When was your first encounter with arcade simulators?
After all, at that time, you could only use computers in Internet cafes (computer rooms), and you needed a certain amount of experience and hands-on ability to play. After all, the emulator has never been sinicized.,If you don't know English, you don't even know how to set the buttons.。
At that time, there were more simulators, and platforms such as Nebula Simulator, Winkawaks, FinalBurn, MAME, and later Youju Gohan Chicken were all developed on these foundations. The simulators in the early years were not so "human", you had to know how to set up, or you wouldn't be able to play for half a day.
I don't know if you still remember the "Haofang battle platform"? Many players realized online battles on this platform back then. If you want to play against arcade games, you generally choose winkawaks, and after you log on to the server, you can play against players from all over the country and even abroad, and the communication is in English.
I guess everyone is curious, when was the original simulator released?
MAME, released in 1997. At that time, there were only five games simulated:
In 1997, imagine what you are doing at this time? This is the most glorious time of the game hall, not only "Three Kingdoms" and "Dinosaur Kombat" are popular, "Journey to the West" and "The King of Fighters 97" are also about to hit the shelves.
In early 1998, there was an arcade simulator called Callus, which could run quite a few of Capcom's CPS1 baseboard games. I guess everyone is more curious, what kind of emulator was used to emulate SNK games at the same time? The answer is: Neoragex
Does it feel like a tear break when you see this picture?
MAME has grown relatively quickly, with the release of MAME 0.29 in 1997, which has supported 258 games. Around 99 years, it has basically matured and simulated two-thirds of arcade games.
In the early years, MAME's ambition was to emulate all the arcade games in the world, including CAPCOM (CPS1, CPS2, CPS3), SNK, Sega, Namco, Data East, IGS, Taidong, CAVE, and Pants Breaker...... Almost most of the games that appear in the arcade are simulated. After other emulator authors lost motivation to update, only MAME has been insisting on the update, never interrupting, and truly achieving game freedom.
Today, many years later, the emulator has been quite perfect, and it also provides game-related posters, promotional images, game screenshots, cheats, game introductions, and game operations. It can be said to be very sweet.
It only takes a few seconds to start playing the emulator, which is almost 99% of the games on the market today. Today's new games are annoying with tedious tutorials and hints after opening. That's why many nostalgic gamers would rather play arcade games than touch new games.
MAME is used in a wide range of applications, such as TV Box, Chicken Player, Moonlight Box, Shared Arcade, and other game consoles.
Nowadays we are in major shopping malls, cinemas, shops, restaurants, hotels...... No one would have imagined that consoles, which had disappeared for twenty or thirty years, would reappear in this way. Shared arcades have been popular for a long time, and it is very convenient for players to scan the code to enter the game directly. If we look a little closer, we can see that the thousands of games that exist in the shared arcade are all based on MAME.
So has the shared single machine gotten the copyright of these games? It's very difficult, after all, many game companies have gone bankrupt, how can they get it? And similar to SNK, CAPCOM, Bandai Namco, Tecmo, IGS...... These game companies still exist, and if you want to win the arcade copyright, the price you pay is not something that ordinary people can afford!
That's right, when these uncopyrighted arcade games enter the mall, it means that the "prestige" of copyright has disappeared
As a player with feelings, it is estimated that there is a game console called "Moonlight Treasure Box" at home! Just experiencing the simulator on the computer is not "realistic" enough, and the game that was not cleared once on the joystick, then there will be no regrets in life. Many people buy the joystick with this mentality, but then they find that they have no motivation after playing a few times, and they eat ashes.
What you may not know is that today's moonlight treasure box substrates have been sold abroad. If you go to some relatively poor countries now, you will see a lot of little kids gathered around the game console, just like you saw yourself back then. However, they are lucky, the Moonlight Treasure Box has developed more maturely, there are many games without cards, and there are many revisions.
Today's NS game consoles can also experience arcade games, but they are all licensed, similar to CAPCOM collection, IREM game collection, IGS game collection, arcade archives...... Every piece of software is a company. Interestingly, there is still one software that can be installed on the NS platform, which covers all games based on MAME. There are always more ways than methods!