General Arcade & Retro Chat' Special Championship Edition

You know what, it's not something I've really looked into. I generally always just replaced the rubbers in controllers with those from sacrificial pads.

If you do find somewhere good, let me know. I've a few childhood controllers that would be quite nice to refresh.

Have you given much thought to changing over to wireless pads? I've my NES, SNES and Megadrive all wireless now and it's absolutely brilliant. No more faffing about with cables.

The 8BITDO ones are particularly lovely. Unfortunately though they've only console receivers for the NES, Snes and Megadrive. Have a lovely looking wireless PCE pad but no receiver for it as of yet.

Yeah they look really lovely! Not sure why they can't create a wireless console receiver though for every pad they release. Seems like a massively missed opportunity.

Its a big one for Nintendo isnt it? They purposely keep the supply of their first party games pretty bang on i think?

Obviously they sell a ton of them but aren't they known for it?

That statistic is a little bit on the hysterical side to be honest.

If you look at something like film, only a fraction of what has been created has been released on Blueray. Same goes for streaming, I find myself hard pressed to find titles sometimes - and video formats aren't updated nearly as regularly as console hardware.

To expect everything ever released to be available on the current line of systems is a bit mad. And to do that every 5-10 years for new console iterations? Not going to happen.

I do agree though, videogames 100% need to be preserved and it's absolutely shocking how little regard has been given to this in the past. But I think that's a bit of a separate issue.

It's referring to commercial availability I think.

Making progress on my launch model Wii U with a dying nand. Hopefully it all works out, I'll know soon enough and if I've any luck, I'll do a thread on it.

There's a shocking ignorance over physical media in gaming at the moment. The discussion has been brought up with the release of Alan Wake II being digital only and a surprising number of people dismiss it because they like digital. Just because you don't want a shelf full of games or like not having to swap discs doesn't mean physical media shouldn't exist.

Considering we've all likely experienced a reduction in the selection of quality movies on Netflix due to every studio wanting their own service I'm surprised people aren't more aware of the importance of preservation or physical media. We've seen the likes of Deadpool or Scott Pilgrim disappear from game stores and more recent examples include Forza 6 and 7 which aren't that old but completely unavailable due to licensing.

I don't think the addition of digital only consoles is the writing on the wall for physical media, I believe both will exist equally side by side for the next few years at least but with the shift to digital and people streaming with Game Pass I do wonder about the future availability of game media. Always online or digital only definitely don't help the future preservation of games. We're already seeing people return to piracy due to the movie streaming services no longer being convenient and even then it's not uncommon that some movies aren't easy to find.

It's one thing I really love about the Switch. Proper physical media on a unique cartridge based platform in nice looking cases. It's the only system I've bought physical games for now since the 3DS.

Which is positively archaic in this modern day and age of gaming subscription services when you think about it. It's interesting in a way as it means kids playing modern games get to somewhat still experience what we did growing up, going into a shop and buying a cartridge based game.

What! That's scandalous, I didn't know that at all. So there are some cartridges out there that if you bought and tried to run without an update you might actually not have a working game?

Pretty much done with this now. I wouldn't say a difficult repair, but the documentation for the processes involved is a bit fractured, and combined with it being a fairly new-to-mainstream repair, I was more nervous doing this than other repairs. Poking around inside the Wii U's nand filesystem isn't exactly my speciality, so I relied on a lot of help from several great people on this one. It'll be an interesting, albeit slightly technical thread, so I'll do my best to write it in such a way that it's not overly boring. Just finishing up a final nand-dump now, and that'll be that.

@Retr0gamer is your Wii U a white 8GB model? Seemingly it the nand-decay doesn't really affect these, and it's more the Hynix based models.

See Antstream Arcade are putting a native app on Xbox for their retro game streaming service, good to see this become available outside the PC and mobile spaces.

You can open it and physically check. It's not difficult, just a little time consuming and you need to keep an eye on what screws are going where.

Or, you can do it in software, via the browser exploit, launching an Aroma Environment, and then using WiiUIdent - https://github.com/GaryOderNichts/WiiUIdent