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Amazing effort, but just makes me pine for the write-ups of Byuu (or the Dolphin devlog in more recent times).
I would highly recommend Shonumi's contemporary devlog focusing mainly on rare or difficult to emulate peripherals for the gameboy and GBA, ranging from infrared modems to Sonar-based fish detection dongles!
Byuu was fantastic - I remember when they came onto the scene and made a big push for better emulator compatibility across the board. Byuu made positive changes in the world, and I still think about them from time to time.
A lot of very talented individuals in the community but I always keep in mind the old saying: "the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long".
Dolphin has some absolutely fascinating right ups on the lengths they had to go to in order to get Factor 5 games to run. When you're working with a fixed hardware set there are absolutely incredible things you can do to eke out extra performance that will go completely unappreciated until years later when somebody tries to run that software on a emulate hardware.
Does anyone know a PC emulator that properly allows mic input via Soundblaster emulation?
I managed to find my first published app on archive.org from like 1994, but it's a music visualizer and requires audio input.
Rest in power. The scene is not the same without him.
https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art16.html
Wow, that brings back childhood memories.
> I should mention that I was a huge Battle Network fan growing up with the GBA. I joined my first online community (GameWinners.com) specifically for the Mega Man forum.
> My first username (Team Shadow V2) was actually a riff on one of the new features found in MMBN2.
> In a way, Battle Network is a huge reason why I'm here trying to preserve old games.
> The Battle Network games will always hold memories of joy and nostalgia for me, so I wanted to see the Battle Chip Gates fully emulated not only for the benefit of video game history, but also for my own enjoyment.
Me too... MMBN2 is a big reason why I learned English and became a programmer. Huge respect.
I still love it so much. It's fun to think back on it and reflect on how oddly prescient it was.
PCs reachable directly from the internet, hosting home pages: a world without NAT. Internet connected doghouses and dishwashers. Mobile handheld AI capable personal computers. Everyone has their own custom AI agents that help navigate the complexity of the cyberworld, and also for self-defense. What I can only assume to be vulnerabilities, reified as literal weapons used by the AIs. Underworld networks normal people don't dare to navigate into. Cyber terrorists everywhere doing things like trying to burn people's houses down by electronically sabotating ovens, causing major damage and loss of life by hacking water mains, power grids, traffic signals, trying to nuke dams, actually hacking entire nations and genociding their AI populations, disrupting global environmental control systems, hacking autopilot systems in planes to bring them down like 9/11...
Pretty wild that MAME has been under active development for over 28 years with the core concept unchanged and no serious forks. It must have a very committed dev community.
A C++ codebase with bonus non-C++ code that generates C++ code plus a build-process-that-generates-build processes all with maniacal inter-dependencies and a guy who insists on renaming everything and moving all the files around in git-destroying ways twice a year does indeed create a bit of a monks-in-the-caves vibe.
interrogations on motives for building from source
constant slap fights between contributors (usually involving haze or guru)
important PRs left ignored due to internal drama
8GB+ memory leak during building that they're in no rush to fix
A benevolent dictator then
Not exactly a fork but there was a separate MESS, for a time, expanding the scope to non-arcade systems, until it was reenfolded.
This reminds me that Linus Torvalds quote that the point of open source isn't just the right to fork but also the right to merge, and that's what justify copyleft
I feel like every one of my repos is a separate mess.
advmame/advmess too.
There are actually a good numer of forks, but not sure if they qualify for your criteria of "serious" or not.
I also won't be naming any of them because those "committed" mame devs are very quick to inject themselves into any story about them, and harshly judge everything else that touches their code that didn't come from them.
This is absolutely so on brand.
Has its pros and cons, of course.
> no serious forks
What about Final Burn Alpha/Neo? They're extremely popular.
What I find absolutely wild and found out by accident is that it also emulates SGI / IRIX
I really love posts like this – and moreover it's clear that emulating games has spurred the development of really deep technical skills in more than one author.
