The History of Arcade Emulators - Part 3

System 16 Emulator (1997)

System 16 Emulator (Windows)

It was created by Frenchman Thierry Lescot, ShinobiZ in 1996 to emulate games from the Sega System 16, Sega System 18 and Sega Super Scaler boards. Shinobi was a huge fan of Sega and the game that gave it its name, so he became interested in the project. At first, Shinobi looked for several emulator authors to emulate the System 16 and no one was interested. Because of this, he ended up creating it himself. Its first release was in February 1997 for MS-DOS. It was the first to emulate the Sega arcade boards in question. It is also considered the first emulator of a 16-bit arcade in the world. In April 1997, Li Jih Hwa, Nao, began to be part of the project. At the time, Shinobi had released the emulator's source code and Nao contacted him to add a patch that supported zooming in Altered Beast and made Golden Axe playable. It was then that Shinobi proposed to join him in developing the emulator and he accepted. At that time, Shinobi had already found a job and his time for the project was greatly reduced. Because of this, he was going to stop it, but with the arrival of Nao the project continued almost entirely in the hands of his partner. Other people also worked indirectly on the project, helping with the sound and CPU emulation. 

System 16 Emulator (MS-DOS)

In 1998, MAME also began to emulate the same cards emulated by the project, but the performance of the System 16 Emu was superior. In 1998, of the 28 games it ran, half had no sound and other bugs, which began to be fixed in 1999. This type of problem was common in all emulators of the time. Another problem in the project was the difficulty in emulating the System 16 ROMs, as the games on the card had particular encryptions for each title. The cards in question, especially the System 16, featured popular games such as Hang-On, Moonwalker, Shadow Dancer, Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Alien Storm, and Tetris. The emulator was also ported to Linux in March 1998 by Hans de Goede, and to Windows in July 1998 by Bartman, also known as Abyss. Bartman also helped directly with the project. The emulator ceased its activities with its last release in January 1999. The last port for Windows, also by Bartman, came out in May 1999. Other ports for Windows would probably come out, but Bartman accidentally deleted the source code for it. The project used Neill Corlett's Starscream M68K emulator, Ishmair's Zilog Z80 and Ishmair's YM2151, replaced by Jarek Burczynski's MAME version from 1998 onwards. Li Jih Hwa also developed an arcade emulator for Irem's M-72 and M-81 games, called M72 Emulator in 1998 for DOS.

System 16 Emulator (Windows)

After the project ended, ShinobiZ decided to transform the site into a collection of information about Sega arcades called ShinobiZ Home. In February 2001, he changed the name to Sega Museum. In September 2001, he decided to transform the site into a collection of arcade boards in general, starting with additions from Namco, Atari and Konami, and changing the name to System 16 – The Arcade Museum, as it is called to this day. In March 2002, Toby Broyad joined the project, becoming responsible for the site in place of Thierry in July. Currently, the site is considered one of the largest with information about arcades in the world. Its last update was in November 2017.

Callus (1997)

Callus (Windows)

Created in 1997 and released in October 1997 for MS-DOS by Icer Addis, Sardu from the same team that created Genecyst and NESticle, Callus came with a pioneering proposal, to emulate games from the Capcom Play System 1 arcade, such as Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Strider Hiryu, Ghouls'n Ghosts, Captain Commando, Cadillacs And Dinosaurs, Pang! 3, and others. Initially Callus used the same interface as Genecyst, then had its own interface under the name Callus 95. In its first year it already emulated 15 games from the board. In 1998, it managed to emulate another 15 games from the board, totaling 30 games played. In April 1998, its emulation began to be used in MAME, immortalizing Sardu's work as the pioneer in emulating one of the greatest arcades of all time. In June 1998, version 0.40 was released, which, in addition to running in DOS mode, also supported Windows, with the Callus95 file, referring to Windows 95, with which it was compatible. This version also brought the netplay option with the possibility of playing over a network.

Callus (MS-DOS)

It was one of the first emulators to bring the TCP/IP concept to network games. A few days later, they released version 0.41 with support for QSound, a sound chip present in some CPS Dash and CPS-2 games, as well as CPS-1, which brought better sound quality. In the same month, two more versions of the emulator were released. After that, the emulator was discontinued. In March 2000, the CPS2 Shock! group, responsible for uploading and encrypting games from Capcom boards, as well as from emulators of the brand, and more specifically from CPS-2, modified the Callus emulator and released it together with a Patch that added more games to the console, in a project called Callus95 Patch. The Patch had to be created because the emulator had never had its code open for modifications. Other changes were also made to the emulator, such as bugs, performance, in addition to changing the names of the ROMs based on the MAME standard.

Callus (Windows)

In the June 2000 version, they fixed a problem that the emulator had when running on Windows 2000. Right from its launch, it already included Street Fighter Zero emulation and QSound support, which made many people think that the emulator would finally support the CPS-2 board. In fact, it was a port of the game for Capcom's CPS Changer home console, based on the CPS-1 arcade game. Despite this, the emulation of a game from this port became another milestone achieved by Callus, now by the hands of CPS2 Shock! The last update of the Callus95 Patch was in November 2000, with an update of the DAT file until December, which allowed games to be run on the Patch. This file had been modified since the beginning of the project by LogiqX.

