The History of Arcade Emulators - Part 9

Chalice (2001)

Cup

The Calice emulator was released in January 2001 for MS-DOS by Frenchman David Raingeard. The emulator was designed to emulate CPS1 and 2 cards. In January alone, five versions of the emulator were released. In March, they released their first version for Windows, known as Calice32, discontinuing the DOS version in the same month. Along with Final Burn and MAME, it was one of the first emulators to support CPS-2, arriving in the emulator in April 2000.

Chalice (Interface)

In June, it began to run games from the Capcom Sony ZN-1 and Capcom Sony ZN-2 boards, in August the Sega System 16 and Sega System 18 boards, and Neo Geo MVS, and in January 2002 the Gaelco System 1 board. In October 2002, they released their latest version, with an update of the game Mighty Pang! In April 2003. The emulator ran a total of 350 games. The project also used Neill Corlett's 68k emulator. About its logo in the executable, it was added in May 2001 and modified in August 2001.

Nebula (2001)

Nebula (Interface)

Nebula was created in 2001 by the well-known emulator creator ElSemi, responsible for CPS-3 Emulator, Nebula Model 2, Sega Model 2 Emulator, and others. The project came with the proposal to emulate CPS-2 games, the sensation of that time, as well as CPS-1. Its first release was dated March 2001 for Windows. Its interface resembled a bit that of NeoRageX, later resembling more the WinKawaks emulator. It also came with the Convert tool to convert Final Burn save states.

Nebula (Menus)

Nebula

In August 2001, it began supporting the Neo Geo MVS, adding support for the Neo Geo CD in November 2001, the Japanese Konami Xexex board (for games like Bucky O'Hare and Wild West COW) in March 2002, and the Taiwanese PGM board (for sequels like Knights of Valour) in May 2002. There is a curiosity about the PGM board. ElSemi added support for the PGM board in version 0.60 of MAME on May 1, 2002 with the game Oriental Legend. The following day, it released its emulator with support for the board as well. So we can say that the Nebula project is the protagonist. The emulator was last released in February 2007. The emulator ran a total of 470 games, including original versions, clones and other nationalities.

Ace (2001)

Ace (Interface)

Another Capcom Play System Emulator, which means Another CPS Emulator (creative, isn't it? lol) was created by Rollback Segment, Friol in 2001 with the proposal of emulating CPS-1 and 2, similar to the proposal of the Calice emulator. Unlike its competitor, it was born with open code in order to get more help from those interested in the subject. Its first release took place in May 2001 for Windows, running only the game Final Fight. In the next version, in July 2001, it added support for CPS-2, with games such as Street Fighter 2, Super Puzzle Fighter and Megaman. Friol was proud to say that it was one of the fastest CPS-2 emulators, comparing the loading times of the games. In this comparison, it used the times of MAME, Nebula, Calice, Kawaks and Final Burn, losing only to the last one, by 1 to 2 seconds of delay.

Ace

In August 2001, he already had the idea of ​​becoming a multi-arcade emulator. In September 2001, he supported Sega System 16, Sega System 18 and Neo Geo MVS. Around August/September 2001, he modified the front-end, adding a ROM selection menu, changing and refining the font, among other things. Although his front-end was functional, with video renderers, reset, pause and save state, he also suffered from some bugs. His last release was in February 2002. The project was discontinued in July 2002, lasting less than a year. The reason was a hard drive problem that caused him to lose the most recent source code and his interest in continuing. The emulator ran 85 games in total.

Long Live Grandfather (2002)

Long live Grandpa

The Viva Nonno project was created by EOF in 2002 to emulate games from the Namco System 22 board. Its first release occurred in July of the same year for Windows. The first game to be released was Ridge Racer 2 (Japan-A). In August it began supporting Ridge Racer 2 (Japan-B) and Rave Racer 1 (Japan-A and World-B). The Rave Racer 1 (Japan-B) version and the game Ridge Racer 1 (Japan-A), which are in the emulator's game list, were never supported. The system requirements were a 1GhZ processor, with 32 RAM, and a GeForce VGA graphics card, in addition to DirectX. They used High Level technology for high-quality video simulation.

