MAME 25th Anniversary Edition!
Everybody this is Shane Armen rowing, you are in the passenger seat with me it’s passenger seat radio. It is February 9 2022. And you are in my backyard in the hot tub with me live on passenger seat radio, you know, I thought, how much fun would it be, we’ll do a show right after dinner before it gets dark. I’m rarely in the hot tub when it’s light anymore. You know, like after my lunchtime workout, occasionally, I’ll come out here, but most of the time, I’m in the tub and it’s dark. So it’s interesting to be out here in the daytime, or when it’s light outside. So I know the Dying Light thing could have gone better. And I’m going to get back to that. But everybody’s jumping on board the main 25th anniversary bandwagon, and I figured I better get on the bandwagon, too. I mean, that’s why they call it a bandwagon after all, because everybody’s in on it. However few people can say that they were there at the beginning. And the neat thing about being of a certain age is that some of us and I’m going to tell you right now, and I wrote an entire article about this, if you want to read about it on medium medium.com/at Dark uni plug, I have an article about why being Generation X is like the greatest time to be alive. Because we’ve seen it all. We’ve come I think, collectively speaking, we’ve come the furthest in pretty much every single way. From technology, social issues, all of that stuff during the Generation X lifetime, we have seen and experienced it all in terms of amazing advances all that good stuff. And so it’s sort of weird, it points to come up and say I was there when right we talked about mp3 is right. I was there when mp3 started the whole mp3 digital music craze started I was there. I was in the hub. You know, there was one IRC channel, and I might have even been invited only at that point. And that’s where digital music started. That was the beginning. And so in the in the early days, you know MAME is now a household name practically, if you listen to this show, if you listen to retro gaming radio in the past, you know, main his main his life, right multiple arcade machine emulator. And so, back in the day, you know, putting in my old grumpy man hat on back in the day. Emulation just wasn’t possible. So if you go back to say, I don’t know, I’m just throwing some dates out here. So I’m sure somebody will collectively correct me if I’m wrong, but jump into like the early 90s. And that is when we started seeing the very very beginnings of emulation. Right? Listen, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Space Invaders, all of these games have been remade, right. So pick any computer system any gaming console prior to the early 90s. And you’re going to find a version of Pac Man a version of Donkey Kong a version of joust a version A Robotron a version of everything under the sun. That’s what we did back then. We tried to get the arcade experience at home. So you didn’t have to go to the arcade and shove $5 In an hour into Space Invaders or Pac Man you can play it at home. So what we got were recreations obviously, some were better than others. Some were almost arcade perfect. In other words, you had all the characters, the pixels look just right. But it wasn’t quite right was it? If you played Pac Man in the arcade, and you’d spend hundreds of dollars honing a pattern, right? Because the ghosts all moved on patterns. And if you were a really good player like Billy Mitchell, once you memorize the patterns up to like nine different levels, nine different patterns, nine different levels, nine different waves. You could play Pac Man forever, until you got tired, hungry or needed to get laid. And if you were playing Pac Man, you probably weren’t getting laid. So all good and hungry or sleep. That’s pretty much the only reason you would lose if you knew the patterns. That’s because the arcade version of Pac Man is a program it’s code that sits on chips. And that program behaved the same every single time somebody played it. And so these things were called patterns. And most games had something that you could play over and over again and get good at and understand the behaviors, when these games would then come out and the home version, or the Atari 2600, the clinico vision, the C 64. Some of them looked fantastic, but they didn’t play the same, the code used wasn’t the same. So if you had mastered Pac Man at the arcade, you got the 2600 version poor thing. Or, you know, the 5200 7800, the Commodore 64, version, whatever, you wouldn’t be playing it, and the ghost just wouldn’t behave the same, you had to kind of relearn the game and learn new patterns. So we had recreations. Then, somewhere along the way, somebody got really, really smart, and said, Let’s remake a processor. Let’s remake hardware in software. Right? So somebody took a Z 80 Chip, right, that was a very popular CPU from the classic arcade games. Let’s take a 6502. Let’s take a Z, let’s take one of these chips. Let’s pull it apart. let’s recreate that chip in software. And that became what sort of would eventually be called a core. So you had a z 80? Core. So okay, so you had a processor? So what? What could you do with having a software version of the z 80? Well, then you start creating software versions and other chips that sat on, say, a zookeeper arcade board, or a Pac Man arcade board, or any of these other arcade boards that happened to use z at processors. Because arcade operators had to occasionally reburn the programs onto chips and stick them into their system boards in their arcade cabinets. Somebody came along and said, Well, we can dump those, or they were already dumped because you were burning them, right. But I wasn’t an arcade operator. So I don’t know exactly how the whole EEPROM burning thing works. All I know is