MikeJ

Out of your list the only console I have seen with obvious capacitor problems is the Super Famicom (surface mount caps leaked and turned a bit of the shield green, still worked OK but would eventually have caused damage). Original Xboxes lower than version 1.6 will have a super capacitor that holds the time etc. and they leak badly so need doing. Other than that from your list I would just inspect them and leave alone if they are working properly. The other consoles you have listed are either outside of known dodgy capacitor (i.e. leaking causing damage, primarily surface mount ones from late 80s to early 90s) eras or use through holes and are generally OK. In terms of doing it yourself, if you have basic soldering skills and equipment recapping is generally very straightforward but start off doing something cheap (Super Famicom would be a good option).

Probably the best an A500 will ever do is this modern game of which a demo has been knocking around for a while:

They did manage to get some OK looking FPS games running towards the end (with an accelerator), however the best Amiga FPS game in my opinion is Alien Breed 3D. It is well designed, runs just about acceptably on base hardware with some extra RAM, looks alright in the smallest window, is creepy and atmospheric, and had impressive at the time engine features not common to other games like transparent water, being able to walk under bits of the map, etc etc. The prettier ones (Alien Breed 3D 2, Breathless, Fears, Nemac IV etc) seemed to concentrate more on looking nice than including any kind of decent game in there. Ultimately though the Amiga was just too long in the tooth to do the genre proper justice and by the time you had spent money on an accelerator etc. you could have bought a much faster PC, which is what pretty much everyone did of course.

<edit: wrong thread>

I think so considering this was the other approach:

The Amiga (1200 version here) did get a version of street fighter 2 which played well towards the end of its life (assuming your Amiga has 6 button joypads available and a hard drive): Unfortunately by the time it was released you could buy a SNES with SF2 Turbo and two controllers for around £100, and you can see the graphical compromises. There was also a version of Super SF2 Turbo which looked great until it moved.

I had a go on Kid Chaos again earlier and like a lot of platformers of the day (including console ones) it’s as if someone came up with a perfectly good game, then a lunatic came along and ruined it by adding horrible platform game cliches. Just in the first world we see: Items needing smashed to unlock the exit; Ridiculous inertia on the character which chucks you uncontrollably into hazards; Springs that repeatedly send you backwards made worse by the above; Power ups that reverse your controls; Leaps of faith; Annoying crawly enemies that are impossible to avoid; Text captions saying stuff like “HEALTH -50%” when you get hit. I can only imagine the playtesters were the programmers.

The story goes that Kid Chaos started as a straightforward Sonic port demo but obviously they had to change it. It's spoiled by excessive inertia and a very dull colour palette (and I think "destroy x flowers before the exit opens" nonsense).

If you enjoy threads like this you will love the EAB forum where they have basically been running on a loop for 20+ years.

I will defend Gloom here as a simple FPS of its time which ran well on the limited hardware it was coded for, I certainly had fun playing it. I don’t remember it being held up as a serious Doom clone/competitor at the time.

Like everything you can learn what’s coming if you play it enough but I had little patience for such cheap mechanics then and even less now so I never got to that point. I got to the penultimate level of the AGA version on my second or so attempt so something in that has made it much easier than the original.

30 years of hindsight is pretty good at sorting the wheat from the chaff and pretty much the only Amiga platformers I will play for fun rather than curiosity nowadays are arcade conversions (Rainbow Islands, New Zealand Story, Tiny Bobble) and BC Kid (improved PC Engine port). The rest of them are full of idiot design decisions like “collect x more magic snails to open exit”, overly massive levels, endless leaps of faith etc etc. The not filling the screen thing really stands out now but is a little unfair as all of the competition did it as well (in fact the PAL Amiga probably has more full screen games than the PAL consoles did). Unfortunately unlike the consoles a lot of them can’t be fixed with a simple NTSC switch as the speed was designed for 50hz so they run too fast, generally break etc. Also Agony is and always has been a terrible game, and it looks like a Terry Gilliam cartoon when it moves.

Before you replace the switch I would be inclined to spray a load of contact cleaner in it (just the switch) then operate the button a few dozen times, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

If I were to give one bit of advice on repairing old stuff it would be this: avoid battery damaged kit where at all possible.

Not too much in the way of projects recently, the Atari TT has been sold as I never used it and I did replace the BBC A with a B. I bought a Mac IIci in a fit of madness and failed to notice telltale battery damage signs in the photos, which I gave up on and is now tormenting someone else in this YouTube video: