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Difficult-to-emulate Systems


PixelCrunch

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Hey, AtariAge. It's me, PixelCrunch. Yes, I'm alive.

 

I want to know what gaming, computer, and Arcade systems that are so hard-to-emulate, so asinine with their hardware designs and choices, that it seems almost impossible to emulate on modern hardware. I'll accept anything made before the year 2000. And when I get enough answers, I'll make a poll. Reply soon!

 

-PixelCrunch

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A poll about what?

 

I shouldn't say never but Monaco GP (1979) might never be emulated.  Same goes for Heavyweight Champ (1976).

 

With arcade games, another question is what control panels are hard to emulate.  Lunar Lander, Fire Truck, Tron, Discs of Tron come to mind.  The intellivision controller is also hard to emulate.

Edited by mr_me
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41 minutes ago, mr_me said:

A poll about what?

 

I shouldn't say never but Monaco GP (1979) might never be emulated.  Same goes for Heavyweight Champ (1976).

 

With arcade games, another question is what control panels are hard to emulate.  Lunar Lander, Fire Truck, Tron, Discs of Tron come to mind.  The intellivision controller is also hard to emulate.

A poll about the most difficult-to-emulate systems of all time. In personal opinion, of course. And I'm not talking about the controllers and emulation, i'm talking about difficult-to-emulate games Systems and video-games. (Battletoads, anyone?)

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4 hours ago, PixelCrunch said:

A poll about the most difficult-to-emulate systems of all time. In personal opinion, of course. And I'm not talking about the controllers and emulation, i'm talking about difficult-to-emulate games Systems and video-games. (Battletoads, anyone?)

I keep hearing that the CD-i is difficult to emulate... not sure if that's still true, though.

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12 hours ago, PixelCrunch said:

Hey, AtariAge. It's me, PixelCrunch. Yes, I'm alive.

 

I want to know what gaming, computer, and Arcade systems that are so hard-to-emulate, so asinine with their hardware designs and choices, that it seems almost impossible to emulate on modern hardware. I'll accept anything made before the year 2000. And when I get enough answers, I'll make a poll. Reply soon!

 

-PixelCrunch

Coleco Telstar Arcade - mosfet based programming

I'd have included the Probe 2000 Pink Panther game for the 2600, but someone pulled off that miracle by downloading it to a save key, say what.

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I suppose any system with peculiar controls. Many arcade machines would prove difficult to emulate since they have specialized controls that are most suitable for each game.

The rest depends on what game, personally. You wouldn't be able to emulate any type of light gun, peculiar controllers such as the Intellivision controller, and perhaps some analog controllers. Perhaps some Pong clone consoles with weird analog inputs. But personally, my vote goes to the Coleco Telstar Arcade.

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1 hour ago, zetastrike said:

I know Primal Rage is not properly emulated in MAME due to some proprietary anti-piracy hardware on the board.

Cases like Primal Rage are accepted, too. And to clear up some confusion, Asaki, i'm talking about system hardware and video games that are hard-to-emulate due to...

 

1. Being on complex or advanced hardware (Post-2000's Arcade)

 

2. Being on a computer system or game console No-one cares about. (Epoch Super Cassette Vision, Mindset Computer ect.)

 

3. Having stupid amounts of D.R.M and Anti-Piracy measures (Primal Rage, Spyro The Dragon 3, EarthBound, Puggsy, ect. The List goes on and on!)

 

4. Relying on "Support Chips" which boost the specs of the system said game is running on. (Going back to Battletoads, did you know it uses a proprietary AO-ROM chip?)

 

5. Being programmed in such a way that getting them to even run is a pain. (Surprisingly, Super Mario Bros. is considered one of the HARDEST games to emulate and run on an Emulator, for a giant list of reasons.)

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On 10/9/2020 at 4:32 PM, zetastrike said:

I know Primal Rage is not properly emulated in MAME due to some proprietary anti-piracy hardware on the board.

 

This game was also included in the Midway Arcade Treasures 2 collection for the PS 2. Does that version have the same limitations?

 

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On 10/9/2020 at 7:22 PM, PixelCrunch said:

Cases like Primal Rage are accepted, too. And to clear up some confusion, Asaki, i'm talking about system hardware and video games that are hard-to-emulate due to...

 

1. Being on complex or advanced hardware (Post-2000's Arcade)[/quote]

 

For the most part, that's usually a case of waiting for a) available computing power to reach the point where the emulated machine is usable, and b) any encryption the emulated machine may employ is either broken, trojaned, reverse engineered, simulated, etc.  There are any number of machines emulated in MAME that are implemented and believed to be working, but that have such heavy demands on the host that they can't run at anything approaching a usable speed.

