Classic videogamers

[wesman6960]

Hey for all of you who love playing old video games you might be interested in this amazing emulator!


RetroCopy


Accurate and fun


RetroCopy emulates home consoles and arcade systems so that you can play the games made for those different machines on your PC. RetroCopy simulates hardware extremely accurately which ensures that these classic games are represented exactly like they were on the real systems.


Rewriting history


Reliving old memories isn't just about playing the games. Many of our fond memories revolve around looking at the game covers, reading reviews and talking to our friends about games. RetroCopy lets you do all this so you can go down history lane in style.


Bloat free and 100% custom


Designed in optimized C++ and featuring a custom user interface, custom 3D graphics engine, custom 3D sound engine and cycle accurate emulator cores means RetroCopy does things in a different way than anything else.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/U32JdpNsFOw?feature=oembed

Virtual Game Room


With RetroCopy you can design your own virtual game room, place virtual TV sets and then PLAY games or movies in your virtual room. It's Sims 3 for videogame lovers. Using a custom OpenGL 3D engine, your game room comes alive with shadows, per pixel lighting and screen projection.


Not just an emulator


RetroCopy also lets you play video files utilizing it's advanced video and audio engine that ensures CPU usage stays low! Supports all popular formats and codecs (AVI, MPEG, FLV, MP4, HD video, etc)

 

[maplesugarlover]

Looking at there website, it looks like this is proprietary and only for windows.

 

[Caine]

100% bloat free? Yeah right. I would consider the virtual game room bloat.


Basically an awkward, proprietary windows-only front-end for a limited number of systems. I'm not impressed at all.

Don't forget retrocopy is the most accurate arcade emulator on earth

A bold claim. Any data to back this up?

 

[TrashyMG]

It's a novel idea, building your own virtual arcade room, it's almost a game in itself. For me I just want to play the games and fine a standard boring looking front end.

 

[wesman6960]

100% bloat free? Yeah right. I would consider the virtual game room bloat.


Basically an awkward, proprietary windows-only front-end for a limited number of systems. I'm not impressed at all.


A bold claim. Any data to back this up?

you do not have to use the virtual game room at all if you dont want, you can use it as just a basic emulator.


It might only have limited number of systems but hes only one guy and hes going to get to other systems, as of right now hes working on NEO GEO. Its still way in development and you need to give him some time. Eventually he plans on having it so you can play online


as for the emulator:


Cycle accurate Sega Master System emulator


Cycle accurate Sega Game Gear emulator


Cycle accurate Sega System E arcade emulator


Cycle accurate Nintendo N.E.S. emulator


if you want more details about the accuracy ask him himself, he will explain to you!


his username on retrocopy is retroralph


retro copy features

Looking at there website, it looks like this is proprietary and only for windows.

He plans on having a version for linux out soon, not sure when though

 

[wesman6960]

It's a novel idea, building your own virtual arcade room, it's almost a game in itself. For me I just want to play the games and fine a standard boring looking front end.

As I mentioned before you dont even have to use the virtual room

 

[Caine]

you do not have to use the virtual game room at all if you dont want, you can use it as just a basic emulator.

Ah, good. That makes it more interesting for me. No reason to organize stuff in 3D when we have much more effective ways of tackling this in 2D (lists, categories, filters, etc..)

He plans on having a version for linux out soon, not sure when though

Ah good. That's nice to hear.


So, it's basically the same idea as M.E.S.S., right?


Well, I do applaud his effort to provide a "universal emulator experience" for the lack of a better term.

 

[maplesugarlover]

If it's closed software, why did you post it on these boards?Mednafen ,mame and mess are open source.(Mednafen is gpl and mess+Mame are bsd with a non commercial clause)

 

[wesman6960]

If it's closed software, why did you post it on these boards?Mednafen ,mame and mess are open source.(Mednafen is gpl and mess+Mame are bsd with a non commercial clause)

Well retrocopy is geared more towards being user friendly and more eye candy whereas mess and mame you have to choose directories and other tedious things but when it comes to organizing roms into categories mess would probably be the better choice.

 

[maplesugarlover]

Does retro copy cost money? I have headaches from watching his stupid blurry interlaced filters.

 

[TrashyMG]

If it's closed software, why did you post it on these boards?Mednafen ,mame and mess are open source.(Mednafen is gpl and mess+Mame are bsd with a non commercial clause)

It's the off-topic section, people can post whatever they want to.

 

[wesman6960]

Does retro copy cost money? I have headaches from watching his stupid blurry interlaced filters.

nope all free! yeah in my opinion the filters are pointless but there could be someone who might like them?


here is simpler video of running sega genesis, its an older video but it still gives you an idea on what it looks like. Oh and in case anyone gets in confusion when your in the 3D room you can play the game as if your in the room but you can also make it full screen as well

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hweeucXqPvY?feature=oembed

 

[wesman6960]

also here is the reasoning of why retrocopy is not open source


"Well people have this idea that anything that looks good is a "front end" and the actual emulators are some command line program running in the background. This is likely because you have Visual Basic or C# programmers concentrating solely on making these GUIs that run other emulators like MAME. As such people may think RetroCopy is only a front end and should run all the emulators that other front ends do. They fail to realize that the emulation of nearly every system RetroCopy covers is as accurate as you can get in the world right now.


