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Capcom To Use Emulation In Upcoming Products
JayBonci writes: "The emulation and classic gaming world has been a large grey area for a while. The subject of reverse engineering other products for the sake of emulating has come up numerous times (see also the Bleem and Connectix lawsuits), but what about emulating your own stuff? It seems that Capcom is going to use emulation as a standard way to make more games cross platform. The blurb is short, but an interesting though. How viable a solution is this? If the performance hit is fairly minimal, how will this affect the future of cross platform game development? It's an interesting solution, IMO."
Later they created SCI, which was used for a while until sierra dropped their classic adventure games. (I'm still mad about that. :<)
Anyway, other games also use scripting engines, it is a very common practice. Only consoles until lately didn't really have the hardware to do such things. (You're dealling with limited memory.) So now there is more of an influx of games using them.
I wouldn't be suprised for one of the Internet languages, Java, Internet C++, C#, etc... to eventually be fast enough to run a game for real. I think you could argue that it would in fact could work now if they extended one or more a bit.
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"Starting next fall Capcom will allow users of personal computers, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, Xbox and GameCube to enjoy online matches with other players regardless of the machines they use" (emphasis mine)
Note: "enjoy online matches". In other words, if you have MvC2 for DC, you can play online against someone playing MvC2 on PS2. That says absolutely nothing about the underlying code, emulation, APIs, anything -- just that they can talk to one another online. (qv the fact that just because multiple systems support HTTP, it doesn't mean they all emulate one another..)
The article is a bit sparse, but it implied binary compatibility, while SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL only provide source compatibility. But yes, they're more likely to be developing a common API on all platforms, which may well lead to their 25% reduction in development costs. Note that there's no real benefit in true binary compatibility -- they still have to ship seperate versions for each console anyway due to the media differences (CD, GD, DVD, cartridge, etc.)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
About the possibility of using an emulated environment for PC games to make them easier to port.... He seemed to shoot down the idea due to performance issues.
Although I can see where there could be a performance hit, with today's fast processors I can't see how the hit would be very large considering you could write your game or program to one API and make it as tight and fast as possible. You also wouldn't have to worry about compatability concerns.
Has anyone heard of any other gaming companies doing something like this?
Dreamcast may be "underpowered" in your opinion, but don't discount it quite yet!
Planetweb 3.0 for SEGA Dreamcast will offer java support. The current "2.0" release offers support for SWF compliant up to Flash 3.0 features as well as MP3 support. Version 3 will also add the ability to play streamed MP3 and use the SEGA Ethernet adaptor, and probably some other cool things. I think 2.0 also supports the Dreamcast mouse when it is released. Most of the hardware releases will coincide with the release of Quake 3 Arena for Dreamcast.
Also, doesnt the PS2 have USB ports? Kind of makes the "two controller ports" a non-issue.. plus the fact that like the original PS, they could easily develop a multitap adaptor to add more ports.
Also, when (if) the Dreamcast zip drive is (ever) released, it adds USB to the Dreamcast. The hardware already exists, someone just has to start creating enough games that use the drive before it's viable to start mass production and selling the thing. The DC's Maple bus (controller port protocols) probably are only good up to 1mb/s which isnt really good for mass storage, video, etc. even though the Maple standard allows for 1, 2, 4, and 12mb operating modes (may be a little off on the exact numbers though)
~GoRK
Maybe they'll just help port the JDK to DC, PS2, X-Box, etc, and then write everything in Java. Then it really will be emulation :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only way that an emulator would pay off is if a program is written almost entirely in asm. And I doubt that this is the case (nowadays), because it kills code portability. Capcom knows that hit games will be ported to consoles and maybe even the PC.
That being said, I suspect that Capcom has actually developed some sort of "portability API", and is incorrectly attaching the "emulation" buzzword to it.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
While at first glance this seems good for all of the console heads out there. But it is a good point about the 'least common denominator'. Will a games appearence have to not exceed the least powerful system that it is being developed for? i.e. conpensating for Dreamcast's poly limits, or Playstation 2's lack of video memory. Do we have to settle for a game with low poly counts and jaggy edges in order to play each other online?
That's just silly. The MAME team has had arcade-perfect CPS-1 and Neo Geo emulation for years, and that hardware is little different from CPS-2 hardware that Capcom is using for its 2D fighters. And that's just on a volunteer basis from people who've had to get the hardware specs themselves. Capcom already has those specs.
Arcade games are never written for portability, and the age of the CPS-2 architecture makes assembly a necessity. Fortunately, the hardest bit is getting the graphics working since the game engines are fairly straightforward (hence only a 25% gain in productivity), but it would be a big help to eliminate that re-coding step.
