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There is now a Free Software Acorn Electron emulator called ElectrEm:
http://electrem.emuunlim.com/

Unfortunately a GNU/Linux port of the new codebase version does not exist yet. Someone please contribute that the project. The graphics code is written for Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL), so this emulator should be quite straightforward to port.

I started with a Sinclair ZX81, 1Kb of RAM expanded to 16Kb with a "RAM pack" that had an edge connector to the main PCB inside. It got hot (as did the power supply) and was often unstable. You could suddenly lose everything you were working on because the system just froze.

Along came the ZX Spectrum, 48Kb (and later 128Kb) with 8 colours (the ZX81 was black & white), sprites (the ZX81 was limited to the built in character set which included blocks & things until someone worked out how to hack that) and rubber keys (the ZX81 had touch sensitive membrane things).

It was a revolution, at my school we swapped tapes which didn't always load, had multiface cartridges to enter POKEs (changing a value at a particular memory address) for cheats and in order to create backups... and a big magazine scene.

I even ran an emulator on my PC to play one game in particular: the game that everyone tried to beat, and still fiendishly hard (and created by a mysterious genius who "disappeared", Matthew Smith) : Manic Miner (link to a Windows version).

Those were the days. The UK 8 bit scene was dominated by this machine.

It did the trick for me until I got an IBM computer back in the early '90s. Until then, my C64 and 1-button joystick worked perfectly.

http://s64.emuunlim.com/gameinfos/bully/bully.htm

this game will be great... no wait, it already IS great

That, and large parts of the classic Xbox architecture are patented by NVIDIA, which is unwilling to license them to Microsoft for use in an ATI based console at any price short of 51 percent of market cap. Besides, do you see working PS2, GameCube, or Xbox emulators on modern PCs? Emulation generally needs a gap of two console generations to work well, outside of special cases that can be High-level Emulated. Microsoft's goal in Xbox-on-360 emulation is to make each game such a special case.

>No, they did do some things.

My three favorite copy-protections of the 80's.

1. ZX Spectrum - Lenslock. Picture this, it takes 5 minutes to load the game. You are then given this weird thing to hold up to the screen which using shaped lens would turn the mess on screen into characters which you could read. Took a while to get past that as well and if you failed the game reset.

2. Spectrum again, Jet Set Willy2 color codes. I kid you not it was crazy to try and read. Here is a picture of it. http://jswremakes.emuunlim.com/Mmt/cover-jsw2-code sheet.jpg

3. Amiga. I forget the protection name but it was put onto two games I know of D+D and some air combat game. Basically it would allow you to copy the game without any problems at all and the game would work fine until about 2-3 minutes into the game where in D+D a monster would appear and wipe out your whole party or in the case of the airplane game an emeny would show up and blow out your engines in one shot.

I'm with you there...that game was incredible, but I never managed to finish it. :(

BTW, here's a little something for nostalgia's sake.

My absolute fav game, however, was Paradroid. Completely fscking brilliant.I highly recommend the port available on Sourceforge...extremely well done.

(and yeah, it may not be new news, but lighten up. At this point, anything besides another 360, PSP or Hot Coffee lawsuit story is a breath of fresh air).

I used too love the amiga. And still do too some degree. And still use some of the tools and games it had too offer.

If you want too try how the amiga was( or try again) I suggest you try the amiga emulator at:
http://www.winuae.net/ [winuae.net]
It pretty much emulate the amiga perfectly.
If you don't have a old amiga it might be hard to find the ROM's needed too get it too run, but they are out there.

If you really want too see what the amiga was capable of try:
http://aiab.emuunlim.com/ [emuunlim.com] (amiga in a box) which enhance the workbench in ways you newer thought was possible.

This forum is most likely the best place too find anything amiga legacy:
http://eab.abime.net/ [abime.net]

Tempest is an absolute classic, and Jeff's rendition on the Jaguar (Tempest 2000 - http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?Softwar eLabelID=1111) is one of the best (video) games made thus far; Frenetic, addictive, almost kinda feels like Quake3 play in a restricted 3d environment + Lyserg-Säure-Diaethylamid (but that's always been the Minter style). Go Hovver Bovver!

Check out the emulator http://pt.emuunlim.com/ which does a good job of running Tempest 2000 (that is assuming you're one of those rare people who own the cart, and can't be bothered pulling the Jag out of the box in the cupboard and hooking it up) *ahem*.

