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Budget Atari and Capcom arcade cabinets to see release this fall!


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To me, that makes the odds even more likely that they've borrowed emulation, since a) again, the sheer man-hours required to create brand new emulators from scratch for every board and manufacturer type they are supporting would have made the current price target impossible, and b) they are effectively describing their solution as a magical unicorn. One does not create proprietary _hardware_ to 'read original arcade ROMs'.

 

I can't stress enough that Tastemakers LLC is a reseller/investor. They do *NOT* make product. They do *NOT* have an engineering staff. They see a shiny, decide they can sell it, and buy the rights, and/or decide to spin up a product line on their own and hire a third party to actually create the thing. Most of their 'technical' explanations thus far sound like complete bunk _because it is_, as sales people have NFC what's actually going on in the geek labs, but the guys who actually know (and packaged the emulation) are never going to say because they'd very much rather not be sued to kingdom come.

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http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php/topic,3057.0.html

that compares the settings in many classic games.

 

Space Invaders by default gave you 3 ships and an extra man awarded at 1500 points. However what is often unnoticed is later in Space Invaders part 2 you can get an extra "5th" man by doing a secret.. finishing a round in 55 shots or less. And it's repeatable! But lol that's hard enough to do on stage 1 let alone later. You can sort of cheat by rolling over the shot counter at 255 shots, but of course that's still a hassle. :lol:

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There is more than MAME out there and developers/companies that specialize in this kind of thing. From what I've heard, they went the latter route.

 

This is not that complicated, really. They need to do everything above board because of what and how they license and where and how they sell. This is not something like a RetroN 5 or Retro Freak where the companies can sort of wing it because they have no onboard games or affiliation of any kind with other active companies. We're talking big money deals here with big money retailers. Nothing that I've seen or heard indicates anything below board, nor would they have to for the number of units that they're moving. But of course it's much more fun to be angry and baselessly speculate because of the actions that a handful of other companies engaged in.

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There is more than MAME out there and developers/companies that specialize in this kind of thing. From what I've heard, they went the latter route.

 

This is not that complicated, really. They need to do everything above board because of what and how they license and where and how they sell. This is not something like a RetroN 5 or Retro Freak where the companies can sort of wing it because they have no onboard games or affiliation of any kind with other active companies. We're talking big money deals here with big money retailers. Nothing that I've seen or heard indicates anything below board, nor would they have to for the number of units that they're moving. But of course it's much more fun to be angry and baselessly speculate because of the actions that a handful of other companies engaged in.

 

So long as you recognize that what they have stated - and you're confirming without any actual facts to base it upon - is literally unprecedented in the industry and flies in the face of common sense, logistics, and finance, then sure, I'll agree that I'm angrily and baselessly speculating. To date, *no* company - even those far more established and well-financed - has achieved a tenth of the complexity or magnitude of what Tastemakers is claiming, including making sweeping changes to product lineups literally 45 days before retail sales are supposed to begin (with a well known industry lead time of 120 days just for procurement, transport, and logistics).

 

I'm not angry. I've no skin in the game. It's for that reason more than any other that I'm willing to call a spade what it is. You work in the industry, and you kind of can't. I get that. What I don't get is the smack of fanboi-ism when every other piece of information or history available flies in the face of the claims made. Yes, I believe they licensed IP. That is the *only* verifiable claim that's been made.

 

One thing I think we can agree on is that time will provide all the answers, so I'm content to wait it out and see.

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So long as you recognize that what they have stated - and you're confirming without any actual facts to base it upon - is literally unprecedented in the industry and flies in the face of common sense, logistics, and finance, then sure, I'll agree that I'm angrily and baselessly speculating. To date, *no* company - even those far more established and well-financed - has achieved a tenth of the complexity or magnitude of what Tastemakers is claiming, including making sweeping changes to product lineups literally 45 days before retail sales are supposed to begin (with a well known industry lead time of 120 days just for procurement, transport, and logistics).

 

I'm not angry. I've no skin in the game. It's for that reason more than any other that I'm willing to call a spade what it is. You work in the industry, and you kind of can't. I get that. What I don't get is the smack of fanboi-ism when every other piece of information or history available flies in the face of the claims made. Yes, I believe they licensed IP. That is the *only* verifiable claim that's been made.

 

One thing I think we can agree on is that time will provide all the answers, so I'm content to wait it out and see.

 

I trust the information I received, so I'm not basing it on nothing. We'll see if it plays out differently (anything is possible), but if you look at the money and relationships involved, I consider being underhanded with the emulation extremely unlikely.

