[00:00:00] I haven't really ever heard of FPGA until Jerry and I here started this whole podcast. That's in between Mega Man and Denny's. This is like all he talks about is FPGA. But yeah, I'd be interested in learning how to learning all about it. You're gonna learn today. Yeah. You're gonna learn lots. You're gonna get schooled. You're gonna get fucking schooled. Get off of your own podcast.

[00:00:29] Hey, I'm Jerry. Hey, I'm Aaron. And this is Retro Rehab. Welcome back to Retro Rehab. You know it. I know it. Aaron knows it. Everybody knows it by now. This is the greatest collaboration of all time. Tell them, Aaron. It is. Listen to Aaron. Aaron knows.

[00:00:58] Today, we are very excited to have another guest with us today. Certified Mr. Master, creator of the Mr. Discord and core contributor. None other than, no, I almost did it. I almost did the thing. I almost called you the internet name. We're gonna introduce you by your real name, Jamie, who also goes by Katrinks on the internet. Welcome to Retro Rehab, Jamie. Hey, it's a pleasure to be here tonight. Awesome.

[00:01:28] I, oh my God. Complimentary RC Cola under your chair. Feel free to take one or two if you want. No, RC Cola cherry. Sorry, we're, we're fancy here at Retro Rehab. We're fancy. Why does it have to be RC Cola? Like, why RC Cola? That's, that's been my thing lately. It's RC Cola. Because it's just like the one nobody wants to. It is. It's Royal. It's Royal Crown. It's fancy. I mean, RC Cola's not bad. Okay. I, we may as well just give them their flowers now. RC Cola's not bad. But it's cheap.

[00:01:57] It's, it's like $1. Like, exactly $1 for a big old tall boy of it at Dollar General. So you can get like, you can get like 50 for 50 bucks. You guys have a 50 tall boys of RC Cola in your house. That'd be cool. Never again. Never again. Well, Jamie, you and I have met before on the, the Mr. Discord, which you, I understand, created. Uh, yeah.

[00:02:27] Sentient and I actually made it several years ago now after moving over from, uh, classic gaming. We need a little more space to grow. And so, uh, we made our own place there. Yep. And it's, it's a really cool community. Um, it was kind of amazing. Like when I started going down the rabbit hole of Mr. Stuff, a friend of mine, he knew a lot already, but then I discovered the discord and it was like, oh, I don't need you anymore. I can ask these people for help. And the community is fantastic.

[00:02:57] Like there's, there's some very, very amazing people in this community. And I mean, I've, I've gotten the chance to speak to, you know, yourself, uh, uh, video game esoterica is in there. He's always razzed people, which is hilarious. Um, and I've even, I've talked to, to Robert, the, the creator of the N64 and the PS1 core. I've talked to him directly too. And he's, he's such a nice dude.

[00:03:24] Like, and even just like the other people on the, in the community, there's just, it's just a very welcoming community. It's you've, you've definitely built something really special there. I like to think, uh, you know, I've been to other gaming communities on the internet and I like to think that we kind of, um, we, we met like a really, uh, happy place with, with the Mr. Community where it kind of has a level of maturity, but not too formal where people like the developers can feel comfortable being around people. They're not harassed.

[00:03:52] It's just, uh, it's really kind of like just vibes really well. I'm kind of proud of it. Honestly, you should be. Yeah. Cause it's, it's really awesome. Um, so before we get into the weeds here with the Mr. Stuff, cause we gotta get into the weeds. We gotta, by the end of this episode, we're hoping that Aaron is going to show us a receipt for all of like a parts list of his Mr. Build. And look, I don't give a shit, dude.

[00:04:21] If you, if you just want to make a Mr. Sandwich, cause look, everybody starts somewhere. If you want to, if you want to make it, that's what they call it. That's, that's what the, that's, that's the thing. Is the sandwich just like the one without the case or is that? It's just like the three. It's well, it's pretty much what I have. You can't see it from where I'm sitting, but, uh, I don't have any fancy cases or anything on mine. I wish my friend has the, um, it's just like three boards on the table. On top of each other. Basically. Is that what you mean? It's the, it's the Mr. Sandwich. It's cool. It's tiny.

[00:04:49] It's like, you know, it's like this big. Um, yeah. So we want to see a, uh, a receipt list by the end of the episode. I've got my, I've got my, my debit card ready. Yeah. Got that PayPal fired up. Got the funds transferred over. Audio listeners won't be able to, uh, won't be able to see it or hear it. Cause I'm holding my debit card right now. Surely you've made enough money from all those, uh, those back picks on only fans, right?

[00:05:19] He was making a believer of you for sure. Yup. Uh, but before we get into that, Aaron, what could possibly be new in the world of retro? There's a bunch actually. I dare you to, I, I dare you to pronounce the name of this translation. I was about to say, I'm going to butcher the hell of this. Uh, Mizu Baku Daibouken translation on the Sega Saturn action platformer 2D. Never heard of it. I'm going to Google it right now.

[00:05:47] Oh, it, uh, it looks okay. Apparently, uh, after I was reading up about this game, uh, it, it is a translation. Yeah. It looks pretty neat. It's just like a colorful platformer. I don't know what else to say about it. It looks, it looks cool. I do want to try it out, but apparently even the Japanese version has a code that you could

[00:06:12] put in to just enable English, but that's, this just weird enables it automatically. Okay. Yeah. What the heck? This reminds me, reminds me a lot of Kirby and like how whimsical it is, but there's also like one of the, one of the, uh, one of the screenshots on, um, city romance shows the bad dude. He like lit their whole like planet on fire or something. The fire devil. Yep. So, uh, maybe not so much Kirby. It does, it does look cool though.

[00:06:42] That's awesome. Yeah, it is cool. So check that out. Uh, also the morph 4k is finally starting to land in people's laps. Uh, if you don't know what that is, that is, I guess the competitor to the retro tank. Um, Jamie, do you have a retro tank or any of those upscalers? Uh, I do not. The last upscaler I got was an OSSC. I don't have any of the fancy modern ones.

[00:07:09] That reminds me, you are the reason why I bought my OSSC. Do you remember that? We were, yeah. Cause we were talking about, I was talking about upscalers and I was like, uh, I kind of want to get this. Oh no. I know what it was. I don't have an OSSC. I have a GBSC. Cause I was going to get the OSSC and you were like, just get the GBSC. It's like fucking 50 bucks. And sure enough, I go on Amazon, it's just $50. And that fixed all of my PS2 woes like instantly. Yeah.

[00:07:39] For PS2, that one is, is probably the better pick. OSSC kind of has like, it's not the greatest with interlay stuff. Yeah. No, it was like a friend of mine came over and he was looking at it. He was like, Holy shit. Like this looks really good. And you only pay 50 bucks for this. I was like, yeah, dude. Like that's, you know, it's a hell of a lot better than pay. Well, you guys only have to pay like, uh, what's a tank. Isn't it like seven 99 or something? I think there. Yeah. Yeah. It's expensive. Yeah. It's 799.

[00:08:09] Uh huh. Yeah. For the retro team 4k, but it's amazing. The same, same guy that was checking out the GBSC with me. He has a 4k tank and holy shit. That thing is wild. But it's also like, it's not, it's not just like a, Hey, I'm going to pick this thing up, plug it in and play it. Like it is a rabbit hole to go down. Like it is very customizable and you kind of need to set up all your different, like it comes with a fucking, like a, basically like a TV remote.

[00:08:37] That's like this long with like all these buttons. And like, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's pretty wild. Um, but yeah, so the, the more 4k is essentially the competitor to that. And it's a bit cheaper. Um, I think that like right now, the only one that's out, there is no analog one out yet. It's coming soon. It's only HDMI.

[00:09:04] So for people that want it to go like from just like an analog signal in, which is like kind of what most people want to do. Um, those aren't, aren't out yet, but it's still a bit cheaper than the, uh, than the tank. It's, I think the, the HDMI one right now is like, I think it's like 399 or 499 or something. It's, it's a lot cheaper, but, um, I kind of want to hear a bit more hands-on with it

[00:09:34] before I'm maybe jumping on and get that one. That's the things I've been reading about that while you've been going off and it sounds awesome. Go off kick. It's got, um, it's got wifi on it, Bluetooth. It's got a, uh, micro SD card slot. So you can, you'd slap in user files and like color profiles and stuff like that. That's, that's really, really cool.

[00:09:59] Speaking of a color profiles, um, one of the, one of the first times that I ever heard anything about you, Jamie, you have a, you have like a color profile on what, what core is that? I think it's the NES core. Uh, yeah, actually I made, um, an NES palette. Uh, it was pretty fancy. Actually, I generate it mathematically. Most people kind of just pick colors or they'll try to read from the screen and do other, uh, creative things like that.

[00:10:29] My approach was to take the way that the PPU worked and write a program that would generate the palette the way the PPU would generate the palette. And I say that like, it's sort of a definitive thing. It's a gigantic rabbit hole that NES enthusiasts could chew your ear off about. But what it boils down to is that there's absolute Luma values because the chip didn't output any kind of RGB, right? So there's absolute Luma values.

[00:10:55] If you look at, you know, YC, but there isn't really absolute Chroma values. Those kind of vary between models and between TVs and things. And so I kind of picked like the most ideal Chromas that would be realistically possible and applied them to the mathematically correct Luma's. And it made, uh, well, a fancy and really good looking palette. I think. That's insane. But you said, I think you said before that your background is engineering, right?

[00:11:25] I am a software engineer. Yeah. Yeah. That checks out because, um, I, I would never, there's nothing about that entire paragraph that I could ever cut. Like I, I can, I, I could barely comprehend the terminology, let alone to implement it or even think about doing stuff like that. So that is, that is absolutely amazing to me. So hats off.

[00:11:53] Well, if you ever have a spare, you know, day, I'll go over the whole thing with you. Detail. Crash course. Put my lab coat on. Yeah. Um, Aaron, I'm very excited for you to read this next piece of news. I really, really want to read this one. I've been waiting. I, um, I don't know how, I don't know how anybody has the patience for this, but Mario 64 has been beat without pushing the A button in 86 hours.

[00:12:24] Yes. Uh, Mario 64 has finally, after all these years, after all these tries and has now finally been able to be beat. I think I'm pretty sure without cheats too. Like this is not these, the, whoever did this did not use cheats. They didn't use cheats that I don't think they use glitches. They just didn't press A for 86 hours, which is, that's insane.

[00:12:52] How do you, how do you even do that? How do you get past any of the Bowser stuff without jumping? Cause like, there's a lot of those carousels and I don't, I'm, I'm having a stroke trying to understand how anybody did this. It, it doesn't make sense. You know what they, they probably like for the Bowser levels in, in, in, I guess, I don't know. Yeah. I, I need to, I need to watch this.

