The History of Arcade Emulators - Part 5

CAGE/HiVE (1998)

CAGE

It all started when Laurance Bank, Larry Bank, or simply Mr. Bank wanted to play Galaga on his PC, a classic arcade game from the 1980s, and found MAME. After that, he saw that the emulator also supported Robotron, but not in windowed mode on his Windows NT 4.0, so he began to develop the game's emulation in his own way. After many hundreds of hours, the emulator of the 6809 processor used in the Williams 6809 arcade game was released to run the game. After that, it was Galaga's turn, from the Namco Galaga arcade game, which led Bank to create his own Z80 emulator. All this resulted in the multi-emulator CAGE, Classic Arcade Game Emulator, released on February 12, 1998 for Windows. After that, it was also able to emulate the 6502, 6808, 8080, and 68k microprocessors. In all, it emulated 11 arcade games. Among them we have Atari 6502, Williams 6809, Exidy Licensed Games, Namco Super Pacman, Namco Galaxian, Taito 8080, Midway Unique, Midway Pacman, Namco Pac Man, Taito Qix, and Midway 8080, responsible for games such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Defender, among others, totaling 27 game emulations between the years 1975 and 1986. Its last version was released in June 1998.

CAGE

After that, with strong competition, he saw the need to improve his emulations, so he rewrote his emulator and named it HiVE, High Velocity Emulator. Its release was in April 1999. Some games such as Bubbles, Colony 7, Robotron, Sinistar, Space Ivanders Deluxe, Splat! and Stargate were removed from this version, but many others were added, such as Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Frogger, Bandido, Arkanoid, Mario Brothers, Motos, New Rally X, Pac Land, Rally X, Super Xevious, among others. In addition to the arcades already emulated in CAGE, of which HiVE ran even more games, we also have the addition of the boards Namco Galaga, Konami Scramble, Taito Arkanoid, Nintendo Donkey Kong, Nintendo Unique, Konami Z80, Namco Gaplus, Namco Pacland, Sega Z80, Atari 6502 Black & White, and Exidy Universal. HiVE was able to emulate 53 games in total. The emulator was able to run games at 60 frames per second from a 486 66MhZ with a basic PCI video card. An interesting fact about this emulator. Version 1.03, released in May 1999, supports Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French, something that was not yet common in emulators. HiVE was one of the emulators that competed most with MAME in its early days. Several games were released in 1999 on both emulators on very close dates, with MAME coming out ahead almost 100% of the time, with the exception of the games Space Invaders Part II, Galaga 3 and Grobda, which HiVE managed to come out ahead of. In the case of Grobda, it was only 16 days ahead of its release on MAME. The other two games were only released, respectively, in March/00 and April/01 on MAME. The last released version of HiVE was in December 1999.

HiVE

All emulators were released by the BitBank Software brand, run by Bank, who later worked mainly in software creation, in addition to ports of Capcom games for Windows CE and other platforms, such as the Virtual CE program, which connected several devices using Windows CE via the Internet, something that was innovative at the time, and the ports of the games Commando, Legendary Winds, 1942, Ghosts n Goblins, SectionZ, Vulgus, all in December 2001, and Capcom Arcade Hits Volume 3 in 2003. Today he works with software optimization, helping with battery life, cost cutting with cloud services, and increased speed. In addition to the CAGE and HiVE projects, he also helped Neil Bradley with his Retrocade arcade emulator, as well as providing information and bug fixes for him to add and fix in the MAME emulator, to which he was also a contributor. Laurance was born in 1966, had a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering, and had been programming since he was 13.

Shark (1998)

Shark!

Shark! Emulator, or simply Shark, was created by Swedes Carl-Henrik Skårstedt and Magnus Danielsson of the group The Dead Serious Clan in 1998. Its first release was version 2.0 in April 1998 for Windows. Initially it only emulated the games Flying Shark (which inspired the name of the emulator) and Twin Cobra. The project emulated the Toaplan boards, Twin Cobra, Version 1, and Slapfight, and the Taito board, The Newzealand Story. All games for this board were released between 1985 and 1989. Shark was very well known in 1998 and 1999 for emulating games not yet supported by MAME. It was the first to bring games such as Fire Shark, Zero Wing, Rally Bike, Truxton, Vimana, Flying Shark, and others.

Shark!

The emulator required a Pentium 166MhZ to run the games at 60 frames. For good performance of the emulator it also required DirectX 6 or higher. Its last version came out in July 1999, the month in which MAME added many of its games to its emulator. He contributed to MAME in December 1998 with work related to the YM3812 and YM3526 sound chips, the first having been part of his emulator released in April. Shark emulated 17 games in total. Shark used the Starscream emulators of Neill Corlett's 68k and the Multi-Z80 of Neil Bradley's Zilog Z80.

