How Do They Compare?

[bast525]

You know... I remember seeing a lot of these systems around when I was a kid... but never really played on any of them. By the time I really got into games, the NES was already out... so that's what I started with.


But I always see guys on here going on and on about the ST, C64, MSX, and Spectrum ZX emulators... I payed no mind initially as they were not compatible with the BLU+ I got. But now in the last week or so BLU+ compatible versions of these emu's have been released, and I am pretty curious about these systems.


I like older stuff a lot and love playing NES and such on my GP... so was wondering, I know many of these other systems were older or about the same time as the NES. How do they compare to the NES in terms of graphics, sound, types and amount of games available and such?

Do any of these emu's NEED the chatboard to use effectively?

Would you say any of these systems in it's original form was better than the NES?

 

[tekt5]

I prefer C64 over NES but thats probably because I had one and my cousin had an NES and we always fought over which one was better.

As for the chatboard question.. I have a chatboard but have NEVER used it with GPFrodo because there's no need. Just load the disk image and press select and it'll load the game for you..

If you want to check out a good list of games goto this thread that I started:
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=16454&st=

I'ver never tried any of the other older systems though.

 

[Drumaster]

Woow what a consequent number of topics you started in a few days. :blink:

 

[Angel]

I cannot get Frodo to work, but I love Castaway. The graphics and sound are better than the NES, Robocop is almost as good as the arcade version and overclocking to 156mhz it plays really well.

I used FMSX for a little bit but the games i had played were very bad, the graphics and sound rival the Colecovision.

I never heard of the Spectrum

 

[moz]

Woow what a consequent number of topics you started in a few days. :blink:

​

averaging 11 posts a day so far :blink:

 

[carlgeorge]

Check out Old-Computers.com It is a wealth of technical information on most older computers.

Basically the ST is 16-bit and is really a poor man's amiga, C64 is perhaps the best 8-bit computer from a technical and available games point of view, Speccy was crude, but did have some good games (and lots of them) -- as for the MSX, I don't really know I never even seen one so I can't comment.

Before anyone has a go, I had an Atari 800 which is my personal faviourite 8-bit, but credit where credit's due, the speccy and C64 were damn good machines.

edit: typos

 

[PiNa1971]

I can only second above post.

I have got Commodore C-64 in 1989 to my 18th birthday, then bought amiga 1200 and that was it ... but computers are really great machines. Needless to say I was a big C-64 fan boy in that times.

Castaway fills the gap of Amiga Emulator, that is not possible due to dedicated chips used in Amiga, as the most popular 16bits games were available on both platforms. To some extend, Amiga's versions were better I guess.

ZX started it all. And Atari 800XL was also okey machine, but both were beaten by C-64 IMHO

It's just fours years or so, when I bought GBA, Then GBA SP, then GameCube. But 8 and 16 bits computers still have a special place in my heart....

 

[Vanamonde]

Do any of these emu's NEED the chatboard to use effectively?

Arcade games and games that use a limited set of keys should be fine. Text adventures on the Spectrum, C64 and Atari ST would drive you nuts without a chatboard.

Would you say any of these systems in it's original form was better than the NES?

​

Arcade games and games that use a limited set of keys should be fine. Text adventures and flight sims on the Spectrum, C64 and Atari ST would drive you nuts without a chatboard.

Each system has its own merits, why not experiement with them all?

 

[gaterooze]

I am a huge c64 fan, and while I love the NES I find the c64 even more enjoyable. You really should check it out. You don't need the chatboard at all except for text adventures and the like. There's a virtual keyboard that is very easy to use -- but even then you rarely need to (sometimes you'll need to hit a certain key to start a game or set an option).

Atari ST is a good substitute for an Amiga -- more powerful computer than the c64, which some excellent games. It's 16-bit, so on par with Megadrive, but since it's a computer the "action" games (shooters, platformers) aren't usuaully as good, although other types of games are better (strategy, simulation).

ZX/Spectrum has basic graphics with few colors, but some extremely playable games. Don't be turned off immediately, give it some time. A chatboard is used more than on the c64, but again not entirely necessary for many games. Highly recommended though.

MSX is an odd duck. It has many ZX/Spectrum ports which may make you think it's a basic computer, but it also has many awesome NES-like games! Konami in particular was very active on the MSX. It has amazing shooters like the Gradius series, Aleste, Manbow and the like (next to the Saturn it's probably the most loved system for shoot-em-up fans). It has a HUGE software library (possibly the biggest of all computers?). Try grabbing MBox on PC, which is an emulator with built-in screenshots of all the games - this will give you a good idea of what's out there and let you try them out. Then copy 'em over to fMSX, which is a great emulator.

Explore, explore, explore! You owe it to yourself.

There's also the Amstrad, thanks to Pituka and 16 Days. It sits somewhere between the c64 and ZX, and worth checking out. I'm hanging out for a new version of the emu with chatboard and easy DSK loading -- should be awesome.

Almost forgot the Atari 800! Damn the GP32 is good.

 

[bast525]

hmmm thanks for all the replies.


Question... why is it a bad thing to post a lot here? Is being an active forum member discouraged? I'm loving my GP and trying learn as much about it as I can in as short a time as possible... Surely there are members on this board who are even more active than me. 11 posts a day doesn't sound like much at all.


Well... call me shallow but I've always been a sucker for pretty graphics, so it sounds like the ST would be the most interesting to me, and the MSX as I'm a HUGE sh'mup fan as well. It appears that some of the lucasarts games I was so interested in on Scumm are also on the ST... wonder how they run on it? Having lots of issues with Scumm

I am curious enough to try them all, but have to find some games or, at the least, some really informative websites for each one, to see screenshots and listings of what games are out there. Hopefully there are games out there old enough to not be warez.

