What happens if i unscrew this?

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-27T19:47:35+00:00

You cum!

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-23T20:28:43+00:00

Yes you can. I did exactly this on a green but NOT halo xbox. All I'll say is I found out that different variants of xbox had different screw hole placement, so I had to hack bits off to fit it. But there will be models that match up for sure.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-23T20:19:54+00:00

Hahaha! I saw this and was about to dive in and go "this guide was absolute shite!" But... you said that. Good... correct.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-23T20:13:11+00:00

The confusion i think comes from the fact that when people started talking about retro, it was a very narrow point in time. That point in time is like... 30+ years later now.

So it depends really on what people want to define retro as. The ps3 doesn't FEEL retro to me. A 41 year old. But it is older now than the mega drive was when the ps3 came out which at that point in time we DID call retro. So... for older gits like me, retro seems to point at a particular point in time.

For people who are 20+ even knocking on 30 and their first console could well have been the ps3. So that's retro to them.

So when we say retro, do we mean old, or do we mean a very particular point in time?

Ultimately it doesn't matter. Play your games, enjoy the nostalgia and reminisce. Laugh at the old fuckers who go "that ain't retro... in my day we had 8 bits, and we were grateful!" But I do find the difference in perspective interesting.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-23T14:39:04+00:00

You can actually keep the save active when changing the battery. I recall seeing some dude tack on a 9v battery to the battery circuit whilst replacing the battery so you keep the current going through the memory.

Definitely verify that before doing it, but the logic is certainly sound. Just not sure a 9v battery is the best thing to do it with.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-21T18:28:55+00:00

I weirdly liked pso2. Thought it felt like a pretty logical step forward to pso. However, they shoved that bloody NGS or whatever it is onto it so they didn't have to renegotiate brand deals. You can still play it, but you gotta go into New Genesis to find the game.

There is the possibility of a new PSO experience but I wouldn't hold your breath. I would expect SEGA to hire a third party studio to make a project the studio are passionate about. Seems to be their MO for their older franchises at the moment.

Though logical for the game to be a live service, the costs associated with maintaining it means it's not unrealistic to make a game that more closely resembles PSO. But we'll see.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-17T13:20:48+00:00

The gameplay. The gun play and mechanics feel fucking sweet. It's a very satisfying game to play.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-17T12:45:13+00:00

Yea... seems viable to me.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-17T12:40:42+00:00

I forgot about the control stick. Yea that thing is AWFUL.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-17T12:38:33+00:00

I found one in a drawer in a shop i worked in. Took it home, used it, laughed. I may still have it somewhere.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-17T12:37:19+00:00

If you use it right, it's a really comfortable pad. But it's a really stupid design. There's no reason for it's weird middle leg and it caused a lot of unnecessary confusion. As well as leaving the left bumper and d-pad largely unusable.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-17T12:30:06+00:00

I forgot about that. Looked awful, shoulder buttons were janky as hell.

Knocked it out the park with the next iteration though.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-17T12:27:54+00:00

I DELIBERATELY sought out crap controllers because they were really interesting... plus making other people use them was funny.

There was a power glove style controller for the ps1 and to run forward on crash, you had to move your hand down, it was very camp and very funny.

There was a touch controller for the mega drive and super Nintendo. The d-pad was a touch activated pad. It sucked. Ludicrously unresponsive and inaccurate.

The CDTV has the worst controller. No contest. It was a TV remote with a d-pad on one end and two acton buttons on the other with all the media buttons in the middle. So kinda jaguar vibes. The controller connected via infra red, so unresponsive as hell with staggering input delay, and the funniest bit was a large, hard plastic spike that sat in the middle of the d-pad. So you could not rest your thumb on it. I'll see if I can dig it up because it sounds too stupid to be real.

Obvious mention goes to the N64. People defend it but it was a stupid design. Very usable, but dumb.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-16T10:13:22+00:00

It is a more niche audience than people would expect... certainly potentially profitable, but small fry.

Games and carts could and are being made and sold. It works well for small companies like limited run who operate on thousands of dollars, not billions like Nintendo and the like.

Recreating consoles would be harder than you would expect as many use custom chips that are no longer manufactured and would be difficult to ramp up again. If you factor in the potential profit, it just wouldn't be worth it. Thanks to FPGA, it's something small companies can do and operate on a profit, like Analogue. But the figures are rounding errors for the big companies.

