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!
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.
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.
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!)
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!
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
19 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] threadI 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!
https://shonumi.github.io/articles.html
I managed to find my first published app on archive.org from like 1994, but it's a music visualizer and requires audio input.
Pretty sure I just used it to play genesis games
(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!)
- Battle Toad in Battlemaniac (Battletoads in Battlemaniacs) = 53900 JPY.
- Akumajou Dracula XX (Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss) = 27500 JPY.
- The King of Dragons = 39800 JPY.
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...
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.
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.