Reproductions

[mazonemayu]

Original all the way for me, the only exception I make are fan translations, unreleased games & prototypes coz learly you can’t play those legit
I usually aim for good quality so atthe very least they fit my collection
Here are some picks from the litter

[DCGX]

I have a few repos of unreleased Dreamcast games (Half-Life, Toejam & Earl III, Propeller Arena, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Millennium Racer). Some of them are over a decade old, and most of pretty blurry artwork, which is annoying. They're cool to have, I guess, at least for most finished games like Propeller Arena and Millennium Racer. I prefer originals for commercially released games though. However, fan translations of Japanese only released games are intriguing.

[OlivusPrime]

Original all the way for me, the only exception I make are fan translations, unreleased games & prototypes coz learly you can’t play those legit
I usually aim for good quality so atthe very least they fit my collection
Here are some picks from the litter

Those are awesome!

I agree that they need to be in good enough quality to fit the collection, otherwise they stick out. For my SNES and N64 games, I spent a while finding someone who could print boxes for my cart-only games at top quality on the right card stock. I also restored a whole bunch of box scans from online and made a few of my own pretty much from scratch, including this Everdrive 64 box in the style of the official Nintendo accessories, and this box for the unreleased PAL version of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine:

[mistamontiel]

There's another solution that I don't see the need for physical mockery

I've all of krikzz's shit Everdrives+SD2SNES for all my cartridge systems, I'm down to my last four 64 carts awaiting purchase

[mazonemayu]

Original all the way for me, the only exception I make are fan translations, unreleased games & prototypes coz learly you can’t play those legit
I usually aim for good quality so atthe very least they fit my collection
Here are some picks from the litter

Those are awesome!

I agree that they need to be in good enough quality to fit the collection, otherwise they stick out. For my SNES and N64 games, I spent a while finding someone who could print boxes for my cart-only games at top quality on the right card stock. I also restored a whole bunch of box scans from online and made a few of my own pretty much from scratch, including this Everdrive 64 box in the style of the official Nintendo accessories, and this box for the unreleased PAL version of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine:

IMG_3899[1].JPG

I'm a big sucker for covers & logo's and the likes, I always let my OCD get the better of me
I just spend an hour making a new logo for an emulator on my Xbox hahaha...

The first one is the original one, and the second one is what I made. Since I run a TRON skin atm it all has to fit the theme

[OlivusPrime]

I'm a big sucker for covers & logo's and the likes, I always let my OCD get the better of me
I just spend an hour making a new logo for an emulator on my Xbox hahaha...

The first one is the original one, and the second one is what I made. Since I run a TRON skin atm it all has to fit the theme

That's awesome! TRON is so synonymous with the arcade for me. One of the first games I booted up when I got MAME on my Dreamcast haha. Brilliant movie too.

I always appreciate it when homebrew allows you to customise its menus/icons, as it means you can get these excellent tools looking exactly how you want them. I'm partway through modifying the Dreamshell VMU tool to look like the original VMU menu myself.

[mazonemayu]

I'm a big sucker for covers & logo's and the likes, I always let my OCD get the better of me
I just spend an hour making a new logo for an emulator on my Xbox hahaha...

The first one is the original one, and the second one is what I made. Since I run a TRON skin atm it all has to fit the theme

That's awesome! TRON is so synonymous with the arcade for me. One of the first games I booted up when I got MAME on my Dreamcast haha. Brilliant movie too.

I always appreciate it when homebrew allows you to customise its menus/icons, as it means you can get these excellent tools looking exactly how you want them. I'm partway through modifying the Dreamshell VMU tool to look like the original VMU menu myself.

I’m a bit of a TRON nerd myself, saw the movie when it came out and I even have a sleeve tattooed in an electronics schematic, like the suits from the movie. If you’re into TRON, I have something you may want to see. This is a vid I made for a friend last week, to show him what you can do with a modded OG Xbox when it comes to emulation, skins & customization of the whole thing. It’s basically just me going through some shit whilst switching between screens for arcade games with TATE mode & the likes, BUT my Xbox runs a custom TRON skin with music from the movie. I also added samples from the movie for basic functions withing the skin like scrolling through the menu’s, confirm, back, etc…have a look, you might like what you see

I hadn’t added that new logo yet when I filmed it and the emulator doesn’t show in the menu yet, but you know how it goes with these things: it is an endless process of customization & adding new shit every now and then. I’m also making a new logo for Final Burn Legends atm but it isn’t completely finished yet (see pics below)

[OlivusPrime]

I'm a big sucker for covers & logo's and the likes, I always let my OCD get the better of me
I just spend an hour making a new logo for an emulator on my Xbox hahaha...

The first one is the original one, and the second one is what I made. Since I run a TRON skin atm it all has to fit the theme

That's awesome! TRON is so synonymous with the arcade for me. One of the first games I booted up when I got MAME on my Dreamcast haha. Brilliant movie too.

I always appreciate it when homebrew allows you to customise its menus/icons, as it means you can get these excellent tools looking exactly how you want them. I'm partway through modifying the Dreamshell VMU tool to look like the original VMU menu myself.

