Slashdot Mirror

Apart from the fact that support for fifth and sixth generation consoles (PlayStation, N64, PlayStation 2, GameCube) in MESS is preliminary to nonexistent, LCD + emulator doesn't work with light guns. You really need a CRT to get the most out of Zapper games like Duck Hunt, Operation Wolf, or Zap Ruder.

MESS is great for the obscure systems, but not very good for the popular ones. I suppose that much is obvious. A great site I found for this was http://nonmess.retrogames.com/ ... its author compares MESS against other emulators and documents whether or not MESS is the superior option.

Hmm, I've already done something similar. I wrote a GUI in python using pygame for system/game selection. 47,000 ROMS including MAME, 14 or 15 consoles from the atari 2600 up to the N64, 7 home computers, and 4 handhelds. I haven't created any website for it because it really needs to be an integrated system - making it all run on a different machine/OS would take a lot of work. Almost all of the emulators have been modified to work seamlessly. All of them except one (for the Lynx) is compiled from source. It's all running on Fedora 8, 64-bit. MESS doesn't really cut it for a lot of the systems; see: http://nonmess.retrogames.com/ I also lead the mupen64plus project: http://code.google.com/p/mupen64plus/

Why not - I have an Atari 800 emulator running on my old iPaq ARM based pda. Games requiring a twitchy joystick are hard to play but some like chess, Temple of Apshai and Kennedy Approach are a lot of fun.

Check these out.

Future Pinball

PinMAME

Epic Pinball (DOS only and "abandonware", but IMO one of the best video pinball games ever made)

BrutalChess

GLtron (it's a fun little game too)

Commodore 64: Quest for Tires circa 1983. This is the first video game I remember.

I remember my dad playing this in front of the whole family, and being utterly terrified of the end because of a dinosaur head that pops out of a cave and tries to eat the caveman. I'd go into my room and watch the TV peeking around the corner, waiting for him to get past it so I could go back in the room. The graphics were so realistic.

You're not DragonMinded, author of DSOrganize, are you?

But seriously, Nintendo's argument would be "If hobbyists want an open handheld development platform, they should go buy a PDA that runs Windows Mobile." The Windows Mobile homebrew community even has its own wannabe PocketNES.

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

My replay (You need Mame/windows/Rom, so basically its unwatchable for most people) I was able to take down the Count without dying, but his second form got me. I haven't got back to play after some nice Slashdotter told me to use holy water on the second form. I give Castlevania 1 some serious props for quality gaming. The funny thing is, as hard as it is to beat the game on one life, there's a second stage after you beat the first game where things get harder. I haven't beat the game on one life yet, but its on my lame slacking to do list.

Agreed, I think the article's author probably just sucks at modern games.

It looks like you're #2 now, as of April.

If somebody came up with a real-time version of a game like chess that was sufficiently fun that it became popular, I bet people would still play the old version too.

According to this case:

...Williams obtained three copyright registrations relating to its DEFENDER game: one covering the computer program, Registration No. TX 654-755, effective date December 11, 1980; the second covering the audiovisual effects displayed during the game's "attract mode",2 Registration No. PA 97-373, effective date March 3, 1981; and the third covering the audiovisual effects displayed during the game's "play mode",3 Registration No. PA 94-718, effective date March 11, 1981. Readily visible copyright notices for the DEFENDER game were placed on the game cabinet, appeared on the CRT screen during the attract mode and at the beginning of the play mode, and were placed on labels which were attached to the outer case of each memory device (ROM). In addition, the Williams program provided that the words "Copyright 1980 - Williams Electronics" in code were to be stored in the memory devices, but were not to be displayed on the CRT at any time....

For you kids out there, Defender was the hardest game in the pizza shop and viciously consumed many unsupecting quarters. See the screen shots for the copyright text.

This article covers quite a few games - and these are just on one platform! (the ZX spectrum, in case it means something to you). Admittedly, some were ports of games that were released on other platforms, but still.

The worst has to be when a game ends on a cliffhanger but the sequel is never released. This isn't a problem that's unique to interactive media - this page lists many TV shows that were cancelled before a cliffhanger could be resolved.

Don't send any chickens or would could end up with an Attack of the Mutant Flesh Eating Zombie Chickens From Mars

I think the Commodore 64 version looked a hell of a lot better. Those were the days, man.

I played this when I was five. The original disk still resides somewhere at my parents, along with a dead C64.

Which begs the question:

Actually, it raises the question.

when is that first-person Pac-Man coming out?

Here you go.

Speaking of running Windows viruses... is there an existing tool to run VBS scripts under Linux?

I know, the last thing Linux needs is another scripting language, and VBS is such a horrible abomination.

The one non-viral use of VBS scripts I have seen is Visual Pinball.