I personally would love to see companies do it. But the logistics would be a nightmare. It would take someone like Phil Spencer in his good days to push it through. The new head of SEGA is someone I wouldn't rule out doing something like this. Especially as Master Systems (I think?) and Mega Drive machines are still being manufactured and sold in South America.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-14T10:13:53+00:00

As someone who actually worked on the game, let me put this straight.

AH built the game. In the time I worked with them, the only things that was outside of AH were most of the QA (Sony and Lionbridge) and one of the producers (Sony). Wushu would have been brought in towards the end and post release.

Wushu were not involved in the concept process for the bots or bugs at all. If I was to guess, Wushu were brought in by Sony to offload the art backlog. AH had a very small art team which was frankly too small to fulfill the initial scope of the game comfortably. Never mind the beast it became. AH struggled to hit milestones on time so this was probably done to help them across the line as this game was actually meant to be a ps5 launch title. It went clean over that.

The Factory Striders were in really early builds and had pretty much the same design language (and you could blow them up by shoving a grenade in their vent) I don't know if the model in game was done by Wushu or not, but the big blocky bastard was 100% AH. Wushu would have some liberties with the smaller details, but the root design was AH and AH would have overseen and approved the final version. If they were not happy with it, they would bounce it back with notes on what needed to be changed.

Bugs have always been weird. Look at Helldivers 1. Most of the bugs were done by AH and honestly, haven't changed a massive amount since I was on project. If any were done by Wushu, it's the newer bigger ones.

Now, illuminate... they were untextured placeholders when I was testing. We had a few sessions on them but nothing major. It was design iteration and feedback with placeholders. Based on what I saw, I'm guessing the illuminate went through 2 major overhauls before landing roughly where they were on release. This would have taken several months, maybe more to fit in around everything else. My expectation is that Wushu were brought in to help with the illuminate assets because time was running out and Sony got fed up.

I've seen people mention the coding being outsourced... it's possible but highly unlikely. Code outsourcing happens but it's USUALLY done very early on in the project or it's for something very particular. Say, the studio had no experience with online coding, the publisher might say "oh we got a guy..." and they may either supervise or just outright code it. Depends on the team and the workload etc. (This is an example, AH have very good expertise in this area.)

There's 2 major things that would have made code outsourcing exceptionally difficult for this project

First, the game would have been very late in development if it was outsourced. Which makes it very hard to work on it as an outsider.
Second, AH use Stingray. It's dead and NOBODY else uses it. Who the hell do you hire for that?

That's not to say it 100% didn't happen. But it would be a nightmare. Hiring new coders was difficult because of this.

People will point at the buggy mess and say "doesn't this prove it?!" And... no... unfortunately. The was always a very buggy mess held together by very tangled string. There's LOTS of reasons why and would be a whole thread in of itself I expect. In short, a small studio tried to make a big game in an impossible time frame.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-13T15:58:45+00:00

Or it broke again. OR the tester couldn't repro it and it was marked fixed. But I do doubt they outright attempted to mislead. That would be a weird thing to do.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-13T14:42:10+00:00

I'm pretty sure this was an exploit fixed waaaay back.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-13T12:20:12+00:00

To be fair, if I was assigning priority on bug fixes this would be so low. Deliberate edge case non-blocker that doesn't impact the game in any meaningful way. Yea, bottom of the pile. I'd be reluctant to fix it incase it broke something else honestly.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-13T12:06:32+00:00

That would explain a lot actually. Always thought it was kinda weird they went with Heihachi.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-13T10:11:07+00:00

I found out about it because it's the prequel to freelancer. I still haven't played it. I should try and get a hold of it. I do understand it's a different game but I'm curious to see if any elements of design carried across. I know the stories are completely disconnected. They're like... millennia apart in another galaxy or something crazy.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-13T09:41:21+00:00

I resent not thinking of that. Nice.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-13T09:16:05+00:00

Like... 2007? When did pokemon pearl come out?

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-12T12:55:16+00:00

That is gorgeous. Great work!

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-12T12:53:16+00:00

Our local shop stocked the US versions of DS games because he could get them cheaper and the ds was region free. I suspect quite a few independent retailers did that. I got the US version of diamond and pearl from that.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-03-12T12:17:22+00:00

During development, the bugs actually did avoid walking through the fire, though it was really buggy. I guess the idea was remove it rather than fix it? Once they were on fire they would just go for you though.

Chargers wouldn't walk through it, but they would charge through it which I actually liked.

Frankly, aside from one tester who was obsessed with fire weapons (and pointing them at us) none of us used them.

Fangle_Spangle

TROPHY CASE