Comments on: Comments on 17111

Post number 17111

patrickje — Mon, 13 May 2002 17:10:47 -0800

Interested in video game emulators? Yearning for the games of yesteryear? There is probably an emulator for any 'classic' game that you could wish to play. General arcade emulators, SNES, NES, Genesis, Atari 2600, et al. For the truly curious, listen to the story of the emulator that almost was, Silhouette, the emulator Nintendo almost released.

By: herc

herc — Mon, 13 May 2002 17:26:08 -0800

Ahh, the biggest curse of Mac OS X – it's inability to emulate Jurassic technology. The chance to play "Techmo Bowl"may be reason enough to switch over to the Windows side of the world!

By: eyeballkid

eyeballkid — Mon, 13 May 2002 17:32:20 -0800

A little while ago Mame.dk, the best resource for MAME roms that I knew of, stopped allowing downloads because they got a notice from a copyright holder. Does anyone know a good MAME rom site?

By: mark13

mark13 — Mon, 13 May 2002 17:35:58 -0800

All hail the self contained vector graphic goodness of the Vectrex!

By: patrickje

patrickje — Mon, 13 May 2002 17:43:53 -0800

I don't know, finding ROMs is like snipe hunting, by the time you find a site it's not there anymore. Honestly, the best answer is probably IRC or the alt.binaries.emulators.* newsgroups. I've had MAME forever, I just recently got ZSNES, now Super Punchout, and Super Mario World are mine again.

By: holloway

holloway — Mon, 13 May 2002 17:45:25 -0800

I place a bounty of $50(NZ) on the emulator that can run Exile (the Amiga port) without mangled graphics and frames. Back to the Roots, an A500 archive site, has Nebulus, Carrier Command, D-Generation, First Samurai... yes, much spooge be had.

By: fuq

fuq — Mon, 13 May 2002 17:48:08 -0800

Bah! I play classic games using the massive gray box currently plugged into my TV with a real controller. Anything else would be heresy.

By: darukaru

darukaru — Mon, 13 May 2002 18:06:27 -0800

I hate to burst your bubble, but the Silhouette project was basically just a release of SNES97 after the project was shut down, but before it became SNES9x... I've played it and the interfaces were almost identical. You'll note that story gives absolutely no explanation of why Nintendo would develop an emulator for the Mac, when no one but the graphic design department used them... It was the best SNES emulator for the Mac until the SNES9x project was reborn, though. eyeballkid: get a commercial Usenet account, one with good binary group retention.

By: toddshot

toddshot — Mon, 13 May 2002 18:07:15 -0800

Ahh, the biggest curse of Mac OS X – it's inability to emulate Jurassic technology. Oh, really now?

By: tweebiscuit

tweebiscuit — Mon, 13 May 2002 18:13:36 -0800

The Silhouette story was great -- however, I no longer consider pirating SNES games to really be "pirating" -- they're beyond abandonware, in that there isn't even a possibility of them being sold anymore. Does Nintendo really care that I want to play Ice Climbers? In my opinion, Nintendo (and Sega, etc.) should release official ROMs of whatever games they still hold the copyright to and charge about $2 each for them. Sure, it wouldn't make a lot of money, but the overhead would be so low, why not? They could even let us use freeware emulators... ZSNES in particular is nearly flawless at this point.

By: noisemartyr

noisemartyr — Mon, 13 May 2002 18:30:03 -0800

http://www.emulation.net An invaluable resource for Macs.

By: darukaru

darukaru — Mon, 13 May 2002 18:43:00 -0800

Does Nintendo really care that I want to play Ice Climbers? Considering they're now releasing GameCube games which include entire NES games (including Ice Climbers) in them as bonuses, they just might. (sorry that the link's to Google cache, but the GIA recently shut down, and their successor site hasn't imported the old content yet.)

By: ParisParamus

ParisParamus — Mon, 13 May 2002 18:43:11 -0800

I want to play the original Robocop (NES) on my Mac. Is this possible?

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Mon, 13 May 2002 18:51:04 -0800

I no longer have any game that I want *so much* that I feel the need to use an emulator. I'm much more interested in seeing what outdated stuff I can find locally in old stores and secondhand places. Although I do enjoy particularly surreal emulation projects like MAME for the Dreamcast. Then there was a NES emulator for the Gameboy that I ran on a Windows Palm emulator using a copy of Liberty. Personally, I believe emulation is much more interesting and useful when used for stuff like libraries/archives or mission critical software that's lasted longer than the hardware it was designed for. Using it for "free games" just seems so tacky.

