SNES

[Anarchist420]

The thing that made the SNES the best console of all time was Nintendo itself was bringing out some of the best games ever. When the developer of a console is also producing a stellar line-up of games behind the greatest creative mind in video game history (Shigeru Miyamoto), you've got a surefire recipe for success. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Mario Kart and Star Fox, not to mention the IPs they sold out to other succesful developers, most notably Rare with Donkey Kong Country, and then landing an exclusive contract with Square (meaning if you were into RPGs you HAD to have an SNES). If that weren't enough, they managed to get development agreements with virtually every major publisher outside of Sega (for obvious reasons), so you had all the Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Mega Man, etc. hits that people wanted. The biggest thing you couldn't get on SNES was Sonic (Mario was always better anyway) and fatalities (until Mortal Kombat II came out with fatalities intact).

It's too bad Nintendo managed to perpetually shoot itself in the foot with subsequent consoles through a variety of questionable design decisions and a refusal to accept market pressure. The Wii has been an unbridled success, but anyone who says it's anywhere near as good as the SNES is no gamer.

Yes, it sucks that Nintendo will never again make a modern day Super NES.

The Super NES and Sega Saturn are probably my favorite consoles of all time. The only things that sucked about the Sega Saturn were that its Symphony of the Night port was inferior (mainly loading and transparencies) from a tech perspective and that Sonic Xtreme never came out. The biggest problem about the Super NES is that the Genesis usually ran at a higher resolution, and the Super NES only ran at 256x224 usually and that meant that the fine details in art either weren't clear or were missing. The super NES should've ran at 400x300p (internally and output) and also shouldn't have had its audio compressed.

 

[sonambulo]

NES + Dragon Warrior and Excitebike
1942 + 1943 Honorable mention

The Dragon Quest I, II and III remakes for Super Famicom are far superior to the original Famicom versions. Dragon Quest III on Super Famicom is arguably one of the greatest games ever made. The only advantage FC has over SFC in that regard is DQIV.

My fondest memories on SNES are when Square used to be... Square... Not Squaresoft, not Square Enix, not "Im too cool for myself and too sexy for my pantene hair and blue LED earrings" BS, and not pumping out lame shallow riced out ADHD Fast and the Furious equivalent games and slapping the used and abused Final Fantasy logo on it.

Those really were the golden days. As much as I adore the absolute insanity of the Famicom days a lot of those games are an unplayable mess in retrospect. However with the Super Famicom so many concepts were refined and improved. Square was just Square. Enix was just Enix. Nintendo's own internal dev teams were smaller than 20 members. A director's voice could be heard loud and clear in the final product.

Everything is just too big, too 'commercialized' and too far from a creator's original vision these days.

 

[exdeath]

imo you can't pick a best console. we can say NOT a failure, but few consoles are.

i think that the psx or the n64 could equally have solid cases made for them. the genesis too.

let me go with the psx since i actually had one:
- final fantasy
- breath of fire 3
- chrono cross
- tekken 3
- grandia (on the saturn too, but it hit the psx and is an awesome rpg)
- mega man legends (geez can't capcom give us another one!)
- crash bandicoot 3
- crash team racing (for a ripoff of mario kart its VERY well done)
- vagrant story
- silent hill
- resident evil
- winning eleven
- tenchu

the list is pretty long and every one of those games are absolutely top quality and you will enjoy it unless you simply don't like that type of game.

if you asked me to pick between the psx and snes, i honestly wouldn't be able to decide.

It was the SNES that set the standards for those games to begin with.

Also fail for PSX list without Xenogears.

 

[exdeath]

So the hunt begins for a true RGB monitor. Im looking for something along the lines of the Sony PVM line like a PVM-2530. SNES/Genesis look like crap through S video and 1080p upscale on a 10 ft screen.

There is a 40" Sony FD crt XBR800 for sale for $100 locally, but no native 15 khz RGB input

 

[exdeath]

Yes, it sucks that Nintendo will never again make a modern day Super NES.

The Super NES and Sega Saturn are probably my favorite consoles of all time. The only things that sucked about the Sega Saturn were that its Symphony of the Night port was inferior (mainly loading and transparencies) from a tech perspective and that Sonic Xtreme never came out. The biggest problem about the Super NES is that the Genesis usually ran at a higher resolution, and the Super NES only ran at 256x224 usually and that meant that the fine details in art either weren't clear or were missing. The super NES should've ran at 400x300p (internally and output) and also shouldn't have had its audio compressed.

Pretty sure the Genesis used 256x224 more often than it's 320x224 mode, for the same reasons the SNES 512x224 and 512x448 modes are never used. The graphis chip can only do so much work during vblank and hblank, so cranking out more pixels means giving up background layers, reducing them to 16 colors, etc. 256x224 was most popular (modes 3 & 4 IIRC) on SNES because it allowed all 4 hardware parallax layers with the full color palette. 256 for BGs and another 256 for OAM (sprites)

Hblank is the critical time, remember these graphics chips didn't have frame buffers and DACs, they looked up the tile sets and built and clocked out the scan lines one at a time and sent them to the display real time, so going to 320 or 512 width severely limited the amount of layer combines and palette accesses.

Too bad the Genesis had a crappy encoder. That reminds me I also need to get a CXA1645 chip to replace the crappy Samsung KD2195 in my Genesis 2.

 

[RPD]

So the hunt begins for a true RGB monitor. Im looking for something along the lines of the Sony PVM line like a PVM-2530. SNES/Genesis look like crap through S video and 1080p upscale on a 10 ft screen.

There is a 40" Sony FD crt XBR800 for sale for $100 locally, but no native 15 khz RGB input

I think we have a working on in our bedroom, don't use it and are probably going to put it out for curb side trash pick up next week lmao.

 

[SandEagle]

agreed. best console ever. chrono trigger, actraiser, double dragon, zelda, mario......i miss the good ole days

 

[Fingolfin269]

I've thought about trying to find a snes locally and piece together a game collection again. I'm concerned about the batteries though. How big of a concern is that? Can they be replaced? Some other alternative for saving games?

 

[gorcorps]

I've thought about trying to find a snes locally and piece together a game collection again. I'm concerned about the batteries though. How big of a concern is that? Can they be replaced? Some other alternative for saving games?

Why not just use an emulator? I don't understand the point of overpaying for old games just so you can play from the cartridge. Then you don't have to worry about silly save systems either.

 

[magomago]

It was the SNES that set the standards for those games to begin with.

Also fail for PSX list without Xenogears.

I forgot XG not because I didn't like it, but just because Too bad it turned into retarded psychobabble after disc 1 was over due to development constraints.

And how did the SNES set the standards for these titles?

I don't remember 3-D Fighters, 3-D Worlds from the SNES at all. I don't remember horror stories, or games where you focus exclusively on stealth. I sure as hell don't remember many sports games worth a damn --> especially soccer! The grandfather of current soccer games dates back to Winning Eleven on the PSX (ie: Pro Evolution Soccer). Even EA just said "fvck it, make it like PES/WE and do it better".
The only argument I would take would be RPGs; the SNES wasn't a speed powerhouse, but it was a graphics powerhouse, and RPGs naturally fit the style well. However, even then, the stories were much more shallow than the depth the PSX had; this imo is due to size constraints just as much as it is due to the maturation of the genre based on what the SNES helped to set forth.

Even then, all games ultimately draw on the previous console, so we can talk about how everything the SNES did was simply based on previous generations....but i'm pretty sure that isn't your argument

 

[coldmeat]

I just found my old SNES in storage a couple days ago. It's sitting right next to me right now, not sure if it still works though.

 

[Fingolfin269]

Why not just use an emulator? I don't understand the point of overpaying for old games just so you can play from the cartridge. Then you don't have to worry about silly save systems either.

I guess it comes down to a few things:

1) Emulation - I have roms for pretty much everything and just feel like it doesn't offer the same experience (further explained later)

2) Nostalgia - Playing via the console on a CRT using the same old school wired controllers just seems more real to me. Although the thing with nostalgia is that it is of course often so much better in our memory than it really is/was.

3) Multi-player - How do I play Mario Kart/Secret of Mana multiplayer with an emulator? I'm sure multiplayer exists in that medium but I just don't think a game like Mario Kart would be nearly as fun in that setting.

4) Hobby - I've been looking for something to make into a hobby/collectible and this seems like as good an idea as any. I think it would be a lot of fun to collect old systems/games that I once enjoyed on some level. It sure beats collecting baseball cards these days!

Of course the battery concern is still there. Hell I ran into battery problems playing a rental on my Sega Genesis back in the day. And that was when the console was current gen.

