The History of Arcade Emulators - Part 1

Williams Digital Arcade (1994)

Williams Digital Arcade (Front and Back Cover)

It was a line of products developed and launched in 1994 by Digital Eclipse Software, for Macintosh. Created by Canadian Andrew Ayre in 1992 in Emeryville, California, in its beginnings the company worked with development, publishing and distribution of software for Macintosh.

Williams Digital Arcade

In 1994, in partnership with Williams Electronics, the company developed what is considered the first arcade emulator for home computers. The first title emulated and released was Robotron: 2084 in 1994, followed by Joust and Defender, all for the Williams 6809 arcade machine. Some time later, around 1997, a patch was developed for MAC to run the game Stargate instead of Robotron. They were only able to make the switch with this game, as each of the three games released by the company had a different emulator, and the others were not compatible with this game. The patch was available on the website of John Stiles, a provider of emulators for MacOS. After selling these three games in 1994, the company released the Williams Digital Arcade collection, also in 1994. With the great interest in these releases, the company reorganized itself and began a major development of game software. In 1995, the company released the William Arcade Classics collection, expanding its reach to computers such as Windows and MS-DOS. For this release, they hired Canadian Jeff Vavasour, because of his 6809 emulator, which he had used in his TRS-80 Color Computer emulator. From then on, Jeff was responsible for emulating most of the other collections and ports of arcade and console games.

Joust, Robotron: 2048, Defender, Bubbles, Defender II and Sinistar

With the success of Arcade Classics, many other collections came along, such as from Activision, Atari, Midway, Sega and Capcom. They also began producing their own games for PC and consoles, in partnership with Midway Home Entertainment (then Williams Entertainment). This migration of companies/individuals to creating their own games is something that has happened other times in the history of emulator creation. Both the collections and their own games were released for the Mega Drive, Sega Saturn, Super Nintendo, Playstation 1, Gameboy Color, Dreamcast, N64, Xbox, Gamecube, PS2 and operating systems such as MS-DOS and Windows. They also produced games for Disney and other companies. Starting in 1998, with the release of the Gameboy Color, they focused on releasing ports of classic arcade games and their own games, which continued into the Advance era of the handheld.

Williams Digital Arcade (Opening and Closing)

In 2003, the company merged with ImaginEngine, and Backbone Entertainment was born. In 2005, Backbone merged with The Collective Inc. and formed Foundation 9 Entertainment. In 2007, Digital Eclipse founders Andrew and Jeff left the company and founded Other Ocean Interactive Ltd. using the studios in Charlottetown, Canada. Backbone stopped releasing compilations and Ocean didn't do so either. In 2009, Jeff created Code Mystics, and continued (thanks to its name) the compilations of classic Atari, Midway and Activision games for Windows, Linux, Macintosh, NDS, PS3, Xbox 360, Android, iPad and iPhone between 2010 and 2016. The company also ported SNK games to the Nintendo Switch from 2014 onward. Andrew, from Other Ocean, managed to get his Digital Eclipse brand back in 2015 and use it in his company, and from then on he was also able to bring back classics, such as Konami, Capcom, SNK, Williams and even Disney games, among others. Other Ocean and Code Mystics continue to produce and re-release classics to this day. Backbone produced games until 2012, mainly for PS3, Xbox 360 and PSP, when it went bankrupt. 

Sparcade! (1995)

Sparcade (Introduction)

Sparcade! was created by David Alan Spicer, better known as Dave Spicer in June 1995 as DASArcade (abbreviations of his name), as the first free emulator that ran more than one arcade/brand. It was also known by other names, such as Multi-Processor Arcade Emulator, Dave's Arcade Emulator and The Spice-u-lator. In the same year it changed its name to Sparcade!. David's history begins in the gaming industry, where he participated in several games released for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum computers, such as Adidas Championship Football in 1990, Insector Hecti in the Inter Change in 1991, Sergeant Seymour: Robot Cop in 1992, and Seymour Goes to Hollywood in 1993, which he wrote, and Steg the Slug in 1993, which he programmed. He also created the soundtrack for the 1989 game Time Soldiers, and music for the games Wacky Races and Black Hornet, both in 1992. Several of these games were also released on other computers, such as the Atari RT, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, DOS, and others. After some time he became disenchanted with the industry, and went to study engineering at the University of Kent. 