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They are probably using licensed emulator software from the companies they licensed the games from. It can be that simple.

 

Oh my goodness no. Not only do most of the license grantors not have any emulation code, many don't even have copies of their own ROMs (or source code to same). You offer _far_ too much credit to the shell companies that exist with names and assets of yesteryear with no actual knowledge of what they have. ;)

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Oh my goodness no. Not only do most of the license grantors not have any emulation code, many don't even have copies of their own ROMs (or source code to same). You offer _far_ too much credit to the shell companies that exist with names and assets of yesteryear with no actual knowledge of what they have. ;)

100% of these announced games have previously been released on home console and PC compilations using emulation. Every single one of them. Adapting that emulation to a linux-based microcomputer/RPi device would be completely simple.

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100% of these announced games have previously been released on home console and PC compilations using emulation. Every single one of them. Adapting that emulation to a linux-based microcomputer/RPi device would be completely simple.

 

Number of licensing companies that own said code: Exactly zero. Just because Atari's or William's name is on the box does NOT make it their product (or code).

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Number of licensing companies that own said code: Exactly zero. Just because Atari's or William's name is on the box does NOT make it their product (or code).

Are you seriously arguing that the companies who built the original hardware in these Arcade Machines don't understand how to emulate that hardware on latter day PCs, and no one in the history of computing has every created an emulator for these games that wasn't based on MAME?

 

really_house_of_cards.gif

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Are you seriously arguing that the companies who built the original hardware in these Arcade Machines don't understand how to emulate that hardware on latter day PCs, and no one in the history of computing has every created an emulator for these games that wasn't based on MAME?

 

really_house_of_cards.gif

 

More or less - yes, absolutely.

 

None of those companies retain ANY engineering staff, source code, or documentation for 30-year-old legacy products that have changed hands three to eight times in the intervening decades. They have ZERO knowledge of emulation as a whole, much less how to implement it. They don't even have their own binary code in most cases. (Yes, this even includes still-active-in-technology companies like Nintendo, who had to download pirated copies of their own games and 'borrow' an older copy of the Snes9x source code in order to produce the SNES Classic.)

 

There are really only three extant code trees for multi-(source)-platform emulation out there, period - MAME, Final Burn Alpha (different code tree, same noncommercial license as MAME), and the proprietary code descending from Jeff Vavasour's work (with a smattering of Aaron Giles' work on the fringes).

 

Good Lord, this is AtariAge, man, not Reddit. I expected more technical (and business) knowledge from this crowd.

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Oh my goodness no. Not only do most of the license grantors not have any emulation code, many don't even have copies of their own ROMs (or source code to same). You offer _far_ too much credit to the shell companies that exist with names and assets of yesteryear with no actual knowledge of what they have. ;)

 

 

More or less - yes, absolutely.

 

None of those companies retain ANY engineering staff, source code, or documentation for 30-year-old legacy products that have changed hands three to eight times in the intervening decades. They have ZERO knowledge of emulation as a whole, much less how to implement it. They don't even have their own binary code in most cases. (Yes, this even includes still-active-in-technology companies like Nintendo, who had to download pirated copies of their own games and 'borrow' an older copy of the Snes9x source code in order to produce the SNES Classic.)

 

There are really only three extant code trees for multi-(source)-platform emulation out there, period - MAME, Final Burn Alpha (different code tree, same noncommercial license as MAME), and the proprietary code descending from Jeff Vavasour's work (with a smattering of Aaron Giles' work on the fringes).

 

Good Lord, this is AtariAge, man, not Reddit. I expected more technical (and business) knowledge from this crowd.

So you're saying that they have stolen emulation software in their cabs we're talking about? How about the software used to run the neo geo games on the Nintendo Switch? Stolen unlicensed with that too? C'mon...

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So you're saying that they have stolen emulation software in their cabs we're talking about? How about the software used to run the neo geo games on the Nintendo Switch? Stolen unlicensed with that too? C'mon...

 

I raised SERIOUS questions a month ago about the genesis of their emulation software, yes, and there's been no good response to it yet other than a handful of tweets that say nothing other than "custom software" and an acquaintance of Bill's saying they are on the level...despite the awesome complexity (and cost/time) of writing dedicated emulators for such a wide variety of completely incompatible-with-one-another-even-at-the-emulated-processor-level boards from scratch. That's an effort beyond multimillion dollar companies in many cases - but thrown together in a couple of months by a small reseller who changes its name once every couple of years? Sure, I'll buy that for a dollar.

