Retro Gaming Australia

SCUMMVM, the emulator dedicated to keeping the many fantastic LucasArts adventure games playable for future generations, is available on pretty much every system around.

Thanks to the efforts of programmer Jukka Jylänki, SCUMMVM is now also playable in your HTML5 enabled browser.

To stay on the right side of the law, the version up on the site only enables you to play the demo versions of games such as Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road and The Secret of Monkey Island, to name a few.

I was once an achievement whore which is why the announcement that RetroAchievements.org will be bringing modern achievement systems to classic consoles is a rather enticing bit of news.

How is this possible? RetroAchievements have produced a modified version of the Gens Mega Drive/Genesis emulator which supports achievements for a select list of games. It’ll connect to a profile you create on their website, which will track your achievements and high scores with other users.

Of course, achievement support is limited to a select list of games while the system and emulator undergo further testing. The list of currently supported games includes The Addams Family, Aero The Acrobat 2, Alex Kidd In The Enchanted Castle, Alien 3, Aladdin, Altered Beast, Batman Returns, Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, Chakan: The Forever Man, Cool Spot, Desert Strike: Return To The Gulf, Earthworm Jim, Ecco The Dolphin, Fantastic Dizzy, Ghostbusters, Golden Axe, Gunstar Heroes, James Pond II: Codename Robocod, Castle Of Illusion, Mighty Mighty Missile, NHLPA Hockey ’93, New Zealand Story, Sonic Spinball, Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Sonic The Hedgehog 3, Streets Of Rage 2, Super Hang-On, ToeJam & Earl, Vectorman and Zero Tolerance. More games are being added daily.

Their next planned project is a plugin for Project 64, the popular Nintendo 64 emulator, which will add similar functionality.

The Konix Multisystem was an ambitious British made console originally intended to go on sale in 1989, but never eventuated following years of delays and the death of its parent company. The 16-bit 8086 driven system essentially acted as a dashboard with a variety of peripherals (steering wheels, joysticks etc.) available. Unfortunately the combination of the company’s ambition to use floppy disks and media combined with the system’s low RAM doomed it in the eyes of most developers.

For many years, the only way you get could a taste for what the system was like was through some old VHS footage of the games. However now through the hard work of a programmer called Savoury Snax, Phil Bennett, Slipstream – the Konix Multisystem archive and legendary British programmer Jeff Minter, a Konix Multisystem emulator is now available.

Currently Slipstream has source code for two games: Robocod and Attack of the Mutant Camels 1989. Although the games are from different eras of the Konix Multisystem hardware (as it changed a lot in development), the fact that they are playable at all is simply amazing.

Via RetroCollect

Angry Birds is basically everywhere you look nowadays, and it has even made its way to the Sega Mega Drive – well, on an emulator anyway.

The fan demake, created by a Chinese developer going by the screen name zhengyaxin_8bit, gives the super popular Angry Birds a 16-bit makeover, and overcomes the lack of a touch based control scheme with a simple press and drag on the keyboard instead.

You can download the ROM for Angry Birds on Sega Mega Drive here – it is free and available now.

Source: Retro Collect

ArsTechnia has posted an article written by bsnes developer Byuu, explaining his justifications for chasing accuracy in emulation over system compatibility and resource efficiency.

The article provides an interesting insight into what’s required to get a SNES emulator to be more accurate, and the challenges you face in improving the quality of emulation. He also discusses why past emulators did things the way they did, and why he doesn’t agree with that methodology.

Regardless of where you stand on Byuu’s position, you have to consider this to be a key point in his argument, if not the most important one:

You have to realize that emulators, too, have shelf-lives. That’s especially true for ones such as ZSNES that are written in pure x86 assembly. You simply can’t run this on your cell phone. By locking a hack to run only on ZSNES, you are dooming your hack to irrelevance. As soon as Windows drops 32-bit backwards compatibility, just as it has already done with 16-bit backwards compatibility, these fan translations and hacks will be lost forever. At that point the emulator itself becomes almost like another dead console, instead of a way to keep the old games alive.

With preservation becoming a major issue in the video game industry, Byuu’s approach may end up being vindicated after all.