Other sites to find me on
Youtube: youtube.com/@rexthesheep Mastodon: @rexthesheep@oldbytes.space Twitter: @RexTheSheep (i don't rly use it much though)
Episode 1 of my ongoing adventures to replicate the real N64 look with shaders.
Some of you might be interested in what I've been doing messing around with ReShade in Ship of Harkinian.
If you didn't know, Ship of Harkinian is an excellent open source sourceport of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, based upon the ZeldaRET decompilation project, though enhanced well beyond the capabilities of the original game.
Although most of what I'm talking about here with ReShade has nothing to do specifically with SoH and could apply to an emulator too.
So SoH generally does stick well to its commitment to accuracy, and looks pretty darn authentic with its tri-point texture filtering. And I do like that pristine 1440p with 4× MSAA look a lot even with the original textures, but after watching Dana play through OoT on real hardware a while ago, I've been wanting to try and replicate "real N64 blur", i.e. how real N64 graphics look, using post-process shaders.
I'm not quite at the point where it's hardware accurate yet, but I got pretty close with pre-made shaders. More information under the cut.
i'm thinking of putting "you forgot rainbow edition" on a shirt and selling it as channel merch
Man these photos i took in 2018 are so good. Sadly my Game Boy Pocket's screen doesn't look this nice anymore due to it deteriorating over time, but I'm glad I have these to look back on.
they're so high res you can even see the shadow being cast by the LCD on the reflector.
you just can't get that no matter how good your shaders are. that's why it saddens me how rapidly these screens are failing now and how willingly people just throw them away.
I was actually playing Nettou World Heroes 2 Jet again a few weeks ago, both since I felt like playing it again and also b/c i honestly didn't give it a proper chance in the Dead Heat Fighters video.
Revisiting it with fresh eyes was definitely worth it; I like it even more now.
In the video I said I wanted to like it but it felt sluggish and lacked feedback on attacks. I think I actually might now disagree with that! It's actually pretty fun and a lot smoother than I gave it credit for.
I got a lot farther than I did in the video too. I got all the way to the boss this time! … Then the game randomly crashed because idk a dirty cartridge connection or something.
… though with final boss bullhonkey like this idk if i could have actually beaten the game anyway.
(Played on Super Game Boy and captured from real Super NES hardware, using RGB SCART via RetroTiNK-2X.)
I have found myself in the most bizarre conundrum today my friends, where i bought a second copy of Samurai Warriors 2 for Xbox 360, because my first copy doesn't work anymore for some reason, even though the disc looks totally fine and we gave it a good clean a while ago. …
… Only to find the second copy can't be read either!!
My X360 reads every other game I've thrown at it just fine – installed games, games from the disc, original Xbox games, discs in much worse condition than these ones. And I've tried both of my copies of SW2 on a different Xbox 360 and they don't work there either.
I can't just keep buying X360 copies of SW2 until one works. And we do have the PS2 version of Samurai Warriors 2 (and of SW2 Xtreme Legends) if I want to play it that badly.
But this is just so weird. There's nothing visually wrong with either of the discs, and as far as I can tell the other PS2-era musou games I have on X360 work fine. Very strange situation.
For years now I've desperately wanted a consoliser mod for the Nintendo DS that can output 240p over RGB SCART.
But I feel like that's never gonna happen because any normal person who wants a "NDS Consoliser" is gonna want HDMI and upscaling, and anyone with a CRT TV could just use the existing composite mod.
… Which, honestly, we've got a dead DS Lite sitting around. May as freaken well just slap a composite video mod in it at this rate instead of waiting for a niche RGB mod that may or not happen. — Not like there's a GBA RGB mod; gotta use a PAL GameCube with GBI for that. Which we do! And I love it!
I'm such a huge Game Boy fan so you'd think Game Boy on NSO would be incredible for me, but that's just the problem: I'm a huge Game Boy fan, so i already have so many perfect ways to play Game Boy games already. original cartridges and the GB Everdrive, multiple game boy systems, super game boy, gb player with gbi software, and software emulation on my PC or my 3DS. the switch just ends up having a tough time sitting in there.
of course, it all does depend on the right game coming along. once more of the puzzle games pop up I can see myself going for quick sessions of those. And I'm definitely eager for the potential of playing classic Pokémon TCG online with friends… if I can actually get people interested in playing with me anyway.
but I mean like, it's weird for me to be hard pressed to play some of my favourite games like Kirby's Dream Land and Wario Land 3. but I guess I just have so many ways to play them already. – and like I always say, commercial emulation is at its best when it offers an experience I can't get anywhere else. and I think having simple and accessible online play is that one killer feature for people, especially jumping forward to the GBA and games like Kirby and the Amazing Mirror.
well, that, and real tilt controls in Kirby's Tilt & Tumble lol.
