What is cool about these versions is that they do have some audio capabilities, although they are so old that they do rely on sampled sounds for:
Alien Syndrome
Altered Beast
Golden Axe
Shadow Dancer
Shinobi
Wrestle War
But it’s from 1999 and that was the state of emulation.
0.82 is basically where the project had left off, and was of course supplanted by MAME. There was preliminary work on AfterBurner 2, although there is from the looks of it a bad/partial ROM dump to blame for the most part. It’s unplayable but it sort of runs the demo.
0.82 does however emulate a strange version of OutRun. Namely that it lacks shifter support all together. So hold down the accelerator and take off!
Notable things is the inclusion of Neill Corlett’s Starscream for 68000 emulation, Neil Bradley’s Mz80, Jarek Burczynski’s YM2151. Which reflects many components of the era that would find their way into MAME.
Which of course speaks to another thing, that tracking down ROMs for these ancient pre-mame emulators is getting impossible with vague names, and no timestamps.
Btw, there is two excellent pages where you can get all the roms supported by this emulator, these pages are : http://www.davesclassics.com by Conjurer and http://www.emuviews.com by JoseQ
Which naturally, are lost to the mists of time.
I’ve been able to run it under DOSBox, Qemu and VMWare. For VMWare, be sure to enable Sound Blaster emulation, and set the BLASTER environment variable to:
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H7 P330 T6
The video mode for the start screen doesn’t render on VMWare or Qemu, so in that case I just start it with the following batch file
I don’t have the FPS stats as it’ll crash when going to the menu to exit, and I didn’t hack up the source that much at the moment (caught another flu…). But Qemu 0.90 feels a LOT more fluid playing outrun than VMWare or DOSBox on my 2006 Mac Pro. Although on my 32 core Xeon monster it plays great on everything. I guess if you have at least 3Ghz and your CPU is less than 8 years old it’ll be fine for running nested emulation along with emulating 2 68000’s a z80, and a ym2151. Or just run a native build of MAME! Or if you really want low lag Outrun, use Cannonball!
And thanks again to Thierry Lescot for letting me redistribute this
A while ago I had chased FrontVM to moretom.net and found 2 links. One from 2003 which is a dead link, and the 2004 version which was archived by the wayback machine!
It was an interesting build, as it still used 68000 emulation from Hatari/UAE this pre-dates the 68000 to C or i386 ASM. However since it ran (mostly) the original code, it was more ‘feature complete’, although loading save games is broken for some reason (I think the decryption was not disassembled correctly). It was actually a stupid file mode setting. I just updated the source & put out a new binary, testing save games between Linux &Windows.
Anyways, it originally built on Cygwin, so I filled in the missing bits, and have it building on both MinGW & Visual C++
Parked outside Willow in the Ross 154 system
So yeah, it’s Frontier, for the AtariST with the OS & Hardware calls abstracted, still running the 68000 code under emulation. I think it’s an interesting thing, but that’s me.
For those who are interested in ‘free’ giveaway type things, Bethesda is giving away The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Just use the code TES25TH-MORROWIND on their store thing here.
You have until the 31st!
Since I already have an account from the Fallout 76 debacle, no biggie for me.
Also for the MS-DOS fans out there, you can get Arena & Daggerfall with no registration required!
It’s an interesting twist on the typical point & click adventure game. How so? Well simply put it’s all based on web technology! With a big emphasis on that late 90’s vibe! Complete with ‘desktop pets’ animated GIFs, blinking text, and embedded MIDI (and even more sophisticated music).
While it’s obviously not real, the entire ‘web’ is stored locally (even in it’s own lore), it’s still fun to dig around in.
You play as an “Enforcer” basically it’s like back to the AOL days of walled gardens being patrolled by unpaid volunteers. Look for banned content and flag it appropriately. As the game progresses things go off the rails, near riots, helicopter crashes, amputations, culminating in a Y2K crash that kills people.
I totally missed out on this being a crowdfunded thing, and found out from Steam recommendations of all things.
Even for the aesthetic alone, I think it’s worth it. Some of the game play is too much wrapped up into it’s own lore, so paying attention is kind of important.
When the best friend becomes an enemy, and the main villain becomes you yourself and blood flows like a river, someone will definitely have to answer the main question – Who is behind the awakening of ancient evil and is there still a chance for humanity?
