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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!