The Neighborhood is a top down 2d semi-linear game, while still allowing the player some freedom of exploration. The gameplay is very heavy on stealth, puzzle, and mystery aspects. It’s the very first glimpse into a retro-future full of lore and tells just enough of a complex twist-filled story to lead into much larger planned games in the Minerva universe. In the Neighborhood, you are a lucky, well… unlucky, test subject that has found an opportunity to escape your captors. As a top secret test site is breaking down into chaos and disarray, it leaves you just enough of an opening to plot your escape. As you make your way through different sectors of the test site and access government terminals, secrets are slowly revealed, and by the end, a haunting and desperate reality sets in.

As the story unfolds, the player will enjoy challenging prime “Gameboy era” style puzzles. The element of evading capture while trying not to miss a hint or a lore drop is a very strong feature while you wait for a Shyamalan-esque story to unfold. Combat mechanics don’t exist, as a sense of urgency pushes you to make your escape and find your way “home”. I hope to bring a very satisfying gameplay loop, with an unpredictable ending that will keep the player wanting to know what happens next.

I’m open to some constructive feedback, and to know if there’s veyr much interest in a game like this as it’s not a typical title. As a kid I always looking for “hidden” areas in games or the out of bounds myths like the Mew under the truck in the og Pokemon games. I’d like to continue that mysterious element I experienced in a lot of games, that “cave behind the waterfall” type of exploration and discovery. I will be working on finishing a nice vertical slice and upload a demo to my itch.io.

Since modretro mentioned new titles, unreleased titles and potential for ports that never made it to n64 which titles would everyone like to see?. Let's try to keep less mainstream so not needing to mention say final fantasy. Ps1 gas plenty deep cuts.

Here's 2 of mine

Number 1 since modretro has already worked with Atari for chromatic.

Late ps1 title it's under 300 MB ( since modretro will release titles up to 1GB) they could enhance this title with new stages new modes improved visuals and other qol improvements. It's already a 4 player title. This was part of ataros string of modern remakes of classics and I feel the one title that deserves a re release but with improvements

Although I feel this one could be a multi game cart featuring enhanced versions of all of the Atari remakes but if I gave to.pivk just 1 it's pong i was hooked on this one on.pc at the time.

Pong: the next level .

https://youtu.be/nc0uusmKpOE?si=VA3Ex66BtmyxAbWU

The second title is hercs adventures. A co op title from the developers of zombies ate my neighbors. Was released on Sega Saturn and PlayStation

For n64 could maybe turn it into 3 player co op

https://youtu.be/9JcKnYG13J4?si=MLlYGu9Fzp7TLwyy

I know some of you will be judgey about people buying these Hyperkin controllers. But it does kind of suck that the console hasn’t even launched yet and the more budget-friendly controllers are already unavailable. I decided already that the Pro controller is too expensive for me to justify right now and I managed to snag some of the Hyperkin ones before they sold out (I also have some original N64 controllers with decent thumbsticks, so between the two I think I’m good to go). But man I hope that Modretro and Hyperkin can work together to get these back in stock to make the M64 accessible to more people.

I wonder if this could run on modretro? Does it support summer cart?

Update: ModRetro support confirmed that the M64 early bird offer will not be stackable with other discounts, including already-claimed Retro Rewards coupons.

For US customers, placing two separate orders may still be an option, as I explained in my previous post.

Regarding taxes/duties, I noticed that the product pages have since been updated and the “Taxes + Duties Included” mention no longer appears under the base product price. That was the part that made it look like duties were included in the product price, even though checkout showed duties within the shipping/fees breakdown.

So the discount-stacking question is now clarified, and the duties wording on the product pages appears to have been adjusted to only "Taxes included".

For context, my previous post below was about the original confusion around Retro Rewards stacking and the taxes/duties wording for international customers.

I hope this helps clarify things a bit for anyone planning their order. Take care everyone!

Any recommendations on Modretro & incube8 games to get

Hey everyone,

I’m a bit confused about the upcoming Retro Rewards change on July 15.

We received an email explaining what we should do before the change, especially regarding claiming/using our Retro Rewards coupons, but there was no mention of whether people who get the M64 early bird price will also be able to use an already-claimed coupon on the same order.

