Final Fight, Baseball Stars 2, Metal Slug serie, Hit The Ice (on FBA), Galaxian (on Coleco), Tetris (On NES and GBC)…
What are your personal favorite games from history that can be played on the Gameshell?
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My favorites were Shrek: Treasure Hunt, Mega Man 8, Atari Anniversary Redux, and Tekken for the Playstation One. For the Gameboy Advance i like Sonic Battle, Duel Masters: Sempai Legends, Super Mario Advance, Bionicle Heroes, and a lot more for the Gameboy Advance. The Gameboy Advance is my favorite retro console.
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The main console games I play are:
GBA: Mother 3 - the recent fan translation.
An amazing game, that was no doubt a huge inspiration for undertale. It has never been officially translated into English, or been commercially available, so this is probably the best way to experience it portably.
PSX: Tales of Phantasia - English patch.
This was originally a SNES game that was translated into English, while maintaining the Japanese voice acting. Later on there was a GBA remake, however the English voice acting was terrible, and the music was just all wrong! All was fixed with superior updates sprites and a 3D overworld in the PSX remake.
N64: Banjo Kazooie.
I see you mention that N64 games can’t be played well. Have a look at some of the recent development re: Lima driver updates. (Eg the custom DEOT image I made) Banjo Kazooie actually runs really really well on the gameshell! I would have said Zelda, but I guess I’d rather play that on my 3DS. Banjo Kazooie portable is a dream come true! It just has a real charm to it that other games simply can’t match.
SNES: Breath of Fire 2.
This has technically been remade for the GBA, but like I mentioned for ToP, the GBA ports just don’t have the same amazing synthesiser patches the SNES has. Not to mention, SNES emulation is much MUCH faster. I would mention Final Fantasy games, however they have been re-released on other portable consoles, and improved upon. Breath of Fire 2 is a real gem that can be overlooked, and really suited to the gameshell console.
NES: Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.
Before there was Dark Souls, there was Castlevania. This game makes you back track like a mad man so much, that playing it on a device that doesn’t allow state saving/fast forwarding would drive you insane. And playing it emulated on a hi res computer will leave you wondering what you’re doing with your life. Enter the game shell. The low res screen actually does NES games a real favour, quasi interpolating the image, giving the closest thing to a CRT feel, without lugging 30Kg of wood and glass around. Only portably, could I ever consider playing this game in its entirety.
GB: Kirby’s Dreamland 2.
A throw back to my childhood was using my SNES super game boy adaptor. This allowed some games to have extra thematic borders, added DSP sound effects, and an extended colour palette. Kirby 2 did an amazing job of this, with dynamically changing borders and palettes depending on which world you were in, and whirring wind noises while travelling by warp star. Not too much of a spoiler but let’s say you get to see a finale including a rainbow. Due to the gameboy’s super low resolution, zooming in on the screen would be a pixelated nightmare. Having it run at a 1:1 scale will give people a horrible postcard like box to play in. This alleviates both problems, again without having to lug a TV or computer around with you.
GBC: Links Awakening DX.
This was the Game of my childhood, so you can imagine how excited I was to play the switch version. There was one element that was left out however: photo mode. A small mini game like experience in the DX version. If you played it on switch, this is a fantastic throw back to where it all began, while using an extensive colour palette and yesteryear charm. Of course even if you haven’t played the remake, this is an amazing standalone game with far more charm and personality than a lot of games today. After you’ve gotten used to the interface, definitely add the next two Zelda GBC (oracle of ages and oracle of seasons) games to your todo list! You won’t regret it!
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Nice! Thanks for your list.
Unfortunately, my Gameshell didn’t show up in time for Christmas as my wife intended, but I should have it tomorrow. So hopefully tomorrow I will be trying to install your custom image on my Gameshell. Which seems like it’s going to be difficult, so I hope I can get it done. But I would love to try out Banjo Kazooie as its also one of my favorite games of all time. That and Crash Bandicoot: Warped.
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I love one NES game that I played as a kid but is rarely mentioned on the internet. It’s called Flying Hero. You can watch the game play here: https://youtu.be/4H-r_OQH_oU
Another NES game: Battle City. It’s arguably the most popular NES game in China (on par with Super Mario Bros!) but for some reason not popular at all in the west. https://youtu.be/MPsA5PtfdL0
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My favorites are The Legend of Zelda - Oracle of {Ages,Seasons}. They pair together well and they’re incredibly well made games for the Gameboy Color. Really long play time too.
The Game Boy Advance Kirby games (Nightmare in Dreamland, The Amazing Mirror) are both fantastic too. They’re quite playable even without the L/R buttons, so you don’t have to have the lightkey attached.
Damn, I forgot ALL FINAL FANTASY!!! 
if i had to choose a few games i would probably choose
Bloody Roar/Beastorizor (PS1)
Gun Nac (NES)
Micro Machines (NES)
Blood Bros (MAME)
and my absolute favorite game of all time
Doom (dos/chocoDM)
I pretty much bought a Game Shell for two reasons: to mess with Linux and to play GBA games. When the first doesn’t interfere with the second, I love to play Advance Wars (the second is the best), Golden Sun, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the GBA Castlevania games, both Metroid games and of course Pokemon. Seriously though the GBA was one of the best consoles of all time and I’m happy to find that my Game Shell runs them really well.
