Retrocade Lives! Holy Shit! Anyone Remember Mid-90S Emulation?


skeezix

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Few of you will go back this far in emulation history ;) Before MAME there were a few hackers making individual game emulators (in fact, I was the very first guy to post a emulator for Unix (BSD, Solaris, Linux) way back in what, like 1996 or something, I'd have to go figure out the date.) A few peopel had brillint works like Neil Bradley who was the first to do Atari vector emulation. (Console emulators were a coupe eyars earlier, but Arcade was pretty new when I got started.) Anyway, a bunch of us got together and started Retrocade, just before MAME came around. For awhile, my own XCade had various public and private builds and I was racing with Nicola who started MAME, and Xcade had more games emulated .. for the first 6mo anyway, then MAME exploded and wiped every emu right off the map.

So Retrocade was king for awhile. Around 1998 I was pretty involved, but around 99 I was getting married and less involved, and msot development stopped around 2000. In 2002 and 2005 Neil Bradley was still hacking around on it, porting it to WinCE and later to some form of SDL, but it probably never went public.

I've got various code snapshots through those years, but much was lost.

For shits and giggles, I started futzing with one of my last known working builds, somewhere from 1998. IT is not anywhere near as advanced as its later builds were, but still pretty hot shit at the time.

Its a PITA to build nowadays as a lot has changed over time; its also interesting that the code had all sorts of time-locks in to expire it from beta use and such, since we wanted people to keep moving to later builds etc when they were in the private test group, etc. We were trying to be all professional and cool, and its amusing to see.. the emu UI just screams "geeks in mid-90s".

Anyway, Retrocade is pretty good for your Pacman-era games (Tron, etc), bt doesn't go much further than those (didn't get too far into the 68k era, though we had a few under our belt.) So it won't compete with MAME, FBA etc, but what we have is a working emu, a snapshot in time from 1998, and it really was some cool shit. And it performs like a ninja, since we were balls out for performance .. full speed on Pentium 90s and crap :) (Well, that was with ASM everything; for this build I've gone back to pure-C versions of things and hacked it to work,.)

The sick-as-shit thing is I could probably build this for Wiz; most of it will work okay at 320x200, though it was designed for (ha!) 640x480 screens :)

Check out this random screenshot from the net, which is pretty accurate:
http://www.isomedia....images/gui1.jpg

Some dude wrote somethign about RC here, take a read:
http://www.isomedia....r/retrocade.htm

Man, this takes me _so_ back.

I wrote one of the first Pacman emus in fact (and Phoenix and Space Invaders), back when this was barely known stuff (it'd take a few hours nowadays, but back then I was spreading schematics all over my desk at college and figuring out this stuff, writing my own Z80 emu and such. I didn't know much electronics at the time..)

*sigh, good old days*

Anyway, anyone care? Anyone remember?

I should make this for Wiz and gp2x, it'd probably run pretty damned good :)

jeff

Low-light pic using iphone (Crappycam!) but what the hell :)
IMG_1011.JPG
 

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That was a pretty interesting read, skeezix. I don't remember, though, because I missed out on it. :p (My introduction to emulation happened in the late 90s, around the time of the big "free ISP boom" in the UK - if not for the fuss Sony made over bleem!, it's possible that I wouldn't have even heard of it at all. :lol: )

EDIT: I see what you mean about the UI. :lol: It kind of reminds me of some of the old shareware stuff that I tried out on a CD-ROM once, long ago, somehow. :p
 
Cool! I got into emulation about the time that Prometheus describes, so I didn't know about it. But it's fascinating to read about now. Thanks! :)
 
I never heard of Retrocade, but it looks pretty sweet. If you port it to Pandora, I'll definitely give it a try.
 
Interesting to learn more about where you came from as a programmer :) Pretty impressive!
 
I Vaguely remember it and may of played with it at some point, I was more into Console emulation back then.. ah Nesticle it was such a good emulator I didn't mind the Scrotum icon and such..
 
Hells yeah!

List of games suported here.

Sure, most (all?) are supported by MAME, but they will rock hard on Retrocade too!
 
wermy said:
Cool! I got into emulation about the time that Prometheus describes, so I didn't know about it. But it's fascinating to read about now. Thanks! :)

Do you see those LEDS on the pics. They look alot like the LEDs of the Pandora, don't they?
 
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Nesticle was so win :) and genecyst iirc :)

yeah got it working on the panda last night, with a lot of the games broken due to hastily chopped out asm etc.. Still, it runs a few dozen games perfectly now. Probably retrocade ran 200 games at it's peak. Mame would do them all nowadays of course but this might be of interest for old school sake and a slick UI :) at the time our goal was performance so ran 10x better than mame.. Could run this at full speed on 150mhz probably

happy Easter eveyone, time to go chill :)

jeffphone
 
Some douche still has the domain name.


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A good and very fast emulator emulator. The GUI intro was a little over the top but era-appropriate. :)

Those were the good-old-days . . .

Retrocade and the Retrobabe:

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i certainly do remember both Retrocade and xcade. when they appeared they took me back to places i hadn't been for so long. well since i first saw things like Ladybug, Moon Cresta, Marios Bros (i can still remember the smell of the local shop me and my friends used to play it in) and Ms Pacman back when they first came out.

Where i lived when those came out we were under international sanctions and electronic games were so expensive and arcade machines few and far between so we had to cycle miles to the nearest shop to play on the games listed (i was born in 1973 so a couple of miles in the early 80's was a long way on a BMX!). the arrival of xcade, retrocade (and everything that came after but to a much lower degree apart from speccy emu) has taken me back to a happy childhood where summers were hot and long, coke had pacman promotions under bottle lids and for that i am very grateful.

wow, i think even Dave's arcade classics site might have been going back when xcade and retrocade came out or at least had roms openly available before the companies caught on and everything went onto those stupid gateway paid by advertising sites, long before the torrents you young folk have now.

before i sound more of an old duffer than i actually am, i have to say i didnt know you had a hand in those Skeezix and thinking about the emu takes me back to happy times then just as playing them in the day took me back to happy days when i was a child. for this i will always be grateful
 
Somebody is going to 'shop the "retrobabe" with a Pandora in her hands.
 
skeezix said:
Few of you will go back this far in emulation history ;)

Hi Skeezix. I tripped over this message pretty much by accident and had to register with this board to reply. I am the author of the i86 core in Retrocade and added Pengo to the list of games. I couldn't get other games to work because there was a bug in my core that broke the gameplay. And sound didn't work because Neil's Z80 emulator wasn't happy living in the sound code.

Like you mentioned, it was smoking fast, cycle accurate, and was rivalled perhaps only by Sparcade at the time. Nothing had a GUI like it. I remember that Neil was totally obsessed by performance, and he squeezed every cycle he could out of his emulators. Perhaps this was to the project's detriment? The focus was so much on performance instead of getting regular releases out to people with nice new features. I think the latter would have helped sustain the momentum of the project and keep it alive.

Sadly, I got on to the Retrocade project just shortly before it died. A sad thing that it did die. I wonder if things would have been different if it was open source? I don't suppose there would be any way to do this now? I'd really enjoy digging into it again, but not if it couldn't get out there for a wider audience to participate in. Do you think there would be any possible way of doing this?

Edit: Oops. It was Q-Bert with the i86core.
 
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I recently discovered a complete Retrocade file set buried in my directory, which I probably downloaded in the year 2000.  I've been moving it from machine to machine without being aware.  It did not run in Windows 7 on my Inspiron laptop.  I know enough to try the Standard User Analyzer but got nowhere.  If anyone can give me tips on making Retrocade run in the current world I would appreciate it.
 
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