Sparcade

It was at this time that he created Sparcade! (at the time, DASArcade). Its development took only 3 months, and it was released in September 1995 for MS-DOS. In 1996, the emulator already had support for Master System and Game Gear games. In the first version from January 1997, it already ran games such as Frogger, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Galaxian, Ms Pacman, Phoenix, Super Cobra, Space Invaders, among many others, totaling 34 in all, with most of them supporting sound. The second version from 1997 and the most stable, known as 1.95, was also released in January 1997. Also in 1997, Sega consoles were removed from Sparcade! When I asked about this in 1998, David said that he could bring back support for emulators, but that he had no plans to do so. And in fact, he did not include them again. In December 1999, Sparcade! had its final version. It ran 46 games in total, dated between 1978 and 1989. David said in an interview that what discouraged him in this market was the lack of interest from software companies in an eminent scene like retrogames. Sparcade! is considered the first multi-platform emulator in the world. Between 1999 and 2000, David helped with the MAME project. After that, he dedicated himself to the semiconductor industry.

Emu / Retrocade (1996)

Emu

EMU, also known as EMU Classic Video Game Emulator, was created by Neil Bradley in the same vein as Sparcade!, working mainly with Atari, Midway and Taito. The project began in 1995 as Asteroids Emulator and was released in September 1996 for MS-DOS. In the same year, he began adding several games and turned it into a multi-arcade emulator. His inspiration, both for entering emulation and for creating Emu, was the Sparcade, the world's first multi-arcade emulator. Neil was also known for creating emulators for CPUs such as M6502, Z80, and others. His emulator used his 6502 processor, which was earlier than the M6502. Emu ran ten games in total. The project was discontinued in July 1997, with the last version of the emulator released. That same month, Neil teamed up with Mike Cuddy, creator of the KEM multi-arcade emulator. They felt that their projects were obsolete and decided to create a project together to emulate arcades. It was at this time that they began work on the Emu's successor, the Retrocade, which used Neil's M6502 CPU emulator. At the time, Neil was the project's chief architect.

Retrocade

In this project, composed of a strong team, the main contributors were Neil, working on sound, integration, portability and games, Mike Cuddy with optimizations, debugging, GUI and the Bally Midway MCR games, Patrick Lawrence with the 6809 core, Zonn Moore who donated the core of his Cinematronics multi-emulator, Peter Hirschberg, adding vector games and others, Neill Corlett with his 68k, YM2151 and 5220 emulators, as well as the Windows version of the emulator, Jeff Mitchell for the UNIX version, Brian Peek, with games and sound for the Namco games, Paul Biondich with a GUI and web, Richard Bannister for the Mac version and Edward Massey with improvements to the GUI and Windows version of the emulator. First released in September 1998, it brought a larger amount of emulator hardware, working with games from companies such as Williams, Namco, Midway, Atari, Konami, Nintendo, Taito and others. Another difference was its compatibility with other systems, such as Macintosh, UNIX, Windows and MS-DOS, all the main operating systems of the time, and even with processors with ARM technology, enabling possible ports for portable devices that began to use this technology years later. At the time, MAME was already reigning, but Retrocade was able to run its games on a 486 PC, an average computer for the time, while MAME required a Pentium 2, a more advanced processor for the time, to run the same games supported by Neil's system. This occurred because Retrocade had some simpler graphics, sound and CPU processes, which sought to not overload the system as much as its competitor. Retrocade ran 120 games throughout its development. Retrocade's last release was in May 1999. In 2007, a project similar to MAME called Another Arcade Emulator used some Retrocade source codes to be created.