Month: May 2019

Arcade Nostalgia

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Arcade Nostalgia

This weekend was one of extended frustration, in part because I went down a rabbit hole that I still have yet to surface from.  One of these days I will go into my sordid past as it regards to console piracy, because there is a story in that worth telling.  However prior to that I was hooked on the concept of emulating all of these machines that I loved playing in the arcade on my PC and was involved with a good number of the early sites giving access to both emulators and roms.  It was a heady time where we had to play SNES titles with a significant frame skip to get them playable…  but it didn’t matter because we were playing Nintendo games on a PC.  I nearly lost my shit when I first encountered MAME, or the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator…  a project designed to emulate the specific chipsets of various arcade machines and make them similarly playable on the PC.

Arcade Nostalgia

The problem with MAME however is that there is a lot of development churn on the project and in its constant seeking for perfect emulation…  the game “ROMs” themselves are often changing formats as folks re-dump the EPROMs trying to get a slightly better copy than the one that existed before.  When I started messing with this back in the 90s the dumps we had access to were pretty much set in stone, and what changed from release to release as adding new supported titles.  Now however the packages fundamentally change functionally obsoleting the games you had previously “acquired”.  This sets up the reality that now the 0.209 ROM set is made up of 36,713 files taking up 555 gb of disk space…  and as such taking forever to download that is if you can even find a place to download.

Arcade Nostalgia

This madness I speak of…  I did this thing this weekend.  I found a location to grab the entire 0.209 ROM and CHD set…  and over the course of a night the roms trickled down as they account for only 66 gb of the total size.  The bulk of the space requirement are the CHD images or actual copies of the hard drives that were installed in the machines and used to pull audio and video from as the game played.  These were widely used in pretty much any cabinet newer than say Killer Instinct.  All of this was to be played with GameEx Evolution which is a slick looking front end for a bunch of different emulators.  The goal being able to create an experience that I could navigate with my fight stick and maybe eventually an in home custom arcade cabinet as that has been a long time dream of mine.  However like may technology projects… I spent the bulk of the weekend tracing down issues and didn’t actually spend much time playing anything.

The first major issue I encountered was the fact that after going through the hassle of acquiring the latest ROMs for MAME…  I find out that GameEx only seems to support an older version…   0.197 to be specific.  Which lead to a whole lot of scrambling to find another place that I could acquire that ROM set from.  While dealing with that I began setting up various other emulators and managed to get Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gameboy, Color Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and with some fiddling Turbografx-16 all working.  For whatever reason nothing that I did seemed to get Sega Genesis to the point of actually launching a game in spite of using RetroArch just like I was using with the other working titles.  There was some discussion on the GameEx forums of having to configure a second version of RetroArch to make it work…  but I didn’t dive into that abyss.  Saturn I could not get running at all, and I have not gotten around to trying to configure Sony Playstation 1 or 2.

Arcade Nostalgia

To add insult to injury…  when I finally got the correct rom set…  for whatever reason I still could not get MAME working through GameEx.  This lead me down a completely different rabbit hole last night of trying to just say screw it to GameEx Evolution entirely and use RetroArch as a front end given most of the sub emulators I am using are just libretro cores.  This is the point where I decided to let it scan my harddrive looking for roms…  and it legitimately took all night as it scanned some 260,000 files. I am guessing there is a bug in its recursion loop because there are no way that many files in my ROMs directory?  For at least one game I noticed it added some 30 copies of it, so I have no clue what is going on.  The other method would be setting up custom playlists which is way more time consuming…  but I feel like that might be the best option.  If I went down that route I would narrow things down to only the games I am actually interested in playing…  because of the 35,000 roms in the MAME library there are probably only a hundred that I am actually interested in.

