To anyone who has an opportunity I highly recommend taking any chance you get to try and play any of the bigger "moving" arcade machines like the AX Monster Ride shown in the video.
Even for really old stuff like Space Harrier the feeling of moving along with the screen gives you a more visceral experience than almost any VR setup. Hard to fake the effects of gravity!
[0] has a list (in japanese) of moving arcade machines. Mikado in Takadanobaba has some of these. These things are getting older and older of course so the window of opportunity is unfortunately shrinking as time goes on.
(EDIT: just realised that list itself is over 10 years old at this point so YMMV)
This is where arcade machines should have all gone. More interesting experiences with hardware that are really difficult to replicate at scale.
The best arcade games sell did this - it doesn’t take much - like the pedal for time crisis. Sure you _can_ buy one at home but most people don’t and even then it’s a crap placid pedal.
They’re being made but I just don’t think there’s a whole lot of demand/spaces for them. People sure don’t want them in their homes and arcades barely exist in many countries now.
I’ve seen a couple of bars open up that try to have an arcade as well but they never take care of the machines/drunk people break them, so after a few months half the games don’t even work. There’s only so many times I can lose a quarter or a dollar before I decide it’s not worth it anymore and I just go drink somewhere else with friends.
The only real arcade left in my city is attached to a laser tag, it would be super weird for a bunch of grown men in their 30s and 40s to roll up during kids’ birthday parties they weren’t invited to lol
In Codona's Amusement Park in Aberdeen in the late 90s, there was a Ridge Racer "cabinet" with three massive rear projection screens and an ACTUAL REAL MAZDA MX5 TO SIT IN.
WHAAAAAAAAAT
Seriously insane levels of money-no-object zero-fucks-given design.
This is painful to me on three levels:
1. Real estate costs have gone up so much it’s prohibitively expensive to do something this grand.
2. Advertising is now a race to the bottom where showing car ads on websites has almost zero cost with all return compared to something novel like this.
3. It’s impossible to find a car like a 90s Miata these days because manual transmissions are almost dead and every car had to get heavier to have enough safety features to survive being T-boned by a Cybertruck.
Yes, that list is quite old and lists some games that are not available anymore, while missing some others like the retro floor of Gigo 3 in Akihabara.
Anyway, Mikado in Ikebukuro has the standard F-Zero AX cabinet, and it is great. I have never visited their game center in Takadanobaba though, it is still in my TODO list...
Is there anything worthwhile in moving games at Gigo 3? Even back in the Sega era it felt like it was mostly those generic Taito cabinets running most things.
Right?? There is a working original After Burner in an arcade in Leeds - on free play and just open to kids of all ages. Sooo many places where it could trap a finger, and it moves pretty violently.
Incredible the pace gaming companies in Japan did innovate with chips and boards and everything during this era. While PCs were following a somewhat slow pace, guys at SEGA, Nintendo, Namco, Capcom and similar were literally making innovation by the hour, and commercializing it. A lot to learn from their stories.
Sadly, like everything, the arcades are now commodity hardware. Everyone just started putting out industrial PC based systems and shipping the games on hard drives
Wild to see how far they've fallen. Although I think this was basically the turning point for Nintendo. The GC intentionally avoided competing(at least on graphics) and was still a financial success.
From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.
I guess sega was a few years ahead of them on their own timeline.
I have seen Mario Kart arcade cabinets, but had no idea about the history behind them. Thanks to the Dolphin team for a great article, and hats off on the emulation work!
Windwaker. Such a fantastic game. That is the first video game where I literally had to stop because I never wanted the experience to end. So my windwaker save is there for me, just before the credits whenever I want to go back.
In context in this case, “hell of a lot of.” Seems we English speakers come up with myriad grammatical constructions to seem less offensive in certain forums.
"Heck" is to "Hell" like "Darn" is to "Damn" (or "Freaking" to “F--ing") - a word that sounds similar but is more polite, to be said in public in more religious places and times.
The article touches a bit on how Sega basically lost.
There is literally a whole documentary about this: Console Wars, where they go deep into how Sega lost the battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Wars_(film)
I played the F-Zero game recently in an Arcade nearby, it was amazing! I was so suprised when a buddy of mine went like: "Yeah, there is just a Gamecube in this".
For all the thousands of slop coders trying to cash in with low effort app store clones of better (often free and open) apps, the Dolphin team does amazing quality archival quality code and documentation for free. Bravo!
The Gamecube aspect is particularly poignant to me. Splayed across my workbench right this very moment is a Gamecube that has a failing optical drive. I am currently trying to resurrect it with a RP2350 so I can load roms from an SD card.
I recently restored my old GameCube. Back in the day I installed a ViperGC (the first modchip for the GameCube) to play "backups", but the optical drive has died.
But thanks to the community, after reflashing it with Gekkoboot it can load Swiss from a SP2SD2, and from there load ROMs from the SD card! Reflashing the modchip was a pain in the ass though, the programmer required a parallel port and the software only runs on Windows XP, but in the end it worked and I am pretty happy with the results.
Not that you shouldn't put a picoboot or whatever in there anyway, but it's getting increasingly common for the caps on the drive board to fail at this point, causing the disc drive to fail.
In the music industry they have a saying about sampling and IP clearance which easily applies here too: "The lawfulness of your actions is directly related to your law firm fees compared to the other part".
Are Dolphin and emulation in general going to be legal in the future? Easy, if Nintendo chooses to go with Morrison & Foerster or Fish & Richardson for a lawsuit I'm going with "no".
For now at least. Given Nintendo's efforts to get rid of Yuzu and Ryujinx I think it's likely that the legal days may be numbered. All they have to do is get it in front of the right judge(s) and the precedent by the Connectix and the Bleem lawsuits is undone.
Not that I particularly care if it's legal; I seriously doubt anyone is going to break into my house to seize my MiSTer as contraband, but I think it's entirely possible that emulation progress stalls because it's forced to move into the shadows.
That depends on the country. In Australia, there is an explicit carve-out in the Copyright Act to allow for backups of computer programs[1], and there is also a widely held belief (at least, according to the government) that backups of this kind in general are also considered fair use[2]. Actually, it seems there is a somewhat similar carve-out in the US as well[3].
>there is an explicit carve-out in the Copyright Act to allow for backups of computer programs
But there is not a carve out for breaking DRM to do so. It's not the backup part that is the problem with dumping them. It's that these games are encrypted and decrypting them requires breaking the DRM scheme which is illegal.
There is a separate carve-out for breaking DRM for the purposes of "interoperability"[1], which (as far as I understand) is generally believed to include emulators.
I also disagree more broadly with the initial moral indignation over a perceived violation of copyright law -- legality and morality are two different things, copyright law is meant to be a balanced trade-off between the public and creators but modern copyright laws are a travesty. What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?
Somewhat of an aside but I had the thought reading this that arcades would be a great format for games heavily involving GenAI. The pay-per-play model is probably the only model where you can either affordably use a lot of LLM tokens per game. Alternatively, having large commercial arcade machines is the only way to guarantee the very high hardware specs needed to run capable models locally.
Perhaps as a result, we might see LLM and video model-powered games become mainstream in arcades before any home consumer platforms.
Even for really old stuff like Space Harrier the feeling of moving along with the screen gives you a more visceral experience than almost any VR setup. Hard to fake the effects of gravity!
[0] has a list (in japanese) of moving arcade machines. Mikado in Takadanobaba has some of these. These things are getting older and older of course so the window of opportunity is unfortunately shrinking as time goes on.
(EDIT: just realised that list itself is over 10 years old at this point so YMMV)
[0]: https://www.space-harrier.com/arcade.html
reply