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I wished legal Kaillera would update again so I can game online with these old 1980/80s arcade games. There is a new one, but very new and has support to multiple platforms (Linux too!).

so this is the exact samething as the arcade version? cause that's where the difference lies.

and you can play MAME and any arcade game online using Kaillera

why bother with the downgraded SNES port when you can Get the actual arcade version and play it online?

You can even play old school games online. Check out http://www.kaillera.com/ and download the MAME client with Kaillera support. Servers are popping up all over the world. Dust off your game pads and give it a whirl! We need more competition in Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Marvel vs Capcom!

Bah. What we all want is smash brothers DS, with wifi connectivity. You can already sorta get this experience with kaillera and an N64 emulator that supports it; it is actually somewhat smooth. You might think a fighting game is impossible online because of the latency, but if it can work through kaillera, which plays games that aren't even designed for netplay, then certainly it could work for the DS if it was built from the ground up for netplay. You sorta adapt the the latency after a while.

Using Kaillera you can do it today.

This is simply not true. If you take a look at Kaillera it is in a questionable battle with MAME developers. MAME (open source - but no GPL) requires that derivative works open their source as well. But the Kaillera (two of the main Nullsoft guys) developers have not only refused to comply with MAME's license they've also perma-banned the MAME developers from Kaillera's forums.

This is not a group of people that like open source. Sure they liked fighting AOL, but they also like fighting open source.

Joseph Elwell.

There's one (non-microsoft) well known occurance of this. In the Kaillera client, (Kaillera is designed to make it easy to add networking support to emulators, most notably MAME32), there's a bit of code that makes the client break itself if it's running under wine.

Here is
a picture Christophe Thibult took of me and the other
kaillera moderator one day when we were
just hanging out.


This is another pic, this time i'm with the whole nullsoft crew at the CA
extreme games expo. (forgot who's playing with me, some nullsoft dev)

I would have found the post on the kaillera forums where Justin Frankel thanked
me personally for giving him and the crew a bunch of 8-bit atari stuff I have
collected over the years, but autotrimming has nuked that post.

Don't player hate, hate the game.

Fighting games require fast reflexes to win against good players. If you'd have lag more than 25-50 milliseconds the game would not play right at all. That means the game would be limited to LAN play pretty much.

Having played just about every fighting game online that has been available, I can tell you that the lag isn't always an issue. I played MK2 and SF2 on XBand for the SNES (which was a 28.8 modem IIRC) and the lag wasn't too bad. Capcom vs SNK2 on Xbox does feel like it has lag problems at times (I've played over 1000 games on there), which is a joke because there is a free add on for MAME called kaillera which I was playing on a few years ago and handled lag better than the X-Box.

The point is, it can be done and there is a market just WAITING for it to be done right. Capcom vs SNK2 EO was a below average game by capcom standards and included a new cheezy fighting system which turned off long time players (EO). Still I went out and bought an X-box just for the chance to play a capcom game online against a bigger audence than kaillera had. I'm sure plenty of other people are just waiting too.

Mame won't help for long.

As the official moderator of kaillera.com
(been there since the beginning) i've watched the real trend of what games are
and aren't popular in mame. (If you don't know what kaillera is, it lets you
play mame games online)

Anyways, when kaillera was first created 2 years ago, people experimented
with different mame games across its network. At first people would play
anything, Puzzle Bobble, Super Sprint, and rampart were some of the games people
played alot. Over the last year however, the trend has been more towards
Marvel Super Heros VS Capcom. In fact, if you were to browse through the
kaillera servers right now you would see that is all that's out there these
days.. In fact, now there are clans DEDICATED to just this game, it's
popularity there is astounding.

I don't know what caused this. I don't know if it was an influx of younger
people (teens-early 20's) or if people just got sick of playing the old school
games because no one would play the classics. The undeniable truth is
still that both our stats and what
i've seen show that classics (pre-capcom street fighter derivitives) are about
as popular as Grey Davis right now.

Mame won't help for long.

