Showing posts with label Snes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Snes. Show all posts

Friday, November 23, 2012

GC9X Dispatch - Do This, Don't Do That

Robo-fairy-parent observes.

This month’s game, Wonder Project J, is often described as a “raising sim.” It’s about a robot boy named Pino whose creator is arrested right before he comes to life. Pino is raised by the robo-fairy/living cursor “Tinker” and an invisible god-like entity, “the player.” The gameplay basically consists of bringing various objects to Pino’s attention and praising or chastising him based on what he does with it. Pino’s first reaction upon seeing a cat, for example, is to punt it. *RIGHT CLICK* That’s baaaaaad, Pino.

As longtime readers/listeners probably suspected, I’m old. I’m old enough to be married and have a two year old son. So, for obvious reasons, this game feels a bit familiar. Especially the substantial portion of it I spend telling a little boy to do something and watching him ignore me in the most extravagant ways possible.

But that is something Pino shares with other things besides two-year-olds. Puppies, for example. Or Siri.

Read more »
Posted by xerxes at 11:17 PM 3 comments
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Thursday, September 13, 2012

Akira - SNES - Jim Gregory


As promised, my interview with Jim Gregory, on Akira for the SNES. Further interview responses expected in the coming months (hopefully). Spread it around! There has never been this level of detail on the unreleased games published before.
Posted by Sketcz at 2:57 AM 2 comments
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Friday, September 2, 2011

The Making of The Lost Vikings


Before Blizzard became Blizzard and made Warcraft games, they were known as Silicon & Synapse, and one of their games was Lost Vikings.

I had been planning an article on The Making of Lost Vikings for Retro Gamer magazine, to coincide with Blizzard’s big anniversary. Unfortunately despite many attempts at faking email addresses in order to get in contact with Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce directly, none worked.

Eventually I resorted to their PR department, who passed me along several times before settling on one contact, who said he’d try to arrange it. In the end they said everyone was too busy and they wouldn’t be able to do it.

So the article is a non-starter. In my research though I discovered that Blizzard’s Insider newsletter did an interview with Mike Morhaime for the 10th anniversary of the game. Which I’m reposting below. Why am I reposting content from another website? Because Blizzard deleted it from their archives, thereby forcing me to rely on the Wayback Machine. Which is shaky at best.

So this post serves two purposes:
1) I am re-archiving historical content which has been deleted (why Blizzard did this, I can only guess).

2) If you know Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham or Frank Pearce personally, and think they’d like to be interviewed, head to Hardcore Gaming 101’s front page and get in touch with us. From what I can tell only Michael is still full-time at Blizzard, so maybe the other gentlemen will be more willing to talk.


Enjoy the interview. All the images were stolen from various other websites, like Mobygames and Wikipedia.


Interview with Mike Morhaime
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Lost Vikings, Blizzard recently announced plans to bring the title to the Game Boy Advance this spring. The Insider spent a few minutes with Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, to talk with him about the game's creation and what it was like to work at Blizzard back in the Viking days.

BI: Can you tell us how the idea for The Lost Vikings evolved?

MM: Everyone in the office was playing Lemmings at the time, and loving it. We especially liked the way they had characters with unique abilities working together to solve interesting puzzles. With that style of gameplay in mind, Vikings started out as a puzzle game that involved a lot of Viking characters onscreen simultaneously. As we got further along in development, we learned that it just wasn't possible to create that many characters with sprites on the Super Nintendo, so we decided to cut the number of Vikings down to five - each with their own unique abilities. We really liked the arcade action feel that directly controlling fewer Vikings gave us; however, we found that five was still too many to achieve exciting gameplay. After a bit more design work, we paired it down to the three Vikings that we have since come to know and love - Erik, Baelog, and Olaf.

BI: How many guys worked on the game? How long did it take to develop?

MM: I believe we created the game with only about twelve people on the team. Development on the project began late in 1991 and we finished the game in about a year. It was a really exciting time for Blizzard, because this was the first game that we developed from the ground up as a company.

BI: What do you remember about that time at Blizzard?

MM: Back then, we were much smaller, so it was easy to have frequent all-company events. A couple cars could take the whole company out for drinks after work. Our projects were a lot smaller back then too, and (believe it or not) we had a reputation for consistently finishing games on time. No one knew who we were or had any idea of what we were working on back then, but we always felt like we were on the verge of something big. When the magazine reviews started appearing for The Lost Vikings, it was a great thrill for all of us!