[00:13:20] I don't know if I, I don't know if I have 86 hours to dedicate to watching Mario get finished without pressing A, but I definitely want to see some key moments. Like there's, I have so many questions, but yeah, uh, folks just want to make sure everybody was aware. All the listeners out there, Mario 64, I repeat Mario 64 has been beat without pushing the A button. Don't you only took a six. Don't you have to, don't you make him swim with the A button?

[00:13:49] Doesn't he like paddle by pushing the A button? Am I thinking wrong? Yes. Oh, but maybe cause they press, if you press the B button, he does that like little stupid grab and he like flails around. Maybe they like did that, but yeah, I don't, I don't know, man. I, I, I don't know. I'm very confused. That's cool though. That's, that's, that's really, really cool. It is very cool.

[00:14:17] And, uh, a little piece of Mr. News, uh, video game Esoterica has been tinkering with Conker on the Mr. Now, if you're not already aware, I think I talked about it before, um, of the very few games that don't work on the N64 core because Robert pushed that fucker to its absolute limits. Um, Conker was the big one. Conker was like the flag of defeat where we all kind of went, okay, it's okay.

[00:14:47] Let's just keep telling ourselves it's okay. It's fine. Like we got damn near everything else. Like, Ooh, we can't play Mahjong. Who cares? No Mahjong. Like we, we got, we got Conker and the other, I'm serious. Mahjong was one of the other ones that does not play and everybody just kind of went. So you can play on the 3DO if you really want to, man, boot up your 3DO that everybody has and pull a play. Jamie, do you have a 3DO?

[00:15:16] I know you have like a bunch of retro consoles, right? Do I have what? Do you have a 3DO? Uh, you know, that's, that's one that went under my radar. Unfortunately, that's crazy. How could a 3DO ever get under someone's radar? I know, right? Like how could I miss this gem in the rough there? Goddamn 3DO. Sorry, Bill, if you're listening to this. Anthrax. Sorry. Sorry, boys. Yeah. Sorry. Right.

[00:15:41] But yeah, so, uh, Conker notoriously does not work on the mystery. It's not that it doesn't run. It does. It, it will run. I've played up to the area where you have to, uh, take the cheese to the, to the rat. But it has like intermittent freezing where like you can't, there's no way to really predict until this crazy motherfucker started messing around with it. And apparently like the, cause Robert made two cores.

[00:16:11] He made the turbo core and he made the regular core. And for some reason that like, Jamie, do you, do you know at all, like why the turbo core is working more for these games? I think it's, uh, it's really, you're not going to like this answer. It's basically random chance. It's how things just line up randomly. Yeah, no, it's just how things are lining up randomly. It's, it's just, uh, just not crashing because of how they're lining up. I don't think it has a better answer than that. That's so crazy.

[00:16:41] Um, but yeah, so he's been tinkering with conquer and, uh, I didn't watch it yet, but he had a video that he put out, I think last week. And he said that he, he's getting close to figuring out maybe like what is, is exactly that's crashing the game. Um, so I don't know. We'll see. It'd be absolutely insane if all of a sudden there's just like, oh, the turbo core fixes everything, but who knows? He is a, he is a pretty brilliant developer.

[00:17:09] If anybody can do it, Robert's got my trust. Um, that guy is performed some miracles in there. I swear. Yeah. I, yeah, it's, it's been a wild ride and it's cool because like, that is right when I came into the Mr. Stuff was when all, like, it was kind of like in the middle of when all the N64 stuff was happening. And the part of the tipping point for me to get a Mr. Was the fact that all of a sudden the, the one core that everybody was like, there's no way this is happening.

[00:17:35] Like there's so many like different YouTubers, like modern vintage gamer. And like, uh, some of these other guys that were like, this is like pie in the sky shit. Like don't ever expect N64. Like it's never going to happen. And then all of a sudden it was just like, yeah, guys, I'm going to try to get Mario Kart to work by Christmas. And then it was like, we had every game by Christmas except for fucking Mahjong, Conker and, uh, Jet Force Gemini. Classic. Classic Robert. Yeah.

[00:18:03] But it was, he himself said that it was impossible. He himself was like N64. That'll never work. I'm Mr. So I'm going to do it anyway. Didn't he like, how did he do that? Wasn't he like using Ares or something to like, like something to do with like, he was doing it on an emulator first and then like porting it over or something. I don't, I don't really understand how he did that. Uh, from my understanding, the way he does development is he writes an emulator in the same kind of way that an FPGA project would work.

[00:18:32] In other words, he writes it with clocks and everything. It doesn't run full speed per se, um, because it's doing a lot of low level thing, almost like a simulation, but it helps him debug very quickly to be able to recompile it and run it quickly on the, um, on the, on the computer rather than the FPGA. Cause FPGA compilation can take, you know, like half an hour sometimes it's very slow. Holy shit. Yeah. It takes a long time to build things for FPGA.

[00:18:58] So doing it that way, he writes himself an emulator, uh, and he'll use other things to reference too. So he'll use like working things as references to kind of help him, uh, figure out how things are supposed to look, uh, on his own thing. He kind of gets a whole picture together that way. It's so crazy, man. Like, I just like air, this is why you got to get a fucking mister. Are you hearing this shit? Are you listening?

[00:19:25] I know my, uh, my little Amber Nick device and I'm pretty sure most other, uh, non FPGA will, I know any other emulator out there. Yeah. And 64 is a bastard, such a bastard. Like I can't even get way for a 64 to run on my Amber Nick. Like guess where that works. Guess where that works. I'll give you fucking 15 guesses. Yeah. Then, um, I'm, uh, I'm interested to see what it looks like with the turbo core for like

[00:19:53] 60, like all that, that, uh, jiggly, like polygonal ocean with the, with the dolphins and stuff. Seeing that in 60 FPS. I bet it looks awesome. Yeah, man. Give me that jiggly ocean. I don't know how else to describe it. It's like, I've never, I've never heard of an ocean described as a jiggly ocean before in my life. I mean, oceans are pretty jiggly, man. I've never seen it. I've just seen pictures of it. Movies. That old ocean of ours, man, is wet, wild and jiggly.

[00:20:24] Stupid Iowa being landlocked and such. I have too. You've never seen the ocean. No. What? Yeah. I, I grew up poor, man. We didn't ever get vacations to go see the ocean. Like, uh, the most we ever got was like, I almost said South Dakota, but that's nowhere near it either. I don't think we ever took a vacation. Your parents never ever like tricked you right into like Lake Michigan and was like, yeah, that's the ocean. That's the ocean. Too poor. Sorry.

[00:20:54] Too poor. Sorry, ocean. Too poor to go to Michigan. Pretty much, man. I'm sorry, man. This is like two episodes now in a row. I've been dunking on your upbringing. Last episode, I was making fun of divorcee parents. And then Aaron was like, yeah. So when my mom met my stepdad, I was like, oh shit. It's okay, dude. I'm sorry, man. I didn't realize.

[00:21:24] Oh man. Next episode. I'm just going to shut this shit down. I'm going to have something like, Jerry, that was really uncool of you. People tuning in for the first time. We're like, man, this guy's a fucking dick. No, it's fine, man. Yeah. Yeah. Too poor for Michigan. Um, yeah. Jamie, have you ever, have you experienced the ocean? I thought you said Michigan. I live in New York. It's hard to miss the ocean. Honestly, it's kind of right there. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. And, uh, I was in California for a while too.

[00:21:53] They have a pretty good ocean too. So I've seen, seen both oceans, both the big ones. Yeah. I've also, yeah. I, I lived on the East coast of Canada for 20 years of my life and I was on an island. So I had no choice but to see the ocean fucking everywhere. And then when we moved out West, uh, I did get to go to Vancouver last year, which was pretty, pretty dope. That's basically just the California of Canada. That's fair.

[00:22:22] So were you, were you, uh, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland? Newfoundland. Oh, you're Newsy. Okay. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. I'm going to pull up. I am one of them. And I'm going to see, I'm going to see how far I need to drive to get to the goddamn ocean. Pretty far too. Cause Oh my God. I was like right in the goddamn middle, dude. So like, I guess Louisiana would be probably the closest.

[00:22:49] Hey, you know, if it makes you feel better, I've never run through a cornfield. So you've got that on me. He was too poor for that too. No, they're all over the place. It's Iowa. What are you talking? Yeah. Cornfields are cool, but they're sharp though. Don't ever run through a cornfield. They make it. You know what? And the movies, they seem like fun. Yeah. Like what are you talking about? 15 hours to go see the ocean. I'm telling you, dude, spring your kids to Lake Michigan and just lie to them just to ease.

[00:23:20] You see the kids, you smell that ocean air, the, the seagulls, the, uh, oh shit. Well, I think, uh, I think that about does it for the, uh, for the news section. Uh, basically keep, keep your eyes and ears and every orifice open to the earth and keep listening to what video game esoterica is doing.

[00:23:45] Cause the conch shell even, cause you can hear the, uh, through a conch shell too. Well, where the hell are you going to find a conch shell? You could, I mean, you can probably find a cornfield. No, no. Go Amazon. A goodwill. You can find it. Behind a Denny's. You can find anything at a Denny's. Those red lobsters are closing down. I'm sure they got a couple of conch shells. Oh fuck. I'm going to have to bring it up. Bring it up.

[00:24:14] Let's, let's throw some flowers down for a red lobster and no longer RIP to endless shrimp. That's right. Yep. Uh, everybody, you heard it third, third year for the third time here on a retro rehab. Uh, red lobster is closing over 50 restaurants because they are going bankrupt because of all the money they've lost an endless shrimp. So no more endless shrimp, maybe no more red lobster. RIP to Mr. Red lobster himself. Mr. RL.

[00:24:44] Mr. RL. RL. The same guy. Let's go. Let's go to the next segment. Let's go to the next. I don't want to make fun of RL. Stine because he's cool. Yeah. He refused to touch. Oh God. All right. Well, um, so because Jamie, you are well-versed in the mister that is, you know, going to be

[00:25:13] part of what we're going to talk about today. But you also informed me that you have a lot of really interesting information on some oddball systems and consoles and just some funny facts. I don't know if they're funny, but just maybe facts that I can guarantee you that I don't know. And for sure, Aaron doesn't know. Okay. Okay. I mean, I have to admit, I have delved into some systems that, uh, that most people have probably not even heard of much less played.

[00:25:44] The short list that you said to me when we were talking on, on discord did not. I've heard of them, but I've never, I don't even know what they look like. So it'll be, it'll be fun to kind of poke around at what those are. Sure. Absolutely. I'm very interested. Go on. First things, first things first about the mister stuff. Let's, let's talk about how you got into this. So like, how did you start going down this rabbit hole? Like what brought you, oh wait, sorry.

[00:26:14] Shit. Aaron, thank you for highlighting that. I was fucking, I fucked up my own, our own show. Um, before we get into the topic, we ask all of our guests the same thing. What is your favorite video game memory? Okay. So, uh, I would have to say Christmas 1987. Uh, it was a good year. My brother got two games. You may have heard of them.

