'm not ordering in bulk and this is a project I assume has a really niche audience. Also, I mean, if I'm custom ordering a chip, I can't really rationalize having stuff I could cram in there for free sitting outside as separate costly chips, and hell, if it's all gonna be in one package I'm no longer making this an educational electronics kit/console, so I may as well just emulate the whole thing on like a raspberry pi for a tenth of the cost or something.

The other option is... I commit to even more work, and find a way to reverse engineer all the functionality I want out with some big array of custom ROMs and placeholder RAM and just kinda have my own multi-chip homebrew co-processors? Still PROBABLY cheaper than the ASIC solution and I guess not really making more research work for myself. It's just going to make for a bigger/more crowded motherboard or something.

Oh and I'm now looking at a 5V processor and making controllers compatible with a 10V system so I need to double check that all the components in those don't really care that much and maybe adjust things.

And then there's also FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). Even more expensive than an ASIC, but the advantage is it's sort of a chip emulator and you can reflash it with something else. So if you're specifically in the MiSTer scene, I just host a file somewhere and you make the one you already have pretend to be this system. So... good news for those people but I still need to actually build something here.

So... yeah that's where all this stands right now. I admit I'm in way way over my head, but I should get somewhere eventually?

[gaminghearts1-blog]

Sega Saturn- 30 Years Later

The Sega Saturn is quite possibly one of the most overlooked game system of the 90’s decade. The Saturn console was Sega’s fifth generation console which succeeded the Sega Genesis which came out back in August 1989. The Saga Saturn was initially released in Japan during November 1994 and started appearing in retailers around the world in 1995. The Saturn console was Sega’s first and only 32-bit…

[blazehedgehog]

As someone who I know is intricately familiar with Genesis music and the FM synth it uses; why is it that many people (including myself) enjoy the Genesis era Sonic music but when Jin Senoue tries to emulate that sound using Genesis synth samples (Sonic Superstars being the most recent example) it just doesn't sound very good? I know it's literally become a running joke in the community that Senoue uses the Genesis synth too much but it's not like Sonic 1 or 2 had bad soundtracks even though they used the same instrumentation, and Senoue is obviously a very talented composer, so I don't really understand why his attempts to emulate the Genesis soundtracks always turn out so mid.

The general theory I subscribe to is that with the soundtracks to Sonic 1, 2, and presumably even Sonic 3, those games were composed by people who were just writing "real" music. They would pick out real world instruments and write for that sound.

If you've never heard it before, for the 20th Anniversary, Sega put out a compilation soundtrack for Sonic 1 and 2, which included the original demo tracks Masato Nakamura wrote for those games.

Now these are basically just MIDI files, because they didn't need to be anything more than that. But you can tell he was thinking in terms of horn sections, bass guitar, and so on.

Nakamura would submit these MIDI songs on cassette to Sega, and Sega's sound engineers would transcribe those instruments into something that sounded appropriate for the Genesis hardware.

Now, Jun Senoue did the same thing, to a degree. Jun's first major Sonic soundtrack was Sonic 3D Blast on the Sega Genesis, and Jon Burton (of Traveler's Tales) revealed Jun's own demo cassette. If you listen to Jun's tracks, they're all done on the Honky Tonk/Rhodes piano. There's no attempt to utilize real world instruments or have any kind of sound diversity. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Instead of writing music for a band, he wrote music for an individual playing a keyboard.

Worse still, it has eventually been revealed as of Sonic Origins that Jun Senoue had very little awareness of how to make Genesis sounding music. Again, he only submitted his songs on cassette. He was not responsible for the FM Synthesis conversion, just the raw notes, which were all written on, and for, a keyboard.

(throwing the rest of this ask under a "read more" tag because it embeds a lot more videos and even some images)

So when it came time for Sonic 4, and they had Jun Senoue do the retro style soundtracks for those games, he was probably pretty out of his depth. He was writing for style of music he did not really have a nuanced understanding of.