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Sorry for the off-topic but can you share what emulator are you using? Any RetroArch core or the bundled mGBA? The last time I checked GBA emulation it had some problems with the sound but admittedly that was a long time ago (clockwork OS 0.3).
I personally prefer the standalone gpsp emulator, due to the way it upscales the screen; especially when reading text such as mother 3. Due to the integer value not being a whole number multiple when scaling, a lot of emulators end up with an inconsistent pixel width, especially with text. This isn’t the case with the standalone gpsp.
On the same note, it handles the sound font of mother 3 very well, which has a kind of live Hammond organ tone, when played on actual GBA hardware. So mgba for accuracy again.
For most other games however, I use the Retroarch cores, simply for achievements, screen filters, and shaders. If you don’t care about those, just use the standalone.
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Sorry for the late reply. I’m basically just using the MGBA core in retroarch. It has been working fine for me but I’m primarily playing RPGs. I’ve been playing Mega Man Zero a little and besides screen tearing, it’s been working great.
I’m not so into games I bought the GameShell just because I saw the DEOT this kind of “engineering style” got my attention and I love this kind of project that has open-source culture and Linux running, that’s the real game for me! lol
I tough this can challenge my mind in many ways, and after getting into this community I realised how amazing it is… That provides me with a lot of fun with Linux, Games and DEOT (sleepless). lol
Anyway, about my favourite games that I play are:
GBA:
Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure Ed, Edd n Eddy - the Mis-Edventures Street Fighter Alpha 3 Wario Land 4
MISC:
No.909
Cave Story
Hurrican
Open Tyrian
Free DOOM
Pico-8:
Dusk Child
Secret Santa
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I feel this exact joy! Working out things together. Overcoming problems. Finding solutions that are new. Making things do what you want them to. In a sense, I am kinda glad that this isn’t a complete 100% stable product. Otherwise honestly, it would just be sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
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Did you have problems with overheating while emulating N64?
I’ve actually never had problems with overheating with anything.
Then again, what do you mean by problems? There are tolerances with regards to how much heat the CPI can handle, and as long as it’s not melting plastic, it should be ok.
There was no noticeable thermal throttling due to overheating.
Nor was there any artefacting or stability issues.
Comfort wise, I live in Australia. It’s always hot. I might just be used to what other people perceive as hot.
Not sure if that’s helpful or not, but I guess my answer is no; I haven’t had any over heating problems.
I know two things about heat and electronics -
- Too much is bad
- They can tolerate more than I think
The casing on my Gameshell is almost too hot to touch after a couple of hours using GBA emulation.
Never had any further issues though.
I wondered if the extra processing and system demand from N64 emulation would tip it over the edge of safe levels for the silicon in the unit. I would love to emulate N64 but one of my main concerns was damage from overdrawing the system physically and functionally.
Sometimes that’s not immediate but the long term damage you see to laptops etc.
Glad to hear it hasn’t caused problems.
Definitely, too much is bad, but the definition of what is too much is variable. If anything, it would come down to the draw on the battery, and heat close to the battery being the main problem, heat wise.
They definitely can take more than us as humans can tolerate to the touch. The fact that we can touch the plastic housing without getting burned would say that it’s not too hot.
Laptop based damage is often to do with the ball grid array of the GPUs literally falling off due to the solder not containing lead, requiring a reflow. The temperatures of those are FAR higher, normally needing a heat pipe and active cooling. Plus, the boards are much larger and pliable, causing bending to occur, making it easier to dissociate. This shouldn’t be a problem with the CPI, especially seeing as the mainboard is secured to a fixed housing.
There was another thread where another user was doing some kernel modification, overclocking the CPU. After some point, thermal throttling takes place, to make sure that the temperature doesn’t reach the threshold limits.
It’s actually not that much processing to be honest. There are things that use far more processing power than N64 emulation. I wouldn’t worry about it to be honest. The fact is, unless you’re permanently tethered to a USB power pack, you’re probably going to run out of power before doing any damage.
Ah well that’s encouraging.
So the barriers to getting it running on the gameshell are more likely tuning the settings and 3D acceleration?
There aren’t any barriers to getting n64 emulation on the gameshell. It’s working now. It’s just a matter of choosing whether to have faster emulation or more accurate emulation.
That’s what you can change via the configuration.
What do you mean re: 3D acceleration? Do you mean tuning the Lima drivers? You really can’t use it without Lima drivers, without being ridiculously slow. And there isn’t much you can do to tune it, without re-writing the drivers, or replacing them. We only just got them relatively stable.
By accelerating do you mean overclocking? There are some threads going into kernel writing and overclocking, but mainly to do with the CPU. If you’re concerned about heat, then accelerating or overclocking without adequate heat management is probably not the best thing in the world. No doubt to have any stability, you would need go increase voltages.