There has been some talk of making a similar pinball simulation for Linux, but one of the major obstacles is that there are already hundreds of pinball games already simulated in Visual Pinball, by dozens of authors, and they all use VBS scripting (as required by Visual Pinball). This is required to interact with the PinMAME emulator (for modern games) or to implement the entire logic of the game (for old games that did not use a computer). It would be nearly impossible to get everybody to rewrite their tables again from scratch!

If Visual Pinball is ever ported to Linux, it would be necessary to write a VBS script interpreter for Linux (assuming one doesn't already exist). Heavily sandboxed, of course!

Translation: Focusing on driving excellence and solutions to further enhance home entertainment.

nnnyeeeeooowwwwmmmmm ffsssshhhhhtttt eeeeerrrrk!

Sims is just a big fat Little Computer People rip-off anyhow.

This doesn't surprise me at all. As an emulator author myself (jzIntv), I've worked closely with other emulator authors to reverse engineer and understand all the corners of my chosen system of interest.

I've worked with the authors of Bliss, IntvWin/IntvDos, Nostalgia, IntvPC, Kinty and the MESS Intellivision driver to work out emulation bugs and understand the various odd machine details. The authors of those emulators also have worked with each other--it's not like I'm some central focus here. It's a friendly community.

It'd surprise me more if the emu authors couldn't get past their egos to such an extent that they simply didn't talk to each other except to flame.

Or you could just sit back and play Choplifter instead.

Quest for Tires

Like RC Pro-Am?

:p

It wasn't technical (Lynx and GameGear were so much more advanced than a Gameboy it wasn't even funny).

I'll give you that for Lynx; even though its screen was so much smaller (160x102 vs. 160x144 pixels for GB and GG), its CPU was faster, and its sprite engine supported sprite scaling to the point where somebody managed to coax it into hardware-accelerated texture mapping for a Wolf3D style ray caster. Game Gear, on the other hand, was just a handheld Sega Master System whose palettes had more color depth. Heck, the Game Boy and the Game Gear had nearly the same CPU (4.1 MHz Z80 vs. 3.6 MHz Z80), and the Game Boy had a more versatile sound chip.

Well, that and [the Game Boy] had Tetris

Don't tell that to a Columns fan. Also, the version of Klax on the Lynx looked so much better than the pitiful excuse for Klax for Game Boy mono, which looked more like a black-and-white version of Tiles and Tribulations than anything else. (The Game Boy Color version looks much better.)

You don't even need that, you could run this on a C64.

Ulrik

Who dares wins II?
Screenshots and download.

"Hey, babe, wanna help me do a live-action replay of Strip Poker?"

As part of my Ghosts of Slashdot project, I grabbed a copy of this article before it went "live". There was a Slashdot outage at about that time, so I don't know if CmdrTaco & co. decided to change the text, or if it was lost and had to be re-created.

Same submitter, same "dept."... just the title and story text has changed.

Play Those Classic Video Games Virtually Anywhere
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the emulating-the-classics dept.
Iphtashu Fitz writes "If you're like me your introduction to video games decades ago was something like the Atari 2600, and you also pumped untold hundreds of quarters into arcade games like Space Invaders, Defender, and Asteroids. Well according to a Wired News article you can now play these and many more of those classic games in their original format on your PC, Mac, Playstation, XBox, or Gamecube. X-Arcade has an emulator & arcade-style interface that they claim will let you play over 4000 of the classic games on any of these modern gaming systems. Or if you'd prefer to play the actual arcade games from the 1980's then it might be time for you to take a trip to New York where the American Museum of the Moving Image is holding an exhibition where you can play these classics. Game emulators can be found linked from the museums website as well as through Retrogames." Much easier than building your own Cabinet.

If you want to emulate nintendo games, there are native emulators for the iPaq and other PocketPC platforms. Just check out pocketNES for example. It runs at full speed, no frame skip, and even COLOR, something that the newton does not have.

Penguin Adventure. Would be great as a Linux game, too.

Come to think of it, thematically speaking this should really be a Linux game...

I'll never forget it. I was at my cousin's house, and he had a C64 and a 300 baud modem. Right before my eyes, he dialed up some pirate BBS, downloaded a cracked copy of Out Run, and we started playing.

That was the "first one's free!" experience that set me on the long road to internet addiction. And that was also the day I began to dislike the woefully un-modemed Tandy 1000 my parents had gotten me.

~Philly

The new main character is Ash. From what I see and what I hear from people who have actually played the beta, he's one powerful character. But does he look gay, or is it just me?

As for the censoring thing, it's easy enough going into Kawaks and change the region code to Japan or something similar. Then you'll have to deal with Japanese text in some places, but you get to see Mai's bounce! Also, I hear Angel's (pronouced 'An-ell' or something, she's supposed to be Mexican) animation where she takes her top off as a victory pose is stripped out of the US version too.

