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After 2 decades of tinkering, MAME cracks the Hyper Neo Geo 64
- SV_BubbleTime 1y agoCool. But this writing style of intentionally not getting to the fucking point is very good for getting pesky visitors on to other websites.
- rokkamokka 1y agoThe recipe site meta is spreading
- gregkumparak 1y agoit's one part of a newsletter.
- Apocryphon 1y agoAnd the pictures section is longer than the actual intro section.
- racl101 1y agoThat's rad yo!
- piltdownman 1y agoAmazing 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! https://shonumi.github.io/articles.html https://shonumi.github.io/articles.html
- Apes 1y agoByuu 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.
- userbinator 1y agoA 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".
- danparsonson 1y agoByuu was the victim of sustained and targetted online abuse so I'm not sure that saying really applies here.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoCloudflare hosted the attacks while the CEO praised KiwiFarms for its “epic trolling”
- userbinator 1y agoReally a victim of identity politics.
- danparsonson 1y agoThere are always those who will look for an excuse to be cruel, but personally I don't think that makes the excuse more pertinent than the cruelty.
- isk517 1y agoDolphin 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- soulofmischief 1y agoRest in power. The scene is not the same without him.
- matheusmoreira 1y agohttps://shonumi.github.io/articles/art16.html 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...
- qingcharles 1y agoDoes 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.
- 0xMalotru 1y agoAll that work for less than 10 games available on this console, emulation developers are really determined
- giancarlostoro 1y agoHabbo 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.
- Forgeties79 1y agoGotta catch ‘em all
- toast0 1y agoThere'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.
- mrandish 1y agoIndeed. With most of the more well-known, higher volume arcade hardware platforms now pretty well emulated there are still a lot of lesser-known (but still quite interesting) systems unemulated. Various people have put effort into most of them but they can be challenging puzzles.
- dfxm12 1y agoSome 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.
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- RyanShook 1y agoPretty 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.
- ranger_danger 1y agoThere 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.
- RobRivera 1y agoThis is absolutely so on brand. Has its pros and cons, of course.
- badlibrarian 1y agoA 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.
- pandemic_region 1y agoA benevolent dictator then
- hn773746483 1y agointerrogations 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
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- ddtaylor 1y agoIs 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.
- dfxm12 1y agoI 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.
- mrandish 1y agoThe many-year effort to finally break the CPS2 hardware protection is a fascinating story. It was huge not only for the preservation of some well-known, historically significant games but it also allowed a lot of dead vintage arcade boards to be resurrected for new generations to enjoy.
- commandersaki 1y agoI would love to see a write up of the CPS2 cryptography and how it was cracked; my understanding it was some custom Feistel cipher.
- mschuster91 1y agoThat 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.
- dmix 1y agoArticle 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserActive Pretty sure I just used it to play genesis games
- dfxm12 1y agoNot 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.
- wesfenlon 1y agoIf 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-odyssey-of-time-money-wrong-turns-and-frustration-it-took-to-finally-emulate-the-pioneer-laseractive/ 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!)
- pigpag 1y ago[dead]
- blauditore 1y agoSomehow I like the random unrelated ramblings about vintage movies and the author's trip to tokyo at the beginning.
- wesfenlon 1y agolol 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!
- omoikane 1y agoI 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.
- Sniffnoy 1y ago> 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/ 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...
- azalemeth 1y agoI 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.
- mrandish 1y agoEven 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 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 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.
- cyanydeez 1y agoWhen do you think we'll be able to ask an AI to recreate some nostalgia induced fantasy game in the 90s?
- kubectl_h 1y agoI 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! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C33-YCX7Too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C33-YCX7Too
- mrandish 1y agoWow. That's a shocking difference and it's similar to what I remember from back then. There was some truly wonderful music composed for these games which only a lucky few players got to hear. That video shows the similar MU50 which was a cost-reduced MU80 that could play 16 different voices at once with 32 track polyphony. The MU80 did 32 different voices at once with 64 track polyphony, although a game's soundtrack would need to use the extra voices to make a difference. Most of the MU series were backward compatible with the newer ones mostly adding more voices, polyphony, samples, effects and expansion options. Thanks to MAME we don't have to choose as we can have them all including 1999's MU128 which could play 64 different voices at once with 128 track polyphony.
- HackerThemAll 1y agoIt 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.