HyperSpin for instance looks great and is a pretty decent front end for a lot of emulators, but you look at how large it is. That is what most people consider bloat, things that take more resources than perhaps they should.


As to open source, it's just one of those things a few coders and zealots complain about. 99.99% of users can't do anything with the source, it doesn't even make entertaining reading. There are multiple components in RetroCopy that by themselves could sell for significant amounts of money, and the problem is in the past people have taken my open source work (non RC related) and made significant amounts of money from it. Once the MAC/LINUX ports out, being "open source" becomes less relevant. You look at how much development has gone on within RetroCopy and it is beating pretty much every open source emulator there besides MAME and MESS which have high number of people working on it."


-retroralph (creator of retrocopy)

 

[maplesugarlover]

open source is better because it gives the user freedom. Even if you don't use it (You might not code but you benefit from all of the open source software on the Pandora). Also open source software can be forked if the project dies or you disagree with the developer(Red eclipse was created because the blood frontier game died, Libre office was created because people disagreed with oracle).

 

[Prometheus]

I'm afraid I can't try out this software at all, since it's not available for any OS that I use. Things like MAME, MESS, Snes9x, BSNES, FCEU, VisualBoyAdvance, Gens, and so on, are, though, and I've not come across any bloat with these.

Once the MAC/LINUX ports out, being "open source" becomes less relevant.

But what about is a user wants to use it on things that don't use the Intel x86 architecture? Like, for example, PowerPC Macintoshes, or the Pandora?

 

[wesman6960]

But what about is a user wants to use it on things that don't use the Intel x86 architecture? Like, for example, PowerPC Macintoshes, or the Pandora?

Unfortunately it cannot run on the pandora because the pandora would not be powerful enough because the main goal of retrocopy is emulation accuracy and requires a powerful computer that a handheld could not offer. As technology moves forward and computers become smaller maybe eventually retrocopy could run on the next pandora! :lol: but as of right now he only has it for windows and according to their facebook the linux version will probably be released in about a week after the next version of retrocopy (v0.911)

 

[maplesugarlover]

Since mame is source available, there are handheld ports that run faster on systems like the pandora

 

[Caine]

"Well people have this idea that anything that looks good is a "front end" and the actual emulators are some command line program running in the background. This is likely because you have Visual Basic or C# programmers concentrating solely on making these GUIs that run other emulators like MAME. As such people may think RetroCopy is only a front end and should run all the emulators that other front ends do. They fail to realize that the emulation of nearly every system RetroCopy covers is as accurate as you can get in the world right now.

There are perfectly valid reason to separate front-end and emulator (even in a combined package). Taste differs, not every front-end is for everyone (RetroCopy shows this). I don't care how the author describes it, it is a combination of a set of emulators and a front-end into a single program. Having emulators in separate processes greatly increases their composability. Modularity is a good thing!


So it's not a front-end. I would argue it should be.

As to open source, it's just one of those things a few coders and zealots complain about. 99.99% of users can't do anything with the source, it doesn't even make entertaining reading.

And the remaining 0.01% port applications to our precious Pandora handheld. There is a lot of closed source out there which we would like to have on the Pandora but cannot just because it requires a recompile which its authors refuse to do it.

Once the MAC/LINUX ports out, being "open source" becomes less relevant.

Again, not true. Hardware platforms matter as well (x86 vs arm)

You look at how much development has gone on within RetroCopy and it is beating pretty much every open source emulator there besides MAME and MESS which have high number of people working on it."

Great for him, but despite this, we cannot run it. So the point is irrelevant.

Unfortunately it cannot run on the pandora because the pandora would not be powerful enough because the main goal of retrocopy is emulation accuracy and requires a powerful computer that a handheld could not offer.

He wrote his NES emulator so inefficient that it cannot run on the Pandora :blink: What a joke. Great for claiming the highest accuracy (I still haven't seen any proof of this), but other emulators are more than accurate enough and seem to run quite a bit better if this statement of yours is actually true.

 

[second exodous]

this reminds me of something some OEMs used to do with windows. Packard bell had a front end for windows, kinda hard to explain, I'll have to find a link to it.

 

[TrashyMG]

this reminds me of something some OEMs used to do with windows. Packard bell had a front end for windows, kinda hard to explain, I'll have to find a link to it.

I have an old Tandy Sensation (486) that had a really fancy Interface that ran on top of Windows 3.1 (for it's time). It was one of the first Multimedia PCs on the market and it really showed off what the technology could do.