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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.
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What'd be cool is if there was an agreement between the major ROM copyright holders to allow some company to put all the old ROMs on one CD and sell, then split an amount between them. I'm thinking small amounts per CD (1-2 cents per game?) - a disc with 500 games may have to split $10 between the original copyright holders. Perhaps the administrative costs might be too high for some, but they'd be getting *something* instead of people continually 'stealing' their original work. Yes, I've got ROMs for VCS cartridges I bought, and C64 games, and even a few I never bought. If I want more, the only options I have are 'illegal' ones.
Someone give me an affordable, *legal* way to play those good old games I miss from the past, please.
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Subject New Idea.. need opinions! Reply to this message
Posted by borg357
Posted on 01/07/03 02:28 PM
Hello Everyone! Some of you know me, some may not. My name is Richard and I work at a company called HanaHo Games (www.hanaho.com), where I'm a product developer. Over the years, we've created some kewl emulation products like the HotRod Joystick and the ArcadePC among other things..
I wanta drop the ball on something here, and I need some honest opinions. Over the years at HanaHo, we've gained allot of experience in creating our own embedded PCB's for use in Coin-op markets, and we also have experience in marketing, as well as some really good contacts with various partnerships in the real coin-op business.
What would you guys think about a console based gaming system (embedded hardware unit) for use for emulation? This would be an incredibly ambitious project, as we would be facing some huge obstacles! But I've been kicking this idea around for a while now.. and here's some details:
A stand alone game system, that's about the size of an X-box or PS2. It would have the ability to plug in USB game pads, HotRod, X-arcade, Slickstick, or home made joystick keyboard hacks. It would also be able to plug in to a TV or a VGA monitor, as well as direct sound output, and Network support built in. The base system, would simply boot up (within seconds), and play MAME. There would be an optional hard drive, but contain a DVD-ROM player for the games to load.
With our experience in embedded products, I feel that we could launch such a project, as an alternative to "hacking" an x-box or ps2 to play MAME. Emulation would be the main purpose for this console unit, however, it would be very similar to the way the X-Box works, in fact, given today's chip prices, we might even be able to create something even more powerful than an X-Box.
The OS would be embedded into the boot-up of the console, and we would have to reply on a team of people, working with, and creating a MAME version for this unit.
The target price I'm shooting for would be $200-300, and we would of course bundle this with as many ROMS as we can get the rights too.
There would also be some added bonuses here too.. First off, creating our own game system would solve a lot of ROM licensing issues, and also create and help legitimize MAME, while still keeping MAME as a grass roots movement. The only way this major gamble would work is to have the support of the MAME community. We know very well, that the market is now saturated with consoles and titles by some heavy hitters, but we're NOT after the same market of newer games. In fact, while microsoft is busy sueing everyone offering mod chips, we would fully embrace hacks in our system. This system, unlike X-Box or GameCube, or PS2 would be very very useful in "home-brew" arcade units, as well as the engine in our own line of cabinets we sell. It might even be a significant cost savings as a PC is actually a bit of an overkill for a MAME machine.
Take a moment.. think about it. tell me what you think..
Thanks
--
-Richard Ragon/Senior HanaHo Evangelist
http://www.HanaHo.com - HanaHo Games, Inc.
Hope this helps.
Licensing ROMS is a very expensive deal, I wonder how they plan on paying for them? I'm pretty skeptical of this venture getting much further than that post (but I'm still hopeful).
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$300 is far too much money for something like this. Put it this way, over here in the UK we can buy a console that looks suspiciously like an old N64 controller which plugs straight into the TV. It holds a large amount of NES games on it. (I haven't checked the number, but there's loads.)
The price? 30 quid. That's roughly $50.
Sure, some geekier-than-thou types would get a stiffy from being able to plug Linux into their telly, but the average person won't care whether or not they get their Retro gaming fix from the NES or Arcade versions of games.
Considering the horsepower that's required to do everything post 1997, Xbox level hardware may not cut it for the folks who like the Metal Slug/Capcom Vs. games/etc. For those of us who just want to sit around and play Burgertime or the Ninja Turtles arcade game, I'm all for it.
I have a feeling this may cause more problems than it's worth, though. The last thing I want to see is some company decide that this is the last straw and really persue shutting down the mame project. I imagine getting permission from more than a couple companies to distribute rom images will be pretty hard, even if they're offered compensation. I can't get to the thread right now - what do the mamedevs think about all this?
Has anyone bought that single player X-arcade joystick?
And yes, I know how easy it is to get MAME up and running, but face it. If you're reading slashdot, chances are you're in the top 5% of the technically inclined and setting up an emulator is *easy*. But, if you're mom and pop AOL who don't even know what type of sound or video card they have, let alone the processor speen and RAM, well then it becomes a more daunting task.
Though I have to wonder how much of a market there will be for this... considering how many publishers have released collections of their old games for the latest consoles already..