As the official moderator of kaillera.com
(been there since the beginning) i've watched the real trend of what games are
and aren't popular in mame. (If you don't know what kaillera is, it lets you
play mame games online)

Anyways, when kaillera was first created 2 years ago, people experimented
with different mame games across its network. At first people would play
anything, Puzzle Bobble, Super Sprint, and rampart were some of the games people
played alot. Over the last year however, the trend has been more towards
Marvel Super Heros VS Capcom. In fact, if you were to browse through the
kaillera servers right now you would see that is all that's out there these
days.. In fact, now there are clans DEDICATED to just this game, it's
popularity there is astounding.

I don't know what caused this. I don't know if it was an influx of younger
people (teens-early 20's) or if people just got sick of playing the old school
games because no one would play the classics. The undeniable truth is
still that both our stats and what
i've seen show that classics (pre-capcom street fighter derivitives) are about
as popular as Grey Davis right now.

It would be fantastic if they could strike up a deal with the proper-owners of arcade boards and titles to set up a system where the Phantom runs a modified version of MAME, and Inifinium Labs' networks provide on-request ROMs to subscribers. Every time you hit "insert quarter", you get charged a nickel. Two cents go to the holder of the copyright, two to Infinium Labs, and one cent to PETA (I just threw that last one in for fun).

It'd be like having an infinitely large arcade in your home, and you wouldn't be doing it illegally. The people who wrote the software will be reimbursed, possibly even twenty five years after they stopped producing that game.

Also, imagine if they implemented something along the lines of Kaillera. You could team up with your kid brother from a thousand miles away to play NARC together, just like you did in high school, at the corner arcade.

DoA Online isn't really the first... Kaillera lets play online tons of ol' school fighting game, e.g. Street Fighter or King of Fighter...

possibly is the first 3D.

I'm sorry, but gamespy obviously doesn't know about
kaillera.

Kaillera enables mame to play just about any old arcade hit online. Since it's
release 2 years ago, it's developed an entire subculture of dedicated players,
clans, and ladders.

According to statistics built by
kaillera the most popular game genre on kaillera is fighting games (King of
fighters, Street Fighter), followed by a single adventure game that dominates
the charts,

Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara.

I think this game was misclassified as an Adventure game, because it's
gameplay really resembles that of Final Fight, and other Beat em ups

Thats all I have to say about that.

I'm sorry, but gamespy obviously doesn't know about
kaillera.

Kaillera enables mame to play just about any old arcade hit online. Since it's
release 2 years ago, it's developed an entire subculture of dedicated players,
clans, and ladders.

According to statistics built by
kaillera the most popular game genre on kaillera is fighting games (King of
fighters, Street Fighter), followed by a single adventure game that dominates
the charts,

Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara.

I think this game was misclassified as an Adventure game, because it's
gameplay really resembles that of Final Fight, and other Beat em ups

Thats all I have to say about that.

I'm sure microsoft would love selling a license for a program that would allow 'full hacking' of the hardware.

It would do nothing of the sort.

The way Xbox works is, if the binary isn't signed with MS's key, the program ain't running (unless the box is chipped).

So:
1. Buy rights to use some set of ROMs.
2. Compile MAME with support for said ROMs.
3. Write whizzy front end
4. Buy license from MS, get binaries signed.
5. Sell kosher Xbox game product

MAME already runs checksums on the ROMS, although it only warns you if they're wrong. If anyone were really paranoid, they could extend this to refuse to run, and to use a more secure hash function.

FWIW I think this would be The Right Way to port games like Metal Slug 3 to the Xbox. The hardcore will appreciate getting emulation rather than a port.

It wouldn't be the first time something like this has been done. When Sega released their Sonic collection for the PC, they paid Steve Snake for a version of his KGen Genesis emulator.

Hmm, all this gets me to thinking... MAME with Kaillera on Xbox Live, for online multiplayer games and the ability to chat with the other players... If the right games were licensed, I'd buy an Xbox for that.

First and foremost, the page that contains the version of MAME32K that we "redistribute" DOES have the full source code changes quite visibly available.

Let me move on to the next point. Kaillera is NOT, I repeat, NOT MAME32K. Kaillera is a client/server application and .dll that allow programs to communicate over the internet that normally would not do so. Emulation is the MOST NATURAL application of the Kaillera solution due to the popularity of arcade/console games, and the interest that people have in playing against real people, instead of the computer.