If it's only a buzzword, I don't see how it'll help. Only hard-core techie geeks (like slashdotters) and arcade purists care whether the games are ports or the emulated article. Everyone else just cares that "Street Fighter Alpha 4 is out for PlaystationCastX! Yay!"
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
It doesn't matter whether it's emulation or not. It still doesn't seem very innovative to me. Many companies use emulation to port their programs to other OSes. Corel Office 2000 for Linux is an example that many Slashdot readers will be familiar with. Other software I use on Solaris is ported a similar way from a certain Microsoft OS. Is it supposed to be innovative that they applied this concept to games?
From this article, I can't tell that they're emulating anything more than the network layer on each platform. Where does it say anything about porting games to different platforms? Someone who speaks Japanese has to read the original source and explain what's going on.
Breakfast served all day!
The thing this the JVM operates at different speeds on different OS's. I wonder if gamers will get around to using Linux/Unix variants since the JVM is usually quicker on those platforms? I can see some poor windows guy getting shot up because his JVM won't let him get out of the way... Hey, come to think of it, that might be a lot more fun than a custard pie.......
The Namco Museum collection of games, with about 5 volumes, uses emulation and original ROMs to play classics like PacMan and Xevious on the PSX. This is nothing new -- it's easier to emulate one piece of known hardware (or so) than to try and re-write some of these arcade games.
Pretty cool really...
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That's the key here: the bread and butter of Capcom are precisely these common denominator games; namely the Street Fighter series. All consoles support the technology for these, because it's such an entrenched genre. So it's pretty straightforward to write an abstraction layer for them.
Capcom's business model is to provide good gameplay and content. They're not as focused on wringing every last cycle out of the unit to show off the technology. So the emulation techique will work just fine for them, but it's certainly not a good general solution for all developers.
are there any good nes emulators around for linux? my roommate's been playing nesticle constantly for the past 2 weeks and its makin me kinda jealous...
Some of its 3D fighters and fancier shooters (19XX runs on x86 hardware, I believe) aren't likely to be emulated, but the article doesn't say it'll be for all their games anyway.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Hey, if seeing Elizabeth Hurley in skin tight red latex, French maid outfit and cheerleader uniform doesn't convert you, then you and I obviously have different priorities, pal.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Someone else mentioned it already, but they were off the mark about the c64 bit..<br><br>
It was actually Atari 2600 emmulation as I remember correctly. The funny thing was, that if you took any other properly dumped 2600 rom, and renamed it to one of the roms used on the CD (i.e. Pitfall) the emulator that activision provided would almost certainly run it.<br><br>
So all I gotta say is, <b>GO CAPCOM!</b>
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
I don't really think that emulation is 100% what they mean. Like a previous post that stated something about Sierra and its' interpreter style approach, most likely they'll develop and use something like Java (or our most recent example, Internet C++ ;). Surely a write-once solution...
In the concerns about the speed of the resulting product, I'd like to point out that not many times has Capcom made a game that needs a hefty hardware configuration (eg. SF Alpha 3 in playstation that used to run on a 68000 CPS 2 board). They are mostly concerned about gameplay, and availability, and I think we must recognize this one to them... A much better approach than the one we are used to (just take a look at nocturne, and you'll see what I mean)...
---- Fear the mighty TsEA
Speaking of Zork, I would dearly love to finish playing the original Zork. (I made it through a few puzzles when it was on ARPANET.) You can still buy PDP-10 compatibles, but the power drain is horrendous. Does CompuServ still use them? Anybody done an emulator?
(I know about the 16-bit FORTRAN vesion. Played it. Parser not as smart, not all puzzles.)
For that matter, I'd love to see a new adventure game -- graphic or non-graphic -- done the Zork way. You start with a few rooms and puzzles, and let people from all over the word bang on it. Then you grow the thing organically. Commercial adventure games were rarely as good.
__________
For those of you who are looking to see what's out there on the emulator front, check out this site. They have just about every emulator in existance, sorted by console/system, OS, etc. They rate and review the emulators too. BTW, The new SNES9x rocks. The thing has OpenGL support.
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
The problem is that game machines have drastically different capabilities and features. Emulation doesn't help for developing new games because they are expected to take full advantage of the hardware. I could see it for a puzzle game or a re-release of an old classic.
The Amiga 2k/Tao Elate system offers a better solution than emulation - which is run-time code translation and hardware abstraction to a certain degree... but they don't abstract a lot of things. Writing a high-end PS2 game requires learning 5-6 different assembly languages (EE-core, VU macro mode, VU micro mode, EE-multimedia instructions, VIF, GS). There really is no way to abstract these without diluting the power of the system.
