
A collector is selling every Super Nintendo game for $24,999 - aaronbrethorst
http://www.polygon.com/2012/12/10/3749792/a-collector-is-selling-every-super-nintendo-game-for-24999
======
georgeorwell
This related article on accurate hardware emulation by byuu is great:

<http://byuu.org/articles/emulation/snes-coprocessors>

The process required an electron microscope!

~~~
agumonkey
A talk mentionning transistor level reversing for the 6502 (atari era though,
not snes)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=K5miMbqYB4E#t=1523s)

~~~
acuozzo
A modified 6502 was used in the NES.

------
mwill
Byuu is one of my hacker heroes. He's passionate, opinionated, and dedicated.
The steps taken to map out the SNES, and make bsnes accurate makes it one of
my favorite non-library open source projects. I highly recommend checking out
his emulation articles on his site[1], and also his piece on ars [2].

[1] <http://byuu.org/articles/> [2]
[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-
power-o...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-
mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

------
andrewfelix
At the risk of being down-voted into oblivion...Other than the fact that the
guy selling the games is a programmer, so what? and why is this on HN?

There seems to be a rash viral digg/reddit style articles creeping onto the HN
front page as of late.

~~~
martincmartin
From the Hacker News Guidelines:

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
rsheridan6
Yes, but do hackers find this interesting, or are non-hackers voting this to
the top? There was a time when you didn't see stuff like this on HN.

~~~
thesis
While I agree the OP doesn't seem like a great fit for HN... is there a clear
and cut definition of "hackers" that should apply to who can post here?

~~~
rsheridan6
You can play word games looking for precise definitions of anything. I don't
have a clear-cut definition of the word "hacker," but in most places it's
clear who is or isn't (I'm definitely not at this point in my life, though I
might have been five years ago when I registered here). Yeah, there are some
edge cases - maybe someone thinks he's a hacker because he runs Gentoo and
knows a little shell scripting but people who contribute substantially to open
source projects think he's not - but the vast majority of people clearly are
or are not hackers.

Reddit started out like Hacker News, because it was initially best known for
being funded/mentored by Paul Graham, so people who were interested in him
went there. It mutated into the Reddit we know today - which is why pg felt
the need to fork a new community a year or two into reddit's evolution. HN
would probably do the same thing given a laissez faire attitude. It's up to HN
to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

------
rpm4321
God, what a great system that was. I was 11 when that thing came out, and
after seeing just how great the quality jump was from the NES to SNES (and my
half-remembered, dust-covered Atari before that), it suddenly became clear to
me just how good video games were going to get in the future.

It was a lesson in Moore's Law that even an 11 year old could understand.

~~~
daeken
What's really interesting -- and what most people don't understand about
pre-5th gen consoles (Playstation, N64, etc) -- is that cartridges weren't
just physical containers for code, but contained their own logic. When you
have a disc, it's just a storage mechanism, but a cartridge back in the NES
and SNES days had a fair amount of power over the functioning of the system.
Several cartridges contained ARM chips, in fact, and boosted the computing
power of the console tremendously; this sort of thing is why the 3rd and 4th
gen consoles were able to last for so long.

NES games were produced for 11 years after the console was originally released
(and the console itself was produced for 20 years!) because of this
flexibility; SNES games were produced 8 years after the console was released
as well. Cartridges were just incredibly powerful, and I'll always miss them.

~~~
byuu
My favorite part was the way you put the cartridge in, turned on the power,
and the game was playing.

No OS bootup, no OS navigation menu, no game booting delays, no game level
loading delays. All games, instantly.

Nowadays, even my television (Westinghouse 40") needs ten seconds from power-
on to showing me a picture :(

~~~
chc
In fairness, TVs have always been dogs. My old CRT TV back then would take
about five seconds to show a picture and like 15 to get as clear and bright as
it was supposed to be.

But yeah, when I fire up my old NES or Genesis, I'm struck by how much time
modern systems waste with loading. I can already be through level 2 of Super
Mario Bros. by the time Assassin's Creed III actually lets me start playing.

------
daeken
Wow, that's incredible! Major props to byuu for doing this in the quest for
better emulation. Wish I could justify the cash to pick this up, though it
does make me think about picking up an SNES again.

~~~
moepstar
Go for it - you won't regret it :)

I've done so half a year ago and also purchased ~35 games - Best 150€ spent in
quite a while...

~~~
kahawe
> _Go for it - you won't regret it :)_

I have to agree with you - maybe it's because I grew up during the time of
those consoles and with absolutely-not-realistic graphics but I actually miss
that good-old-days video games look since nowadays most games are trying to
look realistic like Unreal or Doom or FarCry wow-ing user when they were
released.