I worry that the likes of the extremely difficult to crack, on-chip DRM found within e.g. the Xbox One X, designed at every available opportunity to resist hobbyists understanding and using the hardware, will show up as a big gap in museum exhibits in our cultural memory in the 2200s. DRM has a long tail, and we societally pay quite the underappreciated price for it, for sure.
All that work for less than 10 games available on this console, emulation developers are really determined
There's a fair number of low game count systems where people are really enamored with one game. For example, I'm a big fan of T-Mek (I've got a machine with issues in my barn), but that system only has two games, so it waits for someone who is interested, determined, equipped, and skilled to figure out the protection to enable it to run properly in MAME.
Habbo Origins wouldn't be around if it wasn't for tinkerers who figured out how to make an already compiled Habbo DCR run as a stand-alone desktop app, over a decade later. Which prompted a Sulake Employee to try it out. Said employee was originally part of the Habbo Retro / Emulator scene. ;)
The Reverse Engineering scene is quite a scene.
Some arcade hardware is totally custom and only runs one game. Some chips are unique and only appear on one board. MAME's mission is clear, however SNK is a big enough name, along with Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury, that the HNG64 was always going to get attention.
I think the word you are looking for is passionate.
Gotta catch ‘em all
Archiving the past is a noble endeavor.
Is this similar to what CAPCOM did with their arcade system with that weird battery thing? If it powered off you had to send it back to CAPCOM to get it re-programmed. It was a DRM method used to combat piracy in the early arcade days.
I don't see how it is, but maybe you're referring to something else. I think you're talking about the CPS, or more famously the CPS2, which had a battery power its anti-piracy measures. You only had to send it in if the battery dipped below a certain voltage, after which it would destroy the security key (in memory), so the ROMs would remain encrypted. You could turn off the machine just fine. Arcade machines were regularly powered off. This coupled with the fact that the CPS2 batteries especially are prone to leak over critical components dubbed them the suicide batteries. These security measures have since been defeated in a few ways, all while removing the troublesome battery. You can replaced the encrypted ROMs on your board with Phoenix ROMs, which are decypted. You can solder on a PCB called the Infinikey, which loads the decryption key with power from the board and not the battery. Maybe there are others, too.
I think the HNG64 just had obscure/undumped/not understood hardware.
Yes, it was a 2-part scheme:
They had a proprietary decryptor chip that sat between the program roms and the CPU. The decryptor used a table held in a small SRAM that was powered by a battery. When the SRAM lost power (battery died, or someone was trying to reverse engineer the board), the decryption key would be lost.
We broke it because someone noticed that the FC1 pin was tied to the drcyptor chip. In retrospect this made sense because only the program roms were encrypted, not the gfx roms (FC1 and FC0 pins were 01 for data access and 10 for program access [1]). Whenever the 68000 was requesting an instruction, it would set FC0 low and FC1 high, and when requesting data it would be opposite - this is how the decryptor knew when to decrypt.
But there was an achilles heel!
If you use PC-relative addressing, this ALSO causes FC0 low and FC1 high (because PC-relative is assumed to be accessing more program code). So all you had to do was fetch each address using PC-relative MOVEs, and it would happily give you the decrypted instruction words.
But then there was a secondary protection scheme: The decryptor chip would mysteriously shut down after a short while! WTF!
It wasn't until Capcom released their home console based off the original CPS board, along with backports of games like Street Fighter Zero, that the penny dropped. These backports were full of mysterious reads of weird addresses that made no sense.
It turns out that these weird addresses were what the decryptor chip was waiting for on the address bus. If no such address appeared within a timeout period, the chip would stop decrypting until you reset.
But the guys backporting CPS2 games didn't take the instructions doing these accesses out - even though the original CPS board didn't need it (probably it would have been a lot of work), so that secret leaked out.
After that, it was a simple matter of writing a program that read via PC-relative addresses, sent those weird accesses from time to time to keep the watchdog happy, and then output to a dumper via IO pins.
[1] Section 3.8: PROCESSOR FUNCTION CODES (FC0, FC1, FC2)
That shit is something you still find in the gambling world. Many of the modern one-armed bandits have HSMs with a loooot of protections, including batteries with drill through protections and god knows what else, although it's less used for anti-piracy but more to prevent tax fraud.