somebody came up with the idea that we can take these arcade chips, pull them off the board, stuffed them into a reader and dump the contents of that chip. In this case, it’s the game code, the code that actually runs the game, just like on a computer, right? These arcade boards had a processor, specialized chips, maybe to handle control or sound. And it had these ROMs, these chips with the program permanently burned onto them. So guess what, there’s no zero day patches or software upgrades, right? I mean, sometimes you did, but for the most part, what you got in a chip was what that game was going to be until something better came along. That’s not to say that they didn’t do revisions of ROMs for these games. That’s why you see things like different versions of the games over time if you’re looking in Mame, or one of these other emulators, right. So so now we’ve got a CPU that’s been dumped into software. So we have a z 80, but runs this code, we have the code for the game, we are now dumping the special codes from all of the support ships. And all we need now is something to bind it together something to provide an interface to track a joystick to output the graphics to a computer screen, right, they were going to something else they they had a particular type of video out they were using, right. So in this case, we had somebody had to create what would eventually be called or effectively be called an emulator. That emulator would load a CPU core, say the z 80, you would feed it ROMs. That’s where the term roms came from, because they used to be burned on the EEPROMs. And they were dumped into ROM images, load those ROMs. Inside of this sort of a virtual arcade machine, really, if you think about it, it’s just like a virtual machine. Just like VMware emulates an Intel processor, and Intel graphics or whatever. That’s what the purposes of these emulators were for. And so when somebody wrote a really good CD emulator, right, they took that emulator core or that CPU core and they wrapped it up into an emulator. And that emulator would play one game, whatever it is that they got working, right. So they have the z 80. They got the coprocessors. They’ve got the ROM images dumped. They’ve got a harness to tie it all together that plugs a joystick into it or keyboard in the early days. They would they would tap your keyboard and actually output something to the screen. And that would be known as the ignoring a column that would be known as an emulator, in this case, it was like a Pac Man emulator. And as time went on, they realized, you know, what? Pac Man plus Super Pac Man, Miss Pac Man? What are some of the other ones, all of these games run on almost the exact same hardware as Pac Man does. So let’s dump those roms let’s stop dump those EEPROMs into code and see if we can feed it into this emulator. Maybe it’ll run. And sometimes it did. Like right out of the box. It’s like you plug Pac Man plus into a Pac Man emulator, bing, bang, boom, you’re back at the mall. Right? You’re good to go. In other cases, they had to make changes to the emulator. Right? So it’s like, okay, so there’s one extra coprocessor we have to add, there’s one more instruction set we have to cover. And so they would add it. Next thing you know, now we have a Pac Man emulator that happens to play 16 games, like everything that ran on Pac Man hardware suddenly could run on this emulator. And that was damn cool. That’s the beginning. That’s when we saw things like Spark aid. Sparky was one of the very earliest multiple machine emulators, where you could actually, you know, I don’t remember the number off the top of my head, no one’s in the chat for me to go and do my research for me. But essentially, Starrcade opened the door to playing a handful of games, but not just not just a Pac Man like game, not just a miss Pac Man, like game, or something similar to or a recreation. This was it. If you knew the patterns for Pac Man in the arcade, this would be exactly the same. And that, my friends was a revolution. That whether or not you care about playing Pac Man in its original glory. That’s what began the concept of backward compatibility. That began the concept of, of emulation packages, things that we now take completely for granted, like the arcade classic collections that we get on the switch. Those are all things to emulation. Those aren’t reproductions. Those are the real games. And they’re, they’re the real games, because there’s an emulator that actually emulates all the hardware those used to run on. We have Raspberry Pi’s, we’ve got Amber next. We’ve got consoles, we’ve got computers, every single one of these things, it can run code, it can run emulators and running emulators, opens the door to the past. Very exciting stuff. We didn’t know that that was a huge revelation at the time, we didn’t know that that was going to change the world. And it really has. Because software emulation of hardware drives the industry now. VMware Hyper V, you know, what else might you be using virtual Oh s bluestacks. Everything that you use to play something or run something that belongs to some other system other than the one that you have right now, you owe to the progression of emulation. And it’s, it’s an amazing thing. It has It has changed the world. And so spark Cade was like the big one, like the first one. We saw things like then we saw main come around, I’m gonna get to name in just a minute, but I don’t want to I don’t want to I want to reminisce for just a minute. So when spark Kade came out, and prove that it’s not just a Pac Man emulator, all of a sudden now we have access to a plethora of pin, Jada’s now now became a push for more well, okay, wait, there’s a different push first. Emulation of hardware is expensive, right? So if you have a Z 80 processor, and you