You can write a game to the "lowest common denominator" but then you end up with crap. EA used to have this policy of "4 wide, and 4 deep" meaning every title would run on 4 systems and be translated into 4 languages. They gave up on this when they found out it was basically impossible given the demands of the customers and the time available to the developers.
My philosophy now is to pick a fixed target (i.e. console) and develop a game for it not worrying about portability or what might have to be done later. Then if it sells, bastardize the product and rip it to shreds to port it to other systems.
-- Virtual Windows Project
I'm working on something along those lines in my spare time, actually. It'll be up on apiary.org (which right now just bounces you to my webhosting provider) if/when I get the core stuff together and stable.
DNA just wants to be free...
If you go to ARDI's pages, you'll see that they've been very infrequently updated. Some of them are dated 1997... They say that one of the reasons for this is that they've been concentrating on marketing and making custom implementations of their emulation engine, the core that emulates a 68k Motorola processor on an x86 machine, for companies which want to have apps available on x86 without rewriting their old code.
/. Read all about it, how to use it, and where to get the latest stable or dev release, here:
.org/co mments.pl?sid=00/10/17/1442251&cid=127
This makes sense since I'm sure there are many companies with legacy apps written for 68k machines--not just Macs exclusively--which they don't want to discard just yet, but which are sorely wanting for decent hardware. They'd run much faster on a modern x86 emulating the old processor, than on an old 68k machine.
But if you really like using Executor for Mac apps, I have a much better and more complete and satisfying solution for you. Use Basilisk II, the open-source Mac emulator, with a free copy of the Mac System 7.5.5 downloadable from Apple's own FTP servers. It's much more satisfying to have a real Macintosh OS being emulated, instead of ARDI's reverse-engineered runtime environment which, while efficient, lacks all the charm and nostalgia of running the *REAL* MacOS.
Coincidentally, I wrote a post about Basilisk II the last time emulation was mentioned here on
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"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Gauntlet Legends for N64 has simultaneous 4 player.
Gauntlet Legends for PSX has more levels.
Gauntlet Legends for PC has network play.
This is because systems are different. Some have more RAM or expandable RAM, some have larger storage capacity, some have network interface cards.
What happens to games when one version must be compatible with at least four different consoles. You only get what all the consoles can do. If one of them has less RAM, less storage, fewer ports, less polygons and less control options, then everyone who plays must play a game reduced to lowest possible requirements.
Amazing as it is that talented people can create programs that make your machine think it is another one, despite all the praise they deserve, let's not forget that emulation sucks. Compatibility, sound quality, control options, graphics and peripherals just isn't 100% up to the original.
Fight commercial emulation, not because you think it's wrong to charge for emulation, but because it's wrong to pay for an inferior product.
From reading this blurb, capcom will allow users of PS2,Playstation and PC's to all play the same online games.
Hmm, so to me it sounds like progamming the games in Java, and allowing the Java Virtual Machine on each of the platforms to interpret it.
This might have been amazing 3 years ago.
I seem to recall the old Sierra adventure games were in a specialized format. They were then loaded by an interpreter on the machine. When porting to another OS all they had to do was port the small loader mechanism-- the game itself required no changes.
It seems like that all that they are going to do is make sure that all of the major platforms can run the software. The equivulent to Java running on any platform, or having certain executables to run programs on windows, as well as linux for example.
It's cool what they are doing however, They wont have to spend as much money rewriting and repackaging games, but I also can see games being written for the least common denominator in order so one platform wont have a edge over the others.
If the performance hit is fairly minimal
Big if... I remember plenty of Capcom games with terrible load times. Now, that was probably because of the hardware more than the software, but having to wait half a minute for the latest round of a fight game to load seems a bit much to me... (Yes, I have no patience at all...)
Side note: Anyone know where I can find Raiden 2?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
I've been interested in the field of emulation for a long time. I've been using ARDI's Executor to emulate a mac as well as game system emulators. I understand the fact that to emulate a machine on a computer is a hard task to accomplish. However, Tesser, another slashdotter, has to be on the right idea. Capcom would have to have a little interpreter in the rom image so it could run the game. This sounds like a rough task, but once you have a interpreter done for one machine you could just use it for all games you want to release on that system. High initial startup costs and then its all easy going
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
Sounds like a great idea for Capcom, similar sales with reduced development costs. But this sort of thing would presumably give up the fancy hardware tricks that the likes of Sega and Sony use to make games bolder and more beautiful. I know little about the latest hardware, so I'll use an example I do know a little about..