NSO Game Boy and GBA impressions!
I have such elaborate original hardware and emulation setups for both Game Boy and GBA already so adding them to NSO is a hard sell for me personally, but I did at least try GB and i'm pretty impressed with it! They really nailed the image treatment I think. There's some really nice options too.
I think some people will be disappointed that there's no way to turn desaturation off in GBC mode and have the raw colours, but that's just not accurate to original hardware. – It is accurate to a lot of ppl's experience with emulation, which is valid too, but this is closer to the intended look, and it looks so much nicer in my opinion.
But yeah you get the three screen types for DMG/Pocket/Color, and an option for a nice pixel grid and just the right amount of ghosting. Yeah, I really like it! – Way way way above the visual quality of their efforts on 3DS (where they simply darkened the image instead). That's a win in my book!
trying my hand at some graphic design
more polish. i might still space the "rex" and "the sheep" apart a little more, but i feel like we're getting closer.
EDIT: revision with the text spaced out more. which do you prefer?
bad commercial emulation just frustrates me so much, and I feel like it's such a long solved problem that it only gets more inexcusable when things are done wrong. every game studio needs a little John Linneman yelling at them about frame pacing and input latency.
like, straight up, if I can get a better experience from free and open source software, then your offering has failed. sometimes I just want an old game on Switch to take around with me, but I have a hacked New 2DS XL I could be using that can run most SNES games at full speed. you gotta offer something more than that.
Offer unique features not easily accessible otherwise. Offer enhancements beyond the original experience. Hell, even just load it up with bonus material. This is something that, say, the X and Zero/ZX series Mega Man Legacy Collections offer in spades. They actively improve upon the original games and are one of my favourite ways to play those games for it. (Okay those mostly use native ports when possible rather than 100% emulation, but still. It counts.)
What I don't like is a bunch of games thrown in an emulator package with little care for the experience. Like, I was talking about the laggy emulation offered by QUByte before, but even SEGA isn't above this with that awful Switch version of SEGA Mega Drive Classics. People act like it's good value in terms of quantity, but 50 or so Seega games are completely useless if they all look and play like shit. It just ends up as a physical Switch game I refuse to even look at let alone play. The single game SEGA AGES releases have infinitely more value to me than the dozens of games in SEGA MD Classics.
Oh yeah, like, I talked about this elsewhere but on the surface of it I'm actually really interested in how all these budget publishers (Ratalaika, QUByte, etc.) are trying their hand at emulated re-releases.
And some of them, like Ratalaika's port of Gleylancer, have been really good! But they frequently seem to lack attention to detail or any real care put into the package, something that the big companies like Capcom and Konami have gotten so much better with with their own games. Some of these emulation engines, such as QUByte's SNES emulator, have serious performance issues on Switch, or have major inaccuracies like Ratalaika's release of Avenging Spirit. You'd think these would long be solved issues by now.
And maybe I'm out of line here but QUByte's Zero Tolerance collection doesn't even have its unique system link feature implemented at all, which would have been a great reason to buy any re-release of it. As it stands it's just some janky Mega Drive emulation with some ugly filters that don't flatter the original games' dithered graphics at all.
And I haven't even tested to see if these have input lag problems like commercial emulation all too frequently does *coughSEGAcough*.
It really is so obvious they don't care about these games at all and just licensed them on the cheap to make a quick buck. And I guess that's obvious, but again, it's not the mid 2000s anymore. The bar for quality is so much higher now. – QUByte calls the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis "8-bit" in the store description for The Humans. They seriously have no idea what they even have.
happy birth i got ur sheep some hot wheels
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
All of the unique Rex the Sheep art assets produced for “Every Revision of Street Fighter II, Explained!”
IT’S OFFICIAL! 🎉🥳 My long awaited SF2 retrospective will premiere this weekend.
GMT: 1PM, Sat 23/Jan/2021 US East: 8AM, Sat 23/Jan/2021 Sydney: 12AM, Sun 24/Jan/2021
Search “sheepytina” on YouTube to set a reminder and watch the trailer!