BI: The original Lost Vikings featured both the Blizzard and Interplay logos. What was the relationship with Interplay?

MM: Several of our earlier games were published by Interplay, including The Lost Vikings. Interplay provided funding for the project, handled sales, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. They also provided assistance to our development staff in areas where we didn't have sufficient resources at the time. They contributed audio, quality assurance, and they even provided some character animations for us to use as well. They had great comments and suggestions during development, and we learned a ton by working with them. As is normal for a development relationship like this, Interplay retained all the rights to the intellectual property for the game.

When the GBA came out, we felt that it would be the perfect platform for The Lost Vikings, Rock 'n Roll Racing, and Blackthorne. It's always been kind of a dream of ours to eventually get the rights back to our earlier games. We checked with Interplay, and sure enough, they were willing to sell us back the rights. For me, that's a perfect ending to the story, and coincidentally just in time for the The Lost Vikings' 10-year anniversary!

BI: Is there anything you learned in developing The Lost Vikings that has found its way into Blizzard games ever since?

MM: I think we learned some important design lessons that have become sort of part of the Blizzard culture now. Everyone at the company played The Lost Vikings over and over to help test and polish it. We saw what a huge impact that such attention to detail had on the game. We also learned that the people who program and design a game aren't the best judges of how difficult it is to play; they know the game too well. We had to constantly bring new people in and watch them play, especially with the early levels, to make sure they weren't too hard. Working on Vikings helped us remember the big picture: that a game, first and foremost, should be fun to play…that it should feel good and look good. The Lost Vikings was also our first attempt at adding a bit of humor to a game. We wanted each Viking to have some charm, so we came up with funny animations and interesting dialogue to give each character his own unique personality. By the time Warcraft II came along, we had refined the concept a little more, but Blizzard's first attempts at humor began with The Lost Vikings.


Posted by Sketcz at 4:28 AM 15 comments
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Friday, May 21, 2010

Scans of old game magazines

Games magazines, with only a few exceptions, do not sell for much on eBay. Often postage is more than the final item value. So during a recent clear-out, I decided to scan (photograph) articles of interest in a bunch of mags which I was going to throw out. Some of these are quite interesting, so here they are for your reading pleasure.
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In truth, a lot of the magazines which I photographed I decided to keep, and those which I decided to throw out didn’t have anything work photographing. Launch issues are notoriously awful. All those initial Dreamcast and N64 magazines might still be fun to read, but they all only covered Sonic and Mario, Toy Commander and Star Wars. Only later issues started featuring the really interesting or obscure games. PS2 launch magazines are the worst, seeing as the PS2 had one of the worst launch line-ups ever. PS2M had to resort to covering imported copies of Shogi (two reviews in one issue), plus those perverted cameraman games where you photograph women in bikinis. My brother gave me his collection of Official Nintendo magazines which, being official, are also absolutely worthless.

It also occurs to me, there was no single-format PS1 magazine that catered to the "Japan crowd", or was fun and serious, in the same way Sega Saturn Magazine, Super Play, or N64 Mag were. Most PS1 mags in the UK positioned themselves as halfway lads mags, with photos of scantily clad women, laddish talk, and photos of clubbing and alcohol, with coverage of shmups and Japanese games being very limited, and often criticised. PlayStation Power was sort-of decent, sometimes, with features on disc-swapping and Japan, but it still had a rather loathsome attitude a lot of the time. The only choice for keen PS1 importers it would seem, was Dave Halverson's GameFAN or EGM.

But a lot of old magazines are still interesting. Old issues of Arcade had some amazing features in them, including one where they gave their staff between £1 and £1000, and asked them to buy as much gaming stuff with them as they could. All interesting (one guy nabbed a Saturn for £50 with a second-hand copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga before it shot up in price – he promptly dropped the Saturn on the way to the office, breaking it). Other mags have coverage of unreleased games, or forgotten features with behind the scenes info. All the scans take up about 10mb, and I’ve put them on Megaupload for you. The scans are as small as I could make them while keeping the text legible.

Featured in the ZIP file is the following:

Akira scans – a cover of Game Zone magazine which I was never able to buy claimed to have screenshots of the Game Boy version of Akira. While a copy of Super Gamer, which I did own, had a screenshot of the SNES game.

EGM does 32-bit importing – a detailed feature for importing during the PS1/Saturn era.

Game Zone Japan – a feature on Japan circa 1993, from Game Zone magazine, complete with casual racism.