 

Common wisdom once held that the arcade version of Galaga was too complex to emulate.  It also held that CPS-1 and CPS-2 encryption would never allow the games to be accurately playable due to the way that Capcom's protection was being bypassed.  Looking back, it's understandable why people believed these ideas to be accurate, but throw the right amount of time, monkeys, and typewriters at the problem and you'll get a machine that works under emulation.

 

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2. Being on a computer system or game console No-one cares about. (Epoch Super Cassette Vision, Mindset Computer ect.)

 

MAME has a Super Cassette Vision driver; ditto Mindset.  I realise those are just examples, but they're ones that I feel point out why it's dangerous to assume that people aren't interested in emulating <insert platform here>.  The interest can be there, but if the time, desire to see it through, and ability to combine those three things into something useful aren't all there simultaneously, the likelihood of it happening is low.

 

Quote

 

3. Having stupid amounts of D.R.M and Anti-Piracy measures (Primal Rage, Spyro The Dragon 3, EarthBound, Puggsy, ect. The List goes on and on!)

 

Again, give it enough time and those will be worked out.  Even the Atari 7800 was considered unemulatable at one point - then the disks with the ST software needed to sign native 7800 code so that the 7800 would run it were found.  Things change, just not necessarily quickly.

 

Quote

 

4. Relying on "Support Chips" which boost the specs of the system said game is running on. (Going back to Battletoads, did you know it uses a proprietary AO-ROM chip?)

 

Good point.  Lack of available documentation for proprietary ICs will always be a complete PITA, unless you're going the decapping route.  That's not to say that decapping is easy (it's really more of a last resort than anything else), but that it and / or X-Rays may be your only choice(s) in cases like this.

 

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5. Being programmed in such a way that getting them to even run is a pain. (Surprisingly, Super Mario Bros. is considered one of the HARDEST games to emulate and run on an Emulator, for a giant list of reasons.)

 

Not much can be done about that other than swearing at the original programmer(s).

Edited by x=usr(1536)
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I'd add three categories to the list above: TTL&analog based systems, games centered entirely around a unique ASIC, and ones that rare and/or expensive have yet to be dumped.

 

TTL/analog systems (e.g PONG, Death Race, Monaco GP) have historically been difficult since MAME/MESS has been based around a system's CPU, which causes problems for CPUless systems. DICE managed to emulate several of these, but it was last updated in 2014. Thankfully a recent reworking of MAME means it can now emulate TTL games, the drivers just have to be written.

 

ASICs are in almost every system (e.g. graphics chips, sound chips, memory mapping chips) most are fairly well documented though. For the ones that aren't, they may have to be decapped (AY-3-86XX series, Color TV Games, Telstar Arcade) and reverse-engineered, which has only had recent progress. Other techniques include extensively probing the pins with a logic analyzer either alone or in the system (which is being used to further understanding of the SNES PPU chips), or reverse-engineering behavior based on disassembled dumps (which is being used on the undocumented XaviX ISA)

 

The last category is fairly self-explanatory, so keep your eyes out for prototypes.

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MAME team has been working years on Coleco Telstar Arcade, Hanimex HMG-7900, Epoch Cassette Vision (not Super Cassette Vision), Gakken TV Boy etc, but these are still cannot be emulated. these consoles has no CPU or something else, seems technical infos are so lacking. what about Atari Video Pinball C-380?

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6 hours ago, missumj said:

MAME team has been working years on Coleco Telstar Arcade, Hanimex HMG-7900, Epoch Cassette Vision (not Super Cassette Vision), Gakken TV Boy etc, but these are still cannot be emulated. these consoles has no CPU or something else, seems technical infos are so lacking. what about Atari Video Pinball C-380?

 

It's the same as with any other system: until people are willing to volunteer their time to do whatever work is necessary to implement a driver, it's not going to happen.  Note the emphasis on the world 'volunteer': nobody is paid for their contributions to MAME, so things get added as people feel the urge to work on them.

 

Looking at two of the systems on your list (Coleco Telstar Arcade and Atari Video Pinball), both of those use custom microcontrollers to handle game logic in addition to discrete components, IIRC.  This adds a twist to emulation, because microcontrollers can be a real bastard to dump and / or emulate.  I won't go into all of the details - frankly, there are people who are better-suited than I am to explain this - but will suggest taking a look at this article to get a feel for what can be involved in dumping MCUs.

 

The Gakken TV Boy and Epoch Cassette Vision are special cases: each cartridge contains not only its own ROM, but also its own CPU and RAM.  The consoles essentially just act as video output devices for the cartridges, each of which may require emulation as a separate machine.

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