decompile it into code, and you run that on a computer, it requires an amount more power to emulate that piece of hardware and software. Right. Now, remember, we’re talking early 90s We’re talking Pentium 7575 megahertz computers, your phone blows away anything that we had available to us at the time. So emulation, while possible, wasn’t fast. In fact, sometimes it wasn’t even fast enough to be playable. So just because Somebody dumped the Z ad processor, and they dumped the Pac Man ROMs. And they built an emulator for it. That didn’t mean your machine was fast enough to use it. Right? Or maybe it ran at 15 frames per second, because that’s all your pathetic little PC can put out. So there was a race, not only to get better hardware, right? I mean, there’s only so much you can do, right, you have to wait for the Moore’s Law to kick in, wait 18 months, and you’ll have twice the computer. And you’ll be able to play more of these games at the speed that you would want to play them on. So that’s true. But the next step was, Well, shit, we got to see at what’s to stop us from dumping another CPU. What’s to stop us from recreating a 6502 or one of these other gaming processors. So that’s when. So once that got started, and emulation really started taking roots, a group of programmers got together and said, you know, we have all these video games. I mean, these are these are diehard arcade collectors, these people own boards, they own hardware, arcade cabinets, these were people that were big into owning these video games for real. Now listen, maybe they had one cabinet, and they swapped boards in and out, Hey, Michael Caine, the great British actor is on. Didn’t know we had such good company here. Hmm. So these guys had the actual physical hardware boards, along with the tools to dump them. So they got it in their head, you know what, let’s start dumping these things. Now, we don’t know what we’re gonna do with this yet. But this, this equipment is old, it’s frail, it’s going to fall apart and die soon, no matter how good a care we take of it. Every single one of these has an expiration date above its head. So what they started doing was they started putting together a documentation project. That’s what it was supposed to be for documenting all of this equipment hoping that some day, maybe all of this equipment could be rebuilt in software, right? As computers kept doubling and tripling and power, having, you know, these boards aren’t going to live forever, these These chips are going to fry, you know, we’re gonna have battery leaks, we’re gonna have all sorts of catastrophic failure going on here. Let’s get everything we can and document the living shit out of all of this hardware. And they did. And they, and they started this documentation project, and did the preservation of classic arcade video games. That was the essence of what main became, later on. That’s what it started as in later on. It became an emulation project, but it started as a preservation project. So these people managed to get together in IRC chats, on discussion forums, these are the things we had in the day, there was no Snapchat, there was no Facebook, thank God, there was no, there was no social media. Right? These people corresponded in email posted on bulletin boards. And they chatted in IRC Internet Relay Chat, that’s where people got together and communicated, and socialized was in IRC. So they got together and they started this project. And coincidentally, that’s when these particular people who not only were they arcade collectors, and hardware aficionados, these guys, were developers, these guys turn their love of computers and electronics and video games into a well paying gig. They were being paid to code. Well as emulation became more and more plausible, the first, you know, I don’t remember what the first processor was that was properly emulated in in ENCODE, I wanted to say it was the z 80. But I couldn’t be wrong. That’s why I keep bringing it up. But these guys were smart as hell and they said, hey, hey, we could create, we could do a 68,000 core, we could recreate the 68. It’s well documented. It’s easy to get our hands on them, we can dump them. We have access to this instruction set. We know how it works. let’s recreate the 68,000 processor, which happens to drive tons and tons of arcade video games. And so they did it. Just like The original CPU software CPUs that were made the main developers and many other people that weren’t officially attached to main, they were out here making cores, these cores started getting assembled into a tool to not just run a Z 80 processor like Pac Man, not just to be a Pac Man emulator plus these other games. This was a dream of making an architecture where any CPU, a caav is 68,000, whatever any of these CPUs could be added to this emulator. And as such, not only would it play everything that ran on a Pac Man board, but all the sudden, now we have Atari boards, we have Sega boards, we have all of the necessary components to emulate all of the hardware that these arcade boards had on them. And we had the means to dump the game code off the EEPROMs or the ROMs into rom files. Now all we needed was that harness to tie it all together. And that’s what main became, it continued to be an arcade preservation or a preservation project. It never once strayed from that into this day. If you go to the main website, along with downloads to download mainly emulator, it is still considered to be about arcade preservation. What could possibly be better to preserve old arcade games than to make them 100% playable on whatever frickin hardware you have. That’s the ultimate and preservation. But this is also about data information, low level geek stuff, not just about you getting to play Street Fighter two. Right? It’s about maintaining