N64 magazine Japan – a beautiful article from N64 magazine, with a lot of amazing info on the 64DD, plus how to sneak into a Japanese press convention.

PlayStation Power Japan – feature by PlayStation Power, also on Japan. The text isn’t great, but the design is nice.

PS Power MGS – behind the scenes look at Metal Gear Solid.

Rise of the Robots – behind the scenes article from Super Gamer, on Rise of the Robots. Fascinating, if only because of how much they praise it. Sean Hoden looks like a frightened rabbit in this photo.

GameFAN – random scans from GameFAN. Including of Snatcher and Policenauts. These two features are to me, how I would want every single article in a magazine designed. I know people will complain it looks cluttered. But this is, to me, the pinnacle of magazine design. This is why I so badly wanted to play Policenauts. They made an average adventure game look like the greatest game on earth. Just looks at these pages, truly they are a thing of beauty. I want to frame them and put them on my wall. Also included is a 4 page preview of Blue Seed, a Saturn RPG no one remembers.

PS1 expo, 1997 – some interesting info, including photos of the From Software booth.

Glitches in games – article on games testing in the UK, including a history of bugs.

MISC – an interview with David Sheff, obscure Dreamcast games, EGm reviews, Satalaview system, and lots of other random gumph.

Montreaux the clever sheep – between August and February 1994/1995 I stopped buying Super Gamer, and then suddenly in their A-Z of reviews they had a listing for Montreaux the Clever Sheep, on the Game Boy, scoring 99%. Searching the internet reveals nothing. Was this game a hoax, or does it really exist? Apparently by Titus.

Anyway, that’s that, and this lot now has a date with the dustbin. I’d normally donate unwanted items to a charity store, but living in France they won’t accept English magazines. Posting to the UK meanwhile is impossible, since even if I give them away no one wants to cover the postage.

MEGAUPLOAD LINK
Posted by Sketcz at 4:36 AM 2 comments
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Monday, March 22, 2010

Videogames of Egypt



Having returned from my two week sojourn in Egypt, I recount my visit to the local equivalent of the Akihabara, with my driver and guide Mohamed (pictured)

Of the international videogame scenes which are unique, each can be divided into one of two categories – and by unique I mean distinct from the industry leaders of Japan, America and England/Europe (and I realise there are unique elements in every European country). The first category is regions which domestically produce their own content: France with its seldom-exported games based on local bandes dessinées; China and its frankly astounding PC scene, comprising numerous amazing RPGs found nowhere else, and which have been slow to be fan-translated; South Korea’s enormous scene featuring locally-exclusive hardware, games, magazines, and much more which, despite currently being investigated by HG101’s Derboo for the most epic article of all time, has been isolated from and ignored by the west.



The second category would be countries which, due to economic or political reasons, piggyback off another country’s scene, most commonly China, Taiwan and Hong Kong’s pirate scenes, to create their own distinct melange. Egypt, like most of Africa, falls into the second category, with most of its pre-PS1 hardware and software being Chinese bootlegs, and anything more recent appearing to be semi-official imports. There were an inordinate amount of boxed PS2s available, which I can only assume are part of the official quota exported to Arabic countries.

Several years ago, when I wrote the monthly Global Gaming column in Retro Gamer, I often thought I’d like to compile a book detailing the videogame scenes in all world’s countries, since as a follower of videogames, it interested me to see the arcades that children in Africa or South America frequented, or the game centres from North Korea. I interviewed a lot more people than the countries I eventually covered, and one of the biggest problems, besides whining readers complaining that I didn’t accurately cover enough in 2 pages, was that a lot of these scenes were based around Famicom piracy. Since English was the second language of many of those I spoke with, it wasn’t easy to turn their matter-of-fact descriptions into floral prose which conveyed the exotic beauty of the indigenous cultures which were a backdrop to the games. It’s this blending with local culture which makes it so interesting, and without it I was often left with emails which read too similarly.

Two of the best descriptions I had included one from Sergei Servianov, who described how his love of Soviet antiquity and videogames came together when visiting his grandmother and walking through the Russian woods to a local arcade; the other was from Amir Asghari, originally from Iran, who described in equal parts Tehran’s MSX scene and the conflict with neighbouring Iraq, which left stores reduced to rubble and forced his dad to burn the manual to his copy of Metal Gear, out of fear that the militaristic images within could land them in trouble.

Mostly though, by being unable to see things for myself, Global Gaming was painfully frustrating to research. So when I visited Egypt in March 2010, I was eager to see its gaming scene personally.

