T w e n t y S i d e d

So at this point, I had an HP Laptop with RetroArch for 8-bit and 16-bit emulation, and a Wii for GameCube games. I had wanted to keep this as simple as possible, but two systems isn’t really a problem. Except it’s not two systems. This puts me at three systems, actually; because I already had Sony games taken care of. I didn’t mention that before. And arguably, PlayStation and Xbox emulation are really at the heart of a lot of what I want to play. Complicating the issue is that Microsoft *REALLY* doesn’t like backward compatibility. Sony seems to play this weird moving target game. And Nintendo really is just as bad as Sony, if not worse…but they left a couple of big caveats out in public.

And on top of all that, I really don’t want to do this:

As much as I admire, and to an extent desire, a room full of original, running consoles and computers, able to run on an HDMI flat-screen or even a high-quality CRT TV…I just don’t want to mess with it. I want simple. I want elegant. I want easy. I want my Nintendo Pro Controller, which is the only thing I’ve found that is a legitimate improvement over the Xbox 360 controller.

Having teased the fact that I already had Sony games taken care of, I’m going to ignore that and get back to the laptop.

As you no doubt recall, the laptop could do 8-bit and 16-bit gaming beautifully (and I assure you if I needed it to, it could do 1-7-bit gaming of any kind you could think of.) I didn’t get into trouble until I tried to do GameCube games, and that led to last week’s tangent. My next goal was emulating the Sega Saturn.

I actually own a modded Sega Saturn that hasn’t seen much use. I bought it for two reasons, several years ago: to play Shining Force III, which I never bought; and to help me learn Japanese, which I never got around to. There were two reasons I don’t (didn’t) want to just go hook up the Saturn to play the retro games I had in mind: Shining Force is friggin’ expensive, and I was already committed to THREE systems; I didn’t want to add a fourth (this problem will continue to drive my experimentation.)

The impression I got of Sega Saturn emulation after several days of research:

Many people claim to have Sega Saturn emulation running so well on their PC that they never even bother booting up their Saturn anymore. Many more people claim they can’t get anything to work, and even when they get it to work it’s buggy. The same people in the first category frequently respond to the complaints by people in the second category with “the Saturn is a complex system that even now isn’t well understood, and you can’t expect everything to work right.” BTW, the Sega Saturn “core” isn’t available yet for the Steam version of RetroArch, because they deem it to not actually be a working emulator. It’s the same Sega Saturn emulator all the people who say Saturn emulation works great are using. I’m not going to dig any deeper into this topic. I actually tried it a few different ways. We’ll leave Saturn emulation at “didn’t work for me.” And I don’t mean “didn’t work well enough,” like what happened using Dolphin to emulate GameCube games…I mean I couldn’t get it to work. Anything. Not a single disc.

Accepting that the small handful of Sega Saturn games I wanted to play would require a running Saturn, I dug it out of the closet and cleaned it up. I was able to test that it powered on, and I replaced the memory battery just for the heck of it. I had a spare 2032 battery sitting around, and it’s one of the easiest “repairs” you can do on a Saturn. There’s literally a little door for it. Unfortunately, while I did eventually find the Saturn AV cables, my Sony TV doesn’t have a regular AV input. It requires a special breakout adapter that takes the Left and Right Audio plus the Yellow video connection and converts that into a 1/8th inch headset plug. Did I mention my skills? So that should be arriving in the mail in a day or two, and we can finally test the Saturn to make sure it runs. Not thrilled about going the long way around to get access to just a few games, but…well, I actually don’t have an excuse. It’s probably some aspect of OCD.

I opted not to pursue an HD cable converter for the Saturn because, despite impressive close-up screen captures showing sharper edges and more vibrant colors, I have never been overly impressed with the actual improvement during gaming situations. On OLDER systems, I want to clarify, analogue-only 240i systems from the 16-bit and older generations. The color vibrancy can be nice at times, but the increased edge definition is actually distracting to me. It’s kind of like…have any of you watched something in HD that hasn’t been remastered from the source, and it doesn’t look nearly as good as it did when you saw it on TV or watched on VHS? But if you get a VHS, and you capture it to your hard drive, and then open it in a video editor, what you see is just a pixelated mess that only looks good while the video is moving, and only if viewed from a distance? Older video game systems were made to work in that environment, and the graphics were actually programmed to use blurring and dithering to create the impression of more detail and quality than were actually present, or at least capable of being presented, in the source.