[00:26:41] One was called Castlevania and the other one was called the legend of Zelda. So I was nine years old. I'm kind of dating myself here. I was nine years old and he was six years old in that year. And so he got these games and he was trying to play Zelda and he was, you know, six year old. Zelda is a little tough for a six year old. And so, uh, you know, I did the, what any big sister would do. And I got out the construction paper and the crayons and I started drawing the maps.

[00:27:08] And so, yeah, I started drawing construction paper maps of the legend of Zelda. Uh, so we could figure out where we were going, like around the overworld and in the dungeons. And we, like during that Christmas break, we must've spent so many hours together there, uh, playing that, that game, uh, with it's like three songs. Um, and it's just kind of etched into my memory as this, like this, the best winter break ever.

[00:27:33] Uh, and you know, like I eventually those, those construction paper maps turned into like a folder of maps that became like a thing that we did together. Just kind of like, I was like the navigator and he kind of played the games. That was kind of like our, our thing that we did a lot. So that was probably, that's probably amazing. That's probably my happiest memory there of the retro. Yeah. And that's, that's why we love asking that question.

[00:27:59] Cause it's a very, it's a very personal question, but it's also like, you know, it's a, it's a little trip down memory lane and everybody's answer is always different. And it's really cool to hear all the different answers. Um, that's, that's so cool. Like that's, I mean, that is, you know, of its, of its time too. Like there was no internet. I mean, I'm not, I'm not much younger than you are.

[00:28:24] So I too remember a time when, you know, you, you didn't have these things at your fingertips where you just be like, I don't know how to beat this and type it into Google and then go to game FAQs and look up an entire walkthrough to figure it out. You had to, you had to do that shit. You had to draw maps, which is crazy. I mean, I, I distinctly remember the Zelda two palace. Have you ever played that game? Zelda two? Oh my God. You know what?

[00:28:48] I've, I've played it, but I've never finished it because even now that game is hard, man. That's a hard fucking game. The, the, the final palace. I remember drawing the map of that. It looked like some kind of schizophrenics drawing on the side of their cell. Because you know, it has all those warp rooms. It doesn't really mesh together properly. So like all these arrows all over the place. It was just a huge mess. It's like a fucking Rorschach test. Yeah. It was like, I don't even know how this is working. Just keep going in circles until you find a new path.

[00:29:18] And was it the first Castlevania that he had as well? It was the very first Castlevania. Just Castlevania. Nice. Oh yep. No math needed. Just go, just go right. That one's pretty linear. That one was easier. But Zelda was hard because you had to kind of, Simon's Quest. So the thing about Simon's Quest, it has many things to criticize, but the thing I will, I will stop to criticize is the floors that you fall through that have no indication that they're trapped floors. And you have to restart the whole palace. It's so bullshit.

[00:29:47] The whole mansion you have to restart when you fall through those four. It is the worst. It is such bad UX. It's all that bullshit too, where the game is like, go here and do this, but it doesn't actually tell you to do that. Like when you have to cast, it was like a wind spell or something at one point to like the white crystal. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it was. Or you kneel with the blue. Yeah. It had really notoriously poor translations. And also if you did well at it, they got the endings mixed up.

[00:30:17] So if you did well at it, you'd get the bad ending. What a horrible night to have a curse indeed. Yeah. Like it was something really gloomy for a kid too. Like you die at the end, like you, you win the game and you just die at the end. You do your very best only to get to the end of it. And they're just like, fuck you kid. You suck at this thing. Yeah. You didn't make it. Sorry. You weren't good enough. And that's where childhood trauma started for a lot of people. Oh yeah.

[00:30:47] That's why I'm like I am today. For me it was a duck hunt, man. Fuck that dog laughing at your failures. Fuck that duck hunt dog, dude. And that was harsh. Harsh. Harsh teacher. It really was. I mean, I didn't get to play a lot of NES. It wasn't the system that I got first.

[00:31:11] But I do remember playing a whole bunch of Mega Man when I was like a kid and just being like, this game is impossible. It's fun, but it's impossible. There's this is. I don't know how you're supposed to beat any of this shit. And I used to get pissed, too, because I used to think that like all the robot masters, when you pick them, that that's who you got to be. And I was like, this is dumb. Every time I pick these guys, I don't ever get to play as them. I was I was a dumb kid.

[00:31:40] We all were. Yeah. Kids are stupid. But yeah, so that's a that's that is a fantastic memory. And thank you for sharing that with us. So without further ado, let's talk about some Mr. stuff. So I wanted to ask you, how, Jamie, did you ever fall down this rabbit hole? What brought you to Mr. and like, how did you get started with this?

[00:32:09] Like so many things, I stumbled across a tweet and it was actually a tweet of Alexi Sorge Lake, who had added super graphic support to the TurboGrafx-16 core. Now, you have to understand that back then, Mr. was very rough. It's it only had like blurry ringing artifact video. It didn't have any filters. It didn't have any settings for that.

[00:32:38] It was like the Game Boy core had two color palettes. It was like eye searing white and lime green. Like it was it was really quite rough. There was no Super Nintendo core. There was it was. But I saw this and I was like, you know, this because at the time I had all the real consoles. I had them all lined up. You know, I was because I didn't really like the state of emulators.

[00:33:04] I was really discontent with emulators like they were good, but they didn't really capture the proper feel of an original system. They the audio. The audio is the thing I was the most sensitive to. And there's really almost no. At the time, at least, there was almost no software emulator that had less than 100 milliseconds of latency on its audio. And you can feel that that's several frames of latency on the audio.

[00:33:29] Most people are more sensitive to the video, but the audio cues lining up actually is significant, too. If you if you play them side to side, you'll feel it. So anyway, I saw this as like, you know, this is rough, but I can fix this up. If I if I get involved with this, maybe I can get it to where I want it to be. And that sounds a little ostentatious, but, you know, I was like a software developer. I'm like, I can chip in here. Maybe I can help this get to a place I want it to be.

[00:33:59] So, you know, I started getting more involved. I started being the person that sort of brought info to others. If you remember Smoke Monster, he was one of the YouTubers that brought a lot of information to the masses originally. And a lot of his information came from me. So I had a mister while I was still like he didn't have one yet. And so I would kind of explain how it was like working to him.

[00:34:26] And I give him clips of it and other things like that, that, you know, he kind of got got word out. Excuse me. He kind of got word out about it to to people that that, you know, we were kind of like collaborating on learning about together. And from there, I guess the community just kind of formed. And it just, you know, kind of took on a life. And, you know, developers got on board and kind of rolled into what it is today. That's crazy.

[00:34:55] I actually I did not know that you were involved that early with mister. Yeah, it was, I think, early to mid 2018. I want to say somewhere around there. Wow. Yeah, I think I think the first time that I ever heard about mister was on giant bomb because Jeff Gertzman was Jeff Gertzman and like Brad on giant bomb. They were really into mister. I think I think Jeff still like does like his retro streams. And I used to always be like, man, what the fuck is he playing on?

[00:35:23] Like, it looks so ancient looking. But like he's got like this crazy library of games and like he would talk about this mister FPGA thing. And I was just like, I don't know what the fuck that is. And I just kind of ignored it for a long time until a friend of mine. He got one. And I remember he but he like showed it to me. I was like, what the fuck is that thing? And he was like, dude, I just want you to play Super Mario World on this. OK, I just want you to play this.

[00:35:51] And I remember playing it and going, well, why does this feel so different from everything else that I've played for the last like 15 years in emulators? Like, why does why does this feel different? And to your point, it even sounded different. So then he starts showing me the Sega course. And he's like, listen to how fucking good this sounds.

[00:36:13] And I quickly started realizing that the mister had a level of accuracy that it was like very noticeable when you actually play it. Like, Aaron, if you ever, ever get your hands on a mister, you will immediately know what we're talking. Get PayPal going right now. I'm going to have to, man. Like, I really enjoy shmups, especially like vertical ones.

[00:36:40] But on a lot of like on my little Amber Nick device, it's a horizontal screen. So the screen is smushed and you've got black bars on the sides. And to try to get it set up to like to like Tate mode where it's like vertical, it's a pain in the ass. But it sounds like like mister would be the way to go with that. Like, it might be easier to set up that way. But yeah, the latency is a pain in the ass on those sometimes.

[00:37:07] Well, latency and accuracy are two of the things that we we care a lot about those. So it's not really just a matter of FPGAs being useful or conducive to those things doing well. It's also because the developers who are attracted to them care a lot about those things. So it's sort of twofold in that sense. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation. Like, it's a medium that lets us really express the accuracy we want to see when we're making a core.

[00:37:39] Yeah. Yeah. It's it's now Aaron, I did tell you before, though, like to to actually alleviate a little bit of that latency that you get from because on the Amber Nick, it's all running through Arc OS, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's all retro.

[00:37:56] So, yeah, you can you got to you got to turn on that run ahead, turn run ahead on to to put it on to and it should it should to it should it should it should help to reduce it quite a bit. I do remember like when I have my steam deck, because it's funny because I got a steam deck and I was like, okay, this is it, man. This is like my fucking this is my emulator thing. And this is all it's going to be is like this fucking crazy emulator box. Oh, yeah.

[00:38:25] And I spent like weeks and weeks setting it up and twerking, twerking. I did not twerk, but tweaking. I was tweaking and fuck it. Well, I was twerking. I was twerking on my steam deck. And I and I got to a point where I was like, oh, yeah, this is good. And then it would be like I'd throw something else on. I'd be like, oh, fuck, this doesn't work right. This doesn't feel right. So I had to like tweak something else.

[00:38:53] And then like I go over to my buddy's place and he's just like, we want to play. Let's throw it on. And he would just throw something on and it just fucking worked. And it felt amazing. And I was like, all right. And I listed my steam deck and I sold the steam deck and basically bought my mister out of the money that I got for my steam deck. That's and yeah, I haven't looked back since.

[00:39:16] What's a what are the chances you think of like ever getting a Mr. Handheld like a Mr. Handheld that does funny that every funny. Yeah. Yeah, there's rumors. There's rumors bouncing around right now. Yep. What's that? There's a Twitter account. I was just looking at it today. Apparently, like they're doing a test run right now with like this. They were going to go with an LCD screen, but now they're doing an OLED screen. Who? Fuck. What is the name of that account?

[00:39:45] I literally just started following them today. That'd be awesome. I mostly do handheld, which I guess is why I use the amber nickel a lot because I'll just be like. Like, hmm. I don't feel like sitting at my desk to play something. I think I'll sit upside down or like on my bed or somewhere else. And then. Yeah. But that'd be cool to have a handheld Mr. Even if it is. Yeah. Looks or something. I looked it up. It's a Twitter account. Taki Udon.

[00:40:16] And yeah, they tweeted out today. There seems to be a delay with the first trial batch of OLED screens. And then the update before that was quick update on the Mr. Handheld. We are moving to an AMOLED screen. Screen is better suited for a variety of aspect ratios and the panel characteristics are amazing. The MSRP of the handheld should still be roughly $150 or less if there's enough interest. Because I think they might be using that new Mr.