The highlight of my trip was not the pyramids or Sphinx which, thanks to the excess of loud tourists, had a gaudy and unappealing atmosphere. Rather it was the 3 hour night-time tour by car of downtown Cairo and a visit to the Ataba and El Mosky markets and their electronics stalls. There’s also Khan El Khalily market, but that doesn’t have any videogames – it also caters heavily to tourists, and every nationality is anticipated. The most amusing incident was seeing Arabic hawkers shouting out “Nihao!” and, in broken Chinese, try to entice anyone of East Asian origin to their stall.

Even without the videogame element it was incredible to see how people lived and worked in this heavily populated, heavily polluted city. Thousands of cars thronging through night-time streets which lacked any form of road markings, adhering to invisible lines with a mutual understanding of which side has which direction. Cars and trucks miss each other by a hair’s breadth or less while a swarm of vespas zoom past at speed.

Countless carhorns blare and fight against the noise of misfiring engines which pour black soot on to the street. If I didn’t know better I’d believe the blaring horns somehow offered divine protection to their drivers. In the sky above the Imams call out the evening’s prayers from the minarets of Cairo’s mosques, chanting Allah Ahkbar (God is Great), and other Islamic prayers. Inside the safe bubble of the car my driver’s radio plays middle-eastern pop-music and there’s a taste of dirty gasoline in my lungs from the open window. Lighting a cigarette we drive on and are smothered by the smell from Arabic spice merchants, while passing by us is a man on a bicycle, one hand on the handlebars, the other on a basket sitting atop his head, longer and wider than the bicycle and stacked high with freshly baked bread. No amount of words or pictures can fully describe the intensity of downtown Cairo at night.

(This bread bicycle photo was taken on a second trip to Cairo, during the day)

My driver Mohamed, who was also my guide, was fortunate enough to find parking – for a fee several runners will squeeze cars into any available space, with vehicles often packed 3 deep. You leave your handbrakes off, so if someone parked at the rear wants to leave the runners will roll your car by hand to make space. When you return you might find that during the evening your car has moved several feet. Although appearing chaotic, it’s a very efficient system for maximising space in such a crowded city, and the runners also make sure your vehicle is kept safe.
We walked down an alley lined with trinket stores, then crossed a major intersection and reached, what I was told, were the Ataba and El Moscky market areas. Leather bags, mobile phones, sunglasses and pretty much anything you want, is probably available somewhere here.

Trying to describe things is almost impossible, since the scene is one of visually intense, ordered chaos, and I only spent maybe 30 minutes exploring. The outer front of videogame stalls was probably less than 50 meters to walk from one end around the street corner to its other end, whereupon you reach PC territory. These are open air though, and beyond them, deeper within the urban maze, are further stores positioned around concrete columns. As you go deeper it becomes less obvious whether you are under cover of a roof or not, and some passages within this labyrinthine mass are only big enough for people to pass through single-file.

Along with hundreds of PlayStation controllers, many of which appeared counterfeit, there were several models of Famicom clone. Although manufactured in China, there were some featuring Arabic writing, and some systems even came with Arabic keyboards. One store owner referred to them as being “Atari Family” games. The prices for Famicom clones ranged from 40-60 Egyptian Pounds (EP), which at $1 to EP5, is like $8-12 converted. Famicom cartridges were exclusively multicarts, from 4-in-1 carts up to several-hundred-in-one (more on these later), and they cost between EP5 and EP10 ($1-2). I also found what appeared to be official SNES units priced at EP190 ($38), plenty of Mega Drive 2 systems at EP75 ($15), and even more PS2 units at EP850 ($170), though I suspect the guy was hiking the price because a foreigner was asking. Everything in Egypt has two prices: one for foreigners, and one for the locals. The PS3 (models 40GB and 80GB) ranged in price from EP1600 ($320) up to EP2500 ($500) depending on store and model.



It’s interesting to note that the successful systems are those that were easy to pirate for. Succeeding the Famicom are bootleg Mega Drives and enormous stacks of 4-in-1 MD cartridges costing EP10 ($5) each. While I saw the SNES units, plus some controllers and a few dirty cartridges with damaged labels, this was only at one store and miniscule compared to the bootleg MD stuff all over the place. Following this was the PS1, then PS2, and an enormous amount of copied CDs/DVDs. A bootleg copy of God Hand on PS2 to a tourist was EP25 ($5). Some stores also stocked legitimate Wii and PS3 merchandise, though curiously I didn’t see anything at all for the Xbox 360, which I know you can pirate for quite easily. I have no idea if the Saturn was ever popular or even sold in the area. There were also plenty of boxed GBA games, presumably pirates, and also PSP systems. I didn’t spot the DS anywhere, but I wasn’t really looking.



