The History of PC Engine Emulators - Part 1

VPCE (1997)

VPCE (MS-DOS)

Virtual PC Engine, or simply VPCE, was the first PC Engine emulator. It was created by Jens Christian Restemeier, and its first version, beta 0.1, was released in May 1997 for MS-DOS, with a stable version in June, followed by the Windows version in July 1997 ported by Edward Massey, MageX. Since 1996, Christian has been working with programs that add functions to emulators, such as GB, PSX, PC Engine, and even the Sharp X68k PC. In the preview version of VPCE, it even started to emulate CD-ROM support for games on this media, but in the next version, this support was removed. These versions were alpha and came out before May. Because the Windows version had only one release, the DOS versions were more popular. Because of this, around March 1998 the emulator began to have support in the Universal Frontend front-end, famous for supporting emulators for the most varied consoles and portable devices of the time.

VPCE (Windows)

VPCE was also ported to other systems, such as MacOS (known as Power PC Engine and with the sound code written by Richard Bannister) and BeOS by Jonathan Lane, RiscOS by Paul Clifford, Linux by Steven Fuller and FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Unix, SunOS and Solaris by Osamu Kurati. All of them were also ported in 1997. The emulator had two more versions released for MS-DOS, in July 1997 and in November 1997, when the project was closed. In February 1998, it was announced that there would be a version 0.4 of the emulator, which would run the game Street Fighter II - Champion Edition, but this release never happened. Curiosity. Before the VPCE project, in 1996, Jens created another game hardware emulator, the Gameboy GBSIM, discontinued in the same year.

Magic Engine (1997)

Magic Engine (MS-DOS)

Magic Engine was a PC Engine emulator created by Frenchman David Michel, and first released in October 1997 for MS-DOS. Later, his brother Cedric Michel joined the project. Interestingly, in the first version, in addition to running PC Engine HuCards (cartridge) games, it also ran PC Engine CD games, making it the first PC Engine CD emulator. But this prominence came at a price, $35. The demo versions only gave 4 minutes of gameplay.

Magic Engine v0.9 (Windows) (Bomber Man/Menus)

Since there was only a version for MS-DOS, around January 1998, it began to be supported by the Universal Frontend, alongside other famous emulators of the time. In November 1999, it was part of the ArcadeOS frontend, by Brian Lewis. And finally, around April 2003, it began to be part of the Greek frontend, Translations Frontend, of the Greek ROM site, GreekRoms. The frontend was available in both Greek and English. In September 1999, Magic Engine managed to emulate HuCards at 100% and in October 1999, CD-ROM emulation. The emulator had seven alpha versions from October 1997 to December 1999.

Magic Engine v1.1.3 (Interface/Menus)

The first beta version was 0.97 in December 1999 for Windows and MacOS. There were two more beta versions that month. From these versions forward, the emulator began to be sold for 16 dollars. One of the interesting things about the project is that it made versions of the website available in several languages, such as German, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English, having supported Portuguese until 2001, and until 2002 the other languages, except English, French and Japanese, which it maintained from then on. Until June 2002, it had regular updates. After that, there were only three more versions in 2005, 2007 and the last one in May 2008.

Magic Engine (Bomber Man '94)

Regarding its front-end, it always uses the same MS-DOS version, and migrates it to the Windows version in December 1999, with some color modifications, additions and changes to menus. In version 1.0 from April 2005, it makes another modification to the front-end, with more menu modifications and changes to them, in addition to the background wallpaper. The recommended configurations for the perfect execution of the emulator are a Pentium III 600 MHz, with 512 MB of RAM, GeForce 2 or Radeon 7500 with a Sound Blaster.

Magic Engine v0.9 (Interface/Menus)

Magic Engine also provided access to accessories that increased the console's RAM, such as the System Card, Super CD-ROM and Arcade Card. It also had its own music player, MagicSystem, the Cheat Engine cheater, support for ROM patches, IPS, among others. In 2006, the duo David and Cedric began working on another emulator, Magic Engine FX, the successor to the PC Engine, PC-FX. The emulator was released in December 2006 and has four versions in total, with the last release in February 2008. Like their previous project, the full version is also paid.