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April 27th, 2013, 23:18 Posted By: wraggster
Until 1989, it was a bad time to be an arcade machine. At the waning of a game's popularity, you'd simply be carted off or have your electronic guts torn out for a completely new set of internal gizmos, so specific were individual titles to their accompanying workings.There had been experimentation in the past with single machines capable of playing a variety of titles. In 1986 Nintendo's PlayChoice-10 offered arcade gamers ten NES games, and Sega touted the Mega-Tech - a Master System equivalent - but these were little more than modified consoles disguised as arcade cabinets - conniving attempts at domestic gaming indoctrination among those with an affinity for coin slots.Then came 1989, the year when SNK looked at the arcade/console divide and decided to bridge it with the Neo-Geo. An arcade-specific console of sorts, the Neo-Geo Multi Video System (MVS) introduced the console cartridge mentality into arcade cabinets. Sold on cartridges, up to six games could be loaded or unloaded into the core MVS unit that shipped to arcades - far easier than time-consuming cabinet guttings and, at $500 per cartridge, a lot cheaper.  Neo Geo MVS flyerUnlike the puny NES-powered PlayChoice-10, the Neo-Geo was a full-blooded rainbow-powered sprite-spewing beast. Sharing the same 16-Bit 68000 processor later employed by the Mega Drive, the MVS found real visual oomph in a custom video chipset that allowed for 4,096 colours and 380 individual sprites. Released two years later, the Mega Drive could only put out 64 colours and 80 individual sprites - explaining how there could be more detail in a POW beard flick in the Neo Geo's Metal Slug than in the entirety of Sega's Altered Beast.With the arcade/console divide well and truly bridged, in 1990 SNK decided to seize the Neo Geo by its sleek black shanks and drag it across said metaphorical bridge, kicking and screaming into the home. And boy, did it kick. The techno-innards that so propelled it beyond console capabilities came at a bank balance-pummelling price.The domesticated Neo-Geo was launched as the Advanced Entertainment System (AES) in 1990 for $650 (now equivalent to around £600), and games were $200 each. It was a bullish price for a bullish piece of hardware, one that revelled in number crunching power - a start-up screen boasted of 'The 100 Mega Shock' whenever a cartridge contained more than 100MB - while other home consoles tried their hardest to keep their cold technological edge hidden. Later cartridges could carry 716MB, and 'The 100 Mega Shock' was replaced with the even beefier 'Giga Power' start-up screen.  The Neo Geo home console, the AESGame cartridges were a data hodgepodge - each contained both MVS and AES versions of the game plus regional variations. Simple internal commands would inform the cartridge what form of the Neo-Geo it was dealing with. Despite having both versions of the game on the cartridge, the MVS and AES cartridges also came with different connector pin combinations to prevent wily arcade owners buying the cheaper home variations for their machines. The idea of data messily swirling around captures the general lack of finesse you wouldn't have seen with Nintendo or Sega.Much closer to the 'traditional' home console was the Neo-Geo CD, released in 1994. Although carrying the far more reasonable $300 price tag, the system was blighted with slow loading times and a joypad instead of the satisfyingly hefty joystick - which made playing games designed for the stick (i.e. all of them) a chore.Similarly, the 1997 Hyper-64, SNK's first and only 3D rendering arcade machine, was doomed by the company's lack of experience with 3D games, a market held by long time 3D-dabblers Namco and Sega. After the failed 3D venture, SNK wisely returned to the MVS/AES and the art of pushing 2D to its limits - explaining the extraordinary likes of The Last Blade and Garou: Mark of the Wolves, packing details and animation still unrivalled many years later.Although SNK cancelled production of the AES in 1997, software continued being produced until October 19th 2004, with the last official title, Samurai Spirits Zero Special. In console terms it had a killer innings - 15 years is just one year short of the Atari 2600 record. It's a fact made all the more gawp-worthy by the sheer clumsiness of the machine in question. In this age of polished techno wizardry, the Neo-Geo stands as a testament to the power of blunt arcade thrills.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...esson-neo-geo/
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April 21st, 2013, 23:22 Posted By: wraggster
A translation for the Famicom game Mashin Hero Wataru Gaiden was released a couple of weeks ago in English! Please check out this excellent action RPG!
Mashin Hero Wataru Gaiden is a game based on a popular anime series known by the same name minus Gaiden. In this game you play as yourself and you must save Wataru who has been captured by the evil Dakdar.
