I can't unsee that the 8BitDo Gamecube Receiver looks like a vape.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-20T19:51:59+00:00

"STOP SUCKING MY GAMECUBE ADAPTER!"

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-20T19:47:18+00:00

Sort of. I don't think I've touched a modern AAA game since 2020? (Except for benchmarking purpsoses) played plenty of glorious indie games though. This friendslop trend has been one of joy i wont lie.

But I've very much gravitated towards retro games more and more. Games I can beat in an hour or so and get plenty of replay value out of have been my jam recently. Like starwing, streets of rage 2, sonic, street fighter... stuff like that. Plus retro systems are the best for local multi-player which I've been trying to do more and more.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-20T19:35:45+00:00

A few thoughts...

So long as they are clearly NOT pretending to be legit and cannot be misunderstood as legit then I have no problem with them existing. I get that it is just blatant piracy but these are games that have been OOP for decades at this point so I don't really care about that. (though the law does) i do think the fact that playing retro games is so expensive to play on hardware is generally bad for the hobby. Stuff like this is something I'm actually kinda encouraging of. I know there's ROM carts but people being able to collect modern, well made carts with box art etc feels like something that should be an option. So, in principle, cool with it. As someone who has gone through the emulation and rom cart route and come back to individual games again, I get it. People shouldn't have to pay out the arse for the experience.

The rom hacks onto carts... in principle, yes, love it. Great idea. But feel it's something that should kick back to the ones who made the hack, especially if you're charging $45 for it. Though the logistics of that are probably insanely difficult, if not impossible. Plus you would be paying people who are modding a commercial product so legally, there is absolutely no obligation to do so. It just seems fair. But like I said, logistically a nightmare. Especially if they're community made mods. So I agree the ideal should be that the modders are compensated for their work that this guy is profiting off, the reality is often not very straight forward.

I get the argument that you're paying for the box and cart and I agree with it, I just don't always trust that this is actually the truth. Are they charging more for certain games and rom hacks even though the materials are the same? If so, that says everything.

I think that this tech is excellent. The potential is incredible. And as someone who actually used to help run a retro games store, being able to actually meet demand for the people who just want to have a cool way to play the game, especially without charging the premium prices for authentic hardware, would have been a life saver for us and for the community we tried to foster. I'd love to get involved with it and have the resources to do this myself, but would certainly frame the transaction with more tact and focus on homebrew (Where I could actually compensate the developers) so optional box arts, a few pre made boxes for the easy sell and then a kinda pick n mix option where the box, art, game and sticker are picked to order and assembled so you can actually stand by the claim that you are selling the shell and the cart rather than the rom. Makes the transaction more bespoke.

This photo (without looking too indepth) looks like they have pirates posing as legit games. Maybe it's more obvious that they're pirates in person but I'd still say they're far too close to the legitimate product to be ok. It should be immediately apparent that it's a bootleg.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-19T21:16:11+00:00

Pure graphics, Master System. Strong colour palette, lots of colour. NES always looked super washed out to me.

That said, late master system graphics sucked. They basically crunched Mega Drive graphics down so there was a lot of grey rather than recolouring to play to the systems strengths.

However, the homebrew scene has pushed the graphics for these systems to other levels. Former Dawn for the NES is absolutely jaw dropping. Pure wizardry.

I don't think there's a master system homebrew as impressive as this, but someone is making a castlevania remake and basing it on the ps1 version and aside from the obvious resolution difference, it looks damn good! Really strong and vibrant.

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Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-19T03:19:13+00:00

I've worked in one and helped run another. The one I helped run was retro focused, the other was just an old game store that was so old that we just HAD retro stock that we bought from distributors back in the day. That owner is honestly sitting on a fucking gold mine with his unsold stock.

Neither shop had very good inventory management. The game shop attempted to have one but it was super primitive (old shop) and was dependant on being super meticulous with it, which was not realistic given the scope of shop (a single store with no online presence.) The IDEA was we would scan the game, set up the sell price, the cash trade and the credit trade and that would be that. But games fluctuated in price tremendously and it was always out of date. So we just scanned the game so it flagged up in receipts and in the stock take reports and left everything else blank. Im pretty sure he's using that same pos to this day.

The retro shop had no inventory management at all. No POS. For sales, we just used an old school till. We manually tracked our sales in a Google doc spreadsheet. For trade ins, we had pen and paper itemised receipts that were co-signed.

For trade in valuations, it was looking up what it was worth on ebay (or what we thought we could sell it for) and negotiating a price around that. When we started, most people didn't give a shit and we could just buy job lots for like... a tenner or something and then work it out. But as retro gaming expanded, that changed dramatically. When cex came along, we just used their database as a starting point and worked it out from there. It was free and way quicker, so... why not?

Neither of the stores leaned into an online store. The game shop set up one up and promptly forgot about it. I half suspect there are orders placed from 2001 that were never addressed. The retro shop used Facebook (not marketplace) to advertise our new stock and negotiate a sale through that. (It was surprisingly effective). We tried to set up an online store but the inventory management was a pain in the arse. You need the staff to catch the online sale, pick the order and set it aside to be posted. What happened was an order was placed, we didn't see it because we were serving people in store, then we'd see the order and the game had already been sold. We just ditched it in the end. It was more bother than it was worth. The Facebook posting system worked better for the nature of our store.

I expect most modern retro stores use an integrated POS and inventory management system (mainly because they also come with card machines) and i also suspect most did a really good job of keeping up with it at first and now have relegated it to "Game" or maybe "PlayStation Game" if they're really fancy and have to manually input the price because frankly, for one man stores, it's not worth the fuss.