Long Live Grandpa (Interface)

The latest version of the emulator was released in January 2003. The version 22.0.4 that they promised to release never came out. MAME began supporting the card after the end of Viva Nonno, in July 2003 with Cyber ​​Commando. Ridge Racer, which was never able to run on the Viva, was only supported by MAME in May 2005. MAME can run seven of the nine games on the card, having supported the last one, Ace Driver: Victory Lap, only in October 2018.

Nebula Model 2 / Model 2 Emulator (2003)

Model 2 Emulator

The Model 2 Emulator was launched in 2002 by ElSemi under the name Nebula M2, or Nebula Model 2. It was nothing more than the CPS-1 and 2 emulator interface, Nebula used to load the Sega Model 2 core. Its first test files were released in October and November 2002, and the emulator was partially released in December 2002. Its official release occurred in March 2003 for Windows. In July there was another version, and in November two more, the last being version 0.9b, with 21 games from the Model's 2B and 2C, which were the only Model 2 boards that the project supported. The Sega Model was originally divided into three versions, 2A, 2B and 2C, with some games released on more than one version of the board, such as Dead or Alive and Dynamite Cop. The minimum recommendation to run the emulator was a Pentium III or Athlon with 1Ghz each, with a 3D graphics card, 128MB of RAM and DirectX7. The minimum recommendations were a 2Ghz Athlon XP, 512MB of RAM, and VooDoo (in late 2002) or GeForce4 (in late 2003), which were mega PCs for the time. To build the project, ElSemi had the help of some colleagues in the field, such as Sarayan and Farfetch'd from the Modeler project, from the Sega Model 1, for information, Richard Mitton for the emulator of the Intel i960 processor of the board, as well as games ripped by ShinobiZ from the System 16 Emulator, and tests of their betas, such as SMF from the ZiNc emulator, and Haze from the Raine and Modeler emulators, among others.

Model 2 Emulator

In July 2004, the emulator's name was changed to Model 2 Emulator and its first alpha version was released with a new GUI written from scratch. This new start also included emulation of the Model 2A. In October 2004, ElSemi, together with Richter Belmont from the Modeler project and ZiNc, added support for the Sega Model 2 board to MAME. Two years later, the emulator was updated again in August 2006. In February 2007, an update to version 0.3 from August 2006 was released with the Multi-Core CPU function, which is nothing more than permission for the emulator to use both cores of Dual Core and Core Duo processors in parallel for better performance. The project had updates and versions released until December 2010. After a three-year hiatus, the project was last updated, releasing version 1.1 in January 2014.

Model 2 Emulator (Interface)

In its latest version, it supported 66 games, including official games, clones and games from other regions. Only four games on the board did not support it: Air Walkers, Dynamite Baseball (version 97 supported it), Power Sled, and The House of the Dead. These games were never supported on any emulator, with the exception of Dynamite Baseball, which began to be supported in June 2011. The emulator had 9 versions as M2 Emulator, and 4 as Nebula M2, totaling 13 versions, without the test versions included.

CPS-3 Emulator (2007)

CPS-3 Emulator (Interface)

The CPS-3 Emulator, the first Sega card emulator, was released in July 2007 for Windows by ElSemi, creator of the Nebula and Model 2 emulators. Before its release, three test versions were made, all in June. This project began in early 2004. At the time, they even posted about it on a website, but ElSemi had not yet officially released it, and had also stopped its progress. CPS-3 Emulator was the first emulator to run the card. The emulator ran all six games released for the card upon its first release.

CPS-3 Emulator

Two days after the emulator's release, he ported his emulator to MAME, with support for all six arcade games. In the second and final version released in August 2007, he added two alternative versions of JoJo's Venture and SFIII 3rd Strike, and some other fixes and additions. Also in August, he ported the emulator to the Xbox console, under the name CPX3. From February 2008, CPS-3 games also began to run on the Final Burn Alpha emulator. ElSemi made two more fixes in March and April 2008 to the emulator, and never updated it again.