this data for the future. So main started I can’t remember the the core main group I wanted to say were nine guys. And there was a What did they call it the Project Coordinator, guy named Nikola. And I can never remember his last name off the top of my head set sound sol, sol, Somalia, something like that. It was it was it was a it was a difficult name. And I never actually spoke the guy’s name. You know, I saw emails and posts and chats. And of course, once the first like the first version of Maine that came out was much like all the other emulators. It ran a couple of games and it didn’t run them very well. But main became a jogger, not of everything, it became the face of emulation. Meanwhile, there were people like Neil Bradley, and my Cuddy who Yeah, we love the concept of arcade preservation now. Sell Moria Thank you. Thank you, Michael can see it’s great to have somebody in the chat to give me this stuff. So cutting and Bradley said this is great. Now another this preservation shit I’ve got we’ve got shitty PCs out there that can’t run Pac Man at a decent speed. We’re going to take a handful of these cores and we’re going to write them in assembler, we are going to make these things. Windows only. They’re not portable, you’re not going to cross compile them. But when you run them on a Windows machine, good lord, these cores are going to be fast as hell and and you’re not going to need a super PC. To play full speed versions of these classic games. They created something called retro Kade. With retro babe as the boot screen, you probably remember it that that that emulator was all about speed and performance, not about how many games they get stuff in. They’re not about preserving arcade games history net. This was all about Die Hard raw performance, and it delivered in spades. But you only got like 16 or 25 or whatever the number of games were. Meanwhile, every single month name was releasing like banshees. The team grew and grew more people came on board. More people were dumping arcade boards, more people were contributing to the project, this thing exploded like crazy. Now, if you’ve been part of any scene in the last 20 years, 30 years, let’s be honest, that’s if you’ve been in any scene for the last 30 years, you know as well as I do, no scene is sustainable. Something bad has to happen. Whether it’s in the mp3 scene, whether it’s in the emulation scene, whether it’s in a piracy for a particular console Whatever, every scene, or skiing, if you’re part of the elite community, every scene eventually eats itself up, it tears itself apart. So, what ended up happening is, the founders of the projects became, and Nicola was, was the main guy. I heard, I heard other people I heard other people were difficult to work with, I can only speak of my personal interactions with Nikola. I wasn’t, we weren’t close, let’s just put it that way. And I’ll get into more of that in a minute. But eventually, it became very, very large. And Michael Caine’s is mentioning that there were faster release cycles. Yeah. In the early days, they were releasing, every couple of days, they were releasing weekly. But when, when it really became exciting, was the monthly release cycle. Everything was everything was well oiled, was well greased. Everything was like a machine. And I remember every single month gathering an IRC at midnight, that’s back, you know, when I was young enough to stay up till midnight. But yeah, every night at midnight, every every month, that one night, the last day of the month, I believe it was you would stamp till midnight because they would release the game at 12. They would release name at 1201. All the release notes would come in there were no teasers. There were no leaks. It became it became a game to make sure nobody knew what was coming. It was part of the fun was it being this big surprise. And it was exciting. I mean, I cannot even I have trouble relaying to you. For someone who has not been there. i Sorry, my son’s bugging me, no one can let me just do a show in peace. It was a it was exciting. Right? You see people waiting in line to get a new iPhone or whatever. Now, that’s not exciting. That’s that’s an incremental upgrade from last year. Maine was breaking new ground every month, new CPUs were being added. Doesn’t sometimes, you know, 10s of dozens of games, well, maybe not 10s of dozens, but so many games were being added. And, and they were releasing fixes for broken ones. So this was something that was really unique about Maine, Maine wasn’t about letting you play free arcade games. That’s, again, remember, Maine was a preservation project, they chose to use an emulator as the housing of this preservation project. It just so happened that these games sometimes would work and sometimes they would work really, really well. Sometimes they work like absolute shit. Sometimes they would a startup screen would come up but they would crash. They were they would see see a lot of arcade games later on to for piracy among software or arcade operators started doing crazy shit to keep people from dumping the game ROMs. Or they would include a special encryption chip, they would sometimes bury it in like an inch thick of epoxy. So the only way you could get to that chip was to destroy the board to get to it and usually destroy the chip too. So some games took decades, believe it or not, some games took decades for the copy protection, or the the, like the slapstick protection or whatever. All of those things took time to come up. But in the meanwhile, there were hundreds of other there were hundreds of other games that were ready to go and free and clear. What game were you most excitedly waiting for? Man? I just I don’t remember. I know zookeeper was a big one. Because zookeeper and I have a very, very loving history. I remember