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.

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.