This was my weekend… and I feel like I have very little to show for it.  I went down the rabbit hole of emulation and now also remember what ultimately gets me to stop messing with it.  It is exhausting trying to keep up with the latest advances in all of the emulators and the latest copies of the games that are designed to work with them.  The fact that this is of negligible legality ends up making the entire experience way more complicated than it probably could be.  I remember once upon a time that there was a German site that kept a running archive of every game in the MAME library, and back in those days I would just grab the single title that I wanted to emulate because it was so much easier to do so.  Now I feel like the only viable option is to grab entire sets, just in case there is a title that I forgot that I might want to use later.  The result ends up being a situation where I have so much file bloat that I am effectively moving everything off of my G drive so that it ends up being a dedicated emulation repository.

Arcade Nostalgia

Now any time emulation is mentioned…  I feel like I have to place a disclaimer.  This is only legal if you own a copy of the game in question…  and even then it is a grey area depending upon the laws in your specific region.  With arcade games…  that whole thing is a legal quagmire as few people actually have JAMMA boards laying around their house to be able to claim they own the original that they are now emulating.  I also cannot help you on this journey apart from saying that I got to where I ended up this weekend with a lot of careful googling and with the assistance of a french site that I won’t link here.  In the case of the MAME 0.197 the Internet Archive seems to have a copy of those and it is a 61 gb download so that is at least a starting point.  I will say that a MEGA account comes in really handy when it comes to downloading this sort of thing, because inevitably the link you are looking for is encrypted and stored somewhere out there.

Arcade Nostalgia

So this was my weekend.  I feel like a failure for not getting it all sorted out.  How was your weekend?

Arcade Nostalgia

by

Arcade Nostalgia

This weekend was one of extended frustration, in part because I went down a rabbit hole that I still have yet to surface from.  One of these days I will go into my sordid past as it regards to console piracy, because there is a story in that worth telling.  However prior to that I was hooked on the concept of emulating all of these machines that I loved playing in the arcade on my PC and was involved with a good number of the early sites giving access to both emulators and roms.  It was a heady time where we had to play SNES titles with a significant frame skip to get them playable…  but it didn’t matter because we were playing Nintendo games on a PC.  I nearly lost my shit when I first encountered MAME, or the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator…  a project designed to emulate the specific chipsets of various arcade machines and make them similarly playable on the PC.

Arcade Nostalgia

The problem with MAME however is that there is a lot of development churn on the project and in its constant seeking for perfect emulation…  the game “ROMs” themselves are often changing formats as folks re-dump the EPROMs trying to get a slightly better copy than the one that existed before.  When I started messing with this back in the 90s the dumps we had access to were pretty much set in stone, and what changed from release to release as adding new supported titles.  Now however the packages fundamentally change functionally obsoleting the games you had previously “acquired”.  This sets up the reality that now the 0.209 ROM set is made up of 36,713 files taking up 555 gb of disk space…  and as such taking forever to download that is if you can even find a place to download.

Arcade Nostalgia

This madness I speak of…  I did this thing this weekend.  I found a location to grab the entire 0.209 ROM and CHD set…  and over the course of a night the roms trickled down as they account for only 66 gb of the total size.  The bulk of the space requirement are the CHD images or actual copies of the hard drives that were installed in the machines and used to pull audio and video from as the game played.  These were widely used in pretty much any cabinet newer than say Killer Instinct.  All of this was to be played with GameEx Evolution which is a slick looking front end for a bunch of different emulators.  The goal being able to create an experience that I could navigate with my fight stick and maybe eventually an in home custom arcade cabinet as that has been a long time dream of mine.  However like may technology projects… I spent the bulk of the weekend tracing down issues and didn’t actually spend much time playing anything.

The first major issue I encountered was the fact that after going through the hassle of acquiring the latest ROMs for MAME…  I find out that GameEx only seems to support an older version…   0.197 to be specific.  Which lead to a whole lot of scrambling to find another place that I could acquire that ROM set from.  While dealing with that I began setting up various other emulators and managed to get Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gameboy, Color Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and with some fiddling Turbografx-16 all working.  For whatever reason nothing that I did seemed to get Sega Genesis to the point of actually launching a game in spite of using RetroArch just like I was using with the other working titles.  There was some discussion on the GameEx forums of having to configure a second version of RetroArch to make it work…  but I didn’t dive into that abyss.  Saturn I could not get running at all, and I have not gotten around to trying to configure Sony Playstation 1 or 2.