M72 Arcade Emulator (1998) 

M72 Arcade Emulator

The M72 Arcade Emulator was the result of a meeting between Li Jih Hwa and Thierry Lescot in July 1997, when Li joined Thierry's System 16 Emulator project. The following year, in 1998, with the release of the arcade emulator, Rage, Li, also known as Nao, wanted to help improve the execution of Irem M72 games on the emulator. Months later, he had the idea of ​​creating an emulator for Irem M72 games. That's when the project came about. It all started in mid-September 1998, when attempts were made to emulate the game R-Type, the arcade's first release, which took no more than a day to happen. Two weeks later, at the end of September, Thierry put Nao's emulator on his page for download. The version was version 0.20 for MS-DOS. Of the 11 Irem M72 games, Rage emulated seven.

M72 Arcade Emulator

The M72 Arcade Emulator brought four more games, and the other seven achieved full sound and music emulation, which Rage did not do in all games. The four games were unreleased, later being supported in MAME. Although MAME later supported the M72, in its early days the Nao emulator ran its games faster. It also emulated the M82 game R-Type II, which was also emulated in Rage. The M82 had similar hardware to the M72, with minor differences. The Nao emulator also came out ahead in terms of graphics. Nao also had the help of many people in building the emulator. Among them Chris Hardy for various information about the M72 hardware, and the V30 central processor. It also had help from Neil Bradley for the Z80 sound CPU with his MZ80 emulator, and Tatsuyuki Satoh with his Yamaha 2151 sound chip core.

M72front

The Seal and Allegro multimedia libraries, respectively by Carlos Hasan and Shawn Hargreaves. Several M72 games by AraCORN, in addition to three of the four games he added to the emulator, Gallop, Mr Heli and X-Multiply dumped/ripped by JRom. In addition to his System 16 partner, Thierry Lescot for various help. The recommended configuration to run the games was a Pentium 2 266MhZ, with 62 of RAM, with an AGP graphics card and a Sound Blaster 16 sound card, an advanced configuration for the time. The emulator didn't last very long, closing in October, after only one month of existence, despite having had 33 versions, 19 before the launch, and 13 after the launch. It was not intended to emulate all Irem games from 1987 to 1992. In the month the emulator was closed, MRGSoft launched the front-end for Windows called M72front, with a single release.

JFF (1999)

JFF

JFF, or Just For Fun, was a project created by Italian Roberto Ventura, aka Mercenate, in 1998. It was released on February 7, 1999, for MS-DOS, with version 0.18. The emulator's purpose was to run classic arcade games, similar to the work of MAME and CAGE. The games played were from the years 1983 to 1990, and came from the Namco Licensed Games boards (for Kaneko games), NMK System (for Jaleco games), Toaplan Slapfight (for Taito games), UPL Arcade System and Capcom Z80 (with its own games), as well as independent arcades for Ambush and Vastar games. The emulator ran 19 games in total.

JFF

One observation. It may have been the competition MAME had, especially in 1999, as it released several games before its competitor, such as Air Buster, Mutant Night, XX Mission, Raiders 5, Valtric, Butasan, Roller Aces, Omega Fighter and Argus. The emulator ended its history in September 1999, with 14 versions released in total.

PacDX / EmuDX (1999)

PacDX

In September 1999, Mike Green, known as MikeDX, creator of classic emulators such as Speak 'n' Spell Emulator (from the Speak 'n' Spell computer) and SIN-Vaders (from Space Invaders), released the AsciiPac emulator for MS-DOS (renamed the next day to PAC-Deluxe '99). In October, it became PacDX (Pac Deluxe). The purpose of the emulator was to run the game Puck Man. Interestingly, it recreated the entire game, giving it a more modern look. The emulator never had sound or a joypad. PacDX used Marat Fayzullin's Z80 CPU processor, which was changed in November of the same year, when they began using the version developed by Neil Bradley in 1998.

EmuDX (Interface)

In January 2000, Mike created another project called EmuDX (Emu Deluxe), inspired by PacDX, but focusing on emulating the arcade games Pac-Man and Ms Pac-Man, and later Donkey Kong, Frogger and Galaxian. In addition to changing the graphics of the games, he also improved the sound quality, changing the soundtrack and sound effects.

EmuDX and EmuDX32

At this time, Neil Bradley, creator of M6502 and Z80 processor emulators and member of the Retrocade arcade project, joined the project, taking care of, among other things, programming codes, optimizations and Z80, M6502 and 6809 emulation. Neil had already indirectly helped Mike in his projects with the tutorial on how he had created a Space Invaders emulator. In February 2000, it was released for Windows and was discontinued.