The History of Arcade Emulators - Part 6

Impact / S11Emu / ZiNc (2000)

Impact

The Impact emulator began to be created around March/April 1999, when Marcin Dudar, aka Duddie, and Tratax, aka DynaChicken, abandoned the PSEmu Pro project for PSX. Impact follows exactly this line, emulating the Capcom arcades Sony ZN-1 and ZN-2, which ran games like Street Fighter EX 1 and 2, Battle Arena Toshinden 2, Rival Schools, and others, and Taito FX1-A, which ran games like Psychic Force, and others, both based on the PSX console. Initially it was called The Impact, and upon its debut it changed its name to Impact. We believe that the origin of its name comes from the FX1 fighting game, Fighters' Impact. It was first released in January 2000 for Windows. In the first version it only ran games made from 1997 onwards, and with only one OpenGL video plug-in included, called Glide Renderer and created by the duo Duddie and Tratax especially for the project.

Over time, more recent games were added and more plug-ins were included. Speaking of which, the Pete and Lewpy plug-ins, respectively for OpenGL and Glide, which ran on PSEmu, also worked on Impact. All you had to do was rename the plug-in's .dll file to renderer.ipc and run the program. These plug-ins worked better than the ones that came with the program. The ideal configuration to run Impact was a Pentium II 450MhZ, with 128 of RAM, and a 3D video card. A mid- to high-end computer for the time. Also in January, a patch was released to run the emulator on Windows 2000 and NT (and later it was also possible to run it on Windows XP and later with the same patch). From March 2000 onwards, it became part of the Emuhype project, created by iViLDeD, who had already helped with the project in 1999. Impact was probably the first 3D arcade game emulator. It did not last beyond the first release and the project was soon abandoned. It managed to run 12 games in total.

S11Emu Front End

S11 Emulator

After that, Dudar took a hiatus for a while, and returned in late 2001 with the S11Emu emulator, the System 11 Emulator, based on the Namco System 11 board, also based on the PSX. His plan was also to emulate the Namco System 10 and 12 boards, but there were no dumped ROMs for these systems at the time. At that time, he signed as The D. His first release was in December 2001 for Windows, as version 0.2 Alpha. Like Impact, it was another one-time emulator. The emulator managed to run 8 games. It also worked based on renderers and plug-ins. In the same month, Aldo Vargas, creator of patches for PSX VGS, created a front-end for the emulator, called S11Emu Front End.

ZiNc GUI and Zinc Front End

ZiNc

At the time, Duddie dedicated himself to a new emulator (again alongside Tratax) called ZiNc, which they had been developing since January 2001, and which united the Impact and S11Emu projects, running the ZN-1, ZN-2, FX1-A, FX1-B and System 11 boards. Its name is a fusion of ZN from the emulated boards with ZN which symbolizes the chemical element Zinc in the periodic table, in English Zinc, and was called ZiNc and written with capital Z and N. At that time, Dudar signed with the name The Author. The emulator was released in March 2002 as version 0.5 for Windows and Linux. The following month, they added the Raizing PS, Atlus PS, Konami GV, Namco System 12 and Tecmo TPS boards. Later, they also added the Video System PSX. Like S11Emu, it only worked with a GUI/interfaces downloaded separately, like emulators like MAME and MESS use. In this case, it uses the front-ends Zinc Front-End by Aldo Vargas, created in March 2002, and FeZinc by Christian Hackbart and ZiNcGUI by dafreak's Software, both created in April 2002. The first is inspired by MAME32, with a list of games with images on the side, and the second has the option to change most of the settings, as well as support for joypad, auto-fire and Kaillera. The audio and video plug-ins were all by Pete Bernert, known in the PSX and N64 scenes for this, and Lewpy for the video plug-ins, in addition to help from Cap and the Namco System 32 emulator group, VivaNonno, with the sound part of the Namco cards.