By: patrickje

patrickje — Mon, 13 May 2002 19:08:35 -0800

krisjohn: I would play the games on the original systems, if it weren't for the logistics. I own a NES,SNES,Sega Master System, Sega Genesis/CD/32,Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, and Sony Playstation. Only the Dreamcast (sweet, sweet Jet Grind Radio), and Playstation are hooked up. The sheer amount of cables and space I would have to dedicate to hook all these machines up is ridiculous. Mission critical?, some nights knocking out Gabby Jay is mission critical.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 13 May 2002 19:37:21 -0800

God Bless Nesticle, is what I'm compelled to say. I'm absolutely thrilled that (emulator bugs aside) I can actually play on my computer just about every NES game that's been made. (And I don't mean that in the hypothetical sense, either; God Bless College Networks, too.) And I agree pretty heartily with the abandonware sentiment/rationalization. Not only are these games out of print and in some cases very difficult to find, but there's no warranty for decade-old consoles even if you CAN find what you're looking for. Emulation gives these old games a new lease on life. (Having a hefty ROM archive was also a shock-absorber when I found out that my parents had sold all of my NES stuff -- 30+ games, several accesories [remember the U-Force?] -- for Forty. Fucking. Dollars. at a garage sale.)

By: darukaru

darukaru — Mon, 13 May 2002 20:33:54 -0800

I want to play the original Robocop (NES) on my Mac. Is this possible? Yes. Use RockNES.

By: clango

clango — Mon, 13 May 2002 20:47:16 -0800

you better *believe* my boy OS X can emulate!

By: ParisParamus

ParisParamus — Mon, 13 May 2002 20:59:12 -0800

darkuru: looks like non OSX Mac people are out of luck with that. Such as me...

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Mon, 13 May 2002 21:09:28 -0800

patrickje: I have hooked up; DC, N64, MegaDrive/CD/32X, NES, 2600, Colecovision and a PC. Not hooked up are; PSX, SNES, SMS, 7800, Atari XEGS, Amiga 500 and C64. Cables aren't that bad now that they're not all hooked up to the same TV. I've got the PC and DC on a 21" VGA, NES and Coleco on a little old TV and the rest on a 68cm TV. Pelican make a great S-Video switching box. I think I've just worked out how I'm going to setup the PSX, SNES and, ooo, XEGS. Bless Commodore's 1084 monitor series...

By: atom128

atom128 — Mon, 13 May 2002 21:26:36 -0800

paris - install the carbonlib for mac os 8-9 and you can run snes9x in classic.

By: Mach3avelli

Mach3avelli — Mon, 13 May 2002 21:34:34 -0800

It's ALLLLLL about River City Ransom.

By: ParisParamus

ParisParamus — Mon, 13 May 2002 21:36:47 -0800

ok. where do I find robocop?

By: Down10

Down10 — Mon, 13 May 2002 23:39:23 -0800

NE1 got ROMZ???

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 13 May 2002 23:45:24 -0800

age/sex/favoritePartyInFinalFantasy

By: krisjohn

krisjohn — Tue, 14 May 2002 00:06:45 -0800

(Forgot my Saturn...)

By: NortonDC

NortonDC — Tue, 14 May 2002 06:17:38 -0800

The Saturn has the last decent gun game, Virtua Cop. Everything since has been an excercise in sucking wind. For American releases, anyway. Sega never released their first-party light gun for the DC in America, and all the third-party guns were worthless crap. bah!

By: lotsofno

lotsofno — Tue, 14 May 2002 08:21:29 -0800

it really IS all about river city ransom. all thsoe other games you guys are talking about were just supporting characters..

By: darukaru

darukaru — Tue, 14 May 2002 09:49:37 -0800

age/sex/favoritePartyInFinalFantasy 23/m/Black Mage Black Mage Black Mage Black Mage

By: das_2099

das_2099 — Tue, 14 May 2002 11:12:26 -0800

darukaru-- you absolutely rock.

By: darukaru

darukaru — Tue, 14 May 2002 14:52:28 -0800

I didn't say I could win with them. Just that they were my favorite. ;)

By: Mossy

Mossy — Tue, 14 May 2002 17:14:42 -0800

My mommy only lets me hook up one console at a time.. Need to escape to uni again.. PS2 wins out over the oldies like the sms, nes and snes.. Although it now has a sms emulator. Kick off once more, yay.. Tetris on my Palm Vx is far superior to on my gameboy - larger screen, and light on the pocket. Oh, and funky backlighting. Sega should release their old games on the Gamecube - we've seen 3D sonic, why not sonic 1-3? Hell, Atari and Namco release their oldies all the time. And Square should release Final Fantasy 1 - 6 for the PS2 without the bleeding load times that were in the PSX versions of 4, 5 and 6. Where emulation fails, there is, of course, always EBay - SNES for a tenner, hurrah..

By: RevGreg

RevGreg — Tue, 14 May 2002 17:54:23 -0800

Ahh, the biggest curse of Mac OS X – it's inability to emulate Jurassic technology. Whaddya mean! I am running Windows 2000 and Windows XP under OS X without a problem! ;-p