Why would they need permisson of the original rom owners to do this? It's not like they needed permission to make the joysticks. Anyway, I think this would actually be a good idea, but one, is mame legal to sell? Would there be any issues with that? Also, I could see this coming in handy for cabinet builders, instead of specing out a computer, just grab this, grab some roms, and go to town. I am sure you could just insert this in the place of a computer inside a cabinet. They just have to make sure that its powerful enough to run all the cpu intensive roms, like Mortal Kombat 4 and the like. I'll be keeping an eye on it.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
I have MAME on my XBox right now. Go buy an XBox and chip it. Just run the ROMs right off the HD.
No need to design some whole new system to do this stuff.
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.
If it supports end-user hacking and runs Linux, then that's an emphatic yes. Plenty of suitable emulators out there to choose from.
;)
Provided you have legal rights to use those ROMs, of course...
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Replying to own post:
What'd be SMART - if they were to do it - is for a company to bundle all its old games together and ship it with MAME. I thought Activisin did something like this, but EA hasn't done it. Yes, it's not MAME, but there are C64 emulators available. If they'd ship all their old classics (Skyfox, Archon, Seven Cities, etc) *with* an emulator, it'd certainly sell. Huge amounts? Maybe not, but the development cost is practically nill.
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Or, an alternative solution, why don't we just concentrate on xbox mame? I own all three modenrn consoles, and my entertainment cabnet is pretty full as it is :)
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Steps for getting an Xbox to play Mame games:
Find grey-market chip for your xbox on the 'net
order it
wait
open up your Xbox, solder it in
burn the right CD, with all the games you want to play
Steps in using a dedicated MAME console:
Use it.
Yeah, seems so much harder.
Seriously this thing seems a lot simpler. I already have an x-box, but I might be more intrested in this, since for *me* this will be a lot simpler. And I lost the urge to dick around with computers just for the 'fun' of of it a few years ago.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Unlike stealing a bunch of ROMs are you are doing on your XBox.
They would have to get the permission of the MAME developers as well. If you read the license that comes with MAME, it forbids distribution together with roms.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Depends on the customer base. Selling, say, 1000 post-console games at $10-$15 won't make much money. Selling 100,000 (bigger numbers probably apply) to an all-in-one package would probably make more cash. If you could dump it in there with some EMU's for a bunch of different hardware: NES emulator, SNES emulator, Sega Emulator, MAME Arcade Emulator - you could sell different games as packs (as is often done with old games anyways).
I'm not sure how many people would buy "Hang On" for a cellphone, but I'd imagine a certain number would find it rather sweet to own the "Capcom fighter collection", or "Zelda Suite" etc etc.
I'm wondering how they're going to handle the problem of vertical games on a home-TV based game box. I haven't tried MAME at NTSC resolutions, but don't you lose quite a bit when you have to compress down to fit the screen?
"Course if they can do this with permission of the original ROM makers, this could be awesome."
Nintendo is still making money off of selling trading cards with classic games imbedded on them. How many incarniations of the Classic Gaming CD (which contains 10 games, taking up less than 10% of the disk) have you seen? Care to by the sequel?
No, they're gonna have to shell out for the permission to use those ROMs.
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If it's allready running Linux, does that mean we have to change our usual plans and try to get windows to run on it?
Everything will be taken away from you.
It's worth noting that MythTV (PVR software) already has a "MythGame" addon, which is a mame frontend. MythTV is designed with control from an IR remote in mind, so it would make a really good candidate as software for a set-top box. Now, if you'll excuse me, *unpauses CSI*.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
I'd thought of doing something similar myself, except that mine would also be an MP3/DVD player. The Via was the setup I was considering doing this with. Don't think I'll bother now - I have a Shuttle and it's easily transportable from upstairs to the TV. Add a wireless keyboard/controller and you're done.
Cheers,
Ian
I just saw this mame cocktail cabinet at a Tampa distributor. Scroll down to the bottom of this page;
m
http://www.homegameroom.com/catalog/newvideo.ht
I believe such a cluster is known as an 'arcade'...
Cheers,
Ian
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.
Seriously I have wanted to do this since I first tried MAME, but MAME is continually evolving and I think will continue to push hardware limits. Since I don't have the money for a full-on gaming quality machine I have been giving serious thought to nabbing an old 100mhz pentium off of ebay and slapping a TV out video card (or heck, just hooking it to my TView VGA-2-NTSC convertor and making up a settop Stella player. Maybe up the power a little for a NES or (dare to dream SNES) emulator. I don't know why, but having grown up with Atari playing games on a PC monitor still just doesn't cut it, and playing console games on a monitor is just sick and wrong. :)
It all depends on what you're trying to emulate. Pac Man? Donkey Kong? Sure, you can even get away with a 486 (if you use the right Emulator, such as VAntAGE, but if you're looking to play something like, S.T.U.N. Runner, which isn't exactly young, you can't. I've got an Athlon 1GHz, and barely make full frame rate.
