Just realised its 10 years since CPS1 and Neo were first emulated.
Who remembers dos Callus, and playing Neo games with no sound on NeoRage? Zophar’s Domain, …the Madman’s Cafe? Configuring twitchy jumpy joypads? http://bloodlust.zophar.net/Callus/callus.html http://www.sys2064.com/neorage.htm
This was a pretty massive event for me, I hadn’t heard of emulation before Callus and thought I’d have to spend $1000’s and have rooms full of arcade boards and Neo Carts to get to play the classics again :bgrin: Especialy daunting as I’d prolly payed for the boards several times over in the arcade and already bought the 16bit versions…
Clearly the SF world and SRK wouldn’t exist as it does now without these wonderful pieces of software and the people who created them. Callus especialy was an amazing accomplishment (programmed by one guy Icer Addis), it ran CPS1 full speed on my crappy 233mhz AMD in 98!! It even emulated SF2 Hyper Fighting at the correct speed, (something that Mame still doesn’t do, thank god for nFBA).
Its nice too that the the CPS circle is finaly complete, with the cracking last year of CPS3 and finaly getting truly great online play courtesey of GGPO & 0746’s amazing nFBA. Thanks to all the unsung amatuer coding hereos for the last 10 years.
its been 15 years almost since i bought my neo. its almost been 20 years playing sf2. shit pretty much got emulated when it all started dying out. yes, there where still some great games getting released, but the shit was dying out. now, 10 years later, its coming back alive again. long live 2d fighters. and fuck the traitors, capcom.
I’m still waiting for someone to find the Developer Menus in SSF2T (the text for them is there). They managed to find the Jojo’s ones during CPS3 emulation development.
Actually, NeoRAGE wasn’t the “first” Neo-Geo emulator… the first was something called Gekko. It was released as a “teaser” version, with full support to come in a later release… but it never happened. The Gekko teaser only played NAM-1975, but it played it perfectly without sound - it even had preliminary memory card support, which no other Neo-Geo emulator even attempted for a long time. Dumps of some other Neo-Geo games started making the rounds, and people figured out you could actually make those roms play in Gekko by changing the filenames, or something like that. I don’t remember why the Gekko release was abandoned, but I seem to recall it sounded like some made-up bullshit reason.
Ahh, the days of checking ROMLIST and NeoCharity several times in a day in the hopes that something new was released…
All closed source emulators have been dieing one by one with along their Author’s interest. For some of them, one day people’ll hear how their author lost his source code.
Its been a while… the first emulator that i download was ZSNES… v200? it was in 97 or something like that, i remember that a friend of mine says to me “look, i can play Super Mario World in my computer” and i said “thats impossible, these games cant run on a PC”, when i come to his house i just pissed my pants, specially when he say that he got all that for free…
I remember that the Neo-Geo emulation was a truly Internet chaos back in around 99/2001, tons of lamers and n00bs requesting for ROMs in every site you can possible imagine, asking for “how i can play the room!!111???” and bitching the emulator authors when they starting to see that the Neo emulation can harm SNK and stop updating the list of supporting games… but oh well, it was part of the history of videogames, even if the companies tried to ignore it… and to be honest, they can say anything that they want against emulation, but if MAME doesnt exist the fighting scene will be already dead tons of years ago, specially in South America and China, and a lot of unknown games never surface to the public, and thats the real deal of emulation: Preservation.
By the way… today Nesticle gets exactly 11 years… for me thats was the real start of the emulation.
I too remember the ‘breakthrough’ of getting SFA in Callus. I also remember there being a code you could do that had lots of different effects, including a full character select (yes, it’s true!).
You had the standard top two rows, and then at the bottom, it went:
Gouki, Rose, Sagat, Bison, Dan
Other things you could do included an opponent lineup select and simpler Dramatic Battle with CPU assistance.
What I remember about the ‘code’ is you held something on either 2P side, or both sides as you turned the game on, and after the version/release screen, you’d hear an explosion sound. After that, if you wanted other effects past the full select, you merely held buttons as you started the game.
I remember the days of SFA1 and netplay you had to know the other person’s IP addy, me and my Cousin Danny (Codiac on here) played SFA1 and talked on MSN IM’s Voice Chat all on 56K back in 2001.
My first Neo EMUs was KoF2K and MotW…oh those were the days!!!
Indeed…those were the days. Back in high school, I can remember one of the many highlights over those years were looking forward to when the newest CPS2 XORs would be released, and then we could start playing games like the Marvel fighters!
Those were some good times, there. Now-a-days, I try to “make amends” by supporting official ports of the games whenever they come out. But I’ll have to be honest…if it weren’t for emulation, chances are I probably wouldn’t have gotten into the likes of KOF until MUCH later, and God only knows if I would have even known that things like Waku Waku 7 even existed!
