Is playing on the original hardware worth the trouble?

I went through a lot of trouble to be able to play Ogre Battle 64 on the original hardware with today’s high resolution, digital monitors. Was it worth it?

Most older consoles were designed around the old cathode ray tube televisions — one to three electron beams use electromagnets to shine on variously colored phosphors. The whole thing was high voltage and prone to interference from anything else going on electrically in the area.

Displays still only shine one pixel at a time, but they do it thousands of times faster than in the past, and there’s no curving around the edges because of the way electron beams had to be focused. It’s perfectly flat, and flat-out superior.

So getting the old raster scan stuff working with today’s monitors is always going to be imperfect. I was on a mission for this particular game, though — Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber. I got my original Nintendo 64 out from the box where it’s been living for the past twenty five years or so, cleaned it up, confirmed it still turned on.

Next up was a HDMI converter box that would take the composite video outputs from the N64 and turn them into HDMI. This was a muddy mess. I didn’t have the original N64 S-Video cord, so I got one of those and the picture improved slightly. I found a near perfect, complete in box copy of the game on eBay and lost the auction for that, and went for a lower quality cartridge and manual set with a buy it now price. I chatted with the seller about it for a bit to be sure it was going to work.

It came up, but I had to fiddle with my monitor a bit to keep it from stretching it so much. The picture above is the best I was able to get it.

Above are dialog screens, one taken from the original hardware, and the other from the emulator.

On the original hardware, the screen is squished vertically and the colors are way off. This is partially because the iPhone I used to take the picture is desperately trying to decide how to process this light as well as the rest of the light in the room and partially because the color is just that bad and splotchy.

The emulator does a pretty good job. The text box has a weird dashed line on the bottom and a thick solid line near the left edge which is not present in the original hardware rendering, but otherwise does a fairly decent job with the N64’s notoriously low resolution graphics.

To take the N64 picture, I had to try to get the screen perfectly straight in the picture, with the camera’s light sensor detecting a part of the screen that would give the best reproduction. For the emulator, I hit the F12 key (as this was run by the RetroArch front end on Steam).

I occasionally like to blog about the games I play, and sometimes I stream to Twitch so that I can go back later and grab some juicy bits without always having to have a finger hovering over the PRINT SCREEN button.

To do that on the N64, I’d have to get another piece of hardware that would sit in between the HDMI signal coming out of the converter and the HDMI port on the monitor and transfer the signal through a USB 3.0 cable to a computer running the OBS streaming package.

There’s a BUNCH of cards out there that do this — some are actual cards that fit inside the case, some just boxes. Given the physical layout of my computers, doing it with an internal card would probably mean HDMI and USB cables going further than is wise when signal quality is a concern, so it would be a box. Pro level boxes are a couple hundred. Cheap boxes are a third of that. A quality common to all of them is poorly written marketing copy clearly translated with Google Translate from the original Chinese, and almost always with the review comments on Amazon referring to a different product, as resellers often swap the product on the pages with a new product so that the new product starts out with all the reviews and ratings of the often 100% entirely different product.

The whole thing is super shady as well as expensive, but it would be worth it if, and only if, I planned to make streaming from original hardware something I would do on a regular basis.

Playing via RetroArch has other advantages. I can make instant save points and instantly load, allowing me to be able to see all the results on any decision. I can also make and apply cheats, as RetroArch has a very extensive cheating system. (I used that capability to give myself infinite money in Darkstone). I didn’t care about Darkstone, though, and I do care very much about the Ogre Battle series, so I would want the most authentic experience possible for that — hence why I went through so much trouble to get this working on the hardware.

Having spent to much money, I will be playing this game on the original hardware, and we’ll all have to suffer through the poorly photographed shots of the screen, whatever happens to be on my desk, stuff on my wall, and the backyard.

If I decide to play Panzer Dragoon Saga on the original Saturn hardware, though — I’ll have to think about if I want to go through this again.