You’ll travel the world doing various tasks to unlock new areas while trying to locate the Dragon Treasures in order to save Wataru. Each area has its own theme as well as enemies which adds to the overall charm.
The game is fun and interesting in the fact that it is an action game but also has RPG elements that flow very nicely together. The map is overhead view similar to other NES RPG’s of its time while the battles switch over to a side view based screen similar to Zelda 2.
http://spookytornado.wordpress.com/p...u-translation/
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April 15th, 2013, 00:05 Posted By: wraggster
Today aishsha has released his translation for Juvei Quest after a long hiatus. The game was developed by Birthday, the people behind Dream Master and several other excellent RPGs. On the outside, the game is your average DQ clone in a Japanese setting, but the game has a surprising amount of depth and goodies that really makes it stand out.
http://aishsha.blogspot.com/
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April 13th, 2013, 23:33 Posted By: wraggster
 We like pinball. We like classic NES games. Accordingly, it doesn't take much deduction to know that we really, really like Skit-B Pinball's Duck Hunt pinball machine. It has a fully mechanical, themed pinball machine below, but there's also a PC up top that replicates the images and sounds of Nintendo's light gun video game in sync with the analog action. The conversion of a Williams Valiant took about a year of off-hours work to finish, and it shows -- the attention to detail is what we'd expect if Gunpei Yokoi had put all his energy into pinball instead. Our only lament is that the Duck Hunt machine is a side project, and it likely won't escape into the wild. At least there's a video (after the break) to sate our curiosity.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/13/d...analog-and-pc/
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April 6th, 2013, 22:38 Posted By: wraggster
This hack has got to be every gamer’s dream. Someone actually took the time to dig through the binary file of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and fix the errors that made it an abomination of a title for the Atari 2600.
This is quite a feat in many ways. First off, you need to know the game well enough to understand where they problems lie. The Internet is a huge help in that regard as there’s no shortage of sources complaining about the game’s shortcomings. This turns out to be one of the articles strongest points as the author takes time to address the most common myths about bugs in the game. From there he goes on to discuss the problems that were actually fixed. Some are just general tweaks like the color fix listed above. But most of them are genuine improvements in the game play, like the falling fix which prevents E.T. from falling in this pit when his feet are obviously not anywhere near the edge.
So you couldn’t get your hard earned bucks back for a bummer of a game back in the day. But at least a few decades later you can fix the things that made it suck and play it through the way it should have been.
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/06/fixin...or-atari-2600/
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March 28th, 2013, 00:01 Posted By: wraggster
For last year’s Toorcamp, the folks over at DorkbotPDX helped out with the Church of Robotron installation. A religion founded on the prophesy of a cybernetic uprising in the year 2084 is a little esoteric even for us, so the Dorkbot crew wanted a way to make playing Robotron: 2084 a little more visceral. Using MAME and a few debugging tools, they were able to read the memory of a machine playing Robotron to extend the game into the physical world. When the player dies, lights go off, alarms sound, and the prophet of the Church of Robotron is pleased.
The setup at the Church of Robotron included a machine running MAME with a Robotron ROM. When events happened in the game, such as lasers firing or a player death, physical events would be triggered. To do this, the Dorkbot team read the memory locations of a game of Robotron at different times and found memory locations tied to in-game events. On their blog they go over using the MAME debug tool to detect a player’s death which can then be translated into physical apparitions for the Church of Robotron.
It’s a very cool hack, and one we wish we had a video of. Having a plastic ghost hit a player while playing Pac-Man seems like an awesome idea, and with the Dorkbot tutorial, it looks fairly easy.
http://hackaday.com/2013/03/27/exten...ring-and-mame/
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March 24th, 2013, 20:32 Posted By: wraggster
Every school in the UK will be given the retro-gaming documentary film From Bedrooms to Billions for free.A partnership with UKIE - the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment - made this happen.That news arrives as Bedrooms romped successfully to its Kickstarter goal of £18,000. In fact, it's nearly doubled it. But the husband and wife film-making team responsible wants desperately to get to £100,000."If we can achieve this all backers will receive a free upgrade of the Special Edition version of the film which, as well as the film, contains an extra two hours of special features and extended interviews!" the Kickstarter page explained.Hold on a minute - Kickstarter? Wasn't this documentary funded on Indiegogo a year ago? Yes, it was. But that initial funding drive only stretched to the filming. More money is needed now for post-production and to wrap it all up.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ree-to-schools
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March 23rd, 2013, 23:16 Posted By: wraggster
[Chris Osborn] had an old Atari 800 collecting dust and decided to pull it out and get to work. The problem is that it’s seen some rough storage conditions over the years including what appears to be moisture damage. He’s read about a cartridge called SALT II which can run automatic diagnostics. Getting your hands on that original hardware can be almost impossible, but if he had a flashable cartridge he could just download an image. So he bought the cheapest cartridge he could find and modified it to use an EPROM.