I’m a bit of a TRON nerd myself, saw the movie when it came out and I even have a sleeve tattooed in an electronics schematic, like the suits from the movie. If you’re into TRON, I have something you may want to see. This is a vid I made for a friend last week, to show him what you can do with a modded OG Xbox when it comes to emulation, skins & customization of the whole thing. It’s basically just me going through some shit whilst switching between screens for arcade games with TATE mode & the likes, BUT my Xbox runs a custom TRON skin with music from the movie. I also added samples from the movie for basic functions withing the skin like scrolling through the menu’s, confirm, back, etc…have a look, you might like what you see

I hadn’t added that new logo yet when I filmed it and the emulator doesn’t show in the menu yet, but you know how it goes with these things: it is an endless process of customization & adding new shit every now and then. I’m also making a new logo for Final Burn Legends atm but it isn’t completely finished yet (see pics below)

That's awesome! I think TRON's sound design is super underrated, so I'm glad to see you paying such great homage to it. Not sure if it's yours also, but I'm digging the Transformers: The Movie music too!

[mazonemayu]

That's awesome! TRON is so synonymous with the arcade for me. One of the first games I booted up when I got MAME on my Dreamcast haha. Brilliant movie too.

I always appreciate it when homebrew allows you to customise its menus/icons, as it means you can get these excellent tools looking exactly how you want them. I'm partway through modifying the Dreamshell VMU tool to look like the original VMU menu myself.

I’m a bit of a TRON nerd myself, saw the movie when it came out and I even have a sleeve tattooed in an electronics schematic, like the suits from the movie. If you’re into TRON, I have something you may want to see. This is a vid I made for a friend last week, to show him what you can do with a modded OG Xbox when it comes to emulation, skins & customization of the whole thing. It’s basically just me going through some shit whilst switching between screens for arcade games with TATE mode & the likes, BUT my Xbox runs a custom TRON skin with music from the movie. I also added samples from the movie for basic functions withing the skin like scrolling through the menu’s, confirm, back, etc…have a look, you might like what you see

I hadn’t added that new logo yet when I filmed it and the emulator doesn’t show in the menu yet, but you know how it goes with these things: it is an endless process of customization & adding new shit every now and then. I’m also making a new logo for Final Burn Legends atm but it isn’t completely finished yet (see pics below)

That's awesome! I think TRON's sound design is super underrated, so I'm glad to see you paying such great homage to it. Not sure if it's yours also, but I'm digging the Transformers: The Movie music too!

Actually it is
I replaced almost every emulator’s bg music with Unicron’s theme because it is an amazing piece of music imho, as it is both meancing & soothing at the same time . Sometimes I just leave it on in the background while I’m working on my computer

I also finished the logo for my laserdisc enulator today, it’s pretty minimalist, but I’m pretty happy with the result, it came out exactly how I had it in my head, the neon of the disc goes perfectly with the metallic polish of the letters. It looks very old school on my crt…

[Danny Boy]

Not a fan of repros. For me there's either owning the commercial product, which is neat from a collector and an enthusiast standpoint because its the highest quality and supposedly exactly the way sega and the game's creators wanted the game and its packaging to look and feel physically and how they configured the files on the disc, or else there is just focusing on playing the game through any means necessary, of which there are many free and efficient ways to do so, such as burning your own CDR or using a gdemu or something like that.

Repros are this awkward middle ground between buying the commercial version or just playing a downloaded pirate copy of the game, where you are buying something that is supposed to replicate the commercial product - how sega and the game's creators wanted the game to look and feel, but this can never work on the dreamcast because such "repros" are all burned on CDRs, which will always be lower quality than a pressed disc such as a gdrom. No matter how high quality the repro looks, you will always know its lower quality and fake every time you flip the disc over and see that its just a burned disc. The CDR copy also often requires re-ordering files on a disc or downsampling aspects of the game such as sound or movie files, so the actual game files on the disc wind up being inferior and not a good facsimile of the commercial product in that way as well. At the same time, it seems many providers of repros are quite lazy and will only give you a one page picture in the jewelcase rather than an actual complete manual and/or their printers are not so capable at printing high res images akin to the resolution of the commercial manual and packing... so at that point, it's like why bother? You're trying to get some semblance of the commercial product, but the repro product is so inferior in almost every way that it feels like its not worth it to me.


Its kind of like cars, where you really like ferraris but you can never afford one, so you go and buy a fiero that has been modified to look like a ferrari. It's lower quality in every respect, it doesn't fully look like a ferrari, it does not drive like a ferrari, you yourself know its not a ferrari, and everyone can easily tell its not a ferrari, so what are you really getting out of the experience and all the money you spent on it

Definitely get that. Although there’s many games that’s beyond sane asking prices which I can understand why repros seem attractive. I’ve got one of these repos myself; Border Down, which was done by someone called Old Game. Everything is spot on including full colour manual etc, you’d think it’s an official release, the only detail missing being the official Sega trademark on the back of the disc.

Mostly however I’m interested in repros of games that were never released on the console. The problem being that nearly every repro seller’s product is waaaay below standards. I saw a YouTube video of Dreamcast repros, think it was MetalJesus, and all his repros looked cool with home made manuals etc, no link to where they came from etc, I’ve never seen anything like it out in the wild. I think the whole point of reproductions is to replicate the retail game, if you can’t produce that then you’re selling an inferior product, no manual? blurry artwork? What’s the point? I’ve seen too many and got burned myself by a repro that looks more like a knock off DVD you got in the 00s than any product with quality standards, might as well just burn a disc.

An example of a typical repro in my experience. Blurry artwork on cover and disk, no manual, even the front cover has not been cut poorly to fit the case. Basically a waste of my money:

A shout out to a rare good example of a repro however from ProCustomGames;

Basically I like the concept of repros but the reality is that barely any stack up. Would love to know if anyone has come across any good repros.