Perhaps if more programmers utilised the hardware properly (like Jeff? don't know, but the game rocked and that's the point right?) rather than falling back to 68k ("yay, new console but sub-68k quality game" syndrome, where you then open the console and start poking custom chips - "hello! hellooooooooo! chip! are you there?!? work damn you!!!!!)... but then again if the dev kit was better+cheaper... or perhaps if a little thing called the Sony PlayStation wasn't just on the horizon... hmmmm. I know not... i'm with Ecclesiastes anyway :)

RIP Atari, you stupid wonderful bastard of a company.

I thought the same thing. Are you sure it isn't?

I propose a community vs ultracade battle of Joust TO THE DEATH!!!

Have you ever heard of running in an emulator? Well that's what's happening there.

The short description of the patent sounds very much like the help system that appeared in several incarnations on MacOS.
AFAIK the bubble help gave context sensitive information on GUI elements after activating it with a button.
Apparently MacOS 7 came out two years before the patent was filed. Here's a screenshot of MacOS 7 with the help icon and a copyright notice.

Trip Hawkins is an interesting choice, in that the other inductees were all heavily involved in game development, whereas he was more of a facilitator. There's also a great deal of debate on whether Hawkins is to be villified or celebrated. I'll throw in with the latter category, because he pulled together the "electronic artists" who created my favorite games of the early '80s.

An article written by the Dot Eaters does a good job of describing how I think of Electronic Arts when it was just a small studio. I'm still fond of those LP-style packages. And their toolbox-titles, such as Adventure Construction Set, Pinball Construction Set and Racing Destruction Set brought about my own interest in creating games with a strong building component to them. There was nothing in the world like M.U.L.E. before Dan Bunten/Danielle Bunten Berry created it. And I think it was Hawkins that made these things possible.

He may deserve the harsh scrutiny he receives -- and, certainly, he's not going to win any points with anyone for his comments earlier this year. But somehow I can't hate the fellow who brought together so many bright folks under one roof. Electronic Arts has recently published some of my favorite games, but it's the early ones I remember best.
___________________________________________
Inago Rage - Create and fight within your own FPS arenas.
Try the new demo for Windows!

So since Krypton is already taken and any proposal on /. is bound to pay tribute to the home computer era of the 1980s, from your description of the life forms and their presumable favorite tourist activity on Earth, this planet's most appropriate name would quite obviously have to be... Rampage ;-)

Surely the best cooking sim of all time is Mr Wimpy on the Spectrum.

If what you say is true, then why has MSFT not sued people in the three years since XP was unleshed who have made Luna themes for Winamp and Pocket PC's? Some of the themes i've linked are close to, if not exact copies of the Luna UI, just like XPde. Contrast this with Apple, who has clamped down on copies of the Aqua UI in the last three years.

1. The max resolution of computer technology matched the max resolution of television.
2. Because of the high cost of manufacturing electronics, families had fewer TVs/monitors.
3. Houses were smaller (page 14)
4. Videogames were more family friendly than today.
5. We didn't each carry e-mail around on our cell phones.

Let's not forget that the speculation is that this will be a dual processor console.

The Sega Saturn was a console with multiple processors, and to this day there is no decent Saturn emulator. The hardware set-up of the Saturn made it one of the most difficult to emulate systems thus far, this has long been known/commented on/talked about.

Just because something runs on X processor, does not mean that even a computer with the same processor, or even 2-3 times the processing power can emulate it. The N64 had a 93.75MHz processor, and 3d hardware archaic by todays standards, but most PC N64 emulators list 1ghz+ processors in their requirements.

Here's a link to the System 7.5 Network Access boot disk, plus instructions on how to write it to a floppy in Windows. Used to be available on Apple's FTP site, but Google found this first and I'm too lazy to look further.

Anyway, yes, it has AppleTalk, but not TCP/IP.

Apple also has a Mac OS 8.1 Disk Tools floppy image you can download, which is a seriously hacked-up version of Mac OS (without the Mac OS 8 Platinum theme; it looks like System 7) with HFS+ support, but no network access. Includes Disk First Aid and Drive Setup.

My sports heroes when I was growing up were Vincent, Gronk, Crudla, Glunk, Thag, and Ugha.

It is a fact of a turing machine that any one can emulate any other

It is a fact that they can. However that does not mean that it will be easy.

It'd be slow, but it'd work just fine.

