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Classic Games (Games)

Back to the Classics 25

Posted by Zonk from the beep-boop-beep-beep dept.
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."
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Back to the Classics More

Back to the Classics

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  • I still say the best emulation ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kleedrac2 ( 257408 ) <kleedrac@h o t m ail.com> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:56PM (#11350931) Homepage
    ... 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

  • Hopefully companies will realize (Score:5, Interesting)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:00PM (#11350989) Homepage Journal
    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....
    • That's a great idea!! Man if I had mod points I'd so mod you up man!! And they could base the cash value on age and original sales! I'll bet even Nintendo would get into the act and end their long feud against the emulation community (it's bleeding hard to get an NES system to work once it's as old as mine is :) ) and they could sell classic titles without repacking them for new systems.

      Kleedrac

    • Star ROMS [starroms.com].

      $2 a pop (usually) but they only have 25 games right now. It's a start.

      • 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?
        • 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/
    • I was actually thinking about this yesterday :P

      About the only other thing I can think of that they should do is track who buys what and use that to give Amazon-style recommendations. Which could drive interest into some of the more obscure titles.

      Worst case scenario, even if they don't DRM it and the "real" roms start getting copied around all over, is that they'd make a bit of profit off of something they currently get 0 profit from.

  • Pacman is a hard one go get right (Score:4, Interesting)

    by C. Alan ( 623148 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:03PM (#11351031)
    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

  • The Atari Anthology emulation may be nice... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:13PM (#11351191) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:The Atari Anthology emulation may be nice... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @04:26PM (#11352658)
      I concur. That menu system is annoying as hell.

      Also, the 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.

      And the new Spyhunter game advertises on the box that it contains the original Spyhunter. Which is great, but what they don't mention is that you can't play the original Spyhunter until you "unlock" it by winning the new game and doing some other crap. Guh! Don't advertise a feature I can't use right away!

      • Re:The Atari Anthology emulation may be nice... (Score:4, Informative)

        by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @05:19PM (#11353146) Homepage
        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.

      • And the new Spyhunter game advertises on the box that it contains the original Spyhunter. Which is great, but what they don't mention is that you can't play the original Spyhunter until you "unlock" it by winning the new game and doing some other crap. Guh! Don't advertise a feature I can't use right away!

        Off topic rant: I hate this trend in console games nowadays. Does anyone else miss the days when "replayability" meant "I want to play the game again cause it's so cool" rather than "I want to play t

  • how about perfect NES emulation? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 t
    • 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 r
    • FCEUX is a port of FCE Ultra that runs on the Xbox. It is quite nice, but you can't use original NES controllers and the resolution differences cause aliasing and/or bluring even with the best video settings.

      An even better method of playing downloaded NES and Famicom ROMs is a new console [cherryroms.com] being developed by Kevin Horton, which is cycle perfect. While most NES emulators do an OK job of emulating popular NES games, they are not perfect. Kevin's console will be perfect down to the last CPU cycle, as he is

  • Frankly I find this:

    ...by listening to Nolan Bushnell, you'll find out about Atari's game behind the game: Atari contracted chip houses to develop a lot of different graphics chips as busywork to prevent competitors from developing their own consoles.

    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...

  • I don't mean to be a troll, and I've read and enjoyed Vavasour's writings on emulation (his webpage [vavasour.ca] is a fountain of info) but I do wonder if it's really as hard as he describes.

    Look at stella [sourceforge.net] 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? /me goes back to playing Super Mario USA on my Game Theory Admiral.....
  • 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 bee

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