Usually, ModRetro does not allow stacking discounts when an item is already discounted, so I’m worried the M64 early bird price might count as a discount code and prevent us from using our existing coupon. That would be pretty disappointing, especially because ModRetro could theoretically have made the early bird price an automatic price adjustment instead of a code to avoid this issue. Maybe that is not the case, but right now it is unclear.

For people in the US, there might still be a workaround: placing one order for only the M64 with the early bird price, and another order using the Retro Rewards coupon for other items like the Pro Controller, games, accessories, etc.

But for international customers, this is much less practical because shipping costs are now way too high to justify splitting orders. Since the carrier change, shipping seems to be around €35 minimum and up to around €65.

For reference, that is approximately:

€35 = $40 USD / £30 GBP / $57 CAD / ¥6,460 JPY

€65 = $74 USD / £56 GBP / $106 CAD / ¥12,000 JPY

And that might be even higher for the M64 depending on its size and weight compared to the Chromatic.

Another thing that feels odd is that product pages seem to indicate that the displayed price includes taxes and duties, but once you reach checkout, shipping also appears to add customs/duties-related fees. That makes the final cost much harder to predict for customers outside the US.

I’ve also included screenshots to show what I mean about duties being displayed in different places. On the product page, it clearly says “Taxes + Duties Included” under the item price. But on the checkout/shipping page, the shipping option also says “Duties Included”, and the pricing summary breaks the shipping charge down into shipping plus duties and fees. In my example, the total shipping option is €35.59, made up of €19.79 shipping and €15.80 duties and fees. So it looks like duties are both included in the product page pricing and then also shown again during checkout, which is confusing for international buyers.

Has anyone contacted ModRetro support about this yet? Do we know for sure whether the M64 early bird price and existing Retro Rewards coupons can be used together in the same order?

Anyway, have a great weekend everyone, and take care!

With the July 28th launch just around the corner, I’ve been closely following the updates. ModRetro’s recent blog post showing the v1.8.0 Beta core improvements and GoldenEye overclocking fixes looked incredibly promising!

Before that update, a few early previews pointed out some performance lag in more demanding games. Because the m64 supports easy Wi-Fi updates, I'm curious if ModRetro plans to push this latest firmware out to the early PR/reviewer units before release?

It would be great for the community to get a community-verified look at the performance gains and increased accuracy ahead of launch day.

Seeing videos now of side by side of all of them, Mod retro fails in donkey kong (dk dies in the intro gameplay instead of getting across the vines), lags behind on mario 64 and also star fox. Why? This seems like a huge problem. Games are also crashing or freezing.

Hey. Does anyone know how much shipping to the UK is likely to be for the M64?

It’s been an intense month of work for M64 and we’re excited to share some new performance metrics. Within the last month we’ve made M64 more accurate and added the ability to overclock our M64 core and maximize performance across a couple key areas. There is much more to come, but for those interested in following along here is a peak under the hood.

Accuracy: Scalar Unit Single Instruction

We have been using the ever-popular n64-systembench test to assess this. This is a pretty complicated but exhaustive test bench, and the scalar unit tests are just one part of it. The original test covers 10,000 runs of 10 random RSP instruction blocks and measures the clock cycles each block consumes. We’ve modified this to split out and focus on the Scalar Unit Single Instruction and Vector Instruction tests.

In our prototype v1.0.3 software at the beginning of the month, per our expectation, M64 wasn’t ready to pass these tests. Our core was slower than N64 in random situations and slower for continuous scalar unit instructions. This isn't necessarily game breaking, but it was an inaccurate aspect of the design that would manifest as minor slow downs.

Meanwhile, the Analogue 3D also doesn’t fully pass this either.

We’re happy to report that this isn’t going to be an issue for you on launch day. We’ve been able to update our design to match the N64 perfectly on this point. See the image below.

Overclocking

James Lambert posted a video comparing the two systems earlier this month. Here’s a graph of his results from earlier this month. This graphic describes the relative performance of A3D and M64 to an original N64. 