[00:40:45] I was going to ask you, Jamie, about that. The whole deal with this cheap DE10 knockoff thing. Do you know much about that? I've been following it. I'm still reserving judgment on it until I see what they come out with. In the FPGA space, there's been a lot of promises. And I'm kind of at the point where it's like, okay, well, I mean, maybe they'll get something out. Maybe they won't. But I'm not going to really count my chickens before they hatch. It might.

[00:41:12] Like if they can get out like a well-working board that's made to like good quality standards for the prices they say, that's going to be amazing for Mr. users. So don't get me wrong. I really hope they do. But I'm not going to subscribe to this is coming out until I kind of, you know, see things appear. They see things materialize. Because $150 for a handheld, that's ambitious.

[00:41:40] If they can pull that off, it would be outstanding. Yeah, especially like because, I mean, if you're comparing apples to apples, essentially, with the analog pocket, that's $229 US, I believe. That's pretty good. But the thing about the pocket is, we were kind of talking about this before we started recording, like the pocket is a cool piece of hardware. It's very nice.

[00:42:09] But the problem is, is that everything is kind of locked away. It's not nearly as open as the Mr. Like, you can't just, you can't just do the shit on the pocket. Like, even analogs other consoles that they have, like the Super NT. Like, you can't, you can't, like, that's running FPGA as well. But, like, you can't do anything else with it. It's just, it's locked behind all of their, like, proprietary stuff.

[00:42:38] But that's, again, that's what Jamie was saying about the Mr. Community. Everything is so open. And it's just, like, a lot of people coming together to make things for everybody. You know? Um, but yeah, if, if this handheld thing is what it says it is, uh, could be pretty nuts. Like, if we get, like, a Mr. Switch kind of thing going on. That'd be really cool. It's something people have wanted for quite a while. A handheld version of Mr. Yep.

[00:43:07] That was, it was actually one of the first things that, when I started looking into the Mr. stuff, because that was the first thing I was like, well, is there, like, a handheld? Because I didn't really know anything about it. So I was like, is there, like, a handheld version? And my buddy was like, there's the FPGA, or the, there's the analog pocket. But that's not really the same. Like, the pocket, essentially, is not a replacement. Or even really, like, it's, it's not on the same level as, as the Mr.

[00:43:34] It is FPGA, but it's just not the same. If that makes sense. Does that make sense, Aaron? Does that make sense? A little bit. All right. So we're still on. I mean, the pocket, the pocket's a good piece of hardware. But it has like a more specific use case. Like if you, if you want an FPGA in your pocket, I think it's a great little device. It has a wonderful screen. Everybody raves about the screen on the pocket.

[00:44:00] But it does have, like, it's $299 to start with $40 shipping. And like the dock is extra. I think it's like extra 100 or something. I want to say. It is. I paid for it. If you want it on your TV, it's like a little, little extra dollars there. And so it's, and the, the, the number of cores and the polishedness of the cores for it are not quite on the same level as Mr.'s. So it's, it's like kind of one, one step behind generally. And like what's available on it.

[00:44:31] Actually, the, the better cores on it are the ones that were community developed after they opened it. Like, like allowed everybody to use the open FPGA on it. Like those cores are far and away better. The only caveat with those other cores, there's a, there's a weird trade-off. You either, and I think, I think we talked about this on the last episode with Matt, Aaron, talking about how there's a trade-off of like these cores are better, but a lot of them don't support save states.

[00:45:00] Which I don't, I don't mind not using save states, but you can't put it to sleep because it uses save states to go to sleep. So there is like a, a little bit of a trade-off. Yeah. But it's also the, so the development on it is a little slower too. It has a smaller FPGA. That's one of the reasons it can't support the save states is because they tend to be kind of big. And the FPGA is a little smaller than Mr. So it can't hold the extra logic that it needs for those.

[00:45:28] And the other problem with it is that the, even though it's called open FPGA, the, the firmware for it is not open. It's closed source, unlike Mr.'s. And that makes meeting developers needs a little bit, a little bit more slow because they have to add them internally. So developers can get what they need. I think they have a save state API. I haven't really looked at it. So I think that's there. They just can't fit it or it doesn't mesh properly. I'm not, I'm not sure what the issue is with that.

[00:45:56] Have you done anything with the, with the pocket stuff? I have not. I pretty much focus exclusively on Mr. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, that's, that's, this is a perfect opportunity to bring up my next question. Which of the core, like which core specifically have you worked on? I know you mentioned earlier that you worked on the NES. Well, the NES is my favorite core. And you know that for my story earlier, you can tell why I really love that system.

[00:46:25] But yeah, I've done a lot of work on the, the NES. I completely rewrote the audio chip for that. I revamped a lot of the PPU, some of the mappers, some of like the DMA code in that and other techie things. But I wrote a lot of chunks for that. The saves, I added to several of the systems. Like before, I told you it was rough originally, like nothing could save. You couldn't save your game.

[00:46:53] So saving was something I added to several of the cores. I added like palettes and shadows and things to Game Boy. So I added, so TurboGrafx-16, it has like a different palette than everybody else uses. Because they, they found like this hidden palette in the conversion of the composite. So I, with Artemio's help and some other folks, Dave and a few other people, FurTech,

[00:47:21] we figured out the correct palette for that. And I managed to get it into a form that we could use it on Mr. Let's see, Genesis. I did some of the work with the ladder effect. I added the pure Solar mapper. I did a lot of general work on some of those cores. So I've been kind of a generalist with many of the larger cores that have been kicking around. I can't really list everything I've done. But I've also written several cores.

[00:47:50] So the, the 78, the Atari 7800 and 2600 core. I wrote that one pretty much completely. Holy shit. The supervision core. If you've ever heard of that system, Wattara supervision. It's just an awful little handheld. It's awful? It is an awful, awful handheld. I can't, sorry. I can't say a good thing about it, but I'm sure there is someone out there. There's like three people right now that are just crying into their pillow. But one day you woke up and you were like, you know what the world needs?

[00:48:21] I was like, no one else is going to do this. Somebody's got to. It's going to be me. The, the game mate. That's another one of those systems. The, the, the creative vision. I think I wrote that core. It's like an old computer slash gaming thing. What else? Um, so I've ported slash worked on some other cores to the adventure vision, which is, I'm

[00:48:50] not even sure I would call that a console. It's more like a handheld electronic device. Uh, it's, it's got a very, so the way that it works is it has like a mirror that spins kind of like the virtual boy and it projects like, like sort of like LEDs. It's got like a rotating thing that projects LEDs onto us. Like it's like those fans, you know how those fans work that draw the little pictures. Like the, like the, like the, the, the, the clocks and shit. It's almost like a hologram. It kind of works like that.

[00:49:18] It's got, uh, four games and I, um, somebody had sort of like written 75% of a core for that. So I kind of brought that to the, the, uh, the goalposts. Um, that is insane. Yeah, no, there's some fun things. Uh, let's not forget the mega duck. The mega duck. My, my contributions. Um, let's see what else.

[00:49:43] So I was, uh, along with Sultan, I was pretty in, um, I was pretty involved with the audio filters. Uh, they did a lot of the work on it, but I kind of was like involved in, um, getting those going originally. Like, uh, you know how every core you can add an audio filter. So if you, if you want something to sound like it's composite, you can do that. Or, you know, like RF or something. Uh, you can do that. And it's particularly important for cores like NES and Genesis and those things to have this

[00:50:12] because they, they use it more, um, more in depth. Like the, the CD mixing, for example, with, uh, the turbographics, all those things kind of use this technology from the same, uh, edition there. So, um, that I was involved with that, uh, cheat codes. Uh, I was heavily involved in, in getting cheat codes into the cores. Oh shit. So that whole system. Yeah. That's awesome. So Rimsky, who is the, he happens to be a Mr. Fan.

[00:50:37] And he is, um, also the, the, uh, uh, I don't know what to call it. The, the leader of, um, game hacking, the, where all the, the codes live. Oh. Yeah. So there's like this whole site dedicated to codes. He's the leader of that. He has a Mr. And like, we got together and he, uh, provided like these packs of cheats and I did a lot of the, the, uh, FPGA code for them. And so we got that going. Uh, and that's one of my favorite features. Cause I don't know about you.

[00:51:06] I don't have time to grind through dragon warrior anymore. I know you, you, I swear to God, you have saved my fucking life because of these cheats. Like there's a lot of times we will get to like the last, I, I can't, I think it was, uh, I want to say Mega Man X five. We got to, to Sigma and we were like, this is fucking impossible. How the hell are you supposed to beat this? Like it's impossible.

[00:51:32] We were like an hour and a half beating our heads against the fucking walls, trying to beat this last boss. And finally my buddy was like, you know what? Fuck this. Fuck this. We're turning on cheats. We're turning on cheats. Just infinite lives. Fuck all this. And that's what we did. We turned on cheats, but I mean, I've definitely used cheats for other things too. Like I think we, we definitely used, uh, cause I mean, look, you probably know as well

[00:51:57] as I know if you're playing contra, the goddamn contra code is still not enough. It's not enough. So we just were like, just give us, you know what? Give it, I don't need invincibility or none of that shit. I still want to challenge. I just don't want to have to fucking start over every time, man. Like, you know, you know, my favorite cheat is gold, gold and RPGs. I hate grinding gold. So I just give myself all the gold and like that. That's, that's usually all I need to, to make it through like a little, a little easier,

[00:52:26] a little faster. Uh, that's my favorite, favorite cheat. So, uh, what else with contributions? Um, well, beyond all of that, uh, largely I kind of am involved in, um, some community management too, not just like in the discord and kind of keeping the piece there. That's kind of like the smaller piece of what I do. But, uh, like I talked to Alexi regularly.

[00:52:50] So if you know Alexi or Sorgeleg, he can be hard to reach sometimes with ideas. And, um, part of what I do is I kind of watch the community and I see, I kind of use my judgment to see like, okay, this is a pain point people are having, or this is something that, that all these, all these things that people are saying, I can kind of see it painting the picture of this feature that we need.

[00:53:17] And so I will often be the one that goes to him and makes the pitch, uh, like, Hey, I really think we should add this. And here's like why I think it's important. And I've gotten pretty good at, uh, at getting him to give thumbs up to stuff. Um, and so I do, I do some like project management in that sense where I'm kind of working to get features in that, uh, otherwise would meet with some resistance. So that's mostly what I do.

[00:53:45] Kind of like, I don't want to, I don't want to frame it like that, but you know, like I, I, uh, I sometimes can convince him. Okay. Well, I mean, it's for the better because I feel like you're the, I mean, don't sell yourself short. You have contributed a insane amount to this, this project in this community. Like the, a lot of this shit wouldn't be possible without you. I wouldn't be able to be contra without you. So there you go. Probably not air song.

