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Back to the Classics
Gamasutra.com is running an article entitled Back to the Classics (no reg. required), discussing the perfection of the emulation used in the recent Atari Anthology. From the article: "In a port, it's easiest to consider a game written in a high-level language like C (though that wasn't at all common in the first half of the '80s or earlier). As the person porting the game, you'd separate the program into two parts. There's the C code that represents the game logic itself, which you try to leave intact, and there's the platform-specific code (for example, a video driver might be considered part of the platform-specific code). Early computers, arcade games and home consoles had video chipsets that bore no resemblance at all to what we have now. So, you'd have to rip out that code and replace it with something that hopefully works the same way on the new platform."
... was from the Intellivision lives collection. It totally brought me back to the oldies ... actually I ended up firing up my Intellivision again (yes I still have one with about 60 games) and played Utopia with my wife for about three hours till she got frustrated. Ahhh emulators ... is there any memory you can't unlock?
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
that they can get money from their old IP without BEING GREEDY! What would be nice would be an iTMS-like classic gaming store, where one could(legally) get roms for about $.99 or so each. Unfortunately, the mere lawyers fees alone to get this kind of deal together kills it....
Monstar L
If you have done any dabbling in emulation at all, you by now have noticed that there were LOTS of versions of pacman around. The first version out of Japan was known as "Puck-Man" Legend has it that the games name was chaned after some arcades began complaning that the "P" was often scratched out to an "F".
The orginal game logic made the game very predicatable. All you had to do was learn a few patterns, and you could play all day on just one quarter. Not long after Pacman came out, arcade owners started clammering for changes in the game that would keep the games productive. This lead to changes like th speed chip, and pacman plus. I wonder how the developers of the commercial emulators choose what version of the game to remake.
I have purchased on of those 'emulators in a box' that had pacman on it, and it appears that they used the pacman plus code for the game logic. I still keep mame around so I can play the original game.
--C. Alan
but the menus you had to navigate to get to the games made no sense. The games are represented as stars in constellations - seemingly a 2D menu - which you can only navigate as a 1D menu (prev/next). And doing well on one game unlocks stuff for other games - the developers expect you to treat the games as a whole, not just dive into the ones you like and ignore the others.
I loved Activision Anthology but I hate the Atari one. It's certainly not due to the emulation quality. It may be the games, but I suspect it's the way the material is presented. Perfect emulation isn't everything - you need to avoid ruining the experience.
This article talks about "recreating the experience" which I think is something that emulators in general don't take enough time to consider these days. There are few solutions to be able to play old games, on a TV in your living room as they should be. The only emu that I know of that is focused on the experience is imbNES, a NES emulator that runs on playstation 1 (and 2). There aren't a whole lot of emulators that run on consoles (the only way to play IMHO, who wants to play mario with a keyboard on their PC?) and those that exist often have video issues (like not running in the native resolution of the target platform) that ruin the illusion that you're playing the real deal. I wish more time was spent on authenticity of the experience as opposed to skinnable interfaces and useless features!
It's a start.
A very slow start; they've been around for a few years already, and I don't remember the list being much smaller when they first started up. _Have_ they added any since they started up?
Frankly I find this:
more interesting than the game, although the technical aspects of the article were ok. I wonder what games Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo play these days...
It's hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.
I don't mean to be a troll, and I've read and enjoyed Vavasour's writings on emulation (his webpage is a fountain of info) but I do wonder if it's really as hard as he describes.
/me goes back to playing Super Mario USA on my Game Theory Admiral.....
Look at stella for example, it's open source, cross platform, does sound and everything. Is the emulation provided by the fine folks at Digital Enclipse that much more perfect?
Please send all UCE to scally@devolution.com so I can f
1. The pre-fab WAV file technique is not always so hot. Midway Arcade Treasures 1 and 2, also developed by Digital Eclipse, have some annoying sound bugs that result in the music cutting out in Smash T.V. and Total Carnage, wrong sound effects played at times in Rampart, and the music sounding like it was recorded in analog and re-digitized in Xenophobe. Most of these games are among the more complicated cases for them to handle, it is true, but I'm not inclined to cut them so much slack here, they've been doing this for a while now.
2. Often, the cabinet art for arcade games turns out to be a misfeature. In some of their previous emulations of golden age Atari vector games, the beam drawings are so faint that it makes it difficult to play. In fact, I think this is just because the cabinet artwork takes up so much of the screen. You can turn it off and reclaim that part of the screen, but in the compilation I own (for Dreamcast), it doesn't save this setting to the memory card.
3.
One particular problem, in that regard, is the common modern standard that the Start button also be a pause button. Sounds simple, right? Problem is, the Start button should also start the game. So what the Start button should do changes depending on whether a game has already started or not. How does the emulator know if a game has started or not?
Another rant about Midway Arcade Treasures 2:
They added an interesting new "setting" to the games in this compilation that disables continuations and health purchases. This is very useful for games where you want to challenge yourself to get as far as you can on one credit.
But the problem is, their implementation of this feature is just plain buggy. Sometimes Xenophobe will add two credits at game start instead of one (holding down the button mapped to the left trigger at game start seems to do this). Gauntlet II does it as well. Sometimes the emulation will misinterpret a game button press as a buy-in request, and put the emulator in a confused state.
Digital Eclipse's emulation efforts have saved a great many worthy games for general audiences, but most of the time their efforts seem to be *just short* of perfect. They also, for the record, always hide the real game's startup displays and operator settings menus behind their own menus, which sometimes leave out interesting options.
Its weird to see DE get tripped up on problems that MAME doesn't have. I guess this demonstrates that they haven't stolen code, true, but they could still improve their efforts a bit.
They've actually lost titles from their catalog since they opened. They hope to add more but obtaining the rights is a bear I understand . . .
--- saint
Build Your Own Arcade Controls
http://www.arcadecontrols.com/
--- saint
Build Your Own Arcade Controls