Imagine they'd tried this on the old 16-bit consoles. The SNES and the Megadrive were functionally the same (16-bit CPU, 6 button/8 direction input, etc etc). But it was the little things that made games on each one so damn cool. The likes of Mode 7 field scaling and rotation on the SNES that made F-Zero and Mario Kart totally fantastic. How do you build an emulator to support custom hardware? Coz without support for it it won't be used, and all your games will end up looking like the exact same engine with new graphics and a couple of bolt on options to keep the punters from thinking they already own the title.
Hang on.. its Capcom.. all their games ARE like that.. (Street Fighter 2, Championship Edition, Super Turbo Hyper Fighting, Alpha, Alpha 3, Zero, Super Alpha Zero, Ex, Ex Alpha, Ex Alpha 2..)
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I recalled that Capcom's Street fighter Vs Marvel games were modified to run on the PS because of the RAM limitations(cutting down from 2 on 2 to a psuedo 2 on 2 game).
If Capcom is going to use emulation, I guess that might be a kind of common runtime enviroment that caters to the common features that the platforms(be it PC,Arcade boards, PS 2 or DC) would have. Won't that limit the features of the games(Graphics, memory network wise)?
They have source code, why would they use performance-hogging emulation?
It's more likely that they are writing their own compatibility layer for each plaform, such that the same game source can be compiled for each platform with few or no changes. Think of it as porting Linux and glibc from x86 to PowerPC, so that Apache can be compiled for both with no changes.
I suspect the E word slipped in somewhere along the line when someone who doesn't know what emulation is wrote a press release, or something.
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Let's hope Sony picks up on this real quick. Why, with this technology, we might be able to play our playstation games on our PS2!
Wouldn't that be great?
-Denor
For yonks, Hanaho have bundled a CD with licensed Capcom ROM images (including one of the earlier Street Fighter IIs) and MAME with their Hotrod joystick - look on the FAQ page.
Not sure if someone else may have posted this idea, and it's buried somewhere...
....Paul
It occurred to me while reading this, that there are more than a few companies, orgs, individuals writing virtual machine emulators to run other games. But suppose, instead of having to build some hardware first before developing for it, build an emulator first.
What I mean is this...
As an open source project, design the perfect (or at least really good) game machine architecture. What would the APIs for everything it needed to do look like? What hardware services would be available? Then, write and emulator for this API/hardware. The emulator could be made portable and games (or any software) could be written for the emulator standard.
There are portable libraries already, but I don't think anyone has quite gone this far. There are after the fact emulators as well, but they are limited by the capabilities of the original hardware and/or the hardware running the emulator.
Just a silly thought I had...
F U NE X N M? Son: "Dad... How do you spell 'hourly'?" Dad: "0 * * * *"
What he is really talking about is something like Java, or Pascal's p-code, or Sierra On-Lines AGI and SCI interpreter, you could even think PostScript. The word emulation was probably used so that teenage snotbags would understand it.
As a geek, there is nothing new here. I would have done the same thing their shoes.
So they're going to implement some sort of VM. Woo. It's not a bad idea, all things considered, but it's hardly anything to get excited about. (The same could be said of Capcom's games, but that's just pure opinion.)
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When you are using "state of the art" technology in your new game, let's say on the PS2, you can't emulate the PS2 on, let's say a Duron 800. I mean, it's raw processing power won't be enough to have a game ported at full speed...
I can't wait to play Street Fighter 4 on an iMac running Virtual PC in WinNT running VMware running Linux running Netscape running a Java version of Capcom's game. Cross-platform, we emulate them all in cascade!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's good enough to power F355 Challenge, which is probably the most impressive game in any arcade at the moment. You're not going to be emulating this thing any time soon.
Computers are insanely over-powered now, so why dont capcom utilize that extra horsepower. A program that emulates hardware that runs a basic os that runs the game on top of your os that is running inyour hardware.
Basically capcom will have very crappy games. or require 4 processor P-III 1.2Ghz processors and 1.5gig ram just to run it. It's just an example of how programmers are lazy and want to write bloatware.
Welcome to the year 2000, where we bloat our software for no reason whatsoever.
I bet most of you "programmers" cant write an app that comes in under 64K.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The way I see it is Capcom is going to create a fictitious hardware platform. From there, they emulate each of this made-up hardware on each platform. This type of emulation has been named high level emulation, HLE. The reason its called emulation is the idea of making this fictitious hardware run on any platform. Their perspective is from a hardware standpoint not from an API or OS.