[00:54:15] We got to use that infinite life's cheat on the last level of air song. Shit's impossible. Yeah. Yeah. I heard that. I think you, you and my friend both said the exact same thing. That game was not that difficult until the very last level. And it just goes fucking hamburgers. It's just, yeah, it's, it's just boss rush on top of final boss that has like three stages. And it's, it's stupid. It's stupid. It's dumb.

[00:54:44] Um, so of your contributions, uh, to the project, what would you say would be the most difficult one that you've had to, to pull off? Well, there's different kinds of difficulty. There's like things that are technically difficult. Like, how do I do this? Like, what is the mystery? And there's things that are difficult in a more like, this is just a nightmare. It's full of bugs and I don't know what to do. But cumulatively, all of those things put together, I would say,

[00:55:14] adding Atari 2600 support to the 7800 core was probably the most difficult thing I did. And the reason it was so hard, you would, you're like 2600. That system is like weaker than my pocket calculator. I have watches infinitely more powerful than that system. The reason it was so difficult is because when people were making games for that, the system was so anemic. They used every single cycle.

[00:55:42] You may have seen racing the beam and heard all that, that term before where people, you know, it's kind of like a documentary of how, like, how focused they were on getting a Atari running at optimal efficiency. Well, they did. And there is, they, being off by one cycle could break games. So, like, I had to chase down every tiny little inaccuracy, every clock misalignment with the asynchronous clocks that it has.

[00:56:09] Like, there's even one game, Cosmic Arc. It's like a spaceship where you kind of shoot the rocks coming at you and stuff. Well, it has this notorious star field in the background, which has sort of oddly shaped stars. Like, you know, they're just lines, but, like, some of them are long lines and some of them are short lines. And for the longest time, people couldn't figure out why it wasn't just drawing dots there. Because if the system all worked according to, like, how the schematics and everything

[00:56:38] sort of said it should, it should just be drawing dots. Well, it turns out it came down to something like a 20 nanosecond propagation delay, which created an extra falling edge of the clock and triggered, like, an extra movement in the H move that got it kind of stuck drawing. And so that's the level of, like, persnickety this thing is, that TI chip. Holy shit. And so that one was a huge headache to get accurate.

[00:57:04] I went through every one of those god-awful games a hundred times to try to get that thing accurate. I'm serious. They sound like ass. I'm sorry. They are just the worst. That's okay. I'm not an Atari fan. It's just, yeah. I also am not an Atari fan. Here at Retro Rehab, we hate Atari. But we love Jamie's, we love your contributions to the Atari community. However. It's a piece of history.

[00:57:34] You know, it had to be there. The old core existed, but it had lots of problems for the same reasons that I just discussed. And it was like, okay, well, you know, I want Mr. to be great. I want this to have an accurate way of playing this, at least as good as the emulator. So kind of like, all right, I dedicated myself to that. Which is cool. Because I mean, I'm sure there's people out there that are like, fuck yeah, 7800. Right in my alley.

[00:58:01] Well, I mean, 7800, there are few enthusiasts, but there are some. The 2600, there are more people who that was part of their life. And I just think it's important to have them both represented, honestly. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I was just joking about hating Atari. I mean, I just don't have any. No, I know. I'm right there with you. I hate to say I could not make it like 20 minutes with one of those games. Sometimes it's funny because like sometimes I'll just throw on some.

[00:58:29] I'll be like, let's just like, let's just check out some Atari or something. Like maybe there's like a hidden gem or something here. There's not a single goddamn one. There's none. There's no hidden gems. If you want to amuse yourself briefly with 7800, try like Ninja Golf. It will amuse you just by its absolute sheer ridiculousness, honestly. Ninja Golf? Ninja Golf. You play, you're on a golf course, you hit the golf ball, and then you fight off ninjas to get to your ball so you can hit it again.

[00:58:58] That could be a good game show. You're a comedy gold. That sounds awesome. A good game show. That's like, that's just the most extreme elimination challenge. That's exactly what that sounds like. It reminds me of a Japanese game show, actually. I could see that totally as a Japanese game show. I love it. Just. Oh, man. On my Amber next thing, I have yet to ever add. Well, I guess I've added like two Atari Jaguar games to it, but I have yet to ever add an Atari 2600 or anything in between that.

[00:59:29] I've added like a couple Pokemon mini games. You know, like a little Pokewalker, I think is what it's called. The little Pokewalker that came with. Gold and Soul Silver. No. No. Is there never? What is it? I think there's a different thing called the Pokemini or something like that, but I've installed like a Pokemon. There's a Pokemini core on Mr. Yeah, that's probably what it is I'm thinking of. Yes. Okay.

[00:59:55] I got those mixed up, but yeah, I've installed like five Pokemini games, but not a single Atari 2600 game. I'll be goddamn. If you ever get drunk enough, try Warlords. It's a paddle game. It's actually fun with enough alcohol. Hell yeah. It's basically just, it's like a four player pong where you're sort of defending your, it's

[01:00:22] kind of like, it's kind of, it's kind of like air hockey, you know, it's like that, but with four people. Oh, it's got a really cool cover. But you know, it's kind of, I'm trying to, I'm trying to find something that's okay for it. I'm sorry. Digging deep, trying to find those Atari gems. I'm watching a little video of it and yeah, it does look like fun if you had a bunch of really drunk friends around. Yeah. Ooh. It's the Mario Party of 1980.

[01:00:51] No, I want to be the purple paddle. No, I'm the purple paddle. This friendship is over. So before, before, before we go further, can we take a bathroom break really, really fast? Is that, is that all right? Yeah, get it. Get it. Cool. Okay. Yep. Do your bathroom thing. All right.

[01:01:16] I was looking at kind of like comparing the, the, the price of say getting one of those big Mr. Kits that comes with like the aluminum case and like the heat sink and all that stuff. By the way, no fan. That's awesome. That's really, really cool. You can do fanless. Yeah. Yeah. I have a, I have the, the fan in mind. When I went to build mine, those aluminum cases were sold out and I messaged Porkshop

[01:01:45] and he was like, I actually am like totally sold out. And I was like, ah, shit. So I did not snag one. And then when they came back up, I was going to grab that purple one. Cause I fucking love that purple one. I want that green one so bad, dude. My, my dev mister is, uh, one of his, one of Porkchop's cases and I love it. And the, um, the one that I, I throw in my bag to take on like vacations and stuff. That is actually one of the retro castle cases.

[01:02:11] If you've ever seen them, they've got like the three buttons, uh, like the, they look like Skittles on top. It's kind of like a different form factor. It's a little bit smaller. So what they do is they combine the USB board with the, uh, the, um, the IO board. And so you've got like only four, four USB ports, but it's flatter. It's like a smaller package and they have like a nice pink, like aluminum one. That's what I've got for, uh, for like my travel, travel slash living room. Mister. That's your travel mister.

[01:02:42] Yup. Aaron again, dude, it's time. It's time. Get the wallet out. Yeah. I was, um, I was doing like price comparisons between like the mister. And then you guys were talking about how the, the analog pocket, like it's cool, but it's like, it's kind of mad at the same time. It's probably about like the same price to buy. Um, now that, now that I'm looking at the, um, the retro castle site there, you can buy like a whole, like the pink one. I'm seeing it right now. Four 67.

[01:03:11] You can buy it for $467, uh, USD the, the miss or the, um, analog pocket. That thing. If you've got like the cons, if you've got the pocket itself, yeah, the pocket and the dock. Yeah. It's fucking expensive dude. And all of the add ons for like game gear and a Neo Geo pocket color, all that stuff. They're probably going to need the same amount of money as it would to just buy a goddamn mister. So, and it, it does not have analog out yet.

[01:03:39] From my understanding, they have like some kind of converter, but I don't think it works with that at the moment. If you care about like analog, I don't know if you have, if you're a CRT person or not, but that's a deal breaker for some. They've got transparent cases. Oh my God. Oh yeah. There's, there's a lot of relief. Yeah. Yeah. See, this is, ah, we got him, Jamie. He's starting to go down the rabbit hole. I can see it. I can see it.

[01:04:05] We can see the fucking glare of money slipping out of your fingertips. This is the sound of falling down the rabbit hole. Thump, thump, thump. It totally is. All right, this one's. Oh shit. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to get a text next week and the air is going to be like, I can't afford to do retro rehab anymore. I had to take a second job. Just sell my camera.

[01:04:31] I sold, I sold everything in my house for a Mr. Second mortgage, everything. Like Jeff with those fucking, the Game Boy Advance, the e-reader cards. Yeah. The e-reader cards. With the Mr., can you use like, like original controllers from other consoles or does it have its own like proprietary controller that Jeff used with it? That's an interesting question.

[01:04:57] So I would say that the best way to use Mr. would be with USB controllers, like a PS5 controller or whatever your modern controller of choice would be, because it does support pretty much all of the modern controllers nicely. And it's got very low latency. And if you want to fall down that rabbit hole, we have spreadsheets of how fast they go. Like we know the latency. I went by that spreadsheet. Was it Vampyr that made that? Well, that was Lemonese and Porkchop actually.

[01:05:27] Oh, really? I mean, it was sort of a community effort to get the ball rolling on that. But Porkchop kind of spearheaded, like really expanding it into a lot of controllers. And then Lemonese turned it into a nice searchable database. Yeah. It's very, very nice to go through that. And dude. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, Jamie. I will say one more thing. If you want to use like an original controller, like you have some Nest controller, like the Nest Mega or something that you just have to use, you can use this little device we have

[01:05:57] called Snack, which interfaces directly with the FPGA. And it lets you, it just talks just like it's talking to a real system. So you have like the authentic controller operating on the system. That's awesome. Like if I, uh, further down the rabbit hole, I've got, yeah, I've got 8 million NES controllers. I've got like three Dreamcast controllers and, uh, some VMUs and stuff like that. That, yeah. Yep. That's, that's intermediate stuff.

[01:06:28] Intermediate stuff. After you've, after your mister has come in the mail, we can get you started with that. Yeah. Let's keep, let's keep talking about mister. The thing, the thing that I will say though, is that there's, there are controllers that you would think would be a lot lower latency that aren't. And one of the weirdest things that I came across was when I discovered, cause I was like,

[01:06:54] oh, well with this N64 core, I'm going to play with the Nintendo on Nintendo online N64 controller, the one for switch. Oh. And everybody was like, just make sure you play wireless. And I was like, why the fuck would I play wireless? It, it is lower latency wirelessly than it is plugged in directly. Switch controllers are so slow. They have such a weird protocol too. They're oddball controllers. The pro controllers or the, um. All of them.

[01:07:23] All the switch controllers are, none of the switch controllers are really fast per se. Weird. Now the PS5 controller is like blazing fast. That thing is like four milliseconds. It's very good. That's cool. So that's the one I would recommend is, is the PS5 one. And you can use the touchpad as a mouse and like any cores or a light gun in games that. Oh shit. I didn't know that. Yeah. That's, that's awesome. What? It's hard to play them that way, but you know, if you just kind of want to just dunk around with it.