being caught up in the pageantry of it. The excitement of it. 90% of the stuff that came out in Mame, especially over the years, I just couldn’t care about, at some point, it caught up to where I cared about arcade games. It started getting into the Capcom games. It started getting into the NeoGeo games, that’s when I completely lost interest in it. But, but but but it wasn’t just emulation that was going batshit crazy. It was the scene itself, the support groups, the community. I started up a website called Insert Coin, and it had the most amazing 3d Spinning quarter up in the corner. I got more into For that stupid spinning quarter that all of the hard work and effort I actually put into running this website, and at one point in time there was atmospheric heights. There was Dave’s classics, and there was Insert Coin. And new roms came along later. There were there were a number of there were a number of pillars of the community that that created the infrastructure because listen, just because you can download mainboard you get the ROMs. Nowadays, ROMs are plentiful and easy. Back then. There was there was no, there was no torrents going on, there was no websites blindly flaunting the law providing you with roms aplenty. Now, they were being passed around, usually, honestly. Because guess what the main team are the ones dumping these things. These things didn’t exist. Right? Imagine something for a minute. Punch Out roms didn’t exist at all. Forget about well, what website can I find on net? Now what website? Can I find them on where I don’t have ads or crypto coin mining? JavaScript installed on my machine? No, no, they didn’t exist at all. So the main group, of course, they cannot be associated with piracy of ROMs. Now listen, back then nobody cared. There was no there was no marketplace for playing Donkey Kong from the arcade game. None of this nobody cared. But but there was a decorum that had to be maintained and the decorum was main had to stay as far away from illegal activity as humanly possible. And they did that by never including rom files never linking to rom files. If you can get them great if you can’t get them too bad. So sad. So if PunchOut roms does don’t exist. How did how did anybody get them? Well, Insert Coin right. Michael Caine says he got his from Insert Coin bless you. Insert Coin, Dave’s classics, all of these. There were these. There were hubs where you knew you could get the ROMs. Now, listen, occasionally, we had a little backdoor into the community. There were secret main developers that would handout ROM images. Totally off the record. Of course, nobody’s naming names. But yeah, you had to see these things. So here’s here’s here’s sort of an interesting way of looking at it. Imagine the game like he said crazy claimer. Michael Caine said crazy clamor was that he was waiting for. I was waiting for Zookeeper. Imagine sitting in the IRC channel, okay. Imagine it being discord. That’s when people know, you’re sitting in a discord channel waiting for somebody from the main team to drop in and say it’s ready. Here’s the link, go. Right. So you’re sitting there, it’s midnight, midnight. Oh, one the link shows up in the chat. You download it, you look at the release notes. Holy shit zookeepers available. Okay, who’s got the ROMs? Nobody. That’s what it was, man, you get this, you’d get the emulator and there’ll be no ROMs for it. Of course, it started to get to be where the big seed sites like Insert Coin, and others, we sort of eventually got to be, you know, independent contractors. We would get leaked to the ROMs. in advance, we were not allowed to post them. It was a dark, deep secret. If you posted ROMs, you were revealing what the next version of MAME would release, right? Everything had to be hidden. So we would sit there, like a half hour before main got released. We were getting fed the ROM images from people who shall remain nameless. We were putting them up on a hidden page ready to flip it over the second that meme went live. So it’s not just it’s, it’s crazy to imagine all the hubbub that was going on around this, this this emulator, this this this, this juggernaut of amazement and wonder. So yeah, and so that’s how it went. And that’s how it went for a long period of time. And its main progressed, there were a lot of things that are worth mentioning. There’s a lot of things that were milestones, right? Not in terms of emulator cores, like a new CPU or something like that. I’m talking about things that the emulator expanded upon, that made it even better. And of course encryption, right? If you were able to break the encryption on a particular Sega game, then that would unlock other Sega games, right? So there was that but that was that’s just iterative shit. I’m talking about real milestone breakthroughs. And there are two of them that I can remember maybe Michael Caine remembers the other ones. There were two big ones. The first was sample support. So Donkey Kong, all the early Nintendo games had a very interesting problem. Only some of the sounds were emulated. So, and I don’t remember if this was protection, maybe Michael Caine remembers, excuse me. But only part of the sounds were emulated will, because they hadn’t gotten everything done yet off of the board. So what would happen is, you would have the music for Donkey Kong, and a couple of the sound effects, but not all of the sound effects. If you were playing Star Trek SOS, you would have sound effects but no digital speech, right? Everyone, almost every one of these games that had any sort of speech or, or complex audio, we’re missing sounds. For example, you may not remember, but Galaga was missing the ship destruction sound when you got hit by something, and it makes that explosion sound that wasn’t there. And Mame. When Galaga was first