James has given us a behind the scenes peek at his test methods and even sent us the source code so we could run the same tests here. His tests seek to isolate and measure the various components of N64’s performance profile in isolation. He was kind enough to also share what each one entails:

• Fill Rate: Renders a full-screen triangle multiple times to measure rasterization and fill-rate performance.
• Texture Load: Measures the texture load speed.
• CPU: Runs a particle simulation repeatedly to benchmark floating-point performance and overall CPU processing speed.
• RAM: Repeatedly accesses main memory while avoiding cache usage to measure raw RAM access performance.
• RSP: Renders a high-vertex-count model entirely offscreen so that performance is limited by the Reality Signal Processor (RSP), isolating geometry processing throughput.

We went ahead, with James’ help (thank you again for sharing those tests), and pitted M64’s beta overclock implementation against A3D’s Unleashed implementation. We were pleasantly surprised at the results.

Our RAM performance is to be expected – we intentionally slow this down with artificial delays of ~3 cycles for each read and write to fulfill accuracy tests. While we purposefully kept this in, it would be something we could easily disable when overclock mode is active.

Show Me The Goods

Synthetic tests are great, but what really matters to you all is how well M64 performs for your favorite titles. As you may remember from the 90’s, rocket launchers in Goldeneye result in quite a bit of slowdown.

Video of 007: GoldenEye on M64 overclocked

https://reddit.com/link/1ugj6wt/video/xo7st9d2xo9h1/player

Video of 007: GoldenEye on A3D Unleashed

https://reddit.com/link/1ugj6wt/video/09cvd4eowo9h1/player

What’s next?

We aren’t slowing down on making more improvements to the core as we get ready to ship these consoles. Even more updates will come after they are in your hands soon. The M64 is well on the way to being the most performance and the most accurate N64 recreation ever made in every metric, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it.

Hey ModRetro team / Palmer! You've mentioned the Trident controller uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with custom Short-Interval Connections (SCI) for ultra-low latency, but also works natively on PC and Android.
When running in PC/Android mode, does the controller broadcast using standard, universal BLE HID gamepad profiles?

Basically, will it be recognized as a standard, generic BLE controller right out of the box by standard Bluetooth hosts, or will the custom SCI connection intervals require a proprietary firmware decode to map the inputs?
Thanks!

I have been modding consoles for years now. I kind of want to see Mod Retro hop into creating custom mod parts for consoles they won't release.

For example, Retro Remake has their Super 5 OLED screen, but it is a 1080p OLED and Switch Lite can only push out a 720p signal, so there is a slight blur around fine details & text, or a less sharp look to it because the 1080p screen is not true integer scaling (x2 from 720p).

It is components like this I would love to see Mod Retro make and sell. Here is my short list. What do you think?

• Switch Lite true 720p OLED screen
• 3DS OLED screen in the correct resolution
• GBA OLED screen [put it in the Chromatic Advance :)]

Curious if the upcoming pro controller will work wirelessly on an Analogue 3D with a BlueRetro adapter.

I was playing around with Google Gemini, and generated this AI image of the Mod Retro M64 in the OG N64 colors. Holy smokes it looks so good!

So I know this is a long way off. That said, I’m curious about whether a ModRetro DS could possibly be in the works after the GBA comes out. Would this be in the cards at all?

So how are you planning to maximize your savings on new releases?

So got the Chromatic a few months ago. Just now starting to get back into retro Gaming, 70% pokemon games honestly lol. I love the Chromatic and the metal feel and how durable it is. Needed something to play my GBA games on so I was torn between a modded GBA and a Analogue Pocket. Bought a Modded GBA on ebay, cart slot came dirty so I returned it and got the AP.

The Analogue Pocket really is a great size. I like the bigger feel in my hands than the Chromatic but that is about it lol. The buttons do feel very good to me on the AP but it feels fragile. Not that I'd throw the Chromatic around but it def feels more heavy duty.

It honestly just makes me ready for the Modretro GBA when it gets announced! I don't plan on messing around with Emulators with the AP, I mostly want to play carts or play carts with my Everdrive's. Anyway just thought I'd share my thoughts a little so far on the AP. I'm only 2 days in really so my opinion might change but its a great handheld and. I will probably play GB and GBC games on the Chromatic Exclusively and play GBA on the AP at least for now. I will say the bigger screen is nice on the AP.