Treble

Had a chance to check out the internals. The battery has leaked onto the board, as expected. Frigging time bombs, the lot of 'em. Sigh. Ah well, cleaning up that's the first big task! On the positive side, it's got some neato expansions: A5000 board with 68020 @16.67 Mhz plus a 68881 PGA FPU Dataflyer RAM board with 2MB installed, I think, on 2 x 1MB SIMMs, with room for 6 more SIMMs. It has the 2088XT PC XT emulator board too, although not currently fitted. :

Bonus vid:

Just been dropped off. Some of it's suffered water damage, but mostly just the manuals. Some of the contacts are corroded and will need some heavy restoration. But still... pretty exciting... In the anti static bag is the PC bridgeboard, and the external drive *might* be for an ST.

Have you set yourself a budget? One idea for a display is to scavenge a panel from a dead laptop. I think the YouTube channel DIY Perks has a video on doing this.

Nice! I guess you're going to replace the mono CRT with a flat panel monitor. Got any in mind? A Raspberry Pi won't do GC so if that's a deal breaker, I reckon you could fit a MicroATX board in there and go the PC route. You'll have to measure the internal dimensions for that (mATX boards are 24 x 24cm). Intrigued about this project!

So thanks to @Lorfarius I've got a renewed interest in the Miggy world. No doubt this means I'll be broke within a few months, so thanks mate Anyway, I was casually chatting online to my mate Steve about it. He's my mirror universe equivalent, with the key difference being my 90s obsession with console hardware was an obsession with computer hardware. And he has a goatee (not really) So I mentions wanting to get back into it etc. and he casually goes... oh, I've got one in storage if you want it? This is news to me, as we've been mates for about 16/17 years and he never said he had Amiga kit still knocking about and, believe me, we've had some very ,very nerdy chats over the years. I ask which model, and he nonchalantly drops that it's an A2000. I remain calm and enquire what it comes with, and he (still nonchalant) says he thinks the spec is: Additional 5.25 floppy 486 board K&M Commodore monitor (1084 maybe?) :-o So, this lot's all mine now! We're sorting out price later, once I see what state the board's in and stuff. But wow. Holy shit. Now I've got a good idea of value, but still have a few quezzies the more Miggy-minded amongst you might be able to help with: 1) How much do the 486 boards go for? I've got no clue abut these whatsoever, and Googling wasn't immediately helpful. This'll be an original, early days board of course. Knowing my mate, in top condition as well. 2) Does anywhere sell full recap kits with decent caps? IIRC the 2000 board is pretty much the same as the 500, right? 3) When thinking about expansions, what's the best approach for storage? Should I should be looking at IDE -> CF adapter? A SCSI board? WHD load? Gotek floppy emulator? 4) Keeping cost out of the equation for now, what's the best expansion to get up to the highest clock speeds and RAM... Vampire? An old board? Which RAM sticks? Typing that out, I'm even more clueless than I realised, heh heh.

I do like Pi emulation, FWIW. I do find Linux to be a faff though, if I have to make any changes. Simple? Yes. Fun? Yep. Powerful and flexible? Nup.

It's the PC. I've no idea where people are getting the idea it's tough to set up emulators. Configure sometimes, yes, but that's mainly on the newer systems. A Win10 OS (if you get a machine with a 7 or 8 licence, you can still upgrade to 10 for free) is amazing for letting you chuck just about any controller at it too, like @Qazimod says. As for cost, my emu gaming PC runs (as I mentioned in another thread) everything up to and including PS2/Dreamcast/Wii plus a good few games of the late-release PS3 and 360 era but on Steam, like MGSV. I'm playing Cuphead right now. Total cost around £100, so significantly cheaper than the Shield. I like big pc cases (for cooling) but you could fit it all in a mini case if size bothers you

How in all conscience he didn't name this something like, "Conan the Documentarian" I'll never know.