So we get this crunchy, grating, disassociated "this is what the Genesis sounded like, right?" sort of sound. The musical equivalent of one of those early 2000's "How to Draw Manga" books: somebody who thinks they know what they're doing, has actual talent in other adjacent areas, but doesn't actually get this particular niche.

This is one of the reasons why I'm actually a little warmer towards Classic Sonic's music in Sonic Forces -- it's not Jun Senoue. Somebody on that project understood enough and had Naofumi Hataya handle a lot of Classic Sonic's music. He has actual experience with chiptunes and wrote something that feels like it belongs in a Sega System 32 arcade game or something.

Not every single one of Classic Sonic's songs are stone cold bangers in Forces, but at least they sound more authentically retro than Jun's attempts, because they were written by someone who knew what they were doing.

Beyond that, I don't know why Jun doesn't just, like... do better, in a sense. I suppose I don't know his composing environment and how easy or hard it is to slot in what he'd need to sound more "authentic." I just know from my own perspective how easy it is to grab a VST or a soundfont for common Genesis/Yamaha instruments.

But even then, more authentic instruments aren't going to solve the problem that this style of music doesn't seem to be his strong suit, even if somebody at Sega keeps pushing him to do it. Thankfully, I think somebody finally realized it, given how Sonic Superstars seemed to be full of his Sonic 4 style fake-retro music and most of it got replaced at the last second.

[postgamecontent]

OutRunners (MD Mini 2)

It's tough to make a sequel to a game that basically gets everything right, but that's the challenge SEGA faced with following up on Out Run. But follow up it did, several times, to varying results. OutRunners was meant to be a return to the relaxing atmosphere of the original game after a couple of installments that went in different directions. In the arcades it ran on SEGA's powerful System 32 hardware, and in the end was the most successful game to use that board. A very fun game, and one that unlike most System 32 games actually received a home console port. Only one, mind you.

Unfortunately, that one home console port was to the Mega Drive. This was a console that had a hard time doing a convincing port of the original Out Run. It never had a hope of handling OutRunners with any sort of fidelity. And indeed, it did not. It forces a splitscreen even in single player, the animation is really choppy, the scaling has too few sizes for each sprite to be convincing, and objects on the road appear at the last second. The collision detection is bizarre, which really hurts the playability of the game.

In its favor, the soundtrack is really good. The new Original Mode might not add to much with its short one-on-one races, but it's something new. It has a two-player mode, and that's always nice. The Japanese version, which is also included in the Mega Drive Mini 2, has a cheat code that lets you play as the car from Virtua Racing. Could this hardware have done a better take on OutRunners? Maybe, but probably not by much. An attempt was made, it was not the worst racing game you could buy for the console, and it's a neat thing to have on the mini-console. I think it's deeply unfortunate that SEGA has never reissued the arcade game on more capable hardware, but that's hardly this port's fault.

[eziojensenthe3rd]

Midnight Gaming: Long Live Eggbug

So last night I played Atari 50th anniversary collection, checked socials later to find.... cohost will shut down by the end of the year... aww..

So Atari is a company thats been around for a long while in the gaming industry, all the way back in the 70's with pong and asteroids, leading to the atari 2600 or vcs as it was called and finally leading to thier last console, the atari jaguar which flopped hard. It was a console that was advertised as a true 64 bit console even though it was really just 2 custom 32 bit processors, making it difficult to make games that run well, in the same decade that has the playstation and the nintendo 64. Yeah, "do the math".

Never really got to experience much of Atari when they were a contender in the scene, heck I wasn't even a year old when the Jaguar was launched so it wasn't really a part of gaming that I had a hands on experience with but I have heard of them. In my general interest in all things gaming in my youth, Atari was brought up sometimes in some gaming mags and online media, AVGN is probably for many people how they heard about Atari as he covered some games on the 2600, even did an episode on the failed 5200 and the Jaguar consoles.

So Digital Eclipse (not to be confused with digital extremes, the warframe folks) has done a 50th anniversary collection that has various games from atari's history, including some unreleased games. Naturally since these games can be easily emulated, a collection of old games wouldnt mean much but theres more to this than just that. You also get a bunch supplemental material such as artwork, behind the scenes documents and videos of interviews with several employees and key figures in atari's history, talking about various things. Cliffy B is there too for some reason.

For me its damn fascinating to follow along a timeline of events, looking at various media and playing some games, getting a feel on Atari's journey over the years. You do learn a few things about the company and how it ran at the time and uhhh.. it certanly looks a bit familiar. Developers having to work overtime, upper management ignoring concerns from thier employees, games being marketed beyond what could actually be delivered leading to consumer backlash, employees losing their jobs in mass. Yeah those problems are still around nowadays huh. 50 years later and nobody has really learnt anything, still making the same mistakes that one time led to the most infamous market crashes in history. Funny thing tho, while the games market did indeed crash in 83, leading to several businesses going bankrupt, for the average 2600 player it was just an odd time in which new 2600 games werent made. Because the 2600 had such a massive install base, eventually new 2600 games got made again, even during the time when the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System were leading the console scene. To quote one Garry Kitchen "No one told consumers that there had been a crash. No one went to their house and said "You don't like video games anymore"".

Digital Eclipse also did some other games in the documentary style, the art of karateka and llamasoft. I wouldn't mind checking those out as I feel a documentary that covers a particular subject sounds fascinating to put the lenses of an interactive game, though I suppose it does veer a bit close to "edutainment" territory.

So now with that done, lets move onto the.... news. Cohost is announced to be closing down at the end of year with it converting to a read only format in October. I genuinly enjoyed my time on cohost even if it was short. From looking for alternatives to Tumblr, I stumbled onto it and found a chill sort of site that I felt comfortable browsing, chatting with peeps and sharing posts. It was a site that had an independent vibe that was unique and humble compared to some of its contemporaries. Tumblr weared the mask of being queer friendly despite nuking the odd trans blog every now and then, twitter is a cesspit run by that nepobaby bastard, discord seems to have issues with power tripping mods and creeps. A lot of social media seems to either be.full of techbro crypto ai weirdos or algorithmic data-harvesting software or both! But cohost had the vision of a place that didnt had user-unfriendly practices, instead of just making a site that demands engagement from the user for the sake of profit, the team made the site comfortable to browse and post on, letting people build up communities to hang out and chill in. Sadly that ambition wasnt sustainable due to the issues with both work and finance and in the end, it'll all be shut down.

I'll still be posting Midnight Gaming on Cohost until October as well as on tumblr until I find another site to host this series. Maybe I'll try that dreamwidth place I heard about, maybe i'll actually make a neocities site. We'll see what the future holds.

Until then, Rest in Piece Cohost. Hug your local eggbug today.... oh yeah james earl jones passed away too... awful lot of death lately, an old friend on my fathers side recently lost thier wife too. September what the hell you doing?

Hey whatever happened to those prizes that were won during the Swordquest contest?

Thats all for today, see you tomorrow. Feel free to leave any game suggestions or feedbacks. Anons are currently on.

[arcadesega]

SegaSonic the Hedgehog

セガソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ

Sega System 32 (1993)

[nicole-the-hololynx]

What is a retro console that you think was the most underutilized?

the virtual boy my friend the virtual boy!!

this old thing is incredibly powerful for a 1995 portable! it's main CPU is a 32-bit NEC V10 at 20MHz, which makes it comparable less to what you saw in the SNES or Genesis and more to something like Sega's Model 1 or System 32 arcade hardware (it's very powerful!)

its graphics chip has the capability to do affine transformations to any of its background layers, as well as do automatic parallax effects. this allows it to do graphical effects similar to what the SNES can achieve!

musically it's nowhere near the home consoles of the era, but it's still a massive improvement over the Game Boy! it's got 5 wave channels plus a noise channel, which gives it a very similar sound to the PC Engine (Jack Bros sounds beautiful on this thing!)

in theory it could do so much so well, but barely any games came out for it.... it ain't easy being the virtual boy 😔 I guess I'll just have to stick to my beloved Virtual Lab for now