Arcade Nostalgia

To add insult to injury…  when I finally got the correct rom set…  for whatever reason I still could not get MAME working through GameEx.  This lead me down a completely different rabbit hole last night of trying to just say screw it to GameEx Evolution entirely and use RetroArch as a front end given most of the sub emulators I am using are just libretro cores.  This is the point where I decided to let it scan my harddrive looking for roms…  and it legitimately took all night as it scanned some 260,000 files. I am guessing there is a bug in its recursion loop because there are no way that many files in my ROMs directory?  For at least one game I noticed it added some 30 copies of it, so I have no clue what is going on.  The other method would be setting up custom playlists which is way more time consuming…  but I feel like that might be the best option.  If I went down that route I would narrow things down to only the games I am actually interested in playing…  because of the 35,000 roms in the MAME library there are probably only a hundred that I am actually interested in.

This was my weekend… and I feel like I have very little to show for it.  I went down the rabbit hole of emulation and now also remember what ultimately gets me to stop messing with it.  It is exhausting trying to keep up with the latest advances in all of the emulators and the latest copies of the games that are designed to work with them.  The fact that this is of negligible legality ends up making the entire experience way more complicated than it probably could be.  I remember once upon a time that there was a German site that kept a running archive of every game in the MAME library, and back in those days I would just grab the single title that I wanted to emulate because it was so much easier to do so.  Now I feel like the only viable option is to grab entire sets, just in case there is a title that I forgot that I might want to use later.  The result ends up being a situation where I have so much file bloat that I am effectively moving everything off of my G drive so that it ends up being a dedicated emulation repository.

Arcade Nostalgia

Now any time emulation is mentioned…  I feel like I have to place a disclaimer.  This is only legal if you own a copy of the game in question…  and even then it is a grey area depending upon the laws in your specific region.  With arcade games…  that whole thing is a legal quagmire as few people actually have JAMMA boards laying around their house to be able to claim they own the original that they are now emulating.  I also cannot help you on this journey apart from saying that I got to where I ended up this weekend with a lot of careful googling and with the assistance of a french site that I won’t link here.  In the case of the MAME 0.197 the Internet Archive seems to have a copy of those and it is a 61 gb download so that is at least a starting point.  I will say that a MEGA account comes in really handy when it comes to downloading this sort of thing, because inevitably the link you are looking for is encrypted and stored somewhere out there.

Arcade Nostalgia

So this was my weekend.  I feel like a failure for not getting it all sorted out.  How was your weekend?

Gratitude and some Gaming

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First off let me start today’s post by saying how much I appreciate the outpouring of support that I have had over the last couple of days.  I’m sorry that I have not responded to each of you individually…  but I just haven’t been in a great place to be able to do that.  My focus was trying to get through the last couple of days which also had the added bonus of being super stressful on the work front as well.  Each time I saw a message come through it helped, and I wish I had been able to really be sociable and such.  I had mostly been staying off social media the last few days apart from making a few random comments here or there to take my mind off things.  What makes the whole experience weird is we have had a ferret playpen in our living room for at least the last ten years…  so now that we have cleaned everything and removed it…  there is a visible void that will take some getting used to.

To add to the pile of woes that are happening…  I spend a lot of time on the sofa with my laptop remoted in to the machine upstairs.  We were eating dinner and I had to get up to check on the printer upstairs that was reporting to be out of paper.  I had pre-emptively filled it and apparently did not get it jostled just right for the sensors to notice.  As soon as I had gotten settled in and was about to kick out the leg rest…  the handle that does this broke completely.  Now the handle itself had broken some time back as it was plastic and not exactly the best idea for a part that would get a lot of constant use with a certain amount of force applied to it.  This time the pulley or spring or whatever ties the mechanism to the armature under the chair came loose and now the remainder of the broken lever flops freely.  This is part of a sectional…  and the manufacturer apparently no longer carries the design anymore…  which lead me to research a replacement part.  Apparently these handles are pretty standard and I managed to track down what appears to be a replacement and a new cable to boot just in case that actually snapped as well.  So there is a project on the stack for the weekend.