 

NeoGeo is *quite* a different matter - that is _not_ derived from the MAME tree, and its origins are well known and understood. It's (based on) truly open source, so no licensing for that code was required, and it was implemented by the same folks (Hamster) who have released the same identical emulators on pretty much every mobile platform known to man (and good on them, despite the horrific pricing). It took them about 3 years of man-effort to create the first port, for a single-board system of VERY low complexity. Get where I'm going with this now? Imagine if they had to do it another dozen times in only three months, all from scratch. (Note that I'm ignoring the fact that QA time is normally 3x development time, and on a system that can't be field-updated as far as we know, which means it must ship day 1 effectively bug-free like we did it Back In The Day...)

Edited by Rodney Hester
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For the record, Rodney, it's not just any acquaintance who told me. And who's to say it's not one of the possible sources you mentioned? The custom work doesn't have to mean the emulator portion. They clearly have their own UI/UX.

 

Because the licenses for two of those three sources carry a very strict non-commercial/prohibition clause, and the third is tightly-guarded proprietary and commercial source that the rights holder would be outright stupid to license to a competitor. (The Vavasour-derived code also doesn't cover at least 4 of the drivers/boards presented in the lineup as indicated/demonstrated by Tastemakers.)

Edited by Rodney Hester
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Because the licenses for two of those three sources carry a very strict non-commercial/prohibition clause, and the third is tightly-guarded proprietary and commercial source that the rights holder would be outright stupid to license to a competitor. (The Vavasour-derived code also doesn't cover at least 4 of the drivers/boards presented in the lineup as indicated/demonstrated by Tastemakers.)

 

Please just stop. Your idea that there is *no* emulator for these games other than MAME is completely absurd. But even if they are using a MAME-derived emulator, MAME's license does, in fact, allow commercial use, and has since 2016.

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As for the MAME license change in 2016, that's news to me, and was/is quite interesting - I know that was something desired for a VERY long time, but was legally viewed as insurmountable given the sheer number of different contributors (and the fact that so many of their names and/or current contact information had been lost). I cleared my drivers and code over 10 years ago...VERY happy to hear they finally got there.

 

That pretty much settles that, then. If they used MAME, no harm no foul, and since FBA follows MAME, same should apply there, too. I still _quite_ clearly remember the sheer anger and vitriol from MAMEdev (hell, it *predates* a formal MAMEdev - and Belmont was more pissed off than I've ever seen him, ever!) over a torrent of super-shady commercial use in less than a year's time, and people swearing that nobody would ever again use MAME code in a commercial product except over their dead bodies, etc., etc. Delighted that chapter is finally closed.

 

OrionB, sincere thanks for the information. Your nick looks familiar...I imagine we've crossed paths at some point in life. If such be the case, nice to 'see' you again!

 

Everyone else: He cleared it right up, that license change (referenced from here: http://mamedev.org/?p=422) was HUGE. Nothing to see here! =) [And today we all learn something...]

 

Rodney

Edited by Rodney Hester
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I personally think these look cool the height thing don't bother me much still might be the answer for someone's man cave that a full sized cabinet just is not feasible. I'd love to get one waiting to hear more reviews and to see what else will come out. I may get one in the future but if I can only get one I'd hate to get it then see an other one I'd want more to come out. I do think there is a market for this.

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Given how much money local hucksters or even some legit businesses who happen to push them too get for those barcade, barrelcade, faux arcade multicade systems and how well they're scooped up around the $1000 mark or worse, there has to be a pretty solid market for something this size. Sure they may not be some 20 or 60in1 type sketchy device people overpay for, but this has a good size to it and has 4 solid licensed titles that are fan favorites vs the other 20+ in ones which are a lot of filler plus a few gems. $300 vs $1000 is kind of an easier sell.

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Given how much money local hucksters or even some legit businesses who happen to push them too get for those barcade, barrelcade, faux arcade multicade systems and how well they're scooped up around the $1000 mark or worse, there has to be a pretty solid market for something this size. Sure they may not be some 20 or 60in1 type sketchy device people overpay for, but this has a good size to it and has 4 solid licensed titles that are fan favorites vs the other 20+ in ones which are a lot of filler plus a few gems. $300 vs $1000 is kind of an easier sell.

There is a brew pub close to me that has free to play arcade games set up I could see these being Used like that as a cheap alternative to the pricey 60 In one units.
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