[01:07:52] Here's, here's a question about light gun stuff. What would you recommend is the optimal way to do light gun stuff with a mister? That's very subjective. I personally like Wiimote because I'm not that into light gun games. It's a little bit different than, uh, than the original experience of a light gun where you're just like a 10 year old, like touching the screen with the light gun and trying to hit the ducks.

[01:08:18] But, um, but if you are the kind of person that needs the CRT slash original light gun experience, you can do that with snack. So I would say Wiimote mouse or snack, depending on, on you, what you need. Okay. I didn't realize that you could use the Wiimote. Do you just have to get like a USB sensor bar? Yeah. Oh man. You just pair it. It knows what to do. Mostly.

[01:08:49] Holy shit. That's kind of, you're kind of blowing my mind now. Cause I did not know that that was possible. And there's so many cool arcade, like light games and shit. You know, Taggo is constantly pumping out fucking arcade games. And there's, there's so many good light gun games. Oh my God. I love a light gun game. That was another one of my contributions. I did the original light gun code for Mr. Uh, for the score. Yeah. So I wrote the right gun stuff and I worked on, um, Alexi did like the, the framework part of that. And I, I did the core part.

[01:09:19] And so like the original like stuff for that was, was, um, I was part of that. So hang on. Here's, here's a, um, a little bit more in-depth question about the Wiimote stuff. Okay. Does that mean that I could play Mario paint with a Wiimote? Uh, as a mouse. Yes. It can work as a mouse. Oh, shit. I mean, if you want to, I would just use, you know, a mouse, but if you really want

[01:09:48] to, like any other mouse, what should I use to play Mario paint? That would be like a mouse. How about a mouse? Yeah, you do. I didn't even think about just booking a fucking mouse. Yeah. You can use any old, uh, USB mouse. It'll work. Wow. Oh man. Maybe I should play some more. I love Mario paint so goddamn much. You should get one of those. You should get a mouse. One of those old, um, the SNES mouse.

[01:10:17] No, I was going to say like, um, a mouse that has like a track ball on the top. Uh, I forget what the heck the name was for those, but they were like huge. My coworker uses one of those and he's, it makes sense that he uses it because, I don't know, man. I feel like. It's like playing like one of those bowling arcade games where it has that track ball that you just go crazy on, but it's like on the top of your mouse. I could never get into a track ball on a, on a mouse. I could never do it.

[01:10:44] They have, even though dude, like music, like in music production, it's a huge thing. And as a music producer, I cannot get behind it. I just can't, I cannot get my head around it. I don't know. It just doesn't feel right. So super weird thing to add to all this, but there's, um, at the local Chuck E. Cheese, they have this super lucky ball arcade game that has like a little track ball in it.

[01:11:10] So yeah, to roll I and his little friends down the lane, you just, just go totally crazy on that ball and you'll see I just tumble in and it's, it's great. Like I want to, dude, I'm going to be honest. I'm going to be totally fucking transparent here. I did not expect the sentence at your local Chuck E. It's really not local. It's not all local. It's like, well, it's gotta be pretty local. Cause you've never left Iowa.

[01:11:37] I have, I have, I've gone to other States, but I've never gone to like the coast. I've gone to North Dakota, South Dakota. Um, I've gotten all the Dakotas, Wisconsin. I've gone to like everywhere there is in the Midwest. I just, I know I haven't, I haven't gone to any coast ever. Oh man. I love this about you, dude. I swear to God, this is so good.

[01:12:06] Uh, please continue. Yes, I will. Um, so yeah, we, we talked a bit about the, uh, the oddball systems that you, that you, you, you, you, you know, you contributed to these cores of just absolute absurd shit that I haven't, I, there's some things that you said earlier that I've not heard about until today. Um, so I, I kind of, I'm curious, like, do you, what does your actual physical collection look like?

[01:12:36] Like, what do you have any physical consoles still? You're going to be so disappointed. So I have, I have, uh, I do have physical consoles still. They are all in my basement in storage containers. Uh, so the, the, the era of my systems is really fifth gen and before, like I was like, my three big ones are like the NES, the SNES and PSX. So I'm very boring in that sense, but I did have a pretty, I did have Genesis.

[01:13:05] I did have TurboGrafx. I had a lot of the other more popular ones, but I am not, um, I have actually strong beliefs that collecting original things doesn't solve the problem. It's one of the reasons I love Mr. So much is because although I like the original experience that I get from an original NES, I don't believe it's sustainable. I mean, eventually that thing's going to give out. Eventually it won't exactly hook up well to the TV.

[01:13:35] Eventually it'll just be so cumbersome to use. I won't use it anymore. And so I really believe on taking the original experience or even the ideal experience of the original console and making it work on modern things in as close to the same way we can do it as possible. And that's kind of like my, that's kind of my goal with Mr. Is to take these things that I loved and all the things that I loved about them and

[01:13:59] make them accessible to everybody without getting as, you know, a $2,000 PVM and a $700 upscaler and, you know, like a modified NES and all these things that get, I mean, if you think Mr. Is expensive, you should see how expensive original consoles are. Oh, I mean, I think I might've said it on here before, but in 2017, right before we moved

[01:14:25] from the East coast to the West coast, I did start going down this rabbit hole of collecting retro consoles and games. And all I initially was intending to do was to recreate my childhood like collection. I had a Super Nintendo. No, I had a Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, S64, PS1. And I was just going to be like, I'm just going to recreate my, and it just got out of control. It never stops there. And it just never stopped. And I was just like, what if I buy Earthbound?

[01:14:54] What if I, what if I get crazy and buy Earthbound? And then my wife was like, how fucking much is that? How much is that goddamn game? No, no, the fuck you're not. You're not buying that game. And then I'm stuck buying like fucking Jurassic Park for Super Nintendo. I mean, like, yeah, man, I got my Jurassic Park. And then like, I started buying stuff that, you know, I started going off the guardrails of just my childhood collection. Nope. Now I'm buying shit just because, oh, that's a good deal.

[01:15:23] And when we got ready to move, I was like, I got to get rid of this stuff. I don't want to, I don't want to. I mean, props to people like, I know a friend of ours, Bill, who does a gaming collecting podcast. He's got a pretty wild collection and like props to people that have these crazy collections of stuff. Like there's a guy out here in Alberta. I think he just goes by like the N64 guy.

[01:15:47] He has like an Instagram account and he has like this room that's literally like every fucking N64 game ever made. And it's just, he has like all the different, what were the, what were the, was it fantastic or something? What was the, the see-through, the clear transparent ones? I can't remember. Yeah. I think they was, I think those are fantastic. The cool looking, the ones that look like gummy bear, like gummy, gummy peach rings, like those, those kinds of ones. There was like that, the green one. And there was like a pinkish purplish one.

[01:16:16] Like, yeah, he has like all those. And it's like, that's really cool. But for me, I got to a point where I was like, I don't, I don't want to do this. I think I just want to, I want to shift to digital. And it was actually at that time when I stopped buying physical games altogether and I just moved whoops. And I moved totally to digital only. Like I just, all my shit is digital now. I don't own, I have a one physical copy of a Super Nintendo game and that's Secret of

[01:16:46] Mana 2, Second Netsu 3. That's the only thing I have. I have so few. So I have a couple of, of, um, I have a couple of NES games that I put on display just because I like the way they look like I have Crystallis, which is like a, an SNK game that I, uh, you know, we played that a lot. I just like to see it. I just like to see it on the shelf. So I like, I think that if your goal is to collect because you like to have things, like you like to see things, I think that's good.

[01:17:12] If you're collecting to play games, I think there's better ways to do it. Like if you, if you want, if you're, if you care about the experience first and foremost, I don't really think collecting is the right thing anymore. But once upon a time, that's the only way to get like a good experience. I think we, we have fortunately moved to a new era now. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I I'm with you there because like, I also want to get a couple of more, I really

[01:17:38] like, like the Japanese, um, like boxes and stuff for like the super Nintendo, like the family, super Famicom stuff. Cause like the family cartridges, Aaron, have you ever seen the box art for the Japanese super Metroid? Metroid. I think I have it on a shirt actually. It's fucking crazy dude. Like, you know, granted we still got a decent looking, you know, box art for, for the American

[01:18:04] release, but like that super Nintendo one is something else, man. And like all the, all the dragon quest boxes, like I'm going to get some of that stuff and just put them on display. Come try Mega Man too. Sometime. If you ever know. We did that on the last episode. Yeah. Yeah. The last episode I found this picture of, it was like Mega Man one through six, I think on Famicom and the Famicom did it right. God damn it. All their cartridges were so colorful and cool.

[01:18:32] And the, the stickers on the cartridges just looks so much better than the ones on, on the NES that we got here in North America. I mean, we're talking about how like, it'd be cool to just buy those and frame them because they look so fucking cool. Like it'd be fun. Well, I mean that, that Mega Man two box art, Jamie, yeah, you're right. It's like atrocious in North America. It's like, his heel is like broken and like his arm is backwards.

[01:18:58] And like, he's got like, like, why is Mega Man a 52 year old man? Like, with a gun, with a handgun. With a squatting expression. Like, what is he looks like? Like, who is this man? Oh, that's just Hank. Hank goes out and fights crime in his blue tights. Mega Man three. They were, they were getting closer, but Mega Man looks like one of the, uh, the Rice Crispy dudes. He looks like a fucking Cabbage Patch Kid.

[01:19:28] In Japan, they got these cool anime things too. It's like this cool anime thing. Yeah. Oh God. I think the Chrono Trigger box was also better in Japan. If I'm remembering it correctly. Isn't it, is that just like the plain white one? I think. I want to say it had like those cool, like, didn't it have like a more, I could be misremembering. Um, cause there was a lot of cool Chrono art. Oh no, you're right. Yeah. It's, it's white.

[01:19:56] It's just like a white thing, but it has the whole cast of characters on it. Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah. It looks really good. Yup. Man. Um, yeah, I'm a sucker for these, um, for these, like the Japanese box arts. I'm supposed to be going to, I'm going to Japan in March coming and I'm probably going to

[01:20:19] stock up on a, on a bunch of, uh, I'll take lots of pictures of the ocean for you, Aaron. Okay. Okay. I should, I should just like take a picture of like ocean water. No, I'll just take a, I'll take a picture of just like the color blue and be like, look at it, Aaron. Cause you won't know the difference.

[01:20:42] It's just the maps that Jamie made back in 87 for Zelda on blue construction. They were like, look at it, Aaron. Look how pretty it is. You just spilled some of your Japanese Snapple on the ground. You're like, look, Aaron. That's the Atlantic or whatever. See how jiggly it is. Oh shit. Oh, oh man. I don't know why I love the fact that you haven't seen the ocean so much.

[01:21:12] I mean, it'll happen one of these days where we're talking about going down to like, uh, going down to Texas or something. One of these days, but, uh, with, with kids and stuff, but eventually. You might see the Gulf, Gulf of Mexico. It's a lot like the ocean. That's true. That's close as I'll ever get. Just keep telling yourself lies at all these places that aren't the ocean, but look kind of like the ocean. We have lots of ponds and like lots of lakes in Iowa. So I mean like that's, they have waves.