Through meandering passages I ascended stairs to places they said no tourist ever visited. The area was a complicated maze permeated by the smell of dust and burning incense, illuminated by artificial light with scant windows onto the outside world. It reminded me of a story my father told me, about when he was stationed in China, near the city of Nanchang. He explained how, upon my request for him to buy a selection of bootleg games in China, he had asked his assigned interpreter Mr Gwu to take him to a place which sold them. Gwu, having never been to such a place, asked around and then took my father to what appeared to be the entrance to a subway station. Down below was, literally, an underground black market filled with stalls selling all manner of games and electronic junk. Gwu explained that several merchants were surprised to see my father, since in 20 years of being there they’d never seen a westerner visit the place – Gwu also became somewhat agitated, asking if they could leave because he feared they could be killed and no one would find out about it (honest to God, this is how my father retells the story, whether the exaggeration is his, or Gwu’s, I’m not sure). My father didn’t end up buying me anything, because he said all the games were in Chinese and, not being able to find the names of anything on my list, assumed I wouldn’t want anything (which was absolutely the wrong thing to think). But he did bump into an old Chinese guy, in his fifties or sixties, who asked my dad if he spoke Russian – which he did, having learned it at school when Eastern Europe was still under communism. The two sat drinking Chinese rice wine, with Gwu abstaining, and the old man claimed in broken Russian that he’d fought alongside the Russian military, against the capitalist west many years ago, all the while toasting my father and calling him comrade – my father doesn’t recall if he mentioned the name of the war, but I’d guess it was the Korean, since North Korea was pushed back into China and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, was then assisted by the Chinese army to reclaim the northern part of the peninsula (where the Russian military comes in I’ve no idea, since I wasn’t aware they took part in the conflict outside of air support near the border). My dad didn’t have a camera, so I’ve no photos, and when I press him for further details he grows annoyed that I’d want to document such a story, but that’s how it was told to me. The photo below is not of this area – it was posted on a forum, possibly NTSC-uk or SelectButton, by someone else in China. But it’s fascinating nonetheless to consider the rich, undocumented culture of Chinese videogames!

I don’t know if anyone else feels the same, but with the way America and England forever seem to be in conflict with various countries of the world, I’m embarrassed to speak English in a foreign country. As such I always described myself as coming from France, since although the French have their own rocky history with Algeria and Vietnam, my thinking is it would instil less animosity than if they thought I was British. They say videogames and politics never intermingle, but walking those gaming stalls I felt the urgent and embarrassed need to pass myself off as another nationality.




Due to the differences in spending power of the population (according to an Aljazeera news story, over 40% live below the poverty line in Egypt), there is still a demand for cheaper, older games. While we in G8 countries debate whether games are art and other faux-intellectual topics regarding our hobby, it’s fascinating to see the distillation of what’s popular, and then its cheap perpetuation through piracy. Right now, in Cairo, you can buy a Famicom cartridge containing all 4 of the Ninja Turtles games which appeared on the system (1, 2, 3 and Tournament Fighters), and this sits alongside classic Mega Drive games and shrinkwrapped PS2 titles. In America, England and France, you need to visit very specialised stores to see such diversity, and the prices would likely be much higher. Although I can’t claim to understand the workings behind the situation, I find the cyclical boom/bust nature, and limited choice, of videogame stores in G8 countries rather disheartening. You either have to visit eBay, thrift and junk stores, or a specialist to find unusual things.

While there I bought two MD cartridges, two Famicom multicarts and a cheap Famicom clone. One MD cart featured Tiny Toons, Tazmania, Little Mermaid and Battletoads – I bought it because, having no experience of the MD Tiny Toons game, I hoped it would be similar to Buster Busts Loose on the SNES. Sadly it’s pretty awful. Battletoads is also nowhere near as good as the SNES version. The second cart had Sonic 3, Shinobi, Aquatic Games and some Olympics thing. I was curious if it was actually Sonic 3, since I doubted they’d include a battery for save functionality, and I wanted to know why they’d included an anime picture for Aquatic Games. Sonic 3 is actually just Sonic 1, and Aquatic Games is the James Pond minigame collection, so all in all, a fairly rubbish cartridge. I really wanted one with Castlevania, but couldn’t see one.

