I loved Minish Cap & LTTP. What games would be considered Zelda clones?
Thanks in advance!
The mana series games are close to this, just with more of a focus on the RPG stat system and magic. There’s some confusion over what the names are due to localisation, but they’re basically the same kind of hack and slash top down RPG game.
Final Fantasy Adventure/Adventure of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 1 - GB
Secret of mana/Seiken Densetsu 2 - SNES.
Trials of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 3 - SNES
Legend of mana - PSX
Sword of mana - GBA
Children of mana - DS
Heroes of mana - DS
The rest won’t be playable on the gameshell, being on PS2 and mobile phone.
I haven’t tried it yet but there’s a DS emulator for the Gameshell, meaning Phantom hourglass and Spirit tracks could be playable.
There’s also the game boy colour Zelda games.
Link’s Awakening DX
Oracle of Ages
Oracle of Seasons
You can actually play Zelda Ocarina is time on the gameshell. That and majoras mask. (N64)
And how could I forget the Nes Zelda games
The legend of Zelda
Zelda 2 - the adventures of link
The rest are on gamecube, wii, wii U, and switch. I doubt very much that the gameshell will ever play them.
I’m actually wondering whether or not we can emulate the terrible Wand of Gamelon and The Faces of Evil Zelda games on the Phillips CD-I. You’ve got me thinking. They are nothing like Zelda games. 
I’m off! SQUADALA!!
4 Likes
Soleil on the Genesis/Megadrive.
And maybe next year my own game currently in development : Land And Memories 
1 Like
Seriously ? We can Zelda N64 games on Gameshell ?! 
Yes indeed! This is using this community custom OS.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/050Ge9hrRNaEcdeZ47VizVnXQ#East_Victoria_Park
1 Like
Thanks for both of the suggestions and @Dowdheur - will it be gameshell exclusive? @javelinface I have another question, from your experience which ROMs are generally better emulated by gameshell, PAL or NTSC?
1 Like
Historically, older NTSC games were slightly lower resolution, but mainly just a few pixels off the top and bottom. 720x480 for NTSC vs 720x576 for PAL from memory. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t change that much, seeing as they’re normally initially coded that way, and at times would just have bars on the top and bottom for PAL games anyway. There’s also a colour profile difference, and that comes down to personal preference. Think sharper vivid colours for NTSC and more subdued for PAL.
The main thing I remembered with PAL vs NTSC was the speed. Generally the NTSC versions would run slightly faster. This is interesting, given how the NTSC would run at 30Hz vs the PAL 25Hz. It came down to how fast the console was clocked. This was an issue for me playing N64 with my friends as a kid. I grew up on the Japanese console. In Australia, people have PAL consoles. This meant I would not get the turbo start timing off in Mariokart, and misjudge some shortcuts, eg rainbow road and wario stadium. Other games like street fighter 2 turbo felt painfully slow playing on friend’s PAL SNES machines; even with the 10 star turbo cheat active. Frame counting and anticipation was off, and my playing was always sub par on their systems. Due to the recordings of voices being standardised for most characters, some voices would be off. Eg. Sagat’s quarter circle attack combos, he says “Tiger” quickly every time he attacks. This slows down to “Tigh…Gherr” and just sounds all kinds of wrong.
Other thing that PAL vs NTSC introduces are regional changes; often time censorship. You basically don’t get that. Stuff like blood being green instead of red, or scantily clad moe anime girls suddenly being covered with frumpy shower curtains. Any references to holy get replaced with “pearl”, spells attributing “death” get removed, and pubs/bars are replaced with cafes.
Due to copyright issues, some names get changed. Eg Starfox gets changed to star wing. Wtf. And starfox 64 gets changed to Lylat Wars. Both only in the PAL versions. US remains the same.
Street fighter has a name juggle. M-Bison the boxer becomes Balrog. Balrog the clawed Adonis becomes Vega. And Vega the psycho crusher becomes M-Bison. I blame M-Bison the boxer’s name being too similar to Mike Tyson.
Even things like recorded voices get changed, eg Mariokart 64: wario sounds like a beastly gaunt Italian wrestler in the Japanese release. In the pal release he sounds like an annoying goblin you find in your pantry stealing your food. Names of characters change too. The mushroom guy the west knows as toad is named Kinopio. Instead of sounding like a tiny Yoda like gremlin, he sounds more like an angelic cherub fit to sing in a choir, who you legit feel like hugging. I LOATHE his English voice.