You have stated: GPL would probably help here to force the source changes open, or to end the development of these particular derivative works.

This is a closed-minded view at the effects of moving to the GPL. The simple fact is that true open sourcing of a program with as much interest as MAME would bring more interest to its cousins. Frequently, Kaillera has been attacked by people that have no idea how the open source licensing works. We have also been attacked by MAMEDev members who were instantly jealous at the attention that we commanded when we released new versions of the Kaillera client. This took downloads away from the core MAME project and brought them to our derivitive, MAME32K. Most of the verbal attacks that we have suffered have subsided as people began to realize that we brought people and interest to the MAME project.

-soulctcher

(On a more personal note: It does dissapoint me that someone as involved with MAME as you, Gridle, would not do a little homework before tossing accusations towards Kaillera.)

Step 1. GPL MAME

Step 2. ?

Step 3. Profit!

The legal uses of MAME (together with legal ROMs) have been explicitly allowed previously (see the Capcom Classics CD), and it has been made clear that MAME itself isn't for sale, rather just a license for the game ROMs and a free copy of MAME on top.

Of course, we've had a fair share of problems because nobody is willing to try to enforce our current license on the most visible license violators, who currently do not redistribute the full source code changes: MAME32K (Kaillera) and the other MAME32 (not to be confused with the "right" MAME32). GPL would probably help here to force the source changes open, or to end the development of these particular derivative works. GPL would also allow us to re-use some non-critical code from other GPL'd projects, but personally I don't see this as a big advantage. Everything can be rewritten anyway.

In any case, even if MAME were to move to GPL, I don't think the development model would change much. Due to the dubious nature of ROMs, the developer mailing list and archive simply can not be public. A public CVS server would also be quite unlikely due to the support and maintainance nightmare. There haven't been any significant forks (unlike somebody mentioned here - changing one or two lines to remove the OK screen isn't forking) nor are we currently forbidding them - and I don't think GPL would change this situation.

Oh, and if you're wondering, mame.net is handling the Slashdot effect just fine. In fact, we've served even bigger audiences successfully. Moderators should frown any attempts of gaining karma through cut'n'pasting text from mame.net ;-)

I've not had many problems with my linksys since the VERY early firmware. As far as the UDP packet issue, you may be right. I mod http://www.kaillera.com/'s forums, [the Kaillera client/server software allows gaming programs, mainly emulators, to communicate over the net, though they normally wouldn't].

During the early stages, we had more and more people telling us that they were having problems accessing the servers in Kaillera. The connection protocol happens to be UDP.

The problem was, I was fine, as were a number of others that use(d) the linksys routers. Our suggestion was to upgrade the firmware or to just DMZ the router, which worked 90% of the time. For many people, that worked. Over the almost two years now, the problems w/the router have almost completely dissapeared.

If you're into oldschool gaming, you should definitely try Kaillera which plugs into
- MameLang32+ (MAME32 with lots of features added)
- Bliss (Intellivision emulator)
- NESten (NES emulator)
- Jnes (NES emulator)
- Nemu64 (Nintendo 64 emulator)
- Modeler (Sega System 32 emulator)
- Gens (Sega Megadrive emulator)
- WinUAE (Amiga emulator)
- PCAE (Atari 2600 emulator)
- Kawaks (CPS1, CPS2 and NeoGeo emulator)
(list taken from Kaillera.com)
to let you play tons of classic games via the Internet.

They should have MAME setup with Kaillera on the LAN if they really want to bring the old and new together. Nothing like classic Gauntlet with each player on their own PC...

The economy sucks, most people I know are out of work, 911.

Yesterday I went to go visit some friends up in San Francisco. I was appalled at the
number of large office spaces availiable for lease along the 101. Entire business parks empty. It was an amazingly traffic free drive on the way home down the 280 during what would have been bumper to bumper during the boom.

GWB reminds me of the construction people in my neighborhood. They don't understand the importance of dumping money into the tech sector. They forget that during the boom that EVERYONE had money and was spending it on
everything.