When he cracked open his new purchase he was greeted with the what you see on the left. It’s a PCB with the edge connector and two 24-pin sockets. These are designed to take 4k ROMs. He dropped in an EPROM of the same size but the pin-out doesn’t match what the board layout had in mind. After following the traces he found that it is pretty much an exact match for an Intel 2764 chip. The one problem being that the chip has 28-pins, four too many for the footprint. The interesting thing is that the larger footprint (compared to the 2732) uses all the same pins, simply adding to the top and moving the power pins. A small amount of jumper wire soldering and [Chris] is in business.
http://hackaday.com/2013/03/22/atari...artridge-hack/
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March 17th, 2013, 01:21 Posted By: wraggster
FF4kster, the all-in-one editor for Final Fantasy 4 has been updated. In addition to some minor bug fixes, the menus can now be navigated much more easily and quickly with the PgUp and PgDown keys, and menus now have an “indexed mode” that can be toggled with the “/” key, which displays a number next to each menu item that indicates its position in the list (useful for cross-referencing information such as map indexes and the like).
As well, two new editor components have been added: First, an “Item Range” editor, which currently allows you to edit which weapons are two-handed and which items are key items, and hopefully in future more item properties will become editable as well, as more information emerges. Second, a “Map Info” editor which allows you to edit certain properties of the maps such as whether they’re magnetic, what song plays, what background the battles have, etc.
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/914/
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March 16th, 2013, 12:48 Posted By: wraggster
Chances are that the majority of people wouldn’t have even noticed that there was a videogame magazine crash in 1994. That’s not surprising as it easily passed us by and only came to light once we looked at some of the facts and figures from that period. To fully understand the enormity of the ‘crash’ we need to go back in time to 1993 when the 16-bit consoles and computers were at the height of their commercial power and the old 8-bit range of machines were still clinging on. 1993 must surely go down as one of the busiest and most successful years in videogame magazine history.
http://www.outofprintarchive.com/art...h_of_1994.html
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March 15th, 2013, 00:51 Posted By: wraggster
 If you want to relive the glory of owning one of the rarest and most expensive (for its time) consoles in gaming history, you can do that for $130 with the Neo Geo X. Or... or you can recapture that magic and rebuild the system using "one of the rarest and most expensive woods in the entire world." That wood would be Cocobolo and, no, we're not making that last bit up. Analogue Interactive -- the same company that brought you the Neo Geo CMVS Slim -- is introducing a new service today for those (read: collectors) with money to burn, dubbed Black Label.
The service, designed to let consumers craft a new Neo Geo console using a selection of domestic and exotic woods, starts at $1,299 -- that's for a custom setup made with domestic wood. Should you have more champagne tastes, there's a variety of exotic woods on offer, but be prepared to fork over up to an additional $585 for the "privilege." Without a doubt, it's the stuff of an über-collector's wet dreams; the very same stuff that has us scratching our heads and railing against the excesses of the 1-percent. And just in case it was lost on you earlier: a portable and significantly cheaper Neo Geo alternative is readily available.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/14/b...stom-wood-mod/
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March 14th, 2013, 00:43 Posted By: wraggster
Vector based displays were used for arcade games in the ’70s and ’80s. A typical CRT uses raster graphics, which are displayed by deflecting a beam in a grid pattern onto a phosphor. A vector display deflects the beam in lines rather than a full grid, drawing only the needed vectors. Perhaps the best known vector game is the original Asteroids.
[Jeremy] built up a RGB laser projector, and wanted to run some classic arcade titles on it. He started off by using the XMAME emulator, but had to modify it to communicate with the laser and reduce flicker on the display.
To control the laser, a modified version of OpenLase was used. This had to be enhanced to support RGB color. The modified sources for both the MAME emulator and OpenLase are available on Github.
[Jeremy]‘s friend, [Steve], even got a vector based game that he wrote working on the system. “World War vi” is a shoot-em-up battle about the vi and emacs text editors.
The results of the build are shown in a series of videos after the break.
http://hackaday.com/2013/03/12/playi...ser-projector/
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