Gratitude and some Gaming

As far as gaming goes…  I am still playing quite a bit of Marvel Future Fight via Memu Android Emulator each evening.  I largely just burn down the daily objectives similar to how I usually play Dragalia Lost.  I apparently did not notice this last night or this morning when I took the screenshot…  but I appear to have 3 heroes that I can unlock now because I had gathered enough biometrics while doing other things to get over the initial 10 threshold.  I’ve since swapped out Agent 13 to Luna Snow another one of the Netmarble created champions because the team bonus between her and Sharon Rogers is pretty nice.  More or less Sharon Rogers is the primary champion and Captain America and Luna Snow are just walking buffs.  At some point I want to spend some more time playing Iron Hammer which is an interesting Amalgam character of Ironman and Thor first seen in Infinity War #3.  Whatever the case playing a blend of Ironman and Thor is pretty sweet.

Gratitude and some Gaming

I am also still spending a lot of time playing Dragalia Lost because the Fire Emblem event is still going on, and should have the next story block released today.  Both the summon changes and this event went in at the same time…  and it definitely feels like I am getting to summon way more often and without the worry of getting shitty wyrmprints the whole experience feels better.  I am still getting a lot of crap summons, but have managed to gather up several really nice ones over the course of the event so far.  Marth is my jam and the character I play the most in Smash Bros…  so I was super happy to get it here as well.  It reminds me that I really should return to playing some of the Fire Emblem mobile game at some point.  It is still weird to me how much mobile gaming I am doing these days… but the whole playing from bed thing is a way bigger pull than it used to be.

Gratitude and some Gaming

As far as non-mobile gaming…  I played an awful lot of Lumines yesterday because zoning in on a puzzle game was an excellent way to forget about the world for awhile.  As a PSP owner I loved this game on that platform, and was super happy to see when it got remastered and re-released on the Nintendo Switch.  This is one of those games like Tetris that you can just blank out while playing and move into pure muscle memory territory, or at least that is generally how I play puzzle games.  The more I think about things the more I fuck them up… so if I can just reach a point where I am reacting automatically I am not psyching myself out.  The only real question is…  how do you pronounce this game?  I heard someone in a video the other day call it what sounded like “Lou Mines” whereas I have always called it “Lumin Es” sorta like Luminous chopped off with an Es at the end.  The fact that the game has always had a sort of shiny flair element above the I made me think this, but hell I could be wrong.  Lou Mines just does not sound right however.

Goodbye Shiloh

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Goodbye Shiloh

Last night was a rough night, and one where we didn’t get an awful lot to sleep.  First off I am super thankful that we have an amazing vet that is open extremely late, and was wiling to stay there as long as it took us to finally reach the decision.  When you reach the point where you are capable of taking action…  there is still an awful lot of second guessing yourself but from the moment I got home there was not really a time when she was not regularly having seizures.  Before I left yesterday I had tried my best to stabilize her and she was resting relatively comfortably in one of her beds.  When I arrived at home that was very much not the case.

Goodbye Shiloh

So this morning we are going to remember Shiloh in happier times, napping in her toy box or bouncing on the bed.  It is weird how we quickly reach a point where we think things have always been this way.  The photo above was taken in July of last year and she was still her happy and bouncy self, seemingly unaffected by the fetters of age.  So what seemed like something that had been going on for years was in truth a fairly rapid decline over the past year.  The nurse last night remarked that she was one of the oldest ferrets she had ever seen come in to the vet…  that also specializes in exotics.  So I guess we stole a lot of good years that we might not have gotten otherwise.

While Bella that we lost in 2017 was “my” baby…  I still very much loved Shiloh so this has been hard to go through.  The experience also seemingly traumatized the cats…  one of which only came out of hiding after we got back from the vet.  It isn’t really over yet however… because at some point I have to go pick her back up…  so that I can bury her beside her cage mate Bella.  I don’t have much of a post in me this morning but I wanted to at least give an update since so many people offered support yesterday.