[01:21:42] So it's like the same thing. Yeah. They're basically the same scale. I live close to a place called pigeon lake. Pigeon lake. Pigeon lake. Skunk river. That's cool. Yeah. Welcome to Iowa. I have some, uh, some river Hudson. Have you ever heard of it? Hudson river. No, I don't. It's a little river. I don't think that's some river, man. That'll get you. That one's a, that's a doozy.

[01:22:11] That one. That's where the mob dumps you. No, we're talking about, they're, they're making fun. Well, not they, but, uh, Jerry's making fun of me because we've never seen the, I've never seen the ocean. I'll see. Cheyenne's never seen it either. Thanks Cheyenne. Yep. She was looking at vacations. She's in the other room. Just scrolling through pictures of, she just Googled the ocean. She's like, just scrolling and be like, uh, just looking at the ocean. Okay. Let's, yeah. Let's keep going. I'm sorry Cheyenne.

[01:22:44] All right. Retro rehab. Rehab. So what was I going to ask? I mean, the notes are in front of you. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're kind of, we're kind of going over it. Uh, talking about your, like the physical collection, um, which is fine. Cause like, I don't, I don't own, well, I own a Dreamcast and a PS2 and a, and a Wii U. And that's like, I have them for my setup.

[01:23:12] Cause like dream, there's no real good way to do a Dreamcast. So I just went and bought one, but I, I also did that GDMU mod and just loaded a fucking terabyte micro SD up and away you go. Um, I kind of feel like that about the, uh, the DS and 3DS. That's the only one that I've really collected for. Cause there, there really isn't a good way to play those games. Like you can't play, I mean, you kind of play them on your phone, but it's not the same.

[01:23:41] Like you don't have the actual stylus in your hand. You don't have the, uh, the beeps and the boops of the 3DS UI and stuff. It's not the same. You don't got that 3d that hurts your eyes after looking at it for three seconds. It's not bad. It's not that bad. It kills your battery, but it's not that bad. I always turn it. I, there's very few games that I've ever played with it on. Actually, you know what? I think the best implemented, uh, you playing a Robobot.

[01:24:11] That was pretty good. Um, but the, the, the NES remakes that they did in 3d. Yeah. They work really well. Like they, yeah, they, they actually look really cool. Um, but yeah. So Jamie, what would you say is the most wackadoodle system that you know of? Cause like, I mean, you said some shit earlier that had my eyes rolling in the back of my

[01:24:38] cause I, I don't know what the fuck a mega duck is. I don't know. I like, I thought that might've been like a spoof of like the mega drive. So the, the weirdest one that I know of that I would consider like an actual console. Uh, I mean the adventure vision that I mentioned earlier with the spinning LEDs, that one's way up there. Yeah. That is some weird shit. Um, there is, there's one, it's less interesting, but it's got the CPU is on the carts.

[01:25:08] So like every cart is like its own little system that you plug into it. That's called the, uh, cassette vision. Oh. That one's pretty strange. Wait, what was, was there any Mario shit for that? There's no, absolutely not. That was, uh, cause I know Atari era kind of stuff. Hang on. I have to show this cause I don't even think I've showed this to you, Aaron. Uh oh.

[01:25:40] I like how the mega duck, uh, I was looking up on Wikipedia. It's also known as the cougar kid. That's a pretty cool name. It's a bizarre, it's, it's a, it's a system that people only know of because its name is so weird. The mega duck. Mega duck. What you got? This is a cassette tape. Trapped in the what? Perilous pit. Okay. What is that for?

[01:26:10] Exactly. It's like an audio book? I, I, I don't really know. And I've had this since I was a child. Cause this is, this is from 1990. And yeah, I, I remember when we were moving out this way, um, my mom was like, Hey, what do you stop by the house and make sure that like, if there's any thing in our basement that like you want. And it wasn't a lot, but like, I remember looking over and seeing this thing and being like, what the fuck is that?

[01:26:38] So for the listeners, I'm holding a cassette tape that has the Nintendo logo on it and Super Mario brothers trapped in the perilous pit. Uh, I don't have any way to actually listen to this, but I believe it was part of like some like book. It came with a book. Yeah. Yeah. And you would like play it along with the book and I'm pretty sure it used to have like a thing. It'd be like, turn the page now.

[01:27:07] But yeah, it's a, it's the weirdest thing I have. Yeah. That's the weirdest shit I have. So that actually reminds me. So if you don't mind some, some of the, uh, the peripherals I've seen are probably even weirder than the system. Oh, hit me with those weird peripherals. So the Atari 2600 and my adventures there, they really did some, some strange stuff and probably the weirdest amongst them. I believe it was called mind link. Uh, it was this thing that you put on your head, like a, like a, like a tiara or something.

[01:27:36] And you would try to control the games with your mind mind. And it was actually trying to read like your temporal muscles. I don't believe that one made it to market or was on market long, but it was a real peripheral that Atari was actually trying to develop the mind thing. Uh, and I guess it read like the, your, your eyebrow muscle twitches or something. And, uh, I was to say, I don't think that one tested well in the market groups or whatever, man. Oh man.

[01:28:04] We thought the power glove was shit. It looks like a, it looks like a Naruto headband with the Atari logo. Yeah. Did you find it? Yeah. It's I found a flyer for it where they're like our newest brainchild, the Atari mind link system. Yep. Oh, what the heck? There was also, uh, there was a sing-along tape for the Atari. And this is what reminded me of it.

[01:28:29] Uh, there was like a Smurfs and Berenstain Bears, uh, sing-along tape for the, for the Atari and had like a tape cassette thing and it would somehow control it back and forth. Uh, and I don't think I ever implemented that cause I just couldn't find like enough information on the device, but yeah, you could play this game along with like the surfs, the Smurfs singing along with it. Um, in some way it was like a. Oh God. Educational accounting game kind of thing. Holy shit. Man.

[01:28:58] What was the, what was that, uh, gam, gamate? Gamate? That was just a very mediocre, uh, Game Boy wannabe. Um, it had a green and white, like a green, you know, like a pea soup colored screen with, uh, sort of like, you know, very, very Game Boy-esque, but maybe a little lower quality. If you can picture that you probably can't because you could barely see the Game Boy screen as it was.

[01:29:23] So there's not much to picture, but in any case, it was just a really like poor quality Game Boy, basically. And the SuperVision you mentioned? The SuperVision was a little more fun because for a while there, they were actually trying. They really wanted to make something. It's a Chinese system. It, um, it had, uh, a variety of games, uh, nothing that you would like. They were mostly like knockoffs of, of games you might recognize. One of them, I believe that's the one that had Snake.

[01:29:52] I remember that one because it had a very special mode for its audio. And so like, I listened to the intro to it a million times. It goes like snake at the beginning of it. So I heard that like a thousand times. Um, that was kind of funny system. It's, it's mediocre to an extreme. I even, even subpar to an extreme. It's, uh, it also had a poor quality screen, um, with, uh, horrible ghosting.

[01:30:22] So that was the biggest problem is you couldn't see what you're doing. Cause the ghosting on the screen was so bad. You know, it's like kind of weird. This is kind of a side. Uh, over the weekend, uh, a friend of mine was talking about how he kind of wanted to grab, uh, another GBA because we've been playing, uh, the four swords on GameCube with our, our pockets. And he was like, ah, if we wanted to add a third player, like maybe I just grabbed like a cheap GBA.

[01:30:50] But then he was like, I kind of want to get one with like the screen mod. And I was like, why don't you just get the, the SP one Oh one? Isn't that like the one that everybody goes for? And he was like, actually that thing is to me, he was like, not as good as getting like the OG one with like a good screen mod. Cause he said like, and he was like, I don't know if you knew this, but the, I guess the one Oh one has like kind of bad ghosting on it.

[01:31:16] Well, there's, I believe the one Oh one had two different screens that it could have. If I'm not mistaken, I think the older screen did have a pretty bad ghosting cause they hadn't really adapted to the backlight. And the later ones, they got like a, an OLED screen or just a better screen that had, um, less ghosting. It was a more appealing one, but it's, it's hard to figure out which one you're going to get until you have it. And honestly, I would say that the form factor of the original was nicer.

[01:31:45] The, the SP is kind of narrow, you know, uh, for adult hands. It's the, the clamshell thing is cool, but like, yeah, I don't know the, the original, I like, I had the original, like the nice wide Game Boy Advance. I had a purple one and that was, it was pretty comfy. It was, it's a nice little console. Yeah. I liked them too. Um, of course I would just play these on Mr. Honestly, uh, I prefer like my, my eyes just aren't what they used to be.

[01:32:14] Uh, I prefer the big screen now. Yeah. Yeah. Even, even playing it. Like I've been playing Mega Man battle network on my pocket, but sometimes I'm like, am I, am I losing my vision? Like I, this screen is, I know this is a good screen, but am I, am I going blind? Am I losing it? It's like your warranty expires when you're 40. I know.

[01:32:48] Oh shit. I got to use that one on my wife next time. I'm like, man, your warrant has been up for a long time. Okay. So she's going to love that. She's going to love you for that. Yeah. I, I should record the reaction. Blue Boreal. Yeah. Um, all right. Well, uh, why don't we take a quick commercial break? And then when we come back, we will do our closing, say our farewells and, uh, get into

[01:33:18] our random recommended games. Yeah. We'll be right back. Hey, Aaron. Yes. Yes. Jerry. Have you been feeling, I don't know, a little sluggish lately? You've been feeling like you're a little out of shape. Well, flabby even. Can't really get rid of that last 5% of body fat. I think it's time that the people know we are proud to be sponsored by Trevor Belmont's Whipping into Shape VHS Workout.

[01:33:50] Trevor Belmont. Medusa, Medusa's head be flapping around everywhere all over the goddamn place. Trevor Belmont ain't going to have it. He's going to whip your ass into shape. He's going to be bumping and grinding, whipping and slipping everywhere. It's just going to be, it's going to be fucking chaos. There's not going to be room for error anywhere here. You know, the, the, the, the, the skeletons, they're there. They're crumbling all over the place. That's because they don't, they don't work out enough. Get out of your skin, nerds.

[01:34:21] Gotta, gotta pack some beef into those gills. You gotta fucking work that shit. And Trevor Belmont is not going to take it easy. No, sir. He once put Richard Simmons directly into the hospital because Richard Simmons could not keep up with Trevor Belmont's Whipping into Shape VHS Workout. I'm going to live. You've heard of P90X.

[01:34:46] Now get ready for P90 sex with Trevor Belmont's Whipping into Shape Workout VHS. That's the DLC? Yeah. That's the DLC. That's the naughty DLC. But. Yeah, we, we, we're not fully sponsored by that one. We're trying to get sponsorship for the, for the sex with one. We don't have that yet. Buy, buy the entire, uh, uh, 16th VHS set. Get one free. Get the, get the 17th one free. And. That's right.