Game of the Year A1. Astro Bot: Rescue Mission It's our duty as PSVR owners to be like that bloke in Lord of the Rings, who lights the big bonfire on top of that snowy hill: we have to keep the VR flame alive and draw people to it. Our job's a ton easier when a game like this pops out. Astro Bot is a pure ray of joy in a gloomy world. It's funny and it's lovely. It not only makes you use the touchpad and the sixaxis gyrometer... it makes you adore them and clamour for more. Charm by the bucketful and an incredible sense of presence - of 'thereness' - turns it into a small wonder. Trying to explain what the experience is like is the hardest sell, but I'm going with 'Pikmin meets Captain Toad'. That combinaiton of saving the little guy along with full 3D thinking is the closest I can get, and it still doen't do the game justice. As good as any 3D Mario, Astro Bot's good enough to make you hope - fervently pray - that Nintendo move their plumber into the virtual dimension for his next outing. In the meantime, I'm hoping and dreaming for more of this little automaton fella. He needs to be the poster child for VR: bright, sweet, fun and minty fresh A2. WipEout Omega Collection VR The only thing I'll add to what everyone else has said in their praise, is how fantastic it is to see Psygnosis's designs like this. Sharp curves leading to some bright piece of fake advertising; runs like toboggan courses; precipitous twists and drops, all of which are shiny, high contrast and uttery spellbinding. It's as utterly comprehensive a fake universe as we've ever had in gaming, and with VR you're actually in it. Like, properly IN IT. It's one of gaming's most perfect successes and should be played by all human beings. A3. Moss A children's illustrated novel come to life! Moss got slightly overlooked for a few reasons (released early in the year, was too expensive, came out before the big headset price drop) but deserves to be widely embraced. It's an adventure game similar to The Last Guardian and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but much lighter of heart. You guide and help dinky mouse Quill around Sylvanian Families-esque areas in a flick book style, fighting monsters with her needle-like sword. All the while, you're moving objects around as a human sized, benevolent meta-character. Picture ICO but where a god-like hand is moving objects instead of the horny lad. It's the sense of immersion in the story that sets it apart; yet another game that wouldn't work at all in 2D, but is transformatively brilliant in VR. I'm sure it'll get reappraised in the trail of Astro Bot and reach more gamers, which it richly deserves. A4. Spider-Man An action game you could rave about until the cows come home, the stand-out aspects of this fabulous open world game for me are the writing, which makes every side quest feel like an important part of the narrative. Secondly the action, which takes Batman: Arkham Asylum's counter-attack system and adds tons of combat possibilities. Basically it gets everything about the character of Spider-Man right, and injects that into an exciting and tightly-focused detective/scientist/ex-boyfriend/pigeon-chasing/web-slinging adventure. A5. Hollow Knight Dev 1: "You know what they haven't made before?" Dev 2: "What's that?" Dev 1: "Get this... a Strider game that's a Metroidvania!" Dev 2: "Erm, didn't Capcom do one in twenty fourt..." Dev 1: "Shut up" Biggest Disappointment of the Year (game, hardware, or anything else) Z1. Lack of unionisation in the games industry/The Crunch still being a thing Z2. Mario Tennis Aces Z3. Street Fighter V Sound Design of the Year S1. Tetris Effect S2. Hollow Knight S3. Astro Bot Visual Design of the Year V1. God of War V2. Moss V3. Astro Bot: Rescue Mission V4. Battle Princess Madelyn Such a good year for games, BPM gets squeezed out of the main list but deserves a shout. And its comprehensive updating of Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts amazing cutesy ghost drama graphics are the reason why. As a side note, as the Switch release is 2019 I expect to see it start showing up on people's best of lists at the end of this year - it's very good! Writing of the Year W1. God of War I loved everything about the new GoW... except the game play! It just didn't click with me. The writing, though, was excellent. Ok, so it adheres to the The Last of Us template pretty rigidly, but that just means there are now two well-written action games ever made instead of one. I'm exagerrating for effect (a bit, anyway) but yeah, Sony should be proud of the digital world Santa Monica Studio - and the man they call 'The Balrog' - created. W2. Spider-Man Gaming Format (System) of the Year F1. Playstation VR I admit, when it was released I honestly thought the future for PSVR was doomed to be full of tech demos and down-ports of older, popular games. Thank god, then, that 2018 proved it's entirely the opposite. We're seeing Sony do what any company with such a fantastic opportuniy should do but so rarely does: handing a free rein to the developers. We've had the likes of Déraciné, Blind, Firewall, Sprint Vector, Beat Saber, Moss and Apex Construct, plus small matter of GOTY Astro Bot - a wealth of invention for mainline releases. Long may it continue! Publisher or Developer of the Year P1. Sony Including the stunning achievements of their virtual world hardware, Sony managed higher quality exclusives than either Nintendo or Microsoft. Spider-Man and God of War sewed-up your 'best of' AAA exclusives, and the remake of Shadow of the Colossus is very special. Their stuff also has more sophisticated stoytelling and world-building than even a few short years ago. The industry's slowly maturing, and Sony's in-house output is arguably the most progressive of the major players. Best Supported Game (released pre 2018) of the Year B1. Your game of the year that didn't come out this year (basically what is your favourite game you played this year that came out in 2017 or earlier) X1. Superhot VR An incredibly hard one to choose for this category but the 'gun to my head' choice was Superhot, as it's a complete game-changer. God, I hope there's a sequel soon. Best game character of the year C1. Quill (Moss, PSVR) C2. Astro Bot C3. Atreus (God of War) C4. Peter Parker/Spider-Man

A couple of things: God Mode for action games. Once you complete it and unlock the stuff that makes it harder (nightmare difficulty etc.) you should definitely get a god mode where you get chance to have every power and ability from the off. Options for the hearing impaired. I don't have an impairment, but often play games wth no sound (the realities of playing games in the same room as your SO and not isolating them yourself in a headphone bubble, fact fans) and the number of games that have audio cues that you completely miss is bordering on negligence. Once again, the ignorance of the non-impaired is just so deeply entrenched - it should be front and centre of your mind when you're designing these things.

Spider-Verse, Spider-verse, A film to which I am not averse Fighting Ock? You'll need a nurse! Wilson Fisk? Even worse! Look ooooouuut, you're into the Spider-verse!

Yeah, I liked it. I thought it actually got more assured and more interesting as it went along. Funnier, too.

The Disney movies show hard it is to please a fan base. You can't just pick up the toys and play a great game; you have to care deeply about the audience, the universe AND have talented screenwriters onboard. Even then, you won't please everyone. Best thing you can do is make a good film and hope the audience warms to it.

@strider, which one, chap? I had some weirdness with posting my Wrong Turn update review... was it that one?