 

[exdeath]

There are drop in replacement non volatile FeRAM chips for SRAM chips. Works the same way with the same cycle timings as SRAM but retains data practically forever with no power required.

Can't wait until computer main RAM is made of the stuff so we don't need slow ass third tier non volatile storage like HDD/SSD even more. Yes SSD is also slow compared to CPU, bus and RAM speed.

Got my Sony PVM 20M4U in today, and while I only have it hooked up with composite because the SCART and BNC RGB cables have not arrive, holy crap it looks awesome. Even with shitty NTSC composite I can count pixels and scan lines and the image is perfectly square and centers. Top and bottom scan lines perfectly straight all the way across, not clipped at the corners or angled off the screen and right and left edges perfectly straight. So that means borders in game menus, shops, character naming, dialog, status screens, etc. all borders and corners of the entire screen are straight, not cut off, bowed, bent, etc.

No such thing as convergence on this thing, it's just dead on without a hint of red or blue fringing ANYWHERE on fine white lines. This is a 20" HR Trinitron standard definition NTSC TV (not a SVGA PC monitor) monitor with 800 lines resolution capability and .31 mm APG with 15 KHz RGB+sync inputs (sync on green, combined H+V sync, sync on composite video, syncs to pretty much anything) I tried taking pictures but it doesn't do it justice, just massive moire patterns from the camera picking up the scan lines and vertical aperture grill strips.

I can see that RGB is going to look fawking amazing when comparing the OSD built into the monitor vs text on the SNES that could look the same but is smudged by NTSC encoding. PS: I don't have a RCA to BNC adapter handing for the temp composite hookup, so I stuck a wire in the middle of the BNC, then used alligator clips to connect the wire and BNC shell to the RCA from the shitty SNES composite cable, and it still looks awesome. I'm going to be comatose when I get the RGB cables.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

One word:

Emulator

Get one and a game pad. GO!

 

[mmntech]

One word:

Emulator

Get one and a game pad. GO!

Just not a 360 controller though. The D-Pad on it blows. The nice thing about emulators is they'll scale and anti-alias the games, so they look nicer on HD displays. When using retro consoles, you really do need a CRT, or else it looks like crap.

No love for Genesis? It does what Nintendon't. ^_^

I wish I had a SNES growing up, even though my Genesis was/is pretty cool. Had a Gameboy though. That got more play than anything.

There used to be a store in town here that sold all kinds of retro games. They even had mint condition Dreamcasts, Master Systems, and NESes for sale. I had a field day in there. Of course by the time I discovered it, it went belly up a month later.

 

[sao123]

The SNES was posibly the best console of all time, but we must remember it owes it triumph to its predecessor, the NES.

Mario 1, Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, Super Tecmo Bowl, Star Tropics, Tysons Punch Out, RBI Baseball,

So many firsts happened on this console, which made it possibly more important than the SNES.

 

[mmntech]

The SNES was posibly the best console of all time, but we must remember it owes it triumph to its predecessor, the NES.

Mario 1, Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, Super Tecmo Bowl, Star Tropics, Tysons Punch Out, RBI Baseball,

So many firsts happened on this console, which made it possibly more important than the SNES.

The NES is definitely the most important console of all time.

The NES almost singlehandedly brought American gaming back from the brink following the 1983 crash. In many ways, it's the granddaddy of all games today.

The NES represented a dramatic shift in the global gaming market. Not only in the style of games, but also Japanese dominance of gaming as a whole. 25 years later and this is still largely the case. Only now is Japanese dominance beginning to wane. America is starting to take over software but Japan still dominates hardware. The two big American players, Microsoft and Apple, are still far behind of their Japanese competitors when looked at as a whole.

I think the SNES had a lot of great games. The fourth generation served up a lot of fantastic stuff though. The NES really ushered in everything that came after it though, plus it ignited a lot of legendary franchises. That's what makes it the best.

 

[Kev]

Lmao, I recently dusted off my roms and playing Actraiser again. Finally got my PS3 controller working so I can play Mario Kart (150cc was harder then I remembered!!) and Killer Instinct. Have all the RPG's, SoM, CT, FF's, Mario RPG etc.

Also honorable mention, the Xband. Mario Kart vs. players nation wide? YES PLEASE.