Maybe my taste is strange but if the game is trying to be very realistic then
it's already small things that can annoy me and throw me off, while a totally
unrealistic 80s/90s videogame look is perfectly acceptable. I actually prefer
it probably for exactly that reason. I don't want all my video games to look
super-realistic; while that might be a selling-point for the FPS crowd I think
other games should NOT buy into that race and instead focus on the gameplay
and on showing me pretty colors.

~~~
joeguilmette
this phenomenon is called the 'uncanny valley'. it's quite fascinating.

~~~
vidarh
I'm not so sure that applies to most of it.

There's a large gap between games that appeals to me and games that are
approaching uncanny valley territory.

For my part, I'd date the "end of interesting games" to approximately the rise
of Doom. These games are nowhere near realistic enough to enter the uncanny
valley, but to me that's when _enough_ games lost their appeal to me that I
stopped playing much.

There's nothing objective about that timing, of course.

Just to me, Doom never appealed, and indeed most FPS's don't appeal, and Doom
heralded an age where most games changed in a way that made them less
interesting to me. It is conveniently also a way of indicate roughly the
timing of the fall of the Amiga and other not-so-3D-capable computers and game
consoles, and the styles of games popular on them.

There's definitively exceptions - I bought Sim City 3000 and Alpha Centauri
and Terminus long after Doom (those specific games because I've never owned a
console nor a Windows PC, and they were amongst a small set of commercial
Linux ports available after my last Amiga gave up the ghost).

I'm actually contemplating making my own "retro style" game (only thing
stopping me is lack of time to devote to it at the moment) exactly because I
keep seeking something that evoke the type of fun for me that the games I grew
up with did (what I'd like to do is some sort of mix between International
Karate + and Chambers of Shao Lin - never martial arts games don't interest me
much).

Of course a lot of this is down to pure nostalgia, and a lot of people would
get disappointed if they actually went back and played these games again (with
exceptions - I have a Minimig, an Amiga FPGA reimplementation, - and there are
certainly games that survive even being blown up on a crystal clear 42" LED TV
despite the fact I last saw them on a grainy 26" CRT 20+ years ago).

But there's also a stylistic difference, whether in graphics (cartoon-ish
pixel art with lots of metallic gradients vs. "realistic" art that often try
to look real), music (80's chip-tune electronica with lots of inspiration from
a strange mix of Jarre, heavy metal and others), as well as big changes in
gameplay (e.g. 80's games were usually far less forgiving in terms of losing
lives and ending the game), and 2D vs. 3D (even for games which today are
nominally 2D the graphics is still often in a 3D style).

~~~
btilly
Well, I never was much of a gamer. But Doom was the first game realistic
enough to trigger motion sickness for me. I have been unable to play any FPS
since. (I can't even watch many of them.)

------
lostlogin
Plugged in a N64 a year or so ago. Then spent a good 10mins fiddling with and
cleaning the plugs while a friend commented on my progress. At that point it
dawned on us that it wasn't broken. Golden Eye and Super Mario Cart really did
have graphics that were that bad - and we loved it just as much.

~~~
daeken
The N64 had a lot of texturing issues that dramatically reduced the quality
from what it "should've been". The PlayStation on the other hand was great,
except for the fact that textured polygons were just ridiculously slow, so
most games used a lot of shaded polys, e.g. the characters in Final Fantasy 7.

Looking back, nearly all of my favorites from that generation (Tales of
Destiny, Symphony of the Night, etc) were really just 2d games with higher
quality sprites than the SNES. Funny how that works out.

~~~
ANTSANTS
If I'm remembering this correctly, the Playstation had another large problem
in that it used integer coordinates for everything, making it very difficult
to avoid the infamous "wavy textures" with textured polys. I think a decent
portion of the time, shaded polys were chosen because they ended up looking
better, not just because they were faster. If you haven't already, check out
the fascinating (and long) developer retrospective on Crash Bandicoot, where
(amongst other, more interesting things) they mention their rationale for
using flat shading on Crash:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475639>

I'm really fond of the PlayStation's brand of 3D as well: There is something
really charming about low-res, low-poly 3D, with nearest neighbor texture
scaling and 2D "sprites" everywhere. I have some degree of nostalgia for the
N64, but that combination of little texture memory and gratuitous bilinear
texture scaling is not nearly as appealing.

------
DiJu519
I thought i recognized the name.

This guy has his own emulator aswell.

<http://byuu.org/>

~~~
cochese
The -definitive- SNES emulator.

~~~
lmm
Definitive in what sense? For actually playing the games (which to me seems to
be the point) everyone I know uses zsnes or snes9x.