I saw this ‘gem’ pop up on steam for $3.50 HKD (so $0.50 USD?) and thought what the hell let’s try it out. SharpShooter3D is well, a DooM mod of sorts, but it also feels a lot like Duke3D with the inclusion of vehicles and ‘moving room/vehicles’ like train cars. At it’s heart is GZDoom 3.3.2 which states in the license:
Parts of the voxel code in the software renderer use code from the BUILD engine by Ken Silverman and are used under the terms of the GPL v3 with permission.
Well isn’t that cool! The best of Duke3D and Doom! All in one.
It captures the imagined feel of the eastern block, old factories, nuclear power plants, lots of guys in trainers & Adidas all over the place, along with copious alcohol and milk (yes milk is the health thing here!).
Not to mention the punk sound track is pretty good for such a seemingly ‘low end offer’. Had this come out 20 years ago, it really would have set the world on fire, and probably set off quite the few controversy, but today it’s a discount mod that no doubt the devs did put a bit of work into.
I have no idea if the game is 90% off for the rest of the world, but I’d say it’s worth a look at the price.
I picked up an ‘interesting Chinese motherboard, a dual LGA2011 board, some DD3 ECC memory, and 2 of the cheapest ‘widest’ chips I could find, the 6 core E5-2620 v2. The board cost me $200 US, the memory was $90 and the CPU’s were $40. Although the board is E-ATX, and that means I’ll need to get a new case as it won’t fit anything I have lying around.
I think I finally got the hang of Vegas. It’s taken far too long to get here, but I was hoping to have received the board much quicker as it shipped from 30km from here, but they did their best to NOT ship to Hong Kong.
I know it’s far too long, and far too maranding. Oh well it’s late and I’m just babbling like crazy.
So, I thought my mic was working but yeah it’s not. I’ve shot a bunch a footage, and did some capture stuff too. Turns out the audio I though I had working isn’t. I should have started with a 10 second short to get things ironed out.
I’m using old crap I’ve had lying around in this case, software wise, I’m using liteCam Game: 100 FPS Game Capture, which I guess is ‘okay’ for video capture. It runs on my 2006 MacPro so that’s great, but the video compressor it likes to use, the RSUPPORT MPEG4 Codec isn’t understood by the video editor I’m using, VEGAS Pro 15 Edit Steam Edition.
Editing was a fun time flailing around figuring out how to cut tracks, fade in/out add in other layers, and that’s when I noticed that my MIC wasn’t capturing anything. And I didn’t want to try to literally phone it in, so it’s a test video.
24 minutes to render a 5 minute video!
I was kind of crazy, and used the 2006 MacPro to make the video file. I should have known with the ‘blazing’ speed of 0.407x doing the trans-coding that this was going to be SLOW. Obviously dual Xeon 5130‘s @2Ghz isn’t really ideal for video editing today.
Clearly I need a bigger boat.
But just like running Fallout 76 on a 13 year old computer, it still runs. SLOWLY.
I wanted to some crappy branding/art things, but as I made a new channel I’m too much of a n00b apparently to set custom thumbnails. So I need to fluff it out or something I guess.
So here we go!
Consider it more of a process test, I need to get some lighting, and figure out what is up with my audio, maybe hit SSP and get an old audio board or something. Let me know how terrible it looks/sounds… I’m still working on transitions and stuff. I got Vegas on sale for a tiny fraction of the price, I guess it’s high time to use it.
I was just alerted to this playthrough of Quake 2 for MS-DOS by TheSlipGateUser which showcases the game play under DOSBox.
Honestly I’m terrible at Quake, QuakeWorld and Quake 2, but it’s great to see someone who knows that they are doing, and more so that under emulation the game is holding up.
I know the MS-DOS port isn’t exactly the most popular in the world, although I suspect if it had been a thing in 1997 there would have been an audience with people that didn’t want to have Windows in the background as a distraction.
That said, any new people will of course want to check out the excellent (if I do say so myself!) series “Porting Quake II to MS-DOS“.
Well I’ve been able to put a few hours into the game, and I can already say that finding people is super scarce, and when you do basically they are too busy doing quests and stuff at such a higher level they basically avoid someone like me at level 5. With no NPC’s or real ‘vibe’ to the world other than isolation and loneliness people then tend to be, well isolated.