In April, Dudar and Tratax left the project to create the GameCube emulator, GCEMU (GameCube Emulator), and the project went on hiatus. At the time, the Emuhype group was working on several plug-ins and a music player, and only returned to the project in October 2004, two years and six months later. The project was headed by Richter Belmont (creator of Modeler in the Emuhype project) and SMF, who were also part of the MAME project at the time. After that, they released three more versions and ended the project in January 2005. The Emuhype group ended in February 2006. At the time, Belmont spoke of a PSX execution mode on the ZiNc, because in essence it was the evolution of PSEmu, but he hinted that he had added console support to the ZiNc, or that he wanted to add it. He also mentions a new version of ZiNc with open source code, and that even after its release, he would continue the project. Neither of these things happened. The knowledge they acquired with emulated cards in ZiNc, Belmont and SMF took to MAME, developing it and further improving the emulation of these cards. In addition to the projects mentioned, the group also created the OpenGL Renderer and D3D Renderer plug-ins (with a single release) and Glide Renderer, all in January 2000 for Impact. Glide was developed until August 2005, also working on S11Emu and ZiNc.

There were also plug-ins specifically for ZiNc, such as ZiNc OpenGL D3D, updated from December 2002 to June 2004, for both Windows and Linux versions of ZiNc, ZiNc Jamma Keyboard from April 2002 to November 2004, only for Windows and MesaGL Renderer with a single release in May 2002 only for Linux. All of these plug-ins were created by the duo Duddie and Tratax, with the exception of MesaGL created by Richter Belmont. And finally, they created the M1 player, on October 3, 2001 for Windows, initially playing music from Sega Model 1 and 2 cards, and over time expanding to other cards, reaching its final version, in January 2008, with 1,400 supported games. The player was created by the duo Richter Belmont and Phil Bennett, and updated until November 2007, even after the end of Emuhype. In January 2008, it had its last update by a third party named Tommy Tallarico. Two days after the launch of the M1, the Konami GX Player, known as GXP, arrived, a player that played music from nine games of the arcade board in question. It was also created by Richter Belmont, but had only one release.

Sega System C2 Emulator (2000)

Sega System C2 Emulator (MS-DOS)

It all started with David Haywood, known as Haze, who was known in 1999 for his MAME port, NeoMAME, which focused on emulating the SNK Neo Geo MVS. In May 2000, David began developing an emulation for the Sega System C-2 board, which had never been released before. He then passed on all the development and hardware information to Charles MacDonald, who already had knowledge of the Mega Drive hardware, on which the System C-2 was based. That year, he even created the hardware documentation for the console, called the Sega Genesis VDP Documentation. In August 2000, Charles released an emulator for MS-DOS, called the Sega System C2 Emulator. Charles was already known for creating the SMS Plus emulators for the Master System and Game Gear in 1999, and the System 16 Emulator in 2000, which emulated only the Shinobi game for Sega's System 16 board. David has always helped with the project, but in September he joined the MAME project, which took up some of his time. In September the second version of the emulator was released, which also received a port for Windows by the Belgian Pascal Bosquet, NeoZeed, running with the obligatory help of DirectX 5. Pascal was known at the time for his multi-sega Past-o-Rama emulator, for SG-1000, Master and Game Gear.

Sega System C2 Emulator (Windows)

The project ended in November 2000 with the release of its final version. The emulator ran 12 titles for the board, 17 games in total. Only 5 titles were left out. All games for the board from November 2000 onwards were supported by MAME. Even after MAME support, the Sega System C2 Emulator ran the board's games for some time with better performance than MAME. After that, its contributors and creators continued their path in the world of emulation. In 2002, Charles created the Mega Drive emulator, Genesis Plus, materializing all his knowledge about the console. He is also responsible for other emulators, such as TGEmu for TurboGrafx-16 and PC-Engine in 2001, Sega System 24 Emulator for the board of the same name in 2003, as well as contributions to the MESS multi-emulator from 2000 onwards. David works on the MAME project to this day (2021), and contributed to the Modeler project in 2001, and Raine from 2001 to 2004.