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Proposed Set-Top MAME Emulation Console
BRock97 writes "An interesting post over at MAMEWorld discusses the possibility of the folks at HanaHo Games (the creators of the ArcadePC and the HotRod joystick) creating a set-top system that would run the MAME emulator and allow the user to play their collection of ROMS on a TV. From what has been posted, it sounds like the unit would be comparable to an XBox (with x86 inards), run an embedded OS (sounds like it would be Linux), and the company would fully support end user hacking of the unit (i.e. boot a DivX player). They would like to hit a target price of $200-$300 and would bundle as many ROMS as they have the right to. The company is requesting feedback." I tend to think MAME is best played in a cabinet (guess thats why I built one ;) but would love to see a mame set top box, but a custom box seems harder than simply using a dreamcast or x-box to do it. Course if they can do this with permission of the original ROM makers, this could be awesome.
Is why everyone thinks gaming companies are willing to sell old roms for cents on the dollar. The games are being recycled on to mobile platforms that are as powerful as the consoles of old. I've got the original Phantasy Star on my Gameboy, and Hang On on my cellphone. I paid 30$ and 15$ for these, respectively.
Why would Sega (as my example) say "Sure, throw all these games in your little console and send us 5 bucks!"?
There's much more money to be made off of these old roms. They'll end up bundling ROMs from companies that are out of buisness only.
Unlike stealing a bunch of ROMs are you are doing on your XBox.
Someone give me an affordable, *legal* way to play those good old games I miss from the past, please. (emphasis mine)
I agree with this completely, and this is the big reason I very rarely buy those compilation packs of old games. When someone's trying to sell me a collection of 10 old Atari games for $30 and there's only maybe 3 of the 10 I actually care about, that's not very good value for my money. Those old games were fun, but not so much that I'd want to spend $10 on each one... that adds up pretty quick when there's 10 games you want. There just isn't that much gameplay in those old games considering you can go pick up two-year-old PS2 games for $20 that give you ALOT more playtime. I'd easily drop $200 on a legit MAME romset. With 2045 unique games (3596 including clones), that comes out to about $0.10 each. Yeah, there's probably quite a few of those (maybe even most) that I wouldn't care a bit about, but I'm still getting alot better value than what's available now. And that's better for all of them because they'd at least be getting _something_ from me, while right now, they're not getting a penny.
Who says they're just emulating 15 year old hardware? A lot of us emulate games from the late '90s, such as the Neo-Geo games like The King of Fighters 2000, Metal Slug 3, or Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Those games require, at minimum, a 400mhz processor and 256MB of RAM. Add a TV-Out card to that and a small form factor and $200-$300 with a gamepad and a custom box is pretty much the minimum price.
LOLROFLMAOAFK!!!
Ok, just a few opinions/perspectives from someone who is an actual member of the "MAME community" referenced in the Hanaho post.
First off, $300 is not too high for this sort of thing. This is not intended to compete with PS2 or GameCube, this is not going to be a mass market thing. The fact is Hanaho makes money selling $200 joysticks and $1,000 cabinets, and X-Gaming does also. Enough people will pay for this sort of thing for it to be profitable if it's truly as easy and quick as Hanaho says it will be, and truly as customizable. Lots of us have built PC's specifically for use with MAME and spent more than $300 to do it - *and* we have to deal with booting Windows and using the Windows (or Linux, or whatever) interface whenever we want to play. Something that would boot *in seconds* into MAME, and would load all ROMs and play them without a hitch, that's worth $300 to me and I'm sure a lot of other people. It would be a far more elegant solution to making your own MAME-based arcade cabinet than sticking a PC in there like we pretty much all do now, or you could just hook it up to your TV.
It would *have to* be upgradable though, at least as far as CPU and memory. That shouldn't be a major problem, though, as 99% of the games MAME supports will run on a slow CPU, and they'll all run on a faster CPU, so only those of us interested in playing KOF99 or Metal Slug X would really need to worry about it. Basically, build it with PC architecture but make the OS completely dedicated to MAME, and make it small and cheap (for a PC) and boot lightning quick. This thing would be easily profitable. There's far more value to running about 80% of all old arcade games (some of which are actually not that old - only a year or so in some cases) than to running 100% of all NES games (as someone else brought up, regarding those cheap Chinese NES emulators you can buy). We're talking thousands and thousands of games here, arcade-perfect; games you had to pay between a quarter and a buck to play when they were new, and still would if you managed to find them in a real arcade today. The relevant term here is "arcade-perfection" - nobody ever talks about "NES-perfection".
As for the ROMs, few developers are interested in licensing these things because many of them still make money from their older games. Look at Namco with their Namco Museum series, or Midway with their Midway Greatest Hits (not to mention their updates) - they still consider these IP that are worth protecting. It is technically piracy to run these on a MAME box without owning the original game, though nobody really cares that much to do anything about it and many of these publishers I've talked to actually find MAME a very impressive piece of software despite their legal misgivings. Capcom has been more flexible and actually does license their games to Hanaho. It's possible some other companies may follow suit if an actual MAME box were to come out but I doubt it would be worth it - I'd rather keep the costs of the box down than have a few extra licensed games.
Anyway, get to work, Hanaho! If it does all you've said it will and is at least CPU and memory-upgradable, I'm sold.
? "Flash" as in flash-RAM, or "flash" as in CompactFlash media? "du -sh ~/.xmame ~/.snes96_snapshots" returns a total of less than 1M, which should certainly be doable no matter what kind of media you're talking about. (YMMV on this, but I play a fair number of emulated games.) After all, an 8Mbyte SmartMedia card is roughly $10.
if those geeks are able to plug a terminal emulator and nullmodem into a service port on the back
Yes. If any company really tries to make this idea into a real product, this would be a big selling point. Let's just hope they can convince the marketroids and lawyers of this, and that some beancounter decides the $1-2 cost-per-unit of adding this functionality is worth it.
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.