The future of arcade emulation

[zugu]

Hello everyone,

 

 

I've been following the progress of arcade emulation in the past 3 years and lots of good things happened. CPS3 has been emulated, NAOMI emulation is making huge progress at the moment and so on. However, it's clear that there's an industry shift towards PC based architectures and commodity hardware for arcade boards. In the last decade, most commercial game consoles had arcade counterparts (Sega Dreamcast - NAOMI, Microsoft Xbox - Chihiro etc.). Now we also have custom PCs used as arcade boards (Taito Type X, X+, X2, Sega Lindbergh, Europa-R, Ringedge etc.)

 

PC-based boards are much, much more cheaper - standard hardware (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) and development tools (DirectX, anyone?), easy porting, seamless hardware upgrades and countless other advantages. I do believe Sega, Taito and other arcade manufacturers will eventually completely switch to custom PCs.

 

When the emulator developers will eventually tackle these PC-based arcade boards, how will they proceed? As far as I can think, there are two alternatives.

 

1. Emulate the whole stack: PC BIOS, standard PC hardware, operating system, custom proprietary hardware. Basically a virtual machine, like Virtualbox or VMware, only slightly customized in order to emulate specific hardware used in the arcade board. PC hardware is well understood, anyone can download and use free virtual machine software, so it's a problem of cracking the protections and tweaking the VM. (3d support in VM software is currently at the experimental stage, but it will eventually get much better, to the point of cherry-picking the video hardware to emulate). Purists, like MAME, will probably want to follow this path and create a driver for the whole thing. Of course, the downside is long development time, hardware beasts needed to emulate recent Intel processors and powerful graphic cards etc.

 

2. Just crack the protections and implement some compatibility layer, so that the games will run on today's computers. Recent Windows operating systems are backwards compatible, so technically there's no reason these arcade games won't run on your Windows XP/Vista/7 box, except for the protections implemented by the manufacturer (i.e. USB security dongle and custom proprietary I/O board in the case of Taito Type X). Crack the protections and free the games! If this is achieved, everyone with a decent computer will be able to play the games at decent framerates. Yet, this is not emulation.

 

Maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I do believe this is a legitimate question, after all. As far as the emulation scene is concerned, are PC-based arcade boards a blessing or a curse? Will they make things easier or the opposite?

Edited February 18, 2010 by zugu

[Robert]

Ummm... welcome back!

[zugu]

Ummm... welcome back!

Yes, I know, my account is quite old

[MasterPhW]

A nice theory you have there.

I think most emulator authos will prefer the first method, because the second one is more a cracker style of working with things than a proper emulation/reverse engeneering stlye. I would always prefer to try to emulate the whole hardware with all the problems, the proper bios emulatioin and all its little problems.

That's why SCUMM uses a VM design aswell instead of some cracks to made it compatible on actual hardware.

[Agozer]

I would personally like to see some kind of a breakthrough of the second variety. Then again, I don't really have a problem if people just VM the whole shebang.

[GayLorDiuS]

I also thought about the second point a year ago or so when I read about Sega Lindbergh on Wikipedia. It's based on normal PC Hardware and has Linux, but I think the Protection is very very good.

 

But it could also destroy the Arcades so the developers won't develop any new Arcade Games

[zugu]

Fresh news, everyone!

 

It would seem some game called "BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger", running on Type X2 hardware has been cracked. At the moment, I don't really know whether the whole Type X2 security framework has been cracked, or just this one game.

 

I wonder what consequences will this have.

[Agozer]

It's not just 'some game'. What's been cracked is actually an arcade-only addon for BlazBlue named Continuum Shift. Sure, this applies to BlazBLue in general as well, though.

[James]

Blazblue is not emulated though, so it is more or less warez....

[zugu]

Blazblue is not emulated though, so it is more or less warez....

Of course it's not emulated, it's cracked. 'Emulation' will be the term to use 10 years from now, when general purpose PCs will be able to run the Type X2 configuration in software and when the MAME guys will have written and incorporated the Type X2 driver in their emulator.

 

I still don't know what the current situation is. Has the whole platform been cracked, or this just one game (OK, expansion)? The web is not very helpful to me: most of the news article talk about this one incident. Interestingly, someone on another forum said unencrypted bootlegs of Taito Type X2 games have been floating around some USA-based arcades for quite some time. Now I'm really confused.