I never really played WoW that much, I found it was drowning in too many people that you couldn’t get 5 minutes alone without people bugging you. And oddly enough the absolute isolation is unreal.
Looking that we are going to start the second week of retail release now, and the game is discounted from $60 to $35 at the moment doesn’t bode well at all. The reviews came in over the weekend, and it was universally panned as an ‘avoid’ which means death for something that relies on the multiplayer part.
Really?
And then people are pointing out that not only does 76 re-use all the assets from Fallout 4 (which really doesn’t bug me that much) but that Fallout really is a twist on Oblivion
Although I did try to do this with NV onto Oblivion and really had no luck, but re-purposing engines to do different things isn’t all that un heard of. There is that DooM mod where you can mow the lawn, or even add in the QuakeWorld multiplayer after all.
One thing is for sure, Fallout 76 is in major trouble. I’ve read all too many times that after 40-60 hours that there is basically nothing left to do, and people that are enjoying it are leaving as they are ‘done’ which again does not bode well for an online game.
If Bethesda isn’t in crisis mode trying to make ’76 more WoW like, then they will have burnt through a lot of community good will, as they slide into Oblivion. While so many people are decrying the engine, I think the real faults lie in the lack of engagement, which then lets people stare at the assets and then the whole dated look of Fallout 4 really becomes apparent.
Looking back, Fallout 3 was a break out game, and I thought it was an excellent transformation of the isometric world to an engaging 3d game. The story was… well, not the best, I accidentally stumbled onto ‘dad’ pretty quickly and ended it far too early which initially made it feel cheap and boring, not until I saw the strategy guide, and was amazed that there was so much in there, so I set about exploring and finding more enjoyment in the environment, lore and interactions.
New Vegas had so much in common, both development team wise, and atmosphere from the original Fallout it was an incredible follow up to Fallout 3, however too many people were too critical of the tech & timeline that they had been given and focused on defects that were frankly out of Obsidian’s hands. It’s a shame that the best one had the worst reviews, and destroyed the people making it.
Fallout 4 returned to the 3 story, expect it was the parent seeking their child, and the twist that their child was now elderly really wasn’t all that surprising at all. Cutting down NPC interaction was a major problem, as it felt so much on rails. There was nothing to really do to step outside of yes/no trees with groups, you couldn’t ‘sort of side’ with someone, or disagree.. And then there was the minutemen and their constant nagging that was the worst. Even cheating and putting 100 turrets into a settlement did nothing to save it, I saw the super mutants fall from the sky in the middle and proceed to attack. What good is perimeter defenses when your opponents are apparently airborne?
I was so bored by Fallout 4, I can’t even remember if I finished the story. It really wasn’t all that engaging.
And now we enter ’76 which again I knew was going to be strange with no NPC’s which meant no connection with the world at all. But as I’d mentioned that the number of people playing this online is going to sharply crash that if you wanted to experience this aspect you better be quick. And after more game play, I can safely say it doesn’t matter.
It’s now $35, and this won’t save it. I expect more $5 discounts per week, if not steeper, then before the holidays some kind of rebalance to encourage micro transactions, and ’76 becoming a Freemium game, with it eventually being shuttered some time mid ’19 unless something amazing happens content wise between here & there.
They never should have launched @ $60 that’s for sure, and looking at the assets this really ought to have been a DLC / addon for Fallout 4 for perhaps $10-20 and I doubt itd have had anywhere near the massive backlash.
The real shame is that once the servers go dark that this will be the end. I don’t think Bethesda ‘gets’ that the ability to self host is why Minecraft/Quake etc were so incredibly popular in their heyday. And more importantly why that they will be continued to be played for years (decades) to come.
I’m torn on this one. Unless you have been living in a cave, you’d have heard that the launch of Fallout 76 has been…. well a spectacular disaster.
Launching at a full AAA price of $60 to what is apparently an empty world didn’t help things at all.
That said, I’ve liked Fallout for a long while, and yes I really did like the Bethesda treatment for Fallout 3. And then we got New Vegas which was nothing short of amazing. Sadly Obsidian, the team behind New Vegas that comprised many of the original Fallout team were punished in reviews with faults based on the aging gamebryo engine that Bethesda loves so much. Which is sad as their bonus payment & future were tied to the metacritic score, which Bethesda tied a rock around their neck.