Just to play devil's advocate, this doesn't sound like anything more than Capcom throwing out a buzz word to generate publicity... so they develop a midlayer that exports a generic API on several different platforms, and then code their games to that API. That's *NOT* emulation. That's what SDL does, that's what OpenGL and OpenSound do. It's basic tiered design, and it's a good idea. Hell, the point would be moot if all the game console manufacturers would get together and implement a unified API anyway, which they ought to do. But using the word 'emulation' just to stir up interest is pretty weak, IMHO.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I remember buying a CDROM full of games from Activision that were for originally written for the Commodore 64. That was several years ago.
The CDROM included a frontend program and an emulator that would allow you to play these games under Windows. It was a great idea, and the CDROM was priced rather cheap.
I think that it is an absolutely great idea for gaming companies to release thier old titles via emulation. Especially if the price is affordable. However, I would rather see some of these companies release some of their older games, that have lost almost all of their capacity to produce cashflow, into the public domain, source and all (ID software has led the way with source releases of many of its top titles.)
I read a recent article that stated that the computer gaming industry has outgrown the motion picture industry by leaps and bounds. If the Academy of Motion Pictures has setup a film-preservation society, why doesn't someone setup a software preservation society (needs to start now before some of the real treasures of the software industry disappear!)
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Will they use an extra (API-)layer for all machines, or will they make those games for one particular system, and emulate them on others?
If there's no (noticable) performance decrease, emulation is a good idea from a commercial point of view. They'll only have to write those emulators once and just maintain them, instead of having to port -all- their games to -all- the systems -every- time.
Wouldn't it be possible to have more than one company use the same emulator? That is: Will it be an open standard?
And i know this sounds SlashGeeky, but will those emulators include one for Linux?
As the great Butthead would say: That'd be cool!
I'm tellin' ya!
A little uptight, eh? Clearly you've never had the pleasure of HOT GRITS down your pants.
All the old Infocom games did this. It allowed Infocom to port one single app (the zmachine) to each new platform and then have their full product line available on that platform. There's still a thriving interactive fiction community centered around an open source, reverse-engineered copy of the interpreter (several, actually, on desktop systems, Unix/Linux, PalmOS, ...) and an open source compiler that generates code. More details at http://www.iflibrary.org/
Nothing new under the sun...
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
...on what you mean by "cross-platform". AFAIK, emulation only carries a minor performance hit when you're emulating older, less advanced systems on modern computers. Running Playstation emulation is possible, but it's somewhat resource-consuming. I know from experience that doing things like emulating an Intel processor on a PowerPC carries a sharp performance hit.
So, wouldn't you only be able to develop games cross-platform through emulation if you developed the games for an older system that you could readily emulate?
I think standard APIs like OpenGL offer more rational cross-platform development options. And then, of course, there's always Java. Once you can actually run Java apps (like in Linux) and use the appropriate semi-native APIs (like QuickTime and OpenGL), it's not all that slow, really.
Well, that's my two cents.
It's not VMs. It's not APIs. It is making moving a lot of hand-tweaked assembly code easier to move from the arcade to the home system. And that's why it's news.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Everytime a new console comes out, the games look good, but aren't that great..
It takes a long while till the dev's figure out how to get the best out of a machine.
You can't really do this with a virtual machine (without making the VM really bloated, and investing a lot of time tweaking it for every platform).
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Let me get this straight, Capcom is planning on making emulation of their titles EASIER now...
Weren't Capcom the company infamous for making unhackable "suicide boards?" I can't remember the model name of them, but they would format themselves whenever you try to reverse-engineer them, or after a given amount of time, whichever comes first. (At which point, you'd have to get a new one sent in from Capcom; I don't think they charged full price for the replacements, but not being an arcade owner, I don't know.)
If Capcom is doing this, I would imagine it would make it a lot easier to rip the data from their game boards. (Although you'd still probably have to go through layers of encryption, self-formatting, precice voltage monitors, etc... if you wanted to crack an arcade machine.)
Why must people criticize others for typos? It's really annoying! Clutter is not appreciated on Slashdot. If you still understand what the poster is saying, why say anything yourself?
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I seem to remember that Sega released a Sonic CD for the PC, which contained all the Sonic games, emulated, including the MegaCD Sonic CD game.
Does my bum look big in this?
imagine that, that'd make emulation real easy...
but even better, now we'll see which console really is the most macho, because the exact software will be running on all of them... i hope it doesn't get dumbed down to an lcd type of deal though ^^;;
but imagine if this emulator was released to the public! we could develop for all consoles simultaneously! wow.
psx2 has only 2 controllers, dreamcast is underpowered, gamecube has encryption to deal with just about anyone trying anything, xbox has no protected memory. will capcom really save money this way? hm.
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