supported, it was missing. So all of these games like Gorf, and Wizard of war, all of these games, Carnival, they were missing pieces of the audio. Well, instead of waiting around for someone to finish that emulation, or to somehow figure out how those sounds were to be recreated. They built in sound sample support. So right, we know that at this moment in the code in the emulator, that this sound effects should be played. Right. So they would let you download like wav files, put them in a folder with the same name as the ROM image like D Kong. And when you play Donkey Kong inside of name, and you had those sound samples there, you got all the sounds. This was amazing. This really does show the maturity of the emulator, which is really funny, because it was it was all basically a hack, right? It wasn’t preserving emulation, it was making games more fun to play, which was not part of the main project. It’s about preservation. But there were so many hands in the pie at that point, the time that they you know, in the in the code base was available. So they were going in and saying listen, we’ll put in sound sample support for Carnival, we’ll put sound sample support in for Donkey Kong, we’ll put it in for Popeye, we’ll put it in for you know, space period, we’ll put it in for all these things. And they did. And so now unreleased day, not only were you prepping and Insert coin to have all of these roms available these ROM images available, but you also had sound samples that needed to be dispersed amongst the people. The next big thing that was that, that really, this was the next in the last big one that I was party to or that I was part of was something called Color prompts. And I’m no expert. I’m not a hardware guy. So forgive me. Essentially, there were these problems, programmable ROMs, I believe, that would allow for color accuracy in games. So sometimes you would get a game emulated in name. And it wasn’t quite right. something wasn’t quite right. I’m not talking about running Donkey Kong on scramble hardware, I’m talking about you know, I sure do not remember, the the Mario was purple or whatever I wasn’t one of them. But you get the idea. There were certain things about the games that weren’t accurate. And of course, you know, to the lay person it was that the emulation wasn’t good enough, or there was a problem with the emulator cores or whatever. But it really came down to discovering unlocking and supporting these prompts. And it turned out that problems this is my personal story regarding proms and Nicola and my whole my whole portion of main involvement as a main contributor, you really wanted to get on the main contributors list. And if you weren’t developing a new CPU core, you really had to be doing something big for the community in order to get on the main contributors list. It was a it was like I said, every scene eventually eats itself alive. And when main became a fashion project, which it did, that’s when shit started going downhill. That’s when some of the original founders got a little little big for their britches and became you know, elitist in some cases. So, so prom support was being brought in slowly And fixing game a fixing game be added prompt support for this game added prompt support for that game. And sometimes you’d have to get new game images, right? That’s where we started seeing split sets of MAME ROMs. If you were running the last version of Mame, you needed this ROM image, but didn’t have problems if you were running a later version of MAME that didn’t need the prom files. Now you need a new version of the ROM image file. And by the way, we had to keep track of all that shit on Sir going. It got nasty. Okay, so prompts back to prompts. One of the games that I really couldn’t wait to play was top gunner. You probably know it by its original name of jackal. I love top gunner. In fact, I love Tom gunner so much. I bought a machine. So my friend Troy, Troy to you know him from the show, train I played top gunner, we must have dropped 50 bucks apiece and a top gunner, we found it at an arcade. It’s a two player cooperative top down a little by Ikari Warriors ish type game, if you’ve never played jackal or top gunner, I highly recommend it. It’s amazing. But we played that at the arcade and we we just lost our shit. And you know, there’s an end of that game, I mean, you can actually go through the whole map and get to the end of the game and beat it. Coin after coin after coin dollar after dollar $10 every $10.20 hours, we put so much money into that machine. And it left such an impact on me that once emulation started getting crazy, it’s like, oh, God, I gotta have top gunner. When do we get top gunner. And meanwhile, I bought a top gunner machine, it was a converted Jama cabinet. So it wasn’t a dedicated top gunner machine. But it was a machine with an actual top gunner board in it hooked up to Jama controls whatever. I owned a top gunner. That didn’t mean I didn’t want it name, right. I mean, I still wanted it in an emulator. But it gave me a unique opportunity to look at the game that was being emulated by main against real hardware. Now listen as vast as the main development team and the main concurrent contributor team was they didn’t have everything. Nobody had a Top Gun I did. So essentially, I could have wrapped the board up and send it to somebody, right, and I could have become part of the contributors list. But instead, I said, Hey, listen. Thank you for adding Tom and I was very respectful. And and I sent this into the main dev email address, which all the main main devs had access to. And I said, hey, thanks a bunch. I was very respectful. Thank you so much for adding top gunner favorite game. In fact, I love that so much. I bought an arcade cabinet of it. But we there’s a problem. And I