I dunno... personally, the only reason I bought it is for programming on. I wouldn't have bothered for just the games / sound / console-feel.
Being able to have almost the entire library for your original console rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on individual cartridges seems like a pretty good trade off to me.
I dunno... personally, the only reason I bought it is for programming on. I wouldn't have bothered for just the games / sound / console-feel.
To each his own I guess. :p I really wanted to play my NES music on original hardware, that was my motivation to get the Power Pak in the first place.
And if I ever get bored with it or realise it wasn't worth it, I'm sure there's someone around who be interested in purchasing the whole modded NES + PowerPak kit..! So it's (probably) not like I wasted my money.
danooct1 wrote:
Being able to have almost the entire library for your original console rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on individual cartridges seems like a pretty good trade off to me.
Yeah, but there's always PC emulators for that.. Or even Wii emulators if you're desperate to play NES games on your TV and willing to hack yours. :p
Yeah, my computer has HDMI out that I can hook to my TV, and I've got some nice USB gamepads. I wasn't exactly desperate to play them on a real NES. (The picture looks nicer than what my NES puts out, too. :P)
But yeah, If you've gotta have that console feel, then it's a perfectly good solution for a large library of games.
Myself, I get nostalgic for games, not so much the actual console. I feel the similarly way about e-books; I care about the story, not the binding.
Yeah, my computer has HDMI out that I can hook to my TV, and I've got some nice USB gamepads. I wasn't exactly desperate to play them on a real NES. (The picture looks nicer than what my NES puts out, too. :P)
But yeah, If you've gotta have that console feel, then it's a perfectly good solution for a large library of games.
Myself, I get nostalgic for games, not so much the actual console. I feel the similarly way about e-books; I care about the story, not the binding.
To each his own. I love playing games on the original hardware above emulation, so the Powerpak is a perfect fit.
I totally agree with that; nothing beats the original system in terms of its quirks & qualities (plus the fact that I don't have to go down to some flea market & spend a crap-ton of money to get all the games ever released, plus the ability to play NSFs & homebrew ROMs).
This said, I'm still glad emulation's around; teach the youngsters how things were done back in the good-ol' days, when the best graphics were 8-bit graphics & engineers were really pushing the limits of current technology.
As for HDMI, well... My crappy laptop still has an S-Video port; the day my LCD screen breaks off from the hinges, I could just get a couple of RetroUSB adapters & use the machine as a alternate console. :P
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After playing some Super Bat Puncher and Alter Ego, I tried running a test ROM I had written on it. I seem to have discovered that FamiTracker's driver does not run properly with MMC3 (seems fine with mapper 0, but if I use MMC3 the song I'm testing eventually crashes), which makes me sad because the graphics stuff in that ROM require the MMC3's CHR bank switching and scanline IRQ. (And of course, it runs fine in emulators. :P)
Hmm, the music code seems to run fine with the VRC6 mapper, which I think can do the things I needed MMC3 for. I guess I'll port the rest of my ROM to VRC6.
The Power Pak itself it $135 USD though, which comes to about $134.57 (nearly on par). Since you never pay provincial taxes on stuff you buy on the internet, and considering the GST is 5%, that's only $6.73, which adds up to $141.30 CAD. Still very far off the $20.70 (excluding the handling fee)...
In any event I'm expecting mine any minute now.
One thing I was wondering is how it handles all the expansion sound. I'm guessing it likely doesn't include a real VRC6, N163 etc., but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the "emulation on real hardware" concept... Does anyone know the inner workings of it?
I have a vague idea of how it's built. There's some RAM/flash chips to store the ROM data, and then there's a FPGA that gets reprogrammed to act like various mappers (it's like a big array of transistors that you can rewire on the fly; kind of the perfect tool for representing the 100+ different supported mapper hardware). Since all the NES/Famicom music hardware was digital that probably makes it easier to emulate with discrete logic devices like these.
If you want the breakdown of cost, here's what I've got:
PowerPak/2GB CF/Reader: $159.00 US
USPS Shipping, no tracking: $12.00
Here's what the customs bag says:
Exchange rate: 1.001300
Value for duty (CAN$): $159.21
GST/HST: $20.70
Handling fee: $8.50
So, taxes might be different for you. I guess Quebec didn't do the whole HST thing?
It's finally here! And I ended up paying more tax on it than you did, just because I live slightly more to the east. Turns out I was wrong and you to pay provincial taxes on shit you buy on the internet, and Quebec is notorious for taxing the hell out of their citizens. So yeah, the total taxes/duty went up to $32.24.
But it's here now, and I just finished throwing all my ROMs and NSFs onto it so I'll go and play with my brand new toy now!
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