Looking for help in the EMU community (Big Project)

[LynxVGL]

I'm wondering if anyone on AtariAge can get me pointed in the right direction.

 

Emulation. I'm setup with a group of folks who used to love the old Virtual World Entertainment BattleTech & Red Planet games, and the discussion has turned to emulating those complex (for the time) rigs.

 

The distributed network was setup like this:

 

Missions were served off of an Apple System 7 Mac, running an A/Rose card, across an Arcnet network to 8 pods. Each pod has a custom 68000 based CPU and a secondard Amiga 500 Based CPU for graphics. Two more custom cards drove sound and I/O.

 

Mission events were spooled back to the Mac Console computer which created a log file, and then set over an AppleTalk network to Mission Review software.

 

It's a big project to emulate, and we have no idea of where to start the discussions at or with whom. I'm working with he current owner of Virtual World to see if we can develop a plan, or a Kickstarter project.

 

Clues for the clueless?

Edited June 14, 2014 by LynxVGL

[DanBoris]

I'm wondering if anyone on AtariAge can get me pointed in the right direction.

 

Emulation. I'm setup with a group of folks who used to love the old Virtual World Entertainment BattleTech & Red Planet games, and the discussion has turned to emulating those complex (for the time) rigs.

 

The distributed network was setup like this:

 

Missions were served off of an Apple System 7 Mac, running an A/Rose card, across an Arcnet network to 8 pods. Each pod has a custom 68000 based CPU and a secondard Amiga 500 Based CPU for graphics. Two more custom cards drove sound and I/O.

 

Mission events were spooled back to the Mac Console computer which created a log file, and then set over an AppleTalk network to Mission Review software.

 

It's a big project to emulate, and we have no idea of where to start the discussions at or with whom. I'm working with he current owner of Virtual World to see if we can develop a plan, or a Kickstarter project.

 

Clues for the clueless?

 

First thing you are going to need is the technical specs of all the hardware used to run the game. The server sounds straight forward since it's standard apple hardware, but the other hardware sounds custom so you would need detailed specs for it. Next you need the actual software that ran on each component of these system. Once you have these items you can start to develop an emulator. You could write a single emulator that runs all the components of the system, or you could write seperate ones that use TCP/IP to communicate that way you could run from separate machines or run it over the internet if you wanted to.

[LynxVGL]

 

First thing you are going to need is the technical specs of all the hardware used to run the game. The server sounds straight forward since it's standard apple hardware, but the other hardware sounds custom so you would need detailed specs for it. Next you need the actual software that ran on each component of these system. Once you have these items you can start to develop an emulator. You could write a single emulator that runs all the components of the system, or you could write seperate ones that use TCP/IP to communicate that way you could run from separate machines or run it over the internet if you wanted to.

Access to the original hardware is not an issue, as I have the original owner, and current hardware owners on board. Disassembly of roms and source code would be required as well. Any ideas of where to take a project like this?

[DanBoris]

Access to the original hardware is not an issue, as I have the original owner, and current hardware owners on board. Disassembly of roms and source code would be required as well. Any ideas of where to take a project like this?

 

Disassembly of the roms is not necessary, all you really need is the binary dumps. You say you have access to the hardware, but do you have any technical documentation on it like schematics, memory maps, hardware descriptions, etc? If not you will need to reverse engineer the hardware. At the very least you will need to document the major chips used in the system, you may also need to trace out the key parts of circuit.

 

Do you have any programming experience or are you looking for a developer who can write the emulator?

[LynxVGL]

 

Disassembly of the roms is not necessary, all you really need is the binary dumps. You say you have access to the hardware, but do you have any technical documentation on it like schematics, memory maps, hardware descriptions, etc? If not you will need to reverse engineer the hardware. At the very least you will need to document the major chips used in the system, you may also need to trace out the key parts of circuit.

 

Do you have any programming experience or are you looking for a developer who can write the emulator?

I'm not a coder Dan. I'm working on getting info for the IP owner about the reality of the project. How big of a team would be needed, the engineering issues, etc. so we can try to get a funding stream put together. It's a great idea that has appeal to a certain fan base.

 

A lot of documentation no longer exists, so it is pretty much reverse engineering a huge chunk of it.

[+Gemintronic]

It would be a much smaller project if you focused on making an authentic experience instead of emulating multiple systems. Simulation instead of emulation.

[DanBoris]

It would be a much smaller project if you focused on making an authentic experience instead of emulating multiple systems. Simulation instead of emulation.

 

Yeah, since we are talking about a system that runs a very limited set of software, simulation may be far more particle then the emulation route.

 

[DanBoris]

I'm not a coder Dan. I'm working on getting info for the IP owner about the reality of the project. How big of a team would be needed, the engineering issues, etc. so we can try to get a funding stream put together. It's a great idea that has appeal to a certain fan base.

 

A lot of documentation no longer exists, so it is pretty much reverse engineering a huge chunk of it.

 

You could easily do something like this with a single experienced programmer. One thing you will need to think about is how you would release the emulator software. If you went an open-source route there are plenty of existing open source emulation code that you could leverage to make the process much easier.