For those who want to play the original versions, all the KOF games are perfectly emulated in MAME and several other emulators such as Nebula or Kawaks.

Really sad that these games will be censored. Especially about Mai Shiranui's bouncing!

...these people would be counter-sued by the makers of Space Taxi.

GameFaqs still has the Gamecube release of Midway Arcade Treasures listed as Dec. 1st, unlike the 17th listed here - anyone know of any statements by Midway or whoever that can confirm the release date for it?

I am planning on getting it the day it comes out - regardless of the fact that I already have all of these games for MAME on my PC - and not only do I have all of them, for many of them I have mutliple different romsets. Gauntlet, for example, seems to have as many as 15-20 romsets, with various releases as they developed the game, foreign versions, often with multiple releases, and even 2 player versions. I can wish they'd have multiple versions available, as the final version of Gauntlet is overly hard, probably the only release of the game where it is pretty much impossible to play forever on one credit when you get good enough. (Don't believe you can do it at all? The MAME Action Replay Project has various recordings of people playing Gauntlet for a hundred plus levels on one credit.

But even though I already have it on the PC, I want the comfort of being able to sit on the couch and play these games, using the incredibly well-designed Gamecube controller, and enjoying the larger screen and sound piped through the stereo system. I want to be able to play 4 player Gauntlet without having to crowd people around a PC keyboard. And it's a way to further encourage companies to release compilations of their older games, so we can enjoy them again.

But why-oh-why did they not include Gauntlet II in this compilation? The MAME folks could surely tell us that it wasn't hard to add Gauntlet II after they had Gauntlet in there. It's not like it was a big hardware change from the first one...

...which would add about 4000 games in one hit.

Ah, excellent! Rational discussion, I love it. I should have said that Wright popularized the software toy.

Another example of a pre-SimCity software toys is The Little Computer People Discovery Kit (Activision, 1985).

There is a program like MAME called PocketNES which is an NES emultator for the Gameboy Advance. This allows you to play hundreds of NES games on your GBA. Up to 200 NES roms will fit on a single GBA cartridge.

I personally prefer the opportunity to play the original rom, than a remake, even one that is identical from a gameplay perspective.

So to play NES roms on your GBA you need:
- A flash cartridge and linker (I bought mine at SuccessKH and got great service. I recommend the flash2advance USB linker with a 256 Mbit cartridge.
- PocketNES
- Nintendo Roms, a google search finds these quickly

Or if you don't have a GBA but still want to relive your childhood on linux, os x, or windows, grab your roms and then grab RockNES.

There is a program like MAME called PocketNES which is an NES emultator for the Gameboy Advance. This allows you to play hundreds of NES games on your GBA. Up to 200 NES roms will fit on a single GBA cartridge.

I personally prefer the opportunity to play the original rom, than a remake, even one that is identical from a gameplay perspective.

So to play NES roms on your GBA you need:
- A flash cartridge and linker (I bought mine at SuccessKH and got great service. I recommend the flash2advance USB linker with a 256 Mbit cartridge.
- PocketNES
- Nintendo Roms, a google search finds these quickly

Or if you don't have a GBA but still want to relive your childhood on linux, os x, or windows, grab your roms and then grab RockNES.

I played a lot of violent games as a youth. I smashed balls, I beat people up, I violently ate ghosts , and I even engaged in animal cruelty.

And now I am an axe-murderer.

Don't be like me.

No, but I played Shamus!

(Atari 400 version, though)

WRONG, it was done before in 1985.

DO YOURE RESEARCH

One Word. Tapper.

SASS

Speak & Spell simulator. It's pretty cool, was based on the UK model so it has a noticably 'brit' accent :)

There is a Speak & Spell simulator for Windows here if any of you want to relive those great S&S memories. :-P USA and British versions are available.

The Exertainment System is the first truly interactive system that combines aerobic exercise and video entertainment. It consists of a Lifecycle 3500 aerobic trainer, one of the world's most popular computerized exercise bikes, and a Super NES, the world's most popular 16-bit video game system.

While riding on your Lifecycle 3500, you can use the system to monitor your biking activities (rpm, distance, calories, etc.) or set up a long-term fitness program in the "Program Manager". You can also choose to participate in the game "Mountain Bike Rally". Choose from several riders, several terrains, and several different bikes to have a truly interactive experience.

It didn't sell very well, but mostly because it wasn't marketed properly. You still see the systems in a some fitness clubs (if you do, enter your name as "ronaye" to see an easter egg picture of my girlfriend at the time.)

The new system in the article is multiplayer, which should make it a little more fun. It didn't seem to have any feedback to make the pedalling harder, however. That is essential to making the exercise interactive.

I think systems like this will take off, once they're done right. I mean, plain exercise bikes are already a substitute for real biking, and those are accepted now. "Virtual" exercising systems are just trying to be a step closer to reality.

yo.

Since it was posted there on Sunday