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Grandmother Buys Old Building In Japan And Finds 55 Classic Arcade Cabinets
An anonymous reader writes A grandmother agreed to purchase an old building in Chiba, which is just outside of Tokyo. When her family arrived to check out the contents of the building it was discovered that the first two floors used to be a game center in the 1980s. Whoever ran it left all the cabinets behind when it closed, and it is full of classic and now highly desirable games. In total there are 55 arcade cabinets, most of which are the upright Aero Cities cabinets, but it's the game boards that they contain that's the most exciting discovery.
Boards include Donkey Kong, Street Fighter Alpha 2 (working despite the CPS2 lockout chip's tendency to kill old boards), and Metal Slug X.
A lot of old programs relied on some very specific behaviour of chips to perform accurately. They'd exploit bugs in the microcode or timing imperfections to make their games small and efficient. Older games did a lot of very weird crap to get around limitations of the time. I remember reading quite fondly how the makers of Monkey Island 2 hacked their way around the scene where you dive to the bottom of the ocean to make the blue fade to black scene work despite not having a colour palate setup to do so.
What typically happens is if you faithfully emulate what an old console is supposed to do then at best a game plays with minor bugs, at worst it becomes completely unplayable. Correctly emulating an old console on the other hand is a processing nightmare which can bring multicore 3GHz machines to their knees. What really happens is that the people who write emulators figure out how the original game exploited the hardware configuration and then code the emulator to look at which game is currently being played and apply an appropriate hack to make it work. I.e the emulator works differently depending on the game.
Trivial nonsense would actually prevent you from playing the game at all in some cases.
Thank you. I hope that you never need neurosurgery either.