~~~
byuu
In 40 or so years when nobody can obtain a working SNES, and someone wants to
look back and understand how the SNES hardware worked, they won't be looking
at ZSNES' source code for that purpose. (hopefully we will have transistor
layouts ala Visual6502, but you never know ...)

bsnes aims to emulate the hardware as closely as possible, with a side effect
that it runs every game as a result. Other emulators aim to play the games,
with the side effects of bugs in the least popular titles which nobody
notices.

For today's hardware, Snes9X is the best choice for just playing games. But in
ten years when cell phones can run bsnes at full speed, and you have to
emulate an x86-32 to run ZSNES anyway, why not use something more reliable and
guaranteed? GUIs are just frippery, easy to replicate or improve upon separate
from emulation.

------
bpierre
Another great article by byuu on Ars Technica: “Accuracy takes power: one
man's 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator”

[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-
power-o...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-
mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

------
bobsy
Put his on eBay! Ha!

What was that scam that lit up HN last week? Pay for item. Report item as "not
as described." Get reversal. Keep item?

It looks like a cool collection. I didn't know games would be worth this much.
Especially considering how practically all aren't in mint condition, many have
missing manuals etc.

~~~
Adirael
They are not cheap, $35~ per game. They are all in boxes and some games are
easy to be found and dirt cheap, some of them are probably almost impossible
to find with box or at all. I remember trying to score an European Chrono
Trigger with box and I was looking at $100+.

It's a good collection and everything's done, you get it all in one shipping
and everything's clean and verified.

~~~
lmm
I didn't even know there _was_ a European Chrono Trigger. Certainly the only
one of my friends who'd ever played it was the Canadian. So I'm not surprised
if it's more expensive than anything else, because it would be very rare (and,
unusually for rare videogames, it's also a fantastic game).

------
sdqali
byuu:

I am neither a gamer nor a game collector. However, the size of this
collection and the effort you put in to amass it are incredible.

If the only reason you want to sell this collection off is to get more money
that can be invested in improving emulation for European and Japanese sets of
the games, would not a KickStarter/Indiegogo campaign be a better idea?

You would get to keep your prized collection, while the emulation efforts get
funded by people who would benefit from it.

------
paraboul
He's not only a redditor. He's the creator of "bsnes" <http://byuu.org/bsnes/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bsnes> one the most powerful emulator.

~~~
nornagon
It's kind of insulting that the author of this article chose "A Reddit user"
as the first three words. Perhaps "BSNES creator" or "The most fanatic Super
Nintendo fan on Earth"? Surely "uses reddit" is not the most interesting
quality of Byuu :(

------
Irregardless
> Professional firms that do this can charge upwards of $100,000 per processor
> for this kind of work.

> ... [Dr. Decapitator] was willing to do it just for the cost of the donor
> cartridges and supplies. This worked out to $250 per coprocessor.

Sounds like there's some room for improvement in that market. Either that or
Dr. Decapitator is one extremely generous dude.

~~~
byuu
The latter, he's an emulation enthusiast.

There's some 3DS people trying to get a Chinese firm to do it, and they want
$20,000 just to image the chip. No actual modification work.

You need access to machines and tools worth millions. Hobbyist level
techniques like nitric acid and etchand sand to stain the ROMs just doesn't
work even at SNES-era complexity.

It could be done for less in bulk, the issue is supply and demand. Very, very
few people paying for this kind of work combined with wild costs for
equipment.

------
kriro
That's pretty cool. I hope someone buys it because it's dev support in a
sense. I own an NES,SNES,N64 and also stuff like the CDi (yeah I wanted to
complete the Zelda collection...don't those games are horrible :D)

I always enjoy plugging them in. A good game doesn't need fancy graphics in my
opinion.

------
staunch
I remember the day we got an SNES. One of my clearest childhood memories. My
brother's and I collected 24 games and it was by far our most treasured
possession. Too bad I've lost nearly all my patience for games that aren't
fast-paced, competitive, and multiplayer!

~~~
Bockit
I found that I'd reached the same stage. If it wasn't multiplayer with the
chance for competition, I couldn't get into it. If you're looking to branch
out a bit though, I found just playing through co-op games with the same
people I'd normally, 'train' with so to speak, was a great way to get back
into the vibe of single player and non-competitive multiplayer.

Then again if you're happy with things that way, then no need to change things
up.

~~~
staunch
Actually I discovered that as well. I love doing coop games still. Too bad
there aren't many.

------
thejad
Holy hell this is awesome!

------
kenneth_reitz
Want.