This is exactly the problem: it would be slow. And up until a certain point, it's slow enough you might as well not do it at all. No, there's no commercial demand for PPC emulation on x86; there
doesn't really need to be. People write emulators just because they can. Do you think there is any "demand" for an emulator for the Amstrad CPC? In the meantime, there's some hobbyist demand from people who are "curious" about OS X; there's the guarantee of instant infamy for anyone who succeeds. People have really tried, put a lot of effort into trying to, emulate the PPC on an x86. I've never seen anyone succeed. As it turns out, though, writing a PPC emulator that runs on the x86 just happens to be unbelievably difficult to do with anything even remotely approaching an acceptable speed of emulation due to the neatly mismatching design philosophies of the two instruction sets. Yeah, if there was a real commercial *NEED* for someone to emulate, an acceptable emulator could probably be created. But the issue is a little more complicated than "oh, no one wants it".

If it's Mac emulation you are looking at, well that's a problem. The Mac ROMs are not available outside of Mac hardware, nor is the OS, and without those, it is useless. So to run the emulator, someone would need a legit copy of the ROMs and OS, meaning they'd need to own a Mac. Well if you own the hardware an emulator is worthless.

Not only is this not the hard part, this is the part that has already been solved. Modern macintoshes no longer have anything significant in ROM. The ROM is just a tiny kickstart thing and the OS is booted entirely using the openly documented Open Firmware protocol. This part is a non-issue.

Since the internals of an apple machine aren't that public, virtualizing the hardware might be a little bit difficult.. but, well, not that difficult, as practically all of the work has already been done for you in the form of the mac-on-linux project, a VMWare-like virtual machine for macintosh hardware that will let you boot OS X within a virtual machine on top of Linux. I am uncertain how much extra work needs to be done on top of that when emulating on the PC platform since I don't know what the internals of mac-on-linux look like. However, at the very least, the hardest and most voodoo-y part, actually getting it to boot, has already been done.

As far as the OS goes, you can buy a copy of the Mac OS without buying an actual mac. As in, you can go to a store and buy a copy of Mac OS X 10.3 in a box. This is not unrealistic; just because someone is emulating doesn't mean they aren't willing to actually buy the OS. Case in point, everyone who emulates Windows on the Mac does in fact actually have to buy a copy of Windows.

BTW, just out of curiousity, where are these PPC systems which you say are "available from IBM for reasonable prices"? I may just be going about it wrong, but I'm looking at IBM's website and the cheapest POWER-based system I can find is nearly $6000.

Well not really a perfect port of pac-man but one that puts the offical version to shame. The article has a Screenshot. When they say perfect port. That just means that unlike the origian version, this version has a black background, blue maze that resembles the original, and most importantly different colored ghosts that acutally display some AI. You can find it where ever atari 2600 roms are found, usually in a zipped in a file because the roms are very small.

Why do I have a problem with the "(c) 1999" in this "screenshot" from Pac Man? (from the article) pacman.gif

The classics will stay alive, as long as there are people out there who care about them.

This is evidenced in the dozens of emulators out there. Here's a small sample:

Stella (Atari)

FCE Ultra (Nintendo)

Freeze SMS (Sega Master System)

Gens(Genesis)

and, of course:

MAME (Every arcade game we know and love)

On the PC side, we have some very interesting projects:

AGI/SCI Remember all those old Sierra games? Well a few people were able to reverse engineer the interpreter language. The result is that you can now make your own Sierra games, and even take apart existing ones, look at the code, screens, etc, and even modify them if you want. Truly and old schooler's paradise.

SCUMM VM So times have changed, and you can't play your LucasArts games on whatever OS you happen to be running now? ScummVM will fix that. Compatibility is not 100% but give them time.

The people behind these projects are very dedicated to saving the classics. With these kinds of people around, we should have no worries about the games we loved so much fading into obscurity.

A quick look at a Mac OS 7 screenshot [emuunlim.com], convinces me more than the dissimilarity between Nextstep and windows 95 that you are full of shit. It's obvious that windoze 95 borrowed heavily from MacOS. Well, perphaps not from 7 as it came out in 1996, durring the deep darkness under the former Pepsi Lord. The tiny application bar at the bottom of the screen, combined with the tinny horizontal pannel at the top of the screen and bad taste make up the Windoze 95 GUI. That horizontal pannel has been a feature of the apple GUI at least since 1984 and the first Macs but is not found in Nextstep which simply puts the icons at the bottm of the screen, or wherever you want. Nextstep has a verticle docking station, which can be thought of as a pannel with much more flexibilty than Microsoft or Apple's

Twitter, you seem to be a bit confused.

