Hello everyone! You all enjoying your 3D Tvs and wearing your specs?
What do you mean you don't have one yet? Oh ok you over there has one, cool.
So you been playing your games in 3D then, seeing them come out at you and really feeling the depth? What you mean you don't have any games like that? pfft!!
Ahh yes, stereoscopic gaming. With the advent of release of the 3DS, (with no need for the specs I might add) 3D gaming is the big thing of 2011, but actually its been going on for quite some time....
Which brings us neatly on to the topic of
RETRO 3D GAMING (ooooh!)
This is not the first attempt that Nintendo has released a 3D portable console, its first was the virtualboy:
The virtualboy came out in summer 1995 in japan (August 14 US), and was a red/cyan based 3D but recieved a luke warm reception and never made it to europe, so sadly was canned the following year.
Although it did have impressive 3D, because of the monochromatic nature limited its appeal.
Other companies have developed 3D addons for their consoles, but none had gone past the prototype stage.
That leads us on to PC gaming.
3D acceleated graphics cards have made gaming on the pc what it is today, with so many available there have been so many gimmics bundled with them.
And one company decided to add some stereoscopic glasses to the package:
Elsa had bundled these glasses with their Gforce cards around 1999, and were shutter based that synced with the pc, and were wireless using infrared.
They were pretty much comparable to how modern 3D shutter glasses work, so how come they didn't start the 3D stereoscopic gaming a standard back then?
Sadly at the time this was a novelty (half life did look pretty great though!) and was bundled with few demos and tools, but support and compatability mean't it died off pretty quick.
So back to 2011....
You got your latest graphic card, all 3Ded up, but your wondering if you can get your retro fix in a whole new perspective? Well your in luck!
Emulation:
Emulation is pretty much where most retro is played on a modern system, and with more and more plugin based, has allowed console games to be graphically improved, with direct stereoscopic support or to be allowed to be used with the hardware using nvidia 3d vision.
Noteable emulators:
Dolphin, allows stereoscopic display for gamecube and wii with the included plugins
Pcsx2:
N64: with use with the modified rice plugin s3d allows use with nvidia 3d vision
And the rest...
Want to have your classic glide based games in stereoscopic such as tombraider?
well with the use of wrappers with its possible such as
http://www.glidos.net/
With so many options for retro games in stereoscopic 3D, the list is endless, feel free to ask questions or post your own findings in the comments or on our forums.
Well i'm off to play a few classic games in HD now, something to write about for another blog me thinks...........
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