just wanted I wanted to point it out. I’d like to see it. I mean, I understand you guys are busy. I’d love to see it get fixed. The Jeeps both have the number one on them. I said it’s a two player game. And one Jeep has a one on it. And one Jeep has a two on it. That’s how you know which GPR because they’re not different colors. They just have a one or a two on them. And essentially, Nikola wrote me back and said, I’d had no fucking clue what I was talking about. Right? I don’t know if I’d actually mentioned that I own the board. At that point, I just mentioned that I’d found a discrepancy basically treated me like I was a piece of shit. I had no idea what I was talking about, leave development of Maine to the big boys. And you know, basically sit down and shut the fuck up. And I wrote back and said, I do know what I’m talking about. I own a top gunner machine. I assure you, Jeep number two has a two on it. And I said it is incorrect and mean I thought you guys were trying to preserve this stuff. You’re preserving it wrong. You know, I didn’t get I didn’t get testy until he started it. And so at some point in time, that conversation deteriorated to the point where neither one of us wrote back and it just sat there. And it’s like that let that was the beginning of the sour taste in my mouth with Maine. And all that it stood for and where it was becoming as a project is that glamour or fashion project. So how does that tie into proms? Well, son of a bitch. The second that prom support got added to the emulator and coincidentally, two top gunner. Well, holy shit, Jeep number two had a two on it. And it had something to do with the Proms not being properly added to the emulator. Now, the only reason the only way that I got anything done was I utilized a member of the main team. That was fun If away from the glamour of the project, but was still a respected member of the project, and I won’t mention who that was just in case they don’t want me to talk about it. But as at that point in time, I realized going through the main dev@main.org, or whatever the hell it was at the time. That was a no go. So I was in contact after I got fed up with Nikola and his frickin elitist bullshit. I went to this other Dev and said, Hey, listen, here’s, I’m gonna afford you my conversation with Nikola, I assure you, this is wrong. I don’t I mean, I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to fix it. Or if you could look into it, but, you know, I’m about I’m about arcade preservation to an accuracy. And I would love to see this get fixed. And so I got a relationship with this main developer. And, and so that’s when you know, when, so he got kind of involved with the whole prom thing. And, and I think that’s where things things sort of fix themselves with regards to the problems and top gunner and whatnot. But then, but then we’ll take it a step further. This is the second thing that soured me about main. So yeah, main was an amazing thing. But there’s a dark side of this whole thing, too. And my stories are not nearly as dark and sinister as some of those that were involved in the main development scene. And I’ll let those people tell their own stories. But so remember, I was talking about sound samples. sound samples? Were a real pain in the ass to get because it was late enough in the in the arcade. It was so late in the arcade lifecycle. A lot of these games were gone. Right? Yes, some of the main team had the original arcade boards. Yes, they could put those boards into a piece of hardware. Yes, they could then produce recorded audio samples for the game. Now listen, this wasn’t a matter of just hitting record on a recorder and walking away. Not only did you have to get the sound effects, but you had to get them in a quality and not mixed with anything else. I’ll give you an example. The coin sound from Mario Brothers. So when you’re playing Mario Brothers and you and you jump in, hit a coin. It makes a team sound right? This this coin sound? Well, this coin sound is typically being played on top of music or other sound effects you running you sliding? So it’s kind of hard to get a clean sample of it right? It was even more difficult to go on site. Right? If you went to an arcade and tried to record a Mario Brothers sound sample, you have 50 other machines in there making noise. You’ve got people you’ve got attendance, you’ve got people wondering what the hell you’re doing strapping a microphone to the Speaker of Mario Brothers. And let’s be honest, Mario Brothers wasn’t in a whole lot of arcades where I was at certainly not in the early 90s. So as it turned out, the view Dale drive in and when actually Washington Mike Moore drank my coloring, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The view Dale drive in still had a couple of arcade machines in their lobby. One of them coincidentally, happened to be Mario Brothers. I knew the guy that ran that drive in because he was also the guy that owned the theater downtown. Or he was close friends or something like that. I called in a whole bunch of favors. I used a lot of My Divine influence. And I said Listen, can I stop by the drive in before you guys open 2030 minutes before you guys open? It’s really hard for me to explain why I want this. I want to I want to put a microphone right next to the speaker and play a couple of games of Mario Brothers the arcade game you have in your lobby. This guy looks to me like a grown fucking horns like what the fuck are you talking about? Like it’s not destructive. It’s not going to hurt the game. But I need it quiet I need isolating I need to be able to do it two or three times to make sure that I get a good sample and so I did and so I called him his favor I went to the view Dale drive and after hours I got in there I use the best equipment I think I