A collector is selling every Super Nintendo game for $24,999

http://www.polygon.com/2012/12/10/3749792/a-collector-is-selling-every-super-nintendo-game-for-24999

by aaronbrethorst • 14 years ago

175 70 14 years ago

daeken4• 14 years ago

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

moepstar2• 14 years ago

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

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

daeken4• 14 years ago

I've recently been picking up old consoles/computers both to revisit some old games I loved, but also because I'm getting into demo development for retro hardware. I'm currently hunting for a Vectrex -- can't beat developing for a system with 1KB RAM and with a unique vector display.

I just wish I had kept all my old hardware from my childhood; I sold my NES and all my games for something like $20 in ~1998. Quite a shame.

kahawe2• 14 years ago

> Go for it - you won't regret it :)

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

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

primitur5• 14 years ago

With regards to emulation and a return to the classics, I got an Open Pandora (http://openpandora.org/) recently and have been having a blast returning to all my old cartridges, type-ins, tape archives, and so on.

My first computer was an Oric-1, the ZX Spectrum, and I have (had) masses of tapes of things I'd done with those machines .. to think those old tapenames are sitting there in a little emu dir, in my pocket right now, for the train-ride .. pure joy of computer.

aidenn0• 14 years ago

My biggest non-purchase regret was when a friend going off to college offered to sell me his SNES and ~150 games for $150 (about 50 games were Japanese superfamicom carts, including all the DBZ, DQ, and FF RPGs).

I have my old NES, and my wife has her old Sega Genesis, and we spend almost as much time playing those as our newer games.

rpm4321• 14 years ago

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

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

daeken4• 14 years ago

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

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

microtonal• 14 years ago

this sort of thing is why the 3rd and 4th gen consoles were able to last for so long.

Not that I disagree that cartridge logic can extend the lifetime of a console, but the Playstation 2 is 12 years old, and Playstation 2 games are still being produced too (e.g. FIFA Soccer 2013). The last batch of Playstation 1 games were released in 2005 (with minor exceptions in other regions), the PS1 was released in 1994.

icebraining• 14 years ago

The problem with cartridges is that they hugely increase the cost of the primary case - non-extended games - for the advantage of the few cases where it's actually used to its full extent. I think accessories, like the N64 Expansion Pack, make much more sense for that purpose.

That said, I prefer cartridges too; CDs and DVDs are just too finicky.

byuu3• 14 years ago

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

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

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

DiJu519• 14 years ago

I thought i recognized the name.

This guy has his own emulator aswell.

http://byuu.org/

cochese• 14 years ago

The -definitive- SNES emulator.

lmm2• 14 years ago

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

chiefsucker2• 14 years ago

Yes, and he wasn’t really into collecting all those cartridges. As far as I understand he bought all SNES games to scan the labels on the covers and check his emulator’s accuracy.

thristian• 14 years ago

Specifically, to document the memory-map each one used.

Traditionally, SNES emulators have used the internal game header and a whole stack of heuristics to guess at what memory-map each game expected, but that's not exactly what you'd call a preservationist approach, and caused problems for homebrew that wanted to set up a perfectly legitimate memory-map that no commercial games happened to use. Now there is (or there will be) a standard database of game SHA256 → known memory map that SNES emulators can use, and a way for homebrew games to explicitly specify what memory-map they want.

lostlogin• 14 years ago

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

daeken4• 14 years ago

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

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

chiefsucker2• 14 years ago

I think that a lot of gamers feel that way. In retrospective it’s funny to look at those times, see how 2D games were much better, but nonetheless pushed away by their 3D equivalents.

Today we probably take 3D for granted, but we forget that back then it was jaw-dropping to see Mario in 3D and jump in something that looked like an endless world.

These days I just prefer good games over games that use a specific art style or technology. The 2D/3D worlds got also mixed together and I don’t think that it has that much meaning compared to the 3D defining times, i.e. there are a lot of 2D side scrollers that use gorgeous 3D backgrounds and the marketing hype is long gone.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

The most dramatic example must have been F-Zero X, which ran at 60FPS, at the expense of being a huge, 3D-accelerated glitch. (And I still loved it)

ANTSANTS• 14 years ago

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

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

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

GabrielF00• 14 years ago

What was the advantage of using a 64-bit processor in a consumer electronics device like the N64? Presumably addressing more than 4GB of memory was not an issue back then.