Even after 28 years, there continue to be a lot of interesting things happening across MAME - and it goes well beyond the arcade machines MAME is known for to lesser known home consoles, vintage computers and other hardware.
One example I'm excited about is the recent progress emulating professional music synthesizers like the legendary Yamaha MU-series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_MU-series). These are significant not just to musicians but also gamers because in the late 80s PC games started supporting MIDI music soundtracks. Throughout the 90s, most PC gamers only heard these soundtracks through fairly primitive PC sound cards which had limited audio sample memory, bit rates and simultaneous voice counts. So we usually heard chintzy, partial renditions of the lush full soundtracks the game's composer originally created (many composers used external MIDI hardware).
If you were a hardcore gamer with serious money you got an external MIDI sound module like the Roland Sound Canvas which could elevate your favorite game's sound from chintzy to breathtakingly beautiful. However, the absolute best MIDI game hardware was the $699 64-voice Yamaha MU80. I heard one back in the day and it blew my mind what I'd been missing (MU80 Demo Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwWxEN2NGHA). Now thanks to MAME I can have a full software emulation of this powerful, pricey professional hardware I could only lust for back then.
I remember the weird, pretty bad MIDI songs that shipped with my Packard Bell Pentium 166 (with MMX technology) and I didn't realize there were devices at that time that would have elevated them. A quick search on youtube shows this video comparing a Sound Blaster output with the MU80. Pretty cool!
There was some project to use/fork MAME to emulate a bunch of digital synths, running the original ROMs with a GUI to replicate the original controls? Some of those might have GM support with far better sounds than any consumer hardware, and in theory that emulator could be wired up to some PC emulator with MIDI output support?
When do you think we'll be able to ask an AI to recreate some nostalgia induced fantasy game in the 90s?
Article mentions LaserActive. I remember going to my uncles house as a kid where he had one and I had no idea it existed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserActive
Pretty sure I just used it to play genesis games
If you didn't catch the link, a couple issues earlier in the newsletter I did quite an in-depth dive into how emulator developer Nemesis spent the last 15 years finally making it possible to emulate LaserActive games! Much longer than the MAME story if you enjoy the technical stuff :) https://www.readonlymemo.com/this-is-the-first-the-16-year-o...
(And if you don't enjoy the technical stuff, well, now you can actually download some of those laserdisc games you apparently didn't get to play as a kid, haha!)
Not many knew they existed! They are sought after by collectors, and fetch a pretty penny. At least they were when I was getting into PC Engine/TurboGrafx gear ~15 years ago. I'm sure it's even more now.
I felt the urge to zoom into the first picture and look at the price tags:
- Battle Toad in Battlemaniac (Battletoads in Battlemaniacs) = 53900 JPY.
- Akumajou Dracula XX (Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss) = 27500 JPY.
- The King of Dragons = 39800 JPY.
> Vajra and Vajra 2 - A pair of LaserActive-exclusive rail shooters by Data West
Wait, Data West? Apparently there was indeed such a company: https://www.mobygames.com/company/6613/data-west/
They're founded later than Data East, but also Japanese. They don't appear to be any sort of spinoff of Data East or anything, but I have to wonder if with the name they were hoping to confuse people somewhat into thinking they were Data East, or to ride on their reputation...
It would be great if they finally cracked the >100 ms delay between a keypress and game response. Immediately visible in Galaga and Galaga with fast shoot.
That's rad yo!
Somehow I like the random unrelated ramblings about vintage movies and the author's trip to tokyo at the beginning.
lol glad they weren't a turn-off for a new reader. Since I write this as a newsletter that ends up in lots of inboxes, it doesn't have the structure of a typical single-topic article, which probably makes for an odd first impression when it gets shared someplace like Hacker News. I'm always psyched to get my little passion project in front of new readers though!
Cool. But this writing style of intentionally not getting to the fucking point is very good for getting pesky visitors on to other websites.
The recipe site meta is spreading
it's one part of a newsletter.