I remember getting one of these. Looks like absolute garbage to my 2023 brain, but in 1998 I was just happy not to be using my keyboard to play pirated ROMs on ZSNES any more.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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ZSNES in 1998? Did they even have sound working then? IIRC it wasn't until 2000 or so that SNES emulation really became playable.
Yep in 1998 IIRC there were ZSNES and Snes9x. ZSNES was written in assembler and performed very well. I read later that the emulation performed well but wasn’t “accurate”. But at the time I didn’t care. I just cared about playing the games.
Sound was working, but transparency wasn't, so in certain parts of certain games e.g. 600 AD in Chrono Trigger where there was a fog effect, it would be opaque, and you'd have to go into the emulator menu and switch that layer off to see what you were doing.
But hey, it ran at playable speeds on a Pentium 1 / 100Mhz so it wasn't all bad.
Yeah, I remember seeing those weird "skirts" that the cave entrances had in FF6 since they were meant to use transparency to show a glow effect. I guess sound might have mostly been working by then, but it still had problems (like, again in FF6, the wind effect at the beginning of the game being done as a weird high-pitched tone instead.)
Yeah, the SNES sound chip is notoriously difficult to emulate and even now it's not perfect, especially with things like wind sounds. The water rushing sound in Zora's Waterfall in Link to the Past sounds really harsh and distorted on emulation compared to original hardware.
The Gravis Gamepad was the gamepad at the time. It wasn’t a great gamepad, but it was what we had.
The screw on joystick with the colorful face buttons is so iconic
Yeah IIRC Gravis continued on to have the best game pads fort the PC as well. It was too bad when they stopped making them. Not sure if the company went out of business or what.
Why did they send you a save icon?
/joke
I remember playing the heck outta the Jazz Jackrabbit shareware on one of these bad boys back in the day.
That's awesome! Oh I miss the good old days of NHL Hockey on PC
Wow, a floppy disk! It's just like that save icon, hahahaha
The thought that people only know the floppy disk from the save icons makes me feel so old...
We are at a point now where there may be people who are familiar with a floppy disc, but have never seen a CD/DVD. Which is friggin' wild.
Nah, I'm just taking the piss. I even played games on the really old, really FLOPPY 5.5" disks. Wheel of fortune... good times, good times.
So you missed out on the era of 8" floppy disks?
came with a couple of submarine steering wheels as well!
NHL '95 was the shit!
Oh man I had that gamepad! Totally forgot about it (and the Gravis brand... what happened to them?)
I remember playing so much Raptor: Call of the Shadows with it.
Man that's an awesome 2-pack, I didn't even know it existed. Would have killed for this back in the day.
Well...that brought back some memories!
Now all you need to use it is a 90's sound card with a built-in game port.
I got just the thing! Can’t wait to use it on my Pentium 1 system with sound blaster and Dos / Win 3.1
How do they hook up? My Gravis doesn’t have a passthough IIRC, so I think you can only hook up,one.
It came with a Y cable so I can hook them both up. I wonder if it will also work in more modern games like FIFA 2000.
Neat! TIL that can work.
It came with a Y cable so I can hook them both up. I wonder if it will also work in more modern games like FIFA 2000.
It came with a Y cable so I can hook them both up. I wonder if it will also work in more modern games like FIFA 2000.
The joystick attachment seemed to snap so easily.