... slashdot's themselves ... is that considered ... mastochistic?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
- VIA EPIA 800 - $110.71
- 256MB PC133 - $46.53
- Cubid 2688R Mini-ITX Case - $94.67
- Toshiba Slimline 8X DVD - $136.38
Total: $388.29Plus, if you really want to soup up your machine you could add:
Now, this particular site probably marks up a little not to mention that you could find all this stuff on sale. Moreover, most of the above (including the VIA board and case) are available at brick-and-mortor shops today. In fact, I've been eying a VIA board over at Fry's for the past month or two.
All in all, I really don't see the value-add that this would offer. With the GeForce card, one could probably play most PC games too.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Here are two requirements that would completely make this console:
1. Use an embedded, realtime or low latency operating system. Gamers want responsive controls and audio/video. Using a low latency Linux kernel should be more than enough, and it should be fairly easy.
2. Hardware should be silent or at least very quiet. They last thing gamers want is to plug in a game system that sounds like a vacuum cleaner.
Also, let me throw in a few more suggestions:
Concentrate on MAME, and MAME only! Embedded set-top boxes work best when they do one thing really well, and suppley a simple interface.
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.
Pace Micro of Saltaire, England are a major manufacturer of set top boxes. A year ago they entered into an agreement with Sega to add dreamcast technology to their STBs. Pace are now all but tits-up (although that is mostly to do with the Football League, ITV digital, Enron and Worldcom).
Maybe QNX, WinCE, PalmOS etc. licensing costs are prohibitive?
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
The market is the people who want to be have the support and blessing of the parent company to poke around inside the hardware and see if they can get them to maybe pop toast or act as expensive alarm clocks without having to worry about the DMCA or RIAA or ABCD or FBI, et al breathing downn their necks or lawyers knocking on their doors. I for one don't think procurring and installing "mod's" that have to be purchased from a guy in a long trenchcoat in the back ally -- or from lick tsu tang inc. shipped on a slow boat from china with a hefty price tag and no warranty....
I for one like to be able to poke around without getting all McGuyver...I am to old for that anymore.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
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Tim
version .63 of MAME just came out today. Downloadable, of course, from http://www.mame.net.
Forget lame-looking 2600 consoles -- I'd like to see emulation of the walkup boxes. I'd like to play the arcade Altered Beast (my jenny just wasn't the same) and definately Crystal Caverns (castles?) with Bently Bear. Of course, this box would need a roller to control Bently as well as centipede, but a guy can hope!
1. Those NES in a controller setups are nowhere NEAR legal.
2. Arcade games emulated by MAME are far, far beyond what an NES could ever do.
So, let's sum up: $50 for an illegal, mid 1980's era game unit - or $2-300 for a 100% legal, up to and including games from at least 10 years later unit.
Hmm, you're right, why would *anyone* want this?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Imagine how badass it would be if nintendo released, say, 30 of their 1st party titles for NES on a single disc for Gamecube w/ an emu to run it all.
OK, so it's only about 15 first-party NES games in Animal Crossing (that I know of), and you have to work a bit to get them (but Universal codes makes it 15 minutes of work MAX), but what you want is already out there. Plus, you get an entire game beyond that.
The Sonic collection is pretty damn neat too, even if it is only 7 games.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Hanaho has been legally distributing quite a lot of roms, with full permission of the copyright holders, for some time now.
:)
See: Capcom, for one. There are also quite a few arcade roms that have been put into the public domain over the years.
Nintendo is not the end-all and be-all of video games (even if they did make some of the funnest
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
and would bundle as many ROMS as they have the right to.
Let me wager a guess at how many that would be.. perhaps zero??
Isn't this what Dreamcast Emulation is all about?
Well, not all about. But somewhat. A large part. Mostly. Kinda.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
I love Linux, but I don't think it's right for this project. The only reason to run Linux on this thing is that you like Linux and you haven't thought of the alternatives.
What MAME needs is an OS that doesn't get in the way. There's no need for any processes other than MAME to be running, so no multitasking. We want fast, direct access to graphics and sound hardware. We want DOS. It's no coincidence that the core MAME source is written for DOS.
If a free OS is required, I'm given to understand that MAME runs fine under FreeDOS.
DOS MAME aleady contains code to underclock certain video cards to TV scanrates. ArcadeOS is one MAME frontend that can also run at these scanrates.
Personally, the thing that interests me the most is that the mention of bundling ROMS with it, which would suggest [assuming it's legal], that some of the original companies are willing to liscense them out.
The other major difference is the price. The arcade in a box (full version), is over US$1k, and this new article is talking about a US$300 price.
You also start looking at theoretical [HanaHo] vs. already done [Arcade in a Box]. Then there's controls...Arcade in a Box comes with the arcade-like buttons, etc, while it sounds like HanaHo's thinking about USB support, and you'd plug whatever gamepad/joystick/etc it can support, but it'd be seperate from the box.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I just want to note, in an overtly bitter tone, that I had this same idea 2 years ago.