Among other things:

System 7 was released in 1991. The current version of MacOS when Windows95 was released was 7.5.1.

This isn't a screenshot of MacOS. It's a screenshot of a PC running WindowBlinds to emulate MacOS 7, that's why all the screen elements are terribly confused. Notice how the open window is "C:" and has it's own menu bar? Here is an actual screenshot, though it's for 7.5.5 it's close enough.

I'm not sure what you mean by "tinny horizontal pannel at the top of the screen", presumably what you're talking about is the menu bar, a feature that can be reliably traced back to GUIs as early as 1968. MacOS 7.x and Win9x implemented this feature differently, with MacOS keeping the menu bar on the top of the screen wheras Win98 has a menu bar for each window. There is general consensous that the Win9x approach is better on larger desktops.

The "tiny application bar" in Win9x is called the Taskbar, and also includes the Start Menu and System Tray. While the Start Menu is very similar to the Apple Menu (an idea almost certainly taken from MacOS) the Taskbar, which is basically an "icon panel" of the currently running programs, and the System Tray, which was originally intended for system alerts and such. The Taskbar was a real innovation, AFAIK. Nothing similar was present in either NextSTEP or MacOS (the NextSTEP toolbar was just that, a more primitive version of the Apple/Start Menu).

The major GUI innovation of Win95 was context-senstive popup menus you could get through right-clicking. For example, you could rename a file by right-clicking on it and selecting "Rename". In MacOS this required highlighting the file then moving the cursor to the menu bar to rename, the Win985 was was easier. (Yes, there were hotkeys on MacOS, but Win95 has them too).

Asthetically, I think Win95 is closer to NextSTEP due to the similarity of the 'Close' and 'Full Screen' icons, the Recycle bin, the overall grey tone and appearance. In any event, it's simply not possible that Microsoft's design team was not aware of both MacOS AND NextSTEP. If nothing else, the "Close" and "Full Screen" icons are direct ripoffs of the NextSTEP icons.

What MacOS 7.5.1 GUI had over Win95 at the time were generally better asthetics (a soft grey and blue combo rather than the harsh grey of Win95), the Finder, and many OS features were represented by files and folders (which was more consistent than the Win95 approach). That's about it.

And Apple can hardly claim the moral high ground in GUI design. They tried to sue MS and failed, largely because Apple stole most of their "innovations" from Xerox PARC.

Wow, you ask about apepearance and then you talk about file systems and performance of the underlying operating system, price performance and "compatibility".

A quick look at a Mac OS 7 screenshot, convinces me more than the dissimilarity between Nextstep and windows 95 that you are full of shit. It's obvious that windoze 95 borrowed heavily from MacOS. Well, perphaps not from 7 as it came out in 1996, durring the deep darkness under the former Pepsi Lord. The tiny application bar at the bottom of the screen, combined with the tinny horizontal pannel at the top of the screen and bad taste make up the Windoze 95 GUI. That horizontal pannel has been a feature of the apple GUI at least since 1984 and the first Macs but is not found in Nextstep which simply puts the icons at the bottm of the screen, or wherever you want. Nextstep has a verticle docking station, which can be thought of as a pannel with much more flexibilty than Microsoft or Apple's. This page walks you through the evolution of the Mac GUI, a subject I'm not as familiar with as I am systems that run on x86.

In the end, I agree with you. Microsoft never innovated anything outside a court room. I think, howver, that they were only able to rip off stuff that was thrust into their faces and doubt anyone on thier campus used Next, much less were able to convice the powers that be there to persue the neater features of it. Being so "market driven" they would only rip off things proven to have wide market acceptance, despite lip service to ease of use research.

Radial discs for user input are not exactly a new idea; that said, they didn't take off in earlier incarnations.

Anybody remember Intellivision?

The #2 competitor to the Atari 2600, the Intellivision had a controller with a disc very similar to that described on this patent application (see the picture shown at the above link). The radial dial controller (along with a phone-like keypad and a couple 'action' buttons) was used rather than a joystick or a mouse.