Oh wow, Xband. I remember running a 50 ft phone cord so I could pwn noobs in MKII. I hovered around #1/#2 ranked local player, there was only 1 guy who could compete with me, his name was "The Jackal" -- good times

 

[lord_emperor]

3) Multi-player - How do I play Mario Kart/Secret of Mana multiplayer with an emulator? I'm sure multiplayer exists in that medium but I just don't think a game like Mario Kart would be nearly as fun in that setting.

Hook up more game controllers to the computer and hook the computer up to a TV.

 

[EvilManagedCare]

My first console was the Genesis. But when I played Castlevania IV & Super Mario World on my friend's SNES I knew it must be replaced.

My personal favorites: Castlevania 4, the mario games (All stars, world), and Super Smash TV.

Being able to download these from WiiWare is what drove my purchase of the Wii in the first place.

Castlevania 4 may be one of my favorites across all platforms.

 

[slag]

The SNES was posibly the best console of all time, but we must remember it owes it triumph to its predecessor, the NES.

Mario 1, Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, Super Tecmo Bowl, Star Tropics, Tysons Punch Out, RBI Baseball,

So many firsts happened on this console, which made it possibly more important than the SNES.

Mario 2 was so much better than mario 3. It was a total 180 from the first mario where you could pick which character to play, each with his/her own strengths and weaknesses, and had awesome things like the POW bombs, an immersible world with sand areas, water and flying areas, ice, etc. It is hands down my favorite mario game. When I beat the end boss for the first time and realized it was

Spoiler

all just a dream

, it made the game all that much better.

 

[zinfamous]

2 titles are all that need to be mentioned...

Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past
Super Mario kart

that is all that really has to be said, as those are by far the 2 greatest iterations in there genre (ok not by far for Zelda, OOT was close and some say its even better but not me). but mario kart isn't even comparable. there hasn't been a game in the genre to even come CLOSE to being as good as the SNES version. all the later versions were absolutely terrible and dumbed down to require hardly any skill to be good at it.

then we have a HUGE list of AAA title games as well...

Street Fighter 2 (and all the interations)
Mortal Kombat 2
Actraiser
Super Mario World
Donky Kong Country
Soul Blazer
F Zero

This list could probably keep going on and on but I just can't remember right now.

Final Fantasy II
Final Fantasy III
Super Metroid

I can't believe you forgot these, lol.

but yeah, easily the best console ever, if you ask me.

 

[zinfamous]

The thing that made the SNES the best console of all time was Nintendo itself was bringing out some of the best games ever. When the developer of a console is also producing a stellar line-up of games behind the greatest creative mind in video game history (Shigeru Miyamoto), you've got a surefire recipe for success. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Mario Kart and Star Fox, not to mention the IPs they sold out to other succesful developers, most notably Rare with Donkey Kong Country, and then landing an exclusive contract with Square (meaning if you were into RPGs you HAD to have an SNES). If that weren't enough, they managed to get development agreements with virtually every major publisher outside of Sega (for obvious reasons), so you had all the Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Mega Man, etc. hits that people wanted. The biggest thing you couldn't get on SNES was Sonic (Mario was always better anyway) and fatalities (until Mortal Kombat II came out with fatalities intact).

It's too bad Nintendo managed to perpetually shoot itself in the foot with subsequent consoles through a variety of questionable design decisions and a refusal to accept market pressure. The Wii has been an unbridled success, but anyone who says it's anywhere near as good as the SNES is no gamer.

yep. in fact, it was them losing the Square contract, and thus Final Fantasy, as the sole reason I abandoned Nintendo and picked up a PS1 as my next console.

 

[zinfamous]

I forgot XG not because I didn't like it, but just because Too bad it turned into retarded psychobabble after disc 1 was over due to development constraints.

this. the game was great until it became insane nonsense and the majority of play time was spent scrolling through text. I certainly thought to myself--did they completely run out of money/time/effort, and just hash together some sprites to accompany text for the final disc and shuffle this turd out the door?

I have no idea why people are still so fond of this game, when it was so clearly unfinished/unpolished junk.

 

[exdeath]

One word:

Emulator

Get one and a game pad. GO!

Garbage. Can't even emulate SPC700 sound correctly in a game let alone the game run smoothly, and scaled up low res images look like shit on a 106" 1080p screen no matter how good the scaler is. See my previous posts in this thread for examples of shitty emulation, including ps1 games on ps2 even.