As far as GWB being a great president, well we could have had Saddam Hussain as president when 911 happened, all he would have had to say was Lets kick butt and instant popularity in the polls. Satan could
have said Lets Kick butt and the pope would have rallied behind him. Sure you think i'm kidding? Think back to 911, when GWB said he wasn't going to put up with terrorism. Didn't you think what a cool guy?

I think GWB is a liar! I think he lied to win the election, he's lying about the impact 911 had on our economy, he's lying that we can't catch usama. 27
million dollar reward and nobody has turned the guy in yet? I mean cmon folks get real here, if I was some starving Al Quaida soldier fuck my religion, gimme the money! I think GWB is trying to get as many young
americans into the army as possible to lock us in a huge war so he stays in office. We have no business fucking with Hussain in Iraq either, GWB's daddy already carpet bombed the place in the 90's, we kicked his ass so hard
that he now allows UN weapon inspectors to make sure he isn't building weapons of mass destruction.

We should be focusing on rebuilding our economy and the twin towers, not bombs.

After a year and a half of not working, eating ramen noodles to pay the mortgage and watching a lot of my friends in the same predicement, i'm beginning to suspect that 911 was just a ploy by GWB to gain popularity. Yeah
I know it sounds sick, but we're talking about a president who's father was in the CIA, and did some suspicous things when it came to the election.

Another thing bothering me, is what happened to all the 911 relief funds? I have inlaws in NYC that had inlaws that died. They've gotten jack shit from anyone. My guess is it went to the GWB bomb building
fund.

Mod me down if you like, this is honestly how I feel about things. I think times really suck now and I wish Clinton was still president. Hey the man liked cigars, I can relate to that (wink wink nod nod say no more)

Now on top of fucking the economy to fund his war, lying to the public at any chance he can, and letting the RIAA fuck us on our personal rights, he wants to take more away from me? Fuck no! I won't stand for it. Even
though my vote didn't make a difference in the last election there is no way GWB is going to be able to pull that florida crap a second time. I will vote his ass out and I would urge any slashdotters in a similiar situation
to go do the same. Fuck GWB he's a joke!

Now that i've said all these nasty comments about GWB I can expect a knock at the door from the FBI, because he wants my first ammendment rights too.

There is a list of seven FTP servers on that burner web site which all work. Mix cron and wget (they're not *always* available) and you'll have everything in a day or two. If you're looking for some pretty looking point-and-click-and-give-me-roms site, then yes. They're more or less dead. I know I sure wouldn't be able to afford that massive bandwidth drain, so I understand why no else does either. You didn't expect it to be spoon fed to everyone forever, did you? I mean, this *is* something that video game companies really don't care for. But you really can't do much better than working ftp sites with full sets directly linked off of a website (which is indeed findable with google - the Miss Mame site is 9th down the list when you search for mame roms. It also has the FTP links). Come on, did you even go to the sites I linked?

By the way, I believe that a couple folks from the Kaillera forums are working on a P2P system just for emulation. That should make life easy.

I really didn't want to get into a rom file discussion in this thread.

...but as far as I can tell none of them are maintained, so they're pretty much a dead end. I could only find two. Does anyone know of a current one? Here's what I found:

mamedc
mamed

I don't know why the DC Emulation scene seemingly gets no respect or credit in the "geek" community, considering the amazingly amount of work that's been put into various types of emulation. Granted, it's considered a "dead" system, but the technology is still there and still relatively current. At present, a $50 Dreamcast can successfully emulate MAME, NES (the best console emulation i've ever seen), Master System, Gameboy, amongst others. DreamSNES is working on SNES games, and is making some serious headway (they're running at about 88% speed, now), and there are still other emulation projects on the horizon, plus a batch of decent-and-getting-better homebrew games.

I think that person would be ill-advised to acquire and Xbox for $200, spend however much on a modchip, in the process voiding their warrenty, in order that they play MAME, when a console that can be picked up for $50 and under can do the same thing. i recommend anyone visit DC Emulation if they are interested.