You could try printing this photo off, and using it to explain to a guide where you want to go, should you find yourself in Cairo


The 130-in-1 Famicom multicart is a huge disappointment, since it’s actually just 6 crappy games, repeated ad-nauseam. This is annoying, since I recall a time when multicarts had some effort put into them. I once owned a 42-in-1 cart, and it had just that, 42 entirely separate games, pretty much the entire back-catalogue of classic Arcade-to-Famicom ports, plus a selection of other smaller titles. It was awesome and to this day I regret my father giving it away to charity (I’d been given a SNES, and he took it upon himself to donate my old Famicom system). I had hoped for something similar with this 42-in-1 cart, but sadly not. The 4-in-1 cart includes Batman, Turtles 1, Turtles Tournament Fighters and a Spiderman hack of Ninja Gaiden 3. It’s alright, but I really wish I could have found a cart with Samurai Pizza Cats on it or something. Perhaps with more searching, but I was in a hurry.
As for the Famiclone, I was tempted to get one with an Arabic keyboard, but it was like $4 extra and I was feeling stingy. The unit I bought is functional, running in 50Hz with mono sound through A/V cables, and it’s what you’d expect from a cheap bootleg. It has a stinky plastic casing which probably causes cancer, short leads, and naff control pads. Still, at least they have a d-pad, some controllers on other clone machines have PS1-styled button d-pads which are hideously uncomfortable.

I also bought pirate DVDs of Inglorious Basterds and Terminator 4. IB is one of the worst copies I’ve seen, but Terminator is perfect. Each cost me only EP15 ($3).

This is a fleeting glance of a world in constant flux, and as I type this, I wonder what if any videogames were available in Cairo, 1985. And what about Cairo in 1995? And 2005? How have these things changed over the years? These photos and this blog post tell us little about Egyptian videogame culture – only that it exists and beyond it is a history we will never know. Some might criticise that in a country reputed to have so many historical monuments, I’m focusing on pirate videogames, but games are still an element of the cultural tapestry. I’m reminded of a documentary I saw on some far-off East European country’s film archives – possibly Romania’s. There was a vault housing hundreds of pre-WW2 film reels, forgotten by the outside world, but containing valuable relics pertaining to kings and noblemen.



And much like the above example of my father in China, I fear these miniature eras are being overlooked by all except its locals, and will in time be forgotten.
Posted by Sketcz at 5:41 AM 17 comments
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Modding a SNES



I mod my UK SNES to run Japanese and American games in 60Hz. (Previously this post also spoke about the DSi, but I've edited it out since it's dated quite a bit)


Region modding a SNES

(click the images for higher resolution versions)

Modding a console is a quintessentially British thing to do; Americans have little need to do so, since by default they have things better than Europeans.

Since the beginning your systems have run at 60Hz, which meant full speed and fullscreen gaming, instead of nearly a 20% reduction in game speed and thick borders at the top and bottom of a squashed screen. You also tended to receive a hell of a lot more games than us, with maybe a few small exceptions. Recent years have seen a few more Euro exclusives, but really, unless you speak fluent Japanese, America is still the country to live for great gaming. Oh sweet glorious America, with your better weather, lower taxes and full speed gaming, how I wish I were there.


Because I hate region locking, today I modded a UK SNES. I could just use my American SNES, but this seemed like a fun thing to do. I used Mmmonkey's website, which features a collection of system mods taken from a variety of other websites,. What's great about it is, Mmmonkey redid all the photos, made the guides very easy to follow with a clean layout, and brought all of them together under one site.

I recommend everyone visit it and mod their systems.


Modding a SNES is quite tricky. It required the lifting of 3 pins, use of a 2.2K resistor, and a lot of patience. But now my system can be flicked between 60 and 50Hz, plus country regions. Of course some games like Mario RPG still won't work, but it's a nifty system to have, especially since I can now run cheaper domestic games in 60Hz!



I also had to widen the cartridge slot to accept US cartridges, which included taking my dad's power drill and removing the internal side tabs as shown in the photos.

In all, about 2 hours worth of work for the whole system, but damn, if it isn't one sexy bit of region free kit. The same aesthetic design as the Japanese Super Famicom, but able to play US cartridges, and running off a domestic power supply. Plus it runs nearly everything!


Very nice!
Posted by Sketcz at 12:37 PM 12 comments
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