[01:35:16] Uh, uh, uh, uh, Workout Jam's, uh, cassette tape. Which is just the same one song on a constant loop. You have to rewind it every single time after, after, after the entire three minute song plays. You gotta rewind it. That's. I, I know. I said it's on a loop. But it's just one song. It is the, it is the song Vampire Slayer. So you're just gonna be. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The Rondo of Blood. There's not gonna be any fucking TurboGrafx CD version.

[01:35:46] Oh. I'm doing the gorilla chest. Those ass cheeks are gonna fill those seats so well. They're gonna be so defined. You're gonna be able to put on your favorite pair of tights and your best corset. And you're gonna be whipping it into shape. With Trevor Belmont's Whipping Into Shape VHS Workout. You'll be doing calorie blaster workouts such as whipping a, whipping a, a chain whip. Against the, against the old tractor tire for six hours straight.

[01:36:16] While listening to Vampire Killer. You'll, uh, you'll, you'll, you'll jump over things and not be able to correct yourself. Commit air. Cause fuck it. That builds muscle and character, bitch. You'll be, you'll be chucking glass bottles of, of, of dubious chemicals at things to, to build for their arm strength. Cause, cause fuck it. I don't. Commit arson.

[01:36:48] If you don't like the tape, burn your fucking house down. I don't know what's in those bottles of holy water. Maybe it's holy water. Maybe it's guys only, but fuck it. Burn your family to the ground. To the tune of Vampire Killer. Cause they can be vampires. Don't like, just, just, just. Crystal.com. Don't like, just, just. Whipping Into Shape. That's right, folks. Whipping Into Shape. Whipping Into Shape. Good like Trevor Belmont.

[01:37:19] Get those ass- And Vivo. And Vivo. Thank you for the sponsorship. And we're back. Previously on Retro Rehab. Previously. I never dropped his glasses. Couldn't find out where he was. He fell off a cliff. And into the ocean for the first time. I was gonna say it. I was gonna say it. Oh, let's hope for me to lose my vision.

[01:37:48] Fucking Mr. Magoo over here. Oh, Jesus. Or else the real ocean. With the friends we made along the way. Jesus Christ, dude. Oh, man. Aaron, what time is it? What time is it? Tell them what time it is. Time for random, recommended games. Oh, man. Random, recommended games.

[01:38:18] All right. This is the bittersweet part. Yep. This is when we have to say goodbye. But we always leave you with a treat. Before we take off. And, you know, this week, of course, we have our lovely guest here. And, Jamie, what we do is we recommend a game. Just any old retro game that, you know, you just feel like, Hey, you know what? You folks out there should throw this on sometime. I love just throwing things on and just giving them a go.

[01:38:47] And that's kind of what this little segment is. It's just telling folks to try something out that they may not have tried before. So, if you were to recommend a random game to somebody today that you're like, Hey, you know what? Check it out. What would that be? Well, being a NES person, the game I mentioned before, Crystallis, that is a fantastic game. A lot of people have never tried it for the NES. Wonderful game. I highly recommend it. It's got a very open world sort of adventure feel to it.

[01:39:18] I've always meant to throw that on. And I actually haven't. I know what it looks like. And it's definitely up my alley for the type of game it is. Really weird that it's an SNK game, though. It's still really cool. Is it SNK? It is. It's SNK. Isn't it like an action adventure game? Yes. It is completely out of their real house. I don't know why they decided to experiment, but it's a good one. I like it. It's very hard. Is it really? It's unforgiving.

[01:39:48] Is there any cheats on the mystery for that one? Oh, yeah. There's definitely cheats for that one. Hell, yeah. There you go, folks. That's the way to play it. Yeah. There was a Game Boy port, too, I think you just said. I'd suggest the NES one, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I will. You know what? I will take you up on that recommendation. And I will definitely try Crystallis. Is it a very long game? Not by modern standards, no.

[01:40:18] If you know what you're doing, it's pretty quick. Okay. Sweet. I like that kind of thing. I've been playing too many massive games lately, and I've been really enjoying playing some shorter, like, nice games. Animal Well was a lot of fun after coming off of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Aaron. Yes. Buddy. What you got? Give me that sauce.

[01:40:47] Like any good children's birthday party, I'm going to leave you with some goodies. A good old goodie bag or two. Castlevania. A couple cans of RC Cola in there. Yeah. A couple cans of RC Cola. A handful of, like, pennies. Because, like, I don't need them. You can have them. It's treasure to kids. Kids love pennies. Picture of the ocean. This is a picture of the ocean that I once got from an encyclopedia. It's yours to have. Yeah.

[01:41:17] Castlevania Aria of Sorrow is really, really good. Probably the best way to play it, though, would be on the Advanced Collection they have now. Or Mr. You can play on Mr. Or, yeah, the Advanced Collection. Um, because, like, on the GBA original, without, with having no backlight, they had to really bump up the graphics and make it really, really, like, eye-meltingly bright. So it kind of poked out through how dim the screen was.

[01:41:47] But the, uh, the Advanced Collection really fixes all that. And, yeah, it just, it plays so fucking smoothly on the Advanced Collection as well, too. You can, uh, basically it's like Symphony of the Night, but kind of cranked up to 11. Because, like, when you defeat enemies, there's a chance they'll, they'll drop, uh, what are they called? Like, spirits or cores? I forget. Souls. Souls. And, uh, yeah, souls. There we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:42:16] And different enemies can do kind of different, give you different things. Like, some enemies give you active abilities where you, like, cast a spell or something. Some enemies will give you a cool passive effect. Um, and it's just really cool to experiment with all those. And there's all sorts of different cool weapons you can equip, too. Like, you, if you could just get a gun if you wanted. It's not very good. You could just get a gun. Uh, there's all sorts of cool, like, two-handed swords. Uh, you can dual-wield weapons if you want. There's all sorts of cool secrets you can go around and find.

[01:42:46] And just like Simpy. You know, I've never, I, I, I had Circle of the Moon. That was, like, my, that was my GBA, like, starter pack. It was that and Tony Hawk. And I did not play the other, other Castlevania games past that one on GBA or DS. Oh, man. Harmony of Dissonance. I know. It wasn't, Harmony of Dissonance was, like, it was that weak point in the three that were on GBA.

[01:43:15] But, uh, I mean, yeah, they're still pretty good. Was it the second or third one? I think it was the second, because it was Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and then, and then Aria. So, strong, strong recommendation for Aria of Sorrow. Yes. I may not have seen the ocean, but goddammit, I've played all the way through that game twice. All the time that I could have been, that I could have wasted looking at the ocean with those fucking starfish. I instead played Castlevania.

[01:43:45] Aria of Sorrow. Oh, god. There's gonna be, there's gonna be so many good quick cuts from this one about you and the fucking ocean, dude. Holy shit. But, from now on, I'm not even gonna say, like, go out and touch grass. I'm just gonna be like, go out and touch the ocean. Oh, but you can't. Go out and touch soul water. Go out and touch corn. Touch corn. All the members of the band, corn, go touch them. Um, all right.

[01:44:14] Well, I guess I'll give my little recommendation here. I like a Metroidvania as well. And it's funny that you brought up that old Castlevania there, because I actually have a soft spot for Super Adventure Island 2. For the S-N-E-S. So, Super Adventure Island was the original, which is just like a platformer game. And there's a bunch of them. Hudson makes them.

[01:44:43] They've been on the NES. I believe there's some on TurboGrafx, I think. And this one in particular, though, Super Adventure Island 2 for SNES, is a Metroidvania. Like, it has this, like, progression lock of, like, you could explore around, like, this world map. And, like, you get different things to go back to other areas. It's really interesting that this game has those things.

[01:45:12] But then after kind of doing some research, this, I don't know if it's a blatant copy or not. But, like, it was definitely trying to rip off, like, the Wonderboy games. It's... So, like, those old... What did Wonderboy start on? Was that the... The Master System, I think, wasn't it? The Wonderboy games? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're Genesis. I may be mistaken here. But aren't they the same game?

[01:45:40] I thought they licensed them differently, but they were... I could be misremembering, but I could have sworn Wonderboy was also licensed as a different game for other systems. But it was, like, the same game. Or the same IP, at least. Yeah, it could be. Because they are very similar. But, like, the original Super Adventure Island was, like... It was just a straight-up platformer. But then, yeah, Super Adventure Island 2 went completely in a different way.

[01:46:08] Like, it kind of reminds me a little bit of Zelda 2, in a way. Like, it's kind of got that kind of feel to it. But, and... God damn it. I gotta go back to Zelda 2. Because, like, I want to beat that fucking game. I've not gotten very far in that game. And I have my save file on the mister that I started not that long ago. And I definitely want to try to beat it. You got... You reminded me that...

[01:46:37] That's one of those things that... I apologize. You... That game's so fucking hard. It has no right to be that hard. Torture. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what wasn't torture? This episode was not torture at all. Jamie, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. This was a lot of fun. I hope that you had a good time here. Oh, I did. And thanks so much for having me here tonight. I really, really had a good time talking with you folks.

[01:47:05] I feel like we only scratched the surface of lots of things. We still have to make sure that Aaron buys that mister. We also need to make sure that Aaron eventually sees the ocean for realsies. Just know that you are a part of what is probably going to become a brand new meme for Retro Rehab. I'm just going to send you random pictures of the ocean now. You're just going to get like a DM. You're going to look at it. It's just going to be like a picture of the ocean like a seagull.

[01:47:34] Someone standing in their fucking... In their linens. Just standing in the ocean. My view this morning. You're just looking out at the ocean. Look what you're missing out on. The ocean. There's like a freight harbor or something. Rusty Bucket Bay. But yeah. So, Jamie, I don't know if there's anything that you want to plug or promote or anything. Maybe the Discord.

[01:48:02] Well, I'm not one to promote much. I'm not a big marketing person. But if you ever want to join the Discord, you can just use the URL, you know, discord.gg slash MrFPGA. You can see what it's all about there. I'll include it in the show notes. It's really a fun project, honestly. We really pay a lot of attention to accuracy and a good experience. So, if you want to join us, please do. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, Aaron, should we get out of here? Hit the heads.

[01:48:33] Let's go. Yeah. After all, Jerry still needs to figure out who stole his bike after he passed out from overdosing on Pepto Bismol. Dude, where's my bike? Dude, where's my ownership? And Aaron definitely has to try to start going about his daily life without getting motivated by the Pokemon theme song. It's never going to happen. I know that you want to be the very best, but dude, there's other songs. All right. Well, thank you so much for listening.

[01:49:03] You can get us on all your socials at Retro Rehab Pod. Go check out the Mr. Discord. I'll put that in the show notes. Again, Jamie, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. I will definitely be talking to you again shortly, I'm sure, and hopefully get you back on sometime. Fantastic. Awesome. All right, folks. We'll see you on the next one. Aaron, say bye.