After 2 decades of tinkering, MAME cracks the Hyper Neo Geo 64

Amazing effort, but just makes me pine for the write-ups of Byuu (or the Dolphin devlog in more recent times).

I would highly recommend Shonumi's contemporary devlog focusing mainly on rare or difficult to emulate peripherals for the gameboy and GBA, ranging from infrared modems to Sonar-based fish detection dongles!

https://shonumi.github.io/articles.html

Pretty wild that MAME has been under active development for over 28 years with the core concept unchanged and no serious forks. It must have a very committed dev community.

I really love posts like this – and moreover it's clear that emulating games has spurred the development of really deep technical skills in more than one author.

I worry that the likes of the extremely difficult to crack, on-chip DRM found within e.g. the Xbox One X, designed at every available opportunity to resist hobbyists understanding and using the hardware, will show up as a big gap in museum exhibits in our cultural memory in the 2200s. DRM has a long tail, and we societally pay quite the underappreciated price for it, for sure.

All that work for less than 10 games available on this console, emulation developers are really determined

Even after 28 years, there continue to be a lot of interesting things happening across MAME - and it goes well beyond the arcade machines MAME is known for to lesser known home consoles, vintage computers and other hardware.

One example I'm excited about is the recent progress emulating professional music synthesizers like the legendary Yamaha MU-series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_MU-series). These are significant not just to musicians but also gamers because in the late 80s PC games started supporting MIDI music soundtracks. Throughout the 90s, most PC gamers only heard these soundtracks through fairly primitive PC sound cards which had limited audio sample memory, bit rates and simultaneous voice counts. So we usually heard chintzy, partial renditions of the lush full soundtracks the game's composer originally created (many composers used external MIDI hardware).

If you were a hardcore gamer with serious money you got an external MIDI sound module like the Roland Sound Canvas which could elevate your favorite game's sound from chintzy to breathtakingly beautiful. However, the absolute best MIDI game hardware was the $699 64-voice Yamaha MU80. I heard one back in the day and it blew my mind what I'd been missing (MU80 Demo Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwWxEN2NGHA). Now thanks to MAME I can have a full software emulation of this powerful, pricey professional hardware I could only lust for back then.

Is this similar to what CAPCOM did with their arcade system with that weird battery thing? If it powered off you had to send it back to CAPCOM to get it re-programmed. It was a DRM method used to combat piracy in the early arcade days.

Article mentions LaserActive. I remember going to my uncles house as a kid where he had one and I had no idea it existed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserActive

Pretty sure I just used it to play genesis games

> Vajra and Vajra 2 - A pair of LaserActive-exclusive rail shooters by Data West

Wait, Data West? Apparently there was indeed such a company: https://www.mobygames.com/company/6613/data-west/

They're founded later than Data East, but also Japanese. They don't appear to be any sort of spinoff of Data East or anything, but I have to wonder if with the name they were hoping to confuse people somewhat into thinking they were Data East, or to ride on their reputation...

I felt the urge to zoom into the first picture and look at the price tags:

- Battle Toad in Battlemaniac (Battletoads in Battlemaniacs) = 53900 JPY.

- Akumajou Dracula XX (Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss) = 27500 JPY.

- The King of Dragons = 39800 JPY.

It would be great if they finally cracked the >100 ms delay between a keypress and game response. Immediately visible in Galaga and Galaga with fast shoot.

That's rad yo!

Somehow I like the random unrelated ramblings about vintage movies and the author's trip to tokyo at the beginning.

Cool. But this writing style of intentionally not getting to the fucking point is very good for getting pesky visitors on to other websites.

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