So the next thing. PAL vs NTSC. It’s a television signal format to do with refresh rate and resolution. Don’t get this mixed up just language. USA and JPN both use NTSC. My Japanese N64 could play US N64 cartridges just drilling out some little plastic pegs to allow it to fit physically. However, upon trying to insert a PAL eu/AU game, I would get a game incompatibility error screen.
You can probably guess that I’m more of an advocate of the NTSC versions of games. Whenever possible, I prefer to use the Japanese versions of the games; even translated. An example of this is Final Fantasy IV. It was released in the US/EU as Final Fantasy II, and the difficulty level was substantially lower; since at the time the west wasn’t as familiar with the JRPG combat system. Whole mechanics were removed that made the game have so much more depth, eg literally all of Cecil’s dark class abilities. That said, you also get some terrible but hilarious translations. Eg, “You Spoony Bard.”
I would say, do it on a per game basis. Try all the versions out. Some of them scale better, especially given the 320x240 screens. Sometimes text can appear garbled, not using a whole number integer for scaling. Having a lower base resolution can sometimes help with this. Regarding scaling re: resolution differences and frame rates, most emulators within Retroarch allow you to specify which kind of timings and scaling you would prefer. Some even allow you to change things so that you can include/exclude a buffer indicating where the resolution gets truncated. Depending on how you choose to sync your audio will determine how it affects frame rate.
The next big question you should be asking is which emulator do you use? Too many people here just blindly say “I like standalone because they’re faster.” Okay. Sure. But consider the ability to adjust synced up timings etc. Most standalones can’t do this. The most you can do is over/under clock the clock speed of the emulator. People are just so thirsty for high frame rates and no screen tearing that they only take into consideration v-sync and frame rate. The full experience should be both a visual and audio experience. For this reason I prefer to use Retroarch whenever possible. The addition of screen filters and shaders to further embellish the experience is the extra icing on the cake.
Okay. So all of this is obviously extremely subjective, and biased towards my own experiences growing up. At the end of the day, any version is fine. I don’t want to be starting any wars over this. Heck, I’m an invert player on most games, and it drives people INSANE. Your mileage may vary, and anyone’s opinion on this matter is completely valid! It’s … just a point of content I hold very true to my heart. (Don’t even get me started on the scan lines debate!!)
In fact I don’t even develop for the Gameshell.
Basically it was supposed to be created especially for this console, in LUA. But I realized that it would quickly become very complicated for me, so I resumed the project in Java. 
@javelinface that is exactly what I have noticed, some eu ROMs lag but I wasn’t sure whether it had something to do with Retroarch settings or the way the cores were built.
I found this info
“If a PAL movie is converted to an NTSC tape, 5 extra frames must be added per second or the action might seem jerky. The opposite is true for an NTSC movie converted to PAL. Five frames must be removed per second or the action may seem unnaturally slow.”
Would same logic be applied to ROMs?
1 Like
Yes and no. The TVs that people own in the respective regions initially supported either a PAL or NTSC signal. That would mean that physically, the CRT gun would be firing at a certain rate and a certain frequency. That’s why in order for things to “run properly” you would need to insert frames, in order sync up with the refresh rate of your TV.
Later on, multi system TVs came about, and it would detect whatever signal. For my old USA NTSC Snes, in order to play it on a non multi system TV (ie in Australia) I had to put a small converter box behind the AV signal output that essentially did what you mentioned.
Cut to the modern days of LCD screens and variable refresh rates, we shouldn’t have to worry about this. We can simply add in whatever parameters we want in order to get whatever refresh rate we want, granted our screens can do it. That said, your logic is correct re: using PAL and NTSC roms, which would by default be expecting to have a certain number of frames, thus no matter how much you overclock it, it would still have extra frames that relatively would make the PAL ROM feel laggier than its NTSC counterpart, simply because it would have to be processing more frames. That’s when we cause a frame skipping algorithm (in most emulators) to literally skip frames to make games go faster.
Thanks everyone for your valuable recomendation
Thank u so much for your valuable information it will really helped me
(why did you post a link to a burger king survey?)
1 Like