actually bought a brand new microphone just to try to get the best possible quality. I really went acid elbows in to get all the samples that were missing I got home I brought him into cool edit remember cool edit everybody boys and girls cool in it was the shit before Adobe bought it and fucked it over cooler was the bomb. And so I brought them into cool edit, I chopped them up. I put them into nice clean wav files. I submitted into the main team trying to get on that elusive main contributors list. They sent them back and said they don’t they’re not good enough. But thank you. I’m like way, way way, way, way, way way. Wait, wait You would rather have no samples for Mario Brothers than to have the samples. It’s like Okay, listen, I get it if you have five or six submissions for Mario Brothers sound samples and somebody else’s are better than mine. God bless you go with God, I want what’s best for main two. But nobody else submitted any. I did I went through all the effort in the labor. This took me a lot of time, a lot of effort. And they said, Nope, not good enough. Keep thanks buying, you know, giving you that little hand wave. Okay, thank you dismissed. And so once again, I was so pissed. That was, you know, there are things that tend to make me leave communities. You know, like Facebook, taking over the quest with a hostile takeover. Notice how fast I stopped releasing quest videos, I stopped writing articles about quest, I stopped promoting quest, and told everybody I know not to buy a quest. You fuck me over you lose me as a support person. For some people like Facebook, they don’t give a shit. But for a community, like Insert coin was providing to and things like that. You want me to hang out? Not that I deserve any special treatment. I just I just needed to be treated like a human being. And I was snubbed and I was pissed. I wanted to just stop right there. And so the guy that had helped me out with the top gunner thing. I don’t remember the order of operations. I might have been back and forth. But essentially, I wrote to him and I said, Dude, are you kidding me? What the fuck? I submitted a set of sound samples. I understand that they’re not, you know, CD quality. But for God’s sakes are better than nothing. Right? And he listened to me he’s like, Yeah, I mean, yes, yeah, these are low quality. But dude, they’re better than nothing. But yeah, that’s what I said. And so, I believe, if I remember correctly, in my mind’s a little fuzzy, this is like 30 something years ago, 25 years ago. He snuck him in. He didn’t ask anybody’s permission. At the last minute, he committed a build that included Mario Brothers sound samples, and he slipped in they used my sound samples about that. I was very pleased because Mario Brothers is one of my absolute favorite games, arcade games of all time. And of course, because they were snuck in I got no credit, no contribution, credit, I got nothing at that point. Me and I started to part ways. And of course, it was also about the time as you know, as time moved on quickly as it did they started being more interested in CPS too. And and you know, NeoGeo and things quite frankly, I just didn’t give a shit about I didn’t my my love of arcade classics ended about 1991 Anything before that, put it on the table anything after that a you know, I’d say like the Williams the William stuff, Mortal Kombat narc. High impact football, that’s pretty much where, where, where I left off and NeoGeo didn’t really hold any interest to me. They were a lot of the same game in different skins. They were the same fighters, they were the same side scrolling shooters, Eric, my feeling on that doesn’t really matter. Point is main has had an amazing trajectory is still around today. There’s still people working on it today. Retro arch and all of these, you know, there are now new faces of emulation. There are new icons and our icons of of the scene, if you will, retro art gets all the credit. Meanwhile, retro art would be nothing without, you know, main cores and other cores made by talented emulation and core writers. You know, retro arch became a became a scaffolding to bring all of these together and they deserve the kudos. Right? Listen, I’m not dissing retro arch. I’m saying that retro arch is a shell that incorporates a lot of very, very talented work by people who aren’t retro arch. So anyway, there you go. meme. I was there at the beginning. I’m not there at the end because it’s still going. But as usual, with being part of a scene as it begins the origin stories, and actually being able to be a contributor, a part of it with the stories and understanding the lore, knowing some of the dirty, nasty, filthy things that were going on in the background. It was it was an interesting time, as always, and happy birthday to Maine, you know, quite frankly, Maine wasn’t the first and in some cases, they weren’t even the best, right? Retro. Cade deserves a lot of credit for taking a project of emulation and turning it into a A true true passion project. In other words, they weren’t interested. They were interested in giving the people what they wanted, which was the best fastest possible version of gyrus, whether or not it was using a main core, or whether it was using their own hand tools 68,000 core in assembly language, they were interested in doing it better. And God bless people who still do that. You know, God bless them. Alright guys, you’ve had a whole hour retrospective of meme emulation in the whole bit. I hope you enjoyed the story. Happy birthday to meme and all of the folks that made that possible including yours truly. I had a little hand in it here in there. Not too much, but enough to say, Hey, I helped. This is Shane Harmon road passenger see radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care everybody.
