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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)

[0]: https://www.space-harrier.com/arcade.html

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.

Today by comparison with that era (think 1996's Scud Race) arcades should have 4k raytraced driving games almost close to real life videos

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

Yeah, this tracks. My city has a few "retro" arcade bars with pinball, pacman, etc, and it's fun enough but you're for sure going for the nostalgia more than anything else.

I think part of the barrier to expanding the attached-to-other-things arcade concept is the whole aesthetic: an arcade is loud, with flashing lights, giant and sometimes lurid artwork on the machines. I think if you were able to make some machines that gave a high quality experience without all that side of it, you might be able to install them in other semi-public spaces: airports, train stations, shopping malls, basically anywhere you currently see things like massage chairs.

That said, maintenance is for sure a concern. The state of most public pianos does not inspire confidence.

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.

I remember our arcade having one of these too! But I never had enough money to use it - and probably was too short anyway

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.

Agree on the rest, but thankfully for #3 a modern base ND Miata with the 1.5 is pretty close to in weight to a NA due to a lot of weight saving work by Mazda.

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.

There's Sega Rally 2 and Dirt Dash which both have motion cabinets.

If my memory is correct, they have OutRun, Rad Mobile, Sega Rally, and a few other classic racing games.

That's correct, last time I was there they had those games.

Zenius: https://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/arcade.php?id=2701#games has a list of the games, please bare in mind that this is a community driven database.

A friend of mine had the moving After Burner machine. Thing was dangerous as hell, could easily break a bone or sever a finger, but soooo cool.

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.

Thanks though last time I tried that it gave me the mother of all motion sicknesses

I'm always left in awe by not only the Dolphin team's work, but the quality of their articles and release notes. This was no exception!

What I think is truly amazing is how truly rare it is to see a home console move into an arcade platform, instead of the other way around. Almost always, the home system was derived from lessons learned from more expensive, rugged, and elaborate arcade hardware.

Sometimes, this overlap was quite profound but not 100%. NeoGeo home consoles famously use the same hardware and software as their arcade counterparts, but the game cartridges were not pin-compatible. The Nintendo VS line were technically the same as a Famicom/NES, but not the same build; the software has subtle differences. Perhaps the Nintendo PlayChoice would count but again, it's not like they used NES mainboards to build those.

So, the idea of taking a Nintendo console mainboard and grafting it to SEGA-designed components so it can run in a dedicated arcade cabinet, is just wild to me.

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

Well what I mean is how they been printing PCBs and experimenting. Perhaps has lot to do with the then-very vivid generation. Sadly Japan is aging and very closed to outer influx, so this culture may as easily die at all.

I think it's also a benefit in someways though. Preservation should be much easier and more accessible this way. Also maintainability.

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.

The Gamecube was competitive on graphics with PS2 and Xbox. It was the Wii where there console side moved away from keeping up in the cutting edge graphics race.

I’m not sure how successful it was, it was outsold by Xbox and PS2. Although the Xbox was a massive money pit for Microsoft. At least in Europe the Gamecube began to disappear from retail a fair bit before the Wii was out as well. Still, got things like a Wavebird for cheap on clearance though…

I think the big thing that held gamecube back was the lack of other 'utility', at least as someone who was in college at the time.

Can't play DVDs (PS2, or XBox with the remote accessory,) can't even play audio CDs. Let's remember that this was also an era where half or less of the on campus freshmen had a desktop computer for their dorm, let alone something like a laptop.

That said one could also argue that Nintendo was more focused on mobile at the time, between the GBA and DS, both of which certainly carried them through that era.

I think one could argue that the DS's success alongside the challenges Gamecube had for adoption, led to the philosophy involved in the Wii's design.

True. I remember there was a window of time in which the PS2 was the cheapest DVD player you could get, or at least the cheapest in most stores. That was about the time when most consumers were feeling pressure to drop VHS. It was also pretty common for people to have CD binders full of pirated movies on DVD, very popular in colleges then, and kids bringing home those huge stashes of movies also motivated a lot of people to replace their VCRs. The PS2 with it's DVD playing functionality was well timed and well priced.

> From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.

I think you're underselling the role of their game design expertise. They figured out that there's more to games than high fidelity graphics, a concept which has somehow alluded most AAA game studios.

Yeah, their "corporate mascots" are valuable IP because they are associated with fun games. The games aren't fun because of the mascots, it's the other way around.

Thats a long article for what amounts to "Dolphin now supports F-Zero AX" =)

Must have taken a heckin' amount of work!

What does "heckin" mean? I associate it with redditors' impersonation of dogs and I was surprised to see it here.

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.

Well, mostly I realized my first sentence was likely to come off more negative than funny (I just like, really enjoyed F-Zero GX back in the day!), so I decided to add a folksy salute to the effort to dilute that. And a smiley face, people heckin' love those =)

Interesting. I associate the term with reddit, not being folksy. I think the folksy term would be "fuckin lot" or "very lot" or "hella".

I think maybe you were trying to cater to the "christians" or snowflake conservatives

It's linguistically a minced oath[1], and they're pretty common in all manner of online contexts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath

Great reference; thank you.

"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.

That can't explain "hecking", because there is no form "helling".

It's a form of hella which is "hell of" but hecka sounds silly so you get heckin. (Heck is also used as a substitute for fuck sometimes and takes its forms.)

From Wiktionary entry for heckin':

Etymology

From heck as a euphemism for hell.

This still doesn't make sense as "hellin" isnt a term in wide use. What makes the most sense is transition from "fuckin". But why not simply use fuckin? Surely invoking sex is less taboo than invoking hell.

I was expecting this to be about The Legend of Zelda.

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.

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!

The local arcade/bar has two Mario Kart GP 2 cabinets (so you can play linked head to head). I'll have to go check it out after reading this.

This is absolutely beautiful. There's so much to be done when you stop looking forward and start looking at points in time in computing.

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 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".

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.

It was a pretty great console, in its own way.

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.

I'm also printing a new bracket to put a larger fan in, replacing the battle worn 20 year old stock fan

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.

Yeah I suspect that you're right and it's a capacitor issue because if I leave the Cube running in its cute little BIOS-like thing for about 15 minutes then the optical drive starts working again. I suspect the caps or maybe the laser itself just needs to physically warm up.

Kickass article. Really took me back to the days of playing FZero AX in the arcade. Incredible game. Great work, Dolphin team!

A fantastic new addition to Dolphin

I lol'd right clicking to "Open LINK in a new tab". Not quite as funny when I got there, but great none the less.

[dead]

[flagged]

Dank wizardry deserves to be rewarded.

Emulation is legal in the US

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.

Nintendo was able to pressure RyujinX because it relied on stolen code.

This isn't true. They were able to pressure yuzu instead because of fixes for the leaked version of the TOTK ROM.

You’re right, I was thinking of Yuzu.

I’m having trouble finding citation for that. Not saying you’re lying just maybe don’t have the right keywords to search for which code was stolen.

punk never dies

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".

But dumping the games isn't. How do you think the screenshots in the blog post were taken. Do you think they properly got a license to do so?

Hint: The blog post says they made a way to dump the games.

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].

[1]: https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/cons... [2]: https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/copyright-and-the-digita... [3]: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117

>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?

[1]: https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/cons...

>will be done for the sole purpose of achieving interoperability

It's for solely achieving interoperability. It only covers the development of the emulator. Using it to get a picture for explaining what a game is in the blog post is not DRM being broken for solely achieving interoperability.

>What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?

In practice the idea that you can't break laws if you are doing things via a computer is fundamentally flawed.

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.