Fallout 4 was disappointing as it removed so much of the RPG elements, making the game boring, as it just lacked depth. Which really is an unfortunate direction. And the overall story/twist was so utterly predictable it was disappointing that you as the player were not expected to ‘get it’ right away.
And now here we are, Fallout 76, where they decided to remove all the NPC’s all together. Which leads me to the following problem.
Fallout 76 is going to crash and burn, and as soon as the ‘next big thing’ launches nobody is going to play it. So this is basically my only opportunity to play it with other people online. The full price was certainly too much, and with the incredibly poor reception its had over the last week, it is already reduced in price by 33%.
Obviously this doesn’t bode well for the future of the game, but out of morbid curiosity I’m going to give it a try.
I’m pretty sure it’s going to be full of disappointment and failure. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to really try it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in another week the price was further reduced to $30 USD, with some time before Christmas for a further reduction to $20. But by then will there be anyone left to play the game with?
The size of the game is overwhelming, I’m currently living in a small village in Hong Kong (yes it’s not all big city) the only internet options were 6MB DSL, or a 4G cellphone connection. The 4G is much faster, however the WiFi bridge adapter I have is only 802.11a compatible so that is why I’m getting such a poor download speed. It’s been downloading all night, and I’m too impatient to not at least write down my thoughts at the moment.
I should probably just break down, get a capture card, some tripods and lights and just make crappy YouTube videos. I’ve been looking at numbers and I’m almost thinking that videos get further reach. Not that I care too much, otherwise Id have done it ages ago, although it’s probably just me being lazy as video work is a lot of work, while quickly banging this out on a keyboard only takes a few minutes. And I’ll have to get graphics, license music and use something to make snazy effects and stuff. Ugh sounds suspiciously like a lot of hard work.
After about 12 hours to download my junky machine would just launch Fallout 76 to a blank screen and then exit with no error code, or hint of a message. Apparently going onto the forums it turns out that the ancient video card with 512MB of graphics RAM is just not enough, and Fallout 76 requires 2GB of video memory. Unlike prior versions of Fallout, there is no pre-game tuning, instead you are thrown into the game with whatever settings are pre-defined.
I for one am not too amused with the black screen, and sudden close with not even a hint to the user. But the whole thing is apparently a rush job, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
I copied the downloaded game to a better machine via USB drive, and for most of the day I had this fun error:
NoRegionPing
The “No Region Ping” which either means that there are no servers up, or perhaps a firewall issue. I later found out that UPnP was disabled on the Huawei E5785 which may have also been the source of issues (although turning it on, and immediately rebooting didn’t change a thing so I don’t know for certain).
After a bit of fighting and I finally got the game to launch using my ‘pro’ laptop that has a GPU.
I have to say that the engine does look a lot better than the Fallout 4 one, especially going outside into the forest. Maybe it’s the vibrant colours, a nice change from the bleak/dreary games of old.
The texture pop is quite noticeable, it feels like borderlands type flat shading style until it pops the correct texture. I’m playing from SSD which I had thought would help alleviate such issues, but seeing it made no difference, I just moved it to the disk instead.
Combat is atrocious. Stepping outside of the vault you encounter these small robots, the “liberator MK 0” that are almost impossible to hit. When combat isn’t happening I can swing my fists of rage around like no tomorrow. Once I encounter the robots I’m lucky to get a single swing for every 50+ mouse clicks. The enemies move so fast that running away isn’t an option either. I had better luck on herding one group of robots to fight another group of ticks, once I had tried to venture out a little further.
And speaking of opponents it seems that they just spawn on top of you. I made it to some lighthouse to have 3 feral ghouls spawn in front of me, mauling me in seconds. Not that clicking the mouse button to attack frantically would have done anything.
The game world does feel incredibly vast, and also seemingly incredibly lonely as well. After going through the online menu there was only 3 other people on the server I’m on. It’s probably all ready far too late to run into users, as I think the downfall of Fallout 76 is pretty much complete.
So yeah after an hour playing the game feels incredibly lonely and isolated. But I have to admit, that after a nuclear war I’d imagine things would be lonely and isolated. I think the part where Bethesda has really made a critical error is that the NPC’s that they put so much love into the past gave people an emotional attachment to the game, and that the prior fallouts, and all the endless elder scrolls are teeming with life. And ’76 instead presents a vast wasteland. Maybe it’s just too true to the source material.