I do want to point out there is a caveat to this, which I may pursue: the Saturn had s-video out capability in addition to the standard RCA AV connection. S-video can be a moderate improvement, but something you can do with s-video is adapt it to SCART. There are good SCART-compatible monitors if you want to go that route, but you can also convert SCART to VGA, and there are even more VGA-capable TVs…including many HDTV’s. And finally, a VGA signal converted to HDMI is much better than an RGB signal carried over RCA cables. This is how I had my Dreamcast connected. Dreamcasts had an official VGA connector cable, and the video over this connection, even going to a fairly cheap HDMI adapter, put the video quality on par with a GameCube in Progressive mode! There are a few different manufacturers of Sega SCART cables, but I haven’t tried one yet so I’m not going to endorse one with a link.

So now we have a laptop doing 8- and 16- bit emulation, a Wii playing GameCube and, presumably, Wii games, and a Sega Saturn playing Sega Saturn games. And that other system that we will get to shortly.

It was about this time that I started drawing some lines between what I wanted to play and what system was needed to play it. I’m going to be doing a bit of completionism gaming (e.g. playing every Final Fantasy game, every Dragon Quest game, etc.) and that means considering which systems to play which version of which games. I could probably do an entire article about that (note: do an entire article on figuring out which games to play on which systems.) It also led me to ask some questions. Like, hey, I have a Wii that plays GameCube games, and the GameCube had an adapter that let it play Gameboy games…can I play Gameboy games on the Wii? Maybe not the actual cartridges, but legitimately sourced backups? Then I wouldn’t need the laptop to do Gameboy/Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance games.

Wait, quick note for those who didn’t know: The Gameboy Color, commonly abbreviated GBC, is 100% backward compatible with the original Gameboy. In fact, many games programmed for the Gameboy were actually programmed in color. You can plug these original Gameboy games into a GBC and they’ll play in color. So really, these two systems are interchangeable. And the Gameboy Advance (GBA) was 100% backward compatible with the Gameboy Color. Which means that if you have a GBA emulator with 100% compatibility, then it is, inherently, 100% compatible with ALL Gameboy Color and Gameboy Games. So that’s why you will commonly see references to Gameboy/Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance, or GB/GBC/GBA, written just like that. From the point-of-view of 2023, they’re the same system.

The Nintendo DS, however, did not feature Gameboy/Gameboy Color backward compatibility, although it did have Gameboy Advance backward compatibility. The Gameboy Advance, essentially, had a Gameboy processor included. Nintendo made the decision to not include that processor on the DS, but they *DID* include a Gameboy Advance processor. I guess you could look at it as, Nintendo’s portable had enough room on the circuit board for two systems, so when they came out with a whole new model, the DS, the Game Boy got bumped off to make room for including the Advance. That’s probably a dumb way of looking at it, but you still get the same result. :)

Here’s the thing: the Wii has a well-developed modding community. These guys have figured out how to install custom firmware on the Wii, then install programs that will let it load and play legitimately sourced backups from the Gameboy, the Gameboy Color, and the Gameboy Advance.

And the Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System.

And the Super Famicom and Super Nintendo.

And the Sega Master System, the Megadrive/Genesis, the MegaCD/SegaCD, and the 32X.

So…why do I even have this laptop if all that works? I could get rid of one my systems!

But before I took this step, a few things occurred to me:

1) That HDMI adapter for the Wii really bothered me. It barely worked, and it overheated if you left it plugged in and then you couldn’t actually start the Wii. That seemed like an accident waiting to happen. Not to mention I couldn’t play any games when I wanted to.

2) All these things I’m reading about “custom firmware” and “homebrew” and “Virtual Wii” keeps showing up as “Wii/WiiU.” WiiU?

3) Wasn’t I working on a WiiU because I thought it might let me play some DS games? Do I still have that system? Did I brick it when I tried this last time?

4) Wait, that Nintendo HDMI cable I found was for the WiiU, wasn’t it? IT HAS HDMI OUT OF THE BOX.

The question I have to answer is: “Is this a legitimate time/space/money saving option, or have I just been distracted by a new system to try to exploit?”

Also, “Wait, the WiiU doesn’t play GameCube discs does it? But this Virtual Wii thing exists to play downloaded GameCube and Gameboy games…so is that some kind of emulation, or a port, or what?”

Also also, “If it does all THAT………
…
…
…
…would it also play Sega Saturn? How about Xbox (we haven’t even TALKED about Xbox yet, but it’s on the list)? Would it play Sony games?

Paige Francis He/him