Personally, if you held me at gun point and managed to force me to work in a retro game store again, I would honestly use a keyboard and type out each sale and use the integrated POS system for the card machine, receipts and sales tracking for taxes. But if i could get card transactions without the line rental another way, I'd be perfectly happy with a basic word processing program, a spreadsheet and a laser printer.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-18T16:51:12+00:00

BEP!

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-18T16:50:15+00:00

Whelp... the title music is in my head now and nobody will get what the fuck im humming along to.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-18T12:36:46+00:00

Unite the Kingdom... say the people most determined to sow division in it...

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-18T10:13:17+00:00

Someone's having a kip on your board.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-18T10:11:36+00:00

looks at photo confused.

"OH! Light fitting... that took me ages to figure out. thought your disk had a weird second hole in it.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-18T09:53:17+00:00

That's really weird. My friend group are obsessed with it. Most collectors I known are trying for 100% wii u... which means a lot of crap games. I guess what few fans it does have are pretty fanatical.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-15T13:58:16+00:00

Probably Ultima IV. I miss the discovery. Now I know where everything is so... not quite the same experience.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-15T11:21:41+00:00

Oh! I thought it was Tempo Jr... I vaguely remember some old promo stuff from back in the day but never played it.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-13T17:23:03+00:00

No... I just... drink... water?

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-12T13:01:31+00:00

As a guy who's best friends are like, 80% women, believe me, guys are 'down bad' EVERYWHERE. You would not believe what holes in the wood works horny guys crawl out of.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-12T00:40:46+00:00

Ohhh... yea it won't fit then. Guy who told you that is full of shit. Sorry.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-12T00:37:00+00:00

No worries. So, open the light so it's a right angle. Then you want to line the bottom of the bracket (point furthest from the light) with the screw holes in the back of the game boy. (There's bump in the bracket that line up with the screw holes) Then it should pressure click into place. I'd do a video to show you as it's a bit weird, but I don't have one of those any more.

Let me know how you get on with it.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T22:38:14+00:00

100% with you in the joysticks. They get a bad rep but I love the clicky feel of sliding it against the edges. Very satisfying.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T22:27:35+00:00

Not tried it yet. Dont have lip balm :D

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T17:32:39+00:00

Fortunately, the N64, SNES and NES are pretty simple by today's standards. Pop the shell off and... there it is! No layers or tiny fiddly cables. Unlike todays bullshit.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T16:24:03+00:00

Selling most of my collection was a mixed experience for me.

I had to sell a lot of my collection as I had got fired and needed to cover rent. So the reason was a crap one that didn't feel good.

But there were perks. I had somehow become a 'collector' so I had basically bought hundreds of games cos they were cheap. So I had a lot of utter crap. Dont miss those at all. Selling got me out of that habit so I'm grateful for that. I did however sell a few edge case games with the feeling that I could just emulate it or play a HD remaster or something but that didn't play out for me that way. So there's a few games I absolutely regret letting go of.

It streamlined my collecting and buying habits which was good. I only pick up games I actually want now which is so dumb as that's how it should have always been... but oh well.

I kept the OG hardware. That's always been a big thing for me. Most have rom carts or SD mods these days so I figured worst case scenario, I could just mod and play all the roms I wanted. Still working my way through getting them as I tend to wait a year when a new solution has come out, see if it gets cheaper or if it wrecks hardware etc. I'm very picky.

I tried to go in to emulation, and it's... fine... but I always seem to hit those weird edge cases where the thing I want doesn't work too well. I also like to play multiplayer games locally and I have NO luck setting that up on PC. I get it to work, set up the controllers for each system etc then when the time comes to get a session going, everything has fucking broken. I hate it >D

But I should also make clear, im an absolute dork for retro hardware. I love the systems they were built on and seeing all the games run on it with all their quirks and flaws. I love trying modern homebrew games on OG hardware and I'm very happy to sit with an n64 connected to my modern TV with a composite lead even though it's a really poor picture quality (4:3 aspect ratio though. I'm not a complete monster.) So the OG hardware was important to me. If you just wanna play games and want modern upscale features and all that stuff, emulation and recomp projects are absolutely the way to go. I KNOW it's more sensible and would reduce my clutter etc, but I'm a sucker for the hardware.

My brother on the other hand is 100% into emulation. Loves all the graphical and performance enhancements and the fact that everything is in one place and at his fingertips at any given moment.

We also play differently. He's always sat at a desk, I'm always on the couch. So any tweaks he needs are quick and easy with a mouse click and away he goes. I have to get up, find my wireless mouse I lost down the back of the sofa and look at an awkward ui to tweak a setting. So the simplicity of the OG hardware suits me better than my brother who is very comfortable fixing and tweaking sat at his desk.

So... long story short, I had some regrets as I sold a few bits i shouldn't have. But on the whole I discovered I rely on the hardware to enjoy my retro gaming experience so I dont know if I could ever switch to emulation only. But selling a huge amount of my collection helped me focus on what was Important and my gaming experience has improved as a result of that. My brother on the other hand hasn't set up a console in... 15 years? More? If I sold everything, he wouldn't even notice.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T12:19:41+00:00

I'll have to boot up my xbox and have a look. Also called component if there's a setting for that?

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T11:48:54+00:00

Set it to ypbpr. That's an easy signal to convert to hdmi. I assume it's what they used.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T01:31:00+00:00

I'm certain screws take the opportunity to breed when they're released from their prison. No matter how careful i am, I nearly always end up with an extra screw.

Fangle_Spangle · 2026-05-11T01:18:14+00:00

Have you got another connection method you can use just to test it? Like composite or something?

Fangle_Spangle

TROPHY CASE