The Intellivision controller is described at the bottom of this page, and the problems with it are aluded to in this video game history, notably that:
Unfortunately, the control discs are not a huge hit with players, along with the fact that their flimsy design leads to frequent controller breakdowns. Hardwired right into the system, this becomes a big problem for owners who have to slog the whole machine back to the dealer for repair.

I'd imagine Apple will avoid these mistakes; mice aren't integrated and I don't see why they can't insure higher quality. Personally, I found the disc an acceptable substitute for a joystick after playing with it a bit at a friend's house.

So I think there's a fair bit of prior art. I searched for 5 minutes for Intellivision and Coleco patents and found it described in
Patent 4,486,629, 4,470,012, 4,462,594, and 4,439,648. I didn't see that prior art cited in the Apple patent.

That said, the new patent does A) control scrolling actions rather than main-locus-of-control actions, and B) as the patent application says, "pressing down on the disc for clicking does not cause the disc to rotate" which seems like an advance to me over the Intellivision controller.

I guess the question comes down to: how well is the usability testing going?

--LP

P.S. For a Slash-based forum on post-PC UI issues, see Nooface.

There was an excellent C-64 soccer game called "Microprose Soccer". It had an outdoor and an indoor version. Both had amazing gfx and 2 player gameplay! It had a in-the-sky-looking-down view, and the ball got bigger as it was kicked in the air towards the camera. The world cup tournament rocked - gave Oman a thrashing every time!

http://s64.emuunlim.com/maps/microprosesoccer/micr oprosesoccer.htm

One of the main ones is that, yes the linux desktop borrows heavily from MS, and not the other way around, which a lot of people like to proclaim.

Not true. Though it's obviously a good idea to use innovations that work, no matter what the source, the linux desktop does not borrow heavily from MS. You can give it any personality you want. If you want it to look and act like WinXP you can. Likewise an Apple Mac or OSX. People have given the linux desktop all kinds of wacky personalities, which you can see on the KDE and Gnome web sites (and that doesn't count the other window managers such as Enlightenment, fluxbox, etc).

A lot of Linux advocates would like to make Linux more accessible to the man in the street. This involves weaning them off the M$ environment. In an effort to make this painless, key apps are emulated as close as possible to help them move environments. Hence the Outlook and Word clones. Relearning an application also means a loss in productivity for those considering switching their business to Linux.

Microsoft does borrow off everyone else in a big way. The original Windows stolen from Xerox, their look and feel from Apple, their taskbar from RiscOS (it had that look and feel in '89, though it first came out in '87). They produce little innovation except in their legal department.

Phillip.

That being said, does anyone know of a Jaguar emulator out there?

The only one I know of. It appears to only being built because of the classic Tempest as well.

Considering that a number of half-assed programming attempts at a software-only PSX emulator were almost successful, the behemoth force of Microsoft could have easily created a software-based emulator for PS1 titles that would be run on the XBox and look even better than the PS1. Then of course, they would have ended up helping undo the DMCA when defending the inevitable lawsuits from Sony. Ah well.

Btw, I've heard of modded Xboxes being used to play NES/SNES/etc games, can the PS2 with a linux kit do the same thing?

If I remember right, the NES/SNES/Genesis emus run fair (with a hiccup here and there), but mame crawls on ~80% of the games. However, there is at least one snes emu (I think that's the right link) that was more or less direct ported to the PS2 that you can use with a modchip. Neat gui and runs well w/ a couple bugs. Dig around and you'll probably find more.

Do they make a modern processor that's fast enough to run a Java app that emulates a 1 Mhz Z80 processor?? :)

Given that even a mediocre JVM runs Java bytecode at 1/6 the speed of native code, and good JVMs run at half speed, a 1 GHz Athlon should do it nicely. In fact, a Java applet emulates a GBA, which includes a 16 MHz ARM7TDMI processor and a graphics chip twice as powerful as the Super NES's. It seems to run at full speed on my 866 MHz PIII.

With the death of mame.dk, mame is effectively worthless. [...] If only there was a standard for running games on multiple platforms, oh yeah... Java.

You'll find a lot of mame games in alt.binaries.emulators.mame and then there's always Kazaa or whatever favorite P2P you're using...

And as for the MAME Java client... Here it is.

If you want a *REAL*, comprehensive/exhaustive, *FREE* and fun to read history of video games, go read The Dot Eaters.

I spent a couple hours reading through this, and refer back to it often, just for fun. It sounds like it's a lot of the same stuff as in the book, but it also sounds like Dot Eaters is much more professional and comprehensive in regards to the *history* of games and what they mean to us (30 somethings).