Actually,

The source for atari800win is freely availiable. You could use
kaillera for the netcode and voila instant atari netplay goodness. I've been wanting to play ballblazer 2p across the net for a while now :)

Maybe you should make it a senior project for your students to get it done :P

My friends had nintendo's or sega's. I had a turbografx, then the really really luck ones (rich) got a neo-geo for christmas. Those bastards.

I remember walking into my 7-11 (yes kids in those days 7-11's had games in them) and seeing the neo geo for the first time. There was 4 games on it, magician lord, King of fighters, Nam75, and Super Baseball. My buds and I loved vids the way some kids loved baseball. We would buy every game magazine out there, hang out at the flea market trading games and then go home to play games. Games games games. We allways reminised about the good old days when America was the console king with Atari and the 2600/5200/7200. The great debate at the time was nintendo's decision to check games content before we here in america got them. We didn't care if there was a cross in the graveyard in castlevania.

Ok so I proved how deeply emotionally attatched I am to games, let me go on about the neo geo. So there was only 1 kid in the entire east side of san jose that owned one. He never let anyone near it. Our only recourse was to go down to 7-11 to check it out. 4 buttons, cool. Memory card so you could save your place in a game? whats that and where do I get one? Headphone jack? Why were all arcade cabinets built like this one? In terms of sound and graphics, neo geo was top notch.

For awhile there it seemed the neo-geo was going to die into oblivion, but alas a savior came in the form of metal slug. This side scrolling platform shooter showed just what could be done with the system if the artists were given enough time. The attention to detail is apparent everywhere in the game, especially when it came to animations of the different characters. It wasn't just someones helmet flying off when they got shot, their head, and hair flew back as well.

For a time after that, the fighting games started getting really popular on the NG with the release of samuri showdown. All of the sudden out of nowhere came neo geo (about mid 90's) with fighting games that were on par with rival fighting game producer capcom. Even sega's entry into the foray with the virtua fighters series did not get nearly as much play as the neo geo fighters.

15 years later, after being all grown up and looking back.. One of the big dreams me and my buds use to say as kids was, "Wouldn't it be great if we had a game system that could play ALL THE GAMES?!?!!?" I see that mame icon on my taskbar, begging to be clicked.

Unfortunatly this is the reality for the arcade now. PC's have gotten so fast, and so graphically powerful that any system can be emulated to a near %100 accuracy. What did the arcades do in response? They never really did anything, they went about business the old fashion way thinking that things like game houses and home gaming was just a fad that would pass and soon the children would be coming back eagerly slopping quarters down the chute.

Neo Geo, even though they never released new hardware outside of that newfangled 64 bit system, did everything they could to make games that were pleasing to look at, and pleasing to play. It didn't take a 32bit processor and 63 channel sound. Games like metal slug were "designed" and not just a copycat of some other game that was immensly popular.

Well, at least there is one arcade left, I heard King of Fighters 2000 is pretty popular there.

--toq

You could also play on the same machine, but that's not nearly as geeky.

This has bugged me since Kaillera first came out, but I have never seen mention of it elsewhere, which leads me to believe I'm misunderstanding the whole thing. It seems to me that Kaillera is violating both the spirit and the word of the MAME licence, from their readme.

First, if you look at the source code patches, you'll note that most of the work is done in a Kaillera DLL, and that they just export calls to this. So technically, they're releasing the source cod eto their changes, while not releasing the source code to the actuall functionality of their changes. This seems to be violating the spirit of the license, although maybe not the letter: "Derivative works are allowed, provided their source code is freely available."

The second part is from the 0.72 update post. Here, they brag that they "Disabled startup information, warnings, and copyright with network game." From the MAME readme: "There are some specific modifications to the source code which go against the spirit of the project. They are NOT considered a derivative work, and distribution of executables containing them is strictly forbidden. Such modifications include, but are not limited to: ... removing the startup information screens".

Does anyone know more about these issues? Am I totally reaidng it wrong? Open, cross-platform network support has been in my mind for a while, but sadly I have no time to do it alone. When Kaillera first came out, I had high hopes, and it is pretty damned cool and useful, but I'm a bit iffy on the details.

-Puk

p.s. Note that linux support means linux server support. You need to use MAME32 to play. w00t.

It should be interesting to see how the stats change once a few thousand /. readers start playing with this.