skeezix
Internal Development
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
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
