Retro Gaming Australia

Witness the result below.

The author of the most accurate SNES emulator, bsnes (now higan), byuu, is selling off his US SNES Collection. The emulator author rounded up all 721 commercial releases for the system to ensure that perfect dumps of each game were released, that they were 100% compatible with his emulator, and that the boxes and manuals could be scanned and preserved.

The last part of that plan looks like it’s going to the dogs – byuu is selling up so that he can start work on the PAL and Super Famicom sets – though apparently he’ll give you a discount if you let him hang onto those boxes and manuals so he can scan them.

The buy it now price is currently a cool $US25,000 – about $34 per game. Considering that the vast majority of them are complete, that’s actually not that bad a deal when you factor in the high price of most of the system’s RPGs.

In celebration of Harvest Moon’s 15 years in North America, Natsume is releasing Harvest Moon: A New Beginning for Nintendo 3DS.

North America first saw the farm simulation RPG series in June 1997 with the release of Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo. Since then, Harvest Moon has appeared on numerous consoles and handhelds and spurred various spin-off titles such as Puzzle de Harvest Moon and the Rune Factory series.

Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, titled Harvest Moon: The Land of Origin in Japan, sees players rebuild an abandoned rural town in an effort to win back its inhabitants and return the town to its former glory. This instalment in the series features more customisation than previous Harvest Moon games, with players able to determine their character’s appearance and make changes to both their farm and town at large. There are also some new farm animals and crops to tend to, and the farmer can now go on family vacation – cute!

Expect to see Harvest Moon: A New Beginning released later this year.

Japanese trailer:

20 years ago today, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System launched in the United Kingdom. The SNES was a lot more popular with gamers in the UK, taking a much bigger chunk of the market than its predecessor. Though the battle was hard fought, Sega still claimed victory in the 16-bit era in the UK.

Gamers from Old Blighty had to wait some 18 months from the Japanese launch for the SNES to hit their shores. Imagine the furore if that were to happen today (especially from us Australians, who had to wait another 3 months on top of that).

UK developers had quite a bit of influence on the SNES’s lifespan – the Super FX chip was developed at Argonaut and the company teamed up with Nintendo to develop Starwing and Stunt Race FX. Rare became a driving force behind Nintendo’s first party efforts following the release of Donkey Kong Country. DMA Design (now Rockstar North) became part of Nintendo’s “dream team” of Nintendo 64 developers following the excellent Unirally.

We recommend that you read a couple of issues of Super Play, the best UK SNES magazine in celebration.

ArsTechnia has posted an article written by bsnes developer Byuu, explaining his justifications for chasing accuracy in emulation over system compatibility and resource efficiency.

The article provides an interesting insight into what’s required to get a SNES emulator to be more accurate, and the challenges you face in improving the quality of emulation. He also discusses why past emulators did things the way they did, and why he doesn’t agree with that methodology.

Regardless of where you stand on Byuu’s position, you have to consider this to be a key point in his argument, if not the most important one:

You have to realize that emulators, too, have shelf-lives. That’s especially true for ones such as ZSNES that are written in pure x86 assembly. You simply can’t run this on your cell phone. By locking a hack to run only on ZSNES, you are dooming your hack to irrelevance. As soon as Windows drops 32-bit backwards compatibility, just as it has already done with 16-bit backwards compatibility, these fan translations and hacks will be lost forever. At that point the emulator itself becomes almost like another dead console, instead of a way to keep the old games alive.

With preservation becoming a major issue in the video game industry, Byuu’s approach may end up being vindicated after all.