 

[Jarska333]

Everything not officially released to public is warez. There is no law nor directive officially declaring data older than X years to be abandonware. It's just a term the enthusiasts have given to them to differentiate from something like "GTA SA FULL VERSION CRACKED BY DJIN WEAZEL!!!!111"

Some companies actually stomp down on abandonware sites, fearing, that if people can dl Monkey Island, they might not buy Knights of the old Republic feat Eminnem... And right they are.

 

[bast525]

*shrug* well what bugs me is everywhere I go, every forum, chat room, IRC channel, etc. all seem to draw the line at a different point... it drives me nuts because I never know if asking a simple question in one place might get me links, files, or booted/banned

I need to have a FAQ on my desktop to remind me what I can ask about where

Well, thanks again for all the info guys, been messing around with the Castaway at work all night and I must say, I'm likin it thus far! Not as impressive as DrMD or ScummGP, but still a very well done emulator. Another great reason to have a GP as now this is something that I have never even really played with before (the ST) and so is new and fresh to me. The graphics are great... but man did Atari futz the sound on this thing... Genesis graphics with atari 2600 sound

very cool nonetheless and the keyboard/control interface is not hard to use at all.


So what are THE games to look for for ST? That are specific to the ST, or that is to say, aren't on NES, SMS, GG, Genesis, TG16?

 

[dgnadt]

"Well, thanks again for all the info guys, been messing around with the Castaway at work all night and I must say, I'm likin it thus far! Not as impressive as DrMD or ScummGP, but still a very well done emulator. Another great reason to have a GP as now this is something that I have never even really played with before (the ST) and so is new and fresh to me. The graphics are great... but man did Atari futz the sound on this thing... Genesis graphics with atari 2600 sound "

The ST definately was lacking in the sound department, but Castaway doesn't handle the sound 100% correctly as it does sound better on a real ST or STE, especially digitized sounds.

I personally love Castaway for the GP! My only reall beef is that it's a bit dark on my FLU. I would really like better gamma controll but I know that Skeezix is busy so I just live with it. He has done an outstanding job with Castaway.

I'll have to compile a list of some of the better games that run really well on Castaway for you later. I'm at work right now and just poped on the net for a few to see if there was any cool GP news.

 

[LeeT]

I cannot get Frodo to work, but I love Castaway. The graphics and sound are better than the NES, Robocop is almost as good as the arcade version and overclocking to 156mhz it plays really well.

I used FMSX for a little bit but the games i had played were very bad, the graphics and sound rival the Colecovision.

I never heard of the Spectrum

​

So basically you know very little of 8-bit/16-bit computers, then?
Castaway SHOULD be better than the NES, as it emulates the Atari ST, which was 16-bit (the NES was 8-bit). As for the MSX - Have you tried any of the Konami games? No way does it compare with the Colecovision!

The Spectrum was one of the leading 8-bit computers during the 1980's, mostly in UK and Europe. There are over 10,000 games for it.

 

[Jarska333]

I hear Metal Gear for MSX is quite good.

But I haven't actually found out, whether MSX2 actually is significantly better than MSX...

 

[bast525]

Asides from the Konami games, it does seem that many MSX games were well below NES par graphically/soundwise. Of all of the older computer type game systems we're talking about here, one thing does seem apparent, there is a HUGE difference in the quality of all the games available for said systems. I'm seeing this playing with Castaway as well... many games are graphically on par or even better than typical Genesis games... but some games barely touch the level of the NES. The sound seems universally pretty bad... not sure how much of that is the emulation, but I'm betting it didn't sound that much different on the real hardware.

So far, I must say, regardless of how good some of them look, sadly, I have not found any that are very fun to play. I'm skipping the big name ones that are available for other systems... which seems to leave a LOT of games that I'd never heard of before that have all so far ended up being not-so-great.

So yeah, dgnadt if you want to make some kind of list of the good ST games that'd be great... there are SO many to go thru... what are some good ones that weren't also available for NES, Genesis, etc.?

 

[tekt5]

So yeah, dgnadt if you want to make some kind of list of the good ST games that'd be great... there are SO many to go thru... what are some good ones that weren't also available for NES, Genesis, etc.?

I'd like to know that too.

is there anywhere I can go with out ROM Downloads that just have info and screenshots for atari ST games? Kinda like lemon 64 did for the C64..

didn't really wanna start a new topic for this so I posted it here

 

[LHC]

Don't forget the Amstrad CPC! It's great.

http://gp32.dantoine.org/index_en.php

 

[Tobriand]

You used to be able to go to www.atari.st, but over the last 4-5 months, I've not been able to reach more than a white page there. Could just be my connection though.

In the mean time, try out Magic Pockets for the ST (coz it rocks if you like platformers). Possibly Another World too, which rocks a lot (especially the intro; extremely nice realtime rendering expecially for the era, and it does look splended on the GP32). The other two worthy of mention are Captain Blood (do investigate the shrine first - lots of gameplay tips there) and Sundog (which looks awful, but also seems like if you've got patience it could be one of the most intricate RPGs around that we can play; looks like you might expect Elite or Frontier to if you could get out and drive around the city of every planet you visited).

Also, bear in mind when it comes to the MSX that:
- Anything that scrolls will scroll jerkilly; MSX was very very bad at that kinda thing, especially horizontally.
- MSX games typically, to my mind, look like high res speccy ones; MSX2 games look roughly on a par with NES games, but with bad scrolling. MSX2+ games look like they're 16 bit, but whilst they run, they're slow as hell (try out Princess Maker if you want a game to test it on to see it running slow as hell, since that game is insanely cool, but unplayably slow).