SYS 2064 - Introduction to Arcade Emulation!

Introduction to Arcade Emulation

Arcades are magic places...soon after you enter the arcade you are overwhelmed by the mixture of sounds, the flashing lights and the cries of either happy or frustrated players...Do you remember spending coin for coin to beat the highscore on your favorite game only to see the next day that somebody else did the same with your highscore? Do you still remember the first 'cool' arcade cabinets like the motorcycle for Hang-On or the car to sit in for Out-Run?

Then you came to the right place! Stay a while and relive your memories with the help of these magnificent emulators.

Arcade Emulation became quite popular during the last years...In 1996 the emulation community got the initiating spark from the release of Dave Spicers' Sparcade and Neil Bradley's EMU. These emulators supported a few classic games such as PacMan, Frogger and Asteroids. Soon after some single-game emulators emerged...One of the busiest programmers was Nicola Salmoria who released emulator after emulator to merge them into MAME in February 1997.

Early 1997 was dominated by frequent releases of MAME and the surprising return of Sparcade - both drew a lot of attention to arcade emulation. More and more talented programmers contributed to MAME or started own emulators which provided the MAME-team with information for MAME-drivers. Thierry Lescots Sega System 16 and Neill Corletts Multi-Gauntlet Emulator were the first to emulate classic games based on a 68xxx CPU. As 1997 drew to an end and we saw the release of a brand new and great emulator: Callus.

1998 proved that improvement over 1997 is still possible. The System16 emulator and RAGE continue to grow into outstanding emulators and a lot of new and promising emulators like Raine and a lot of single-game emulators emerged! Heck, we even got a sign of life from Dave Spicer with the release of a brand new Sparcade! Two high-speed emulators emerged: Retrocade and HiVE which emulate arcade games in full speed even on 486 PCs! To top all of this, NeoRage did what many thought impossible: it emulates the Number One arcade system of the Nineties: the NeoGeo :-)

In 1999 most emulators continued to grow: MAME now supports 1000 unique games, Raine surpassed 150 supported romsets and other emulators like JFF and Shark were constantly updated! Unfortunately the development of the Sega System 16 emulator was stopped and there was no sign of life from the M72 emulator either.

The year 2000 started with a huge surprise: the awesome Impact emulator was released to a very surprised public in the first week of january! What a great start in this year!

To all emulator programmers I'd like to say:
Thank you for bringing back the magic!

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