It's definitely worth a read.

And X-Copy allowed folks to copy any copy-protected disk on the Amiga; which had some pretty tricky disk encoding schemes available to it if you banged on the hardware a bit. It'll get cracked. Everything does.

DVD players manufactured by the Shinco Co. are software ugradeable with firmware on CD. Most of the models, branded to various companies, have had their firmware hacked to disable regions, macrovision, menu-disabling, etc. You can even change the startup wallpaper and the screen savers. You can get info on Shinco players at shincodvd.emuunlim.com/.

- NTLM Authorization Proxy Server

The fact is that these Construction Set games were never wildly popular. With a lot of effort, you could create a game that still didn't quite measure up to commercial versions.

Simpler games that included a powerful "level editor" to create and save your own levels and share them with other users were generally better than the more general purpose "construction set" apps.

Anybody else here remember the original C=64 "Racing Destruction Set. Apparently, there is work on a PC remake.

Here is some guy that is attempting to rewrite it for the PC. I assume he means Windows.

Here is a review of the classic C64 version.

My brother and I spent many hours creating impossible track and then racing around them.

As an answer to the question of "Why are there no more construction set games?" I think that many of those games were somewhat limited in what you could do. I actually spend more time twiddling with games that I have written than playing other games.

I don't know about all this "construction", but Racing Destruction Set for the C64 rocked. You built your track, gave it gravity characteristics, and then loaded up your car with oil slicks, land mines, etc., and proceeded to bomb the crap out your opponents. This guy is currently working on a 3D version for the PC. Of course, he also rewrote the C64 version of Bruce Lee, the Best C64 Game Of All Time...

NES emu
Spectrum emu
Sega Master System Emu

So does a PC. Not to mention some o t h e r s

Used to be that Galaxians, Pacman and Worm were getting a reworking on the Amiga in the form of Deluxe Galaga, Deluxe Pacman and Megaworm... now it's the Amiga shareware's turn for the remix. Hooray!

We've even seen Populous get a rebirth with Lionhead's Black & White, and Quake with Half-Life's Deathmatch Classic. I wouldn't be surprised in five years time to see a reworking of GTA or Baldur's Gate 2. (Takers, anyone?) :D

Used to be that Galaxians, Pacman and Worm were getting a reworking on the Amiga in the form of Deluxe Galaga, Deluxe Pacman and Megaworm... now it's the Amiga shareware's turn for the remix. Hooray!

We've even seen Populous get a rebirth with Lionhead's Black & White, and Quake with Half-Life's Deathmatch Classic. I wouldn't be surprised in five years time to see a reworking of GTA or Baldur's Gate 2. (Takers, anyone?) :D

We just had a HUGE year

We've got 3 systems out right now

No really good games....

Smells like 1983-1984

And they can all be crappy, lowest common denominator games.

Lowest common denominator != crappy.

game can't use more than 24 megs of memory (gamecube)

No, 40 MiB (24 CPU + 16 PPU). PlayStation 2 has 36 MiB (32 CPU + 4 PPU). Xbox has 64 MB (shared), but its stripped-down Windows 2000 OS might diminish the advantage its extra RAM gives.

Consider that some fun games have been made on only 4 KiB of RAM and 40 KiB of ROM (Super Mario Bros. 1 for NES) and that T*tr*s has been done twice on the Atari 2600, which had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of VRAM.

game can't have high poly counts (PC with budget video card)

Street Fighter style games use only about ten quads on the screen, one for each player, one for each player's fireball, one for each player's status bar, and a few for the backgrounds, but that's about it.

game can't have complex interface (consoles)

"Complex" meaning what? What do you need for a first-person shooter? Two joysticks (one for move and one for turn), a couple triggers (fire and jump), and a couple other buttons (switch weapons, etc)? Want a sim/rts interface? SimCity for Super NES and C&C for PSX showed that sim/rts games can work on consoles. Or are you trying to make glorified chat rooms such as EverQuest?

I'm sorry, but web games will never match a true game.

If by "web games" you refer to games written in the Java programming language, I hereby direct your attention to BoycottAdvance Online. It emulates real games for a real system, namely Game Boy Advance.

Platform independant (real) games are a pipe dream.

No, you have that backwards. Pipe Dream is a platform-independent game :-)

Doesn't go as far back or forward, but much more detailed and better written.