MESS (1998)

MESS (1999)

MESS, Multi Emulator Super System, was created in 1998 by Richard Bannister alongside Brad Oliver and the MESS Team, composed of Mike Balfour, Juergen Buchmueller, Gareth Long, Jeff Mitchell, Frank Palazzolo, Mathis Rosenhauer and Chris Salomon, with the proposal of emulating hardware from PCs, home consoles and portable consoles. Bannister and Oliver had been part of the Nintendo xNes project since 1997, and from there the idea of ​​a multisystem emulator emerged. To do this, they used some elements of the MAME source code. The first system to be emulated in MESS was the NES itself, which was created from the old XNes code. Richard was also a well-known name for porting emulators to MacOS, such as Gameboy, Mega Drive, NES, and others, and it was with this knowledge that he supported so many hardware. With partnerships with many influencers, upon its launch in March 1998, it already had versions for AmigaOS, RiscOS, UNIX, Arm systems, MacOS, MS-DOS and Solaris. Initially, it had no front-end, working via command lines. In the second version in August 1998, the project's coordination passed from Bannister to Brad Oliver, but he remained on the project, now taking care of the emulator's website. After more than a year without releasing any version, it returned in October 1999 with a completely reformulated version, and using all of MAME's source code. Since that version, it has been releasing versions simultaneously with MAME using the same version numbering as the emulator's root source code. Several cooperations took place between the two projects, bringing them closer together over the years. In April 2000, they finally released the Windows version. 

sMESS and AdvanceMENU

Although there was no front-end at this stage, some were created by third parties, such as MESSFront and sMESS, both created exclusively for the emulator in October 1999. Others also appeared, but covering other emulators, such as AdvanceMENU around October 2000, Games Centre 2001 in August 2001, KEmulator in October 2001, among others. In the case of AdvanceMENU, it remained for 18 years with updates for MESS, with the group that created it, AdvanceMAME, creating its own front-end for MESS in September 2002, called AdvanceMESS, and merging in June 2015 with the MAME front-end created by the project, AdvanceMAME, becoming AdvanceMAME/MESS. The last update to the front-end was in September 2018. 

MESS Gui

Returning to MESS, in January 2002, MESS finally debuted with its own GUI called MESS GUI, based on the MAME GUI, MAME32, created by Michael Soderstorm and Christopher Kirmse. In August 2007, in addition to the front-end that came with it, its default executable also brought its own interface, ported from MAME. In December 2007, Christopher Kirmse transformed MAME32 into MAMEUI, also releasing a version for MESS, called MESSUI, which has since replaced the emulator's previous interface. Regarding the emulator team, in 1999, Brad, the project leader until then, started to take care of the NES part of the emulator, and Ben Bruscella took his place. Dan Boris, Ernesto Corvi and Charles MacDonald, respectively creators of Atari 2600, SNES, and Sega 8 and 16-bit emulators, among many others, also joined the project. Nathan Woods took over the project in 2004, as well as the port for Windows, when a major change occurred in the team, leaving only him as a permanent member, the project's leaders, which were Gareth Long for ARM systems, Raphael Nabet for MacOS, Lawrence Gold for UNIX, and he had direct help on the project from non-permanent members. In 2011, Miodrag Milanovic took over the project, leading the ports for Windows, and leaving only the port for SDL, under the responsibility of Richter Belmont, creator of the classic Modeler emulator for Sega System 32 and Sega Model 1. Bannister left the project in 2012, where he still worked as webmaster.

MESS (2007)

Regarding the systems it ran, in the same year of its creation, in 1998, MESS already supported games for Mega Drive, NES, ColecoVision, Atari 5200, Master System, Game Gear, and Vectrex, and some computers such as Apple Series and Atari 800. In 1999, it managed to add PC Engine, Atari 7800, and several computers such as Commodore Amiga, Apple II, and others. In subsequent years, we saw the inclusion of the Gameboy, CPS Changer, and ZX Spectrum 48K in 2000, the Atari 2600, TurboGrafx 16, a third variant of the NES, and the 13th variant of the ZX Spectrum in 2001, the Atari Lynx I and II, MSX 1, and 2, Arcadia 2001 and SNES in 2002, the Gameboy Color, Pocket, and Super Gameboy, PSX, Odyssey, Intellivision, and Sega Mark III in 2004, the Atari Jaguar in 2006, the N64, 3DO, Sega Saturn, SC-3000, SuperGrafx, and WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color in 2007, and the Dreamcast and SG-1000 1 and 2 in 2008, and so on. One of its distinguishing features was being the first multi-system emulator to emulate fifth and sixth generation games. In 2000, the emulator already supported 58 systems, mostly computers. In 2002, it already supported 239 systems, mostly computers.

In May 2015, it formally joined MAME and ceased its activities. With the closure of MESS and merger with MAME, the MESSUI project, which creates GUIs for both emulators, continues to release versions of MESS, which it had been doing independently since October 2011 on its own website. Although MAME theoretically has everything that MESS has, MESSUI brings a pre-configured interface and functionality aimed at computers and consoles that would require a little more work in MAME. I believe that the MESSUI updates are updates corresponding to the MESS standard currently placed in MAME, and adapted to the interface. Its last release is dated March 2021. The emulator also had some hacks, such as sdlMESS in 2006, which makes MESS run automatically on other systems. The same developer also made sdlMAME. Later, this feature was included in the original emulators themselves. In 2015 came AdvanceMESS, also called AdvanceMAME, which was basically an optimized version for various types of monitors, and ran on Linux, Windows and Mac systems, including DOS. The following month came the first version that merged MESS and MAME.