Simucal• 14 years ago

Well, you could utilize more precise operations but, according to Wikipedia, games rarely took advantage of it:

"The Nintendo 64's central processing unit (CPU) is the NEC VR4300, a cost-reduced derivative of the 64-bit MIPS Technologies R4300i. Built by NEC on a 0.35 µm process, the VR4300 is a RISC 5-stage scalar in-order execution processor, with integrated floating point unit, internal 24 KB direct-mapped L1 cache (16KB for instructions, 8KB for data). The 4.6 million transistor CPU is cooled passively by an aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above.

Clocked at 93.75 MHz, the N64's VR4300 was the most powerful console CPU of its generation. Except for its narrower 32-bit system bus, the VR4300 retained the computational abilities of the more powerful 64-bit MIPS R4300i, though software rarely took advantage of 64-bit data precision operations. N64 game-titles generally used faster (and more compact) 32-bit data-operations, as these were sufficient to generate 3D-scene data for the console's RSP (Reality Signal Processor; see below) unit. In addition, 32-bit code executed faster and required less storage space (which was at a premium on the N64's cartridges) Though powerful, the CPU was hindered by a 250 MB/s bus to the system memory; not only that, but in order to access the RAM, the CPU had to go through the RCP (Reality Co-Processor), and could not use DMA to do so (the RCP could). This problem is further compounded by the RDRAM's very high access latency.

Emulators—such as UltraHLE and Project64—benefit from the scarcity of 64-bit operations in the game's executable-code, especially when running with a 32-bit machine architecture as a host. These emulators perform most calculations at 32-bit precision and trap the few subroutines that actually made use of 64-bit instructions."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64

staunch2• 14 years ago

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

Bockit• 14 years ago

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

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

staunch2• 14 years ago

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

georgeorwell• 14 years ago

This related article on accurate hardware emulation by byuu is great:

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

The process required an electron microscope!

agumonkey• 14 years ago

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

acuozzo• 14 years ago

A modified 6502 was used in the NES.

Falling3• 14 years ago

I believe this was on HN a few months ago. Really an interesting article.

bobsy• 14 years ago

Put his on eBay! Ha!

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

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

Adirael2• 14 years ago

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

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

lmm2• 14 years ago

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

andrewfelix• 14 years ago

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

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

belorn• 14 years ago

Two reasons: Because his goal/usage of said games, and because complete collections like this is very rare.

sageikosa• 14 years ago

While not obvious by the headline, the reason for acquiring them was to make bsnes better. The reason for selling them is he's done with what he needed them for on the project.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Late weekend means different stories make the front page.

As other people have mentioned the use of these carts was not to collect (which could lead to interesting discussion about collecting) but to help with programming an precise emulator. There has been previous discussion about that emulator; and about whether it's better to have something that just plays the game or something that exactly models how the games would play on the real hardware / firmware.

I'd gently agree that this article isn't interesting to me. But it's more interesting than a bunch of stuff on HN.

martincmartin• 14 years ago

From the Hacker News Guidelines:

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

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rsheridan62• 14 years ago

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

debacle• 14 years ago

Because the weekend is pretty slow, and programmers need distraction.

paraboul• 14 years ago

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

nornagon• 14 years ago

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

kriro• 14 years ago

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

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

bpierre• 14 years ago

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

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

Irregardless• 14 years ago

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

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

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

jonknee• 14 years ago

In case anyone else is interested in the source of this quote:

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

It's a fascinating story.

byuu3• 14 years ago

The latter, he's an emulation enthusiast.

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

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

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

sdqali• 14 years ago

byuu:

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

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

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

thejad• 14 years ago

Holy hell this is awesome!

kenneth_reitz• 14 years ago

Want.

mwill• 14 years ago

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

[1] http://byuu.org/articles/ [2] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

A collector is selling every Super Nintendo game for $24,999

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