November 20, 2009 at 16:28Nostalgic games without emulator, roms, IPS-s other crap
Hello!
There is a certain category of people who like oldschool games very much, like me.
It would seem that we live in the 21st century, manufacturers produce game consoles with monstrous powers, you can’t distinguish toys from life, and the reality around us has almost become, sorry, augmented. But no, it’s still not that ... With the experiences that at a tender age received from the primitive pixels of the “Spectrum” or “Dandy” little can be compared. And then, what a thrill to play a game that mimics reality? Is this reality enough at work, at the university, in public transport?
Here we are, retrograde, and are looking for entertainment of the last century. You can return them in several ways.
One of them is to download an emulator (for example, FCEUX), find the ROM-images of the cartridges from your favorite console, adjust the video and sound, and - away we go, vagrant! =)
But this is for people who are fond of. To do this, you need to spend time searching, downloading, setting up - and if you just want to select a game, click on the “ON” button and relax the overloaded mosk? All this bothered me, Google did not prompt satisfactory decisions. I had to take the bull by the horns and do everything myself.
What came of this?
Clear business, it is necessary to implement the emulator directly in the browser. In order to play it was possible for users of any OS, the choice fell on the Java platform.
It turned out that there are already a number of projects involved in emulating NES (if anyone does not know, this is so smartly called Dandy) under Java. For example, NEScafe Emulator , or vNES.
The first of them immediately attracted with its customization capabilities. But when I tried to launch Contra, I quickly cooled to it. The emulator slowed down on a not-so-frail machine, and the implementation of control caused me an acute allergic reaction: for example, it was simply impossible to direct the character’s gun obliquely in any direction. Those who played Contra (and there are those who did not play?) Will confirm that playing in this mode is a sophisticated masochism.
But vNES pleased: he was fast. Compared to NEScafe - VERY fast, and I immediately imbued him with a warm feeling. One thing was depressing - few settings, and the control is hard-coded in the code. Actually, the video settings did not interest me, but the control needed to be changed. The default layout seemed unnatural to me: the direction arrows correspond to the arrows on a regular keyboard, and the buttons A and B correspond to the Z and X keys. That is, quite the opposite than on the console joystick.
The vNES developer left me a loophole - the system is distributed under the GPL, and therefore the possibility of modification is limited only by laziness of the user. After dancing with a tambourine and a file around the sources, I made a system that satisfies me! =)
The rest was a trifling matter - the web-interface for choosing a game and control settings was created as a spirit and as a result it turned out what happened.
Meet me! Dandy Online! =)
The project so far includes a few games, but over time their set will be replenished. First of all, of course, I will add those games that users request. One limitation: the site will only have games for which I can find the original cartridge.
Comrades! I ask for comments.
There is a certain category of people who like oldschool games very much, like me.
It would seem that we live in the 21st century, manufacturers produce game consoles with monstrous powers, you can’t distinguish toys from life, and the reality around us has almost become, sorry, augmented. But no, it’s still not that ... With the experiences that at a tender age received from the primitive pixels of the “Spectrum” or “Dandy” little can be compared. And then, what a thrill to play a