Slashdot Mirror
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."
Star ROMS.
$2 a pop (usually) but they only have 25 games right now. It's a start.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
FCEUltra, on a PC with TV-out, running at 640x480, with either a Retrozone NES controller (with USB connector) or a PS2 pad with a USB adaptor, is about as close as one will get to actual hardware at this moment. To me it seems 99% accurate to hardware (the width of the emulated NES is a bit less than fullscreen, but it doesn't affect playability).
Many other emulators are quite close to hardware with a setup like this. I use it for NES, SNES, Genesis, GB/GBC, and GBA games, and also with C64 emulators to run C64 games and demos. I am currently in the process of setting up an N64 emulator in such a fashion.
FC Closer
Sonic the Hedgehog collection does the same annoying thing where you have to play Sonic 1 to unlock, say, Comics Zone or some of the other "bonus" games on the disk. How irritating! Either put those games on the disk or don't, but making me win Sonic 2 10 times before I can play them? Moronic.
It's actually worse than that, I'm afraid. Let's check gamefaqs:
Blue Sphere: Play Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic 3d Blast 20 times each.
Flicky: Play Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine 30 times.
Knuckles in Sonic 2: Play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic Spinball 20 times each.
Ristar: Play Blue Sphere, Knuckles in Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Knuckles, and Flicky 30 times each.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles: Play Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles 20 times each.
So if you want to get to those games, you're in for a half-hour of select-game, start-game, exit-game, wait-until-the-count-is-auto-saved. That's right, you wait a couple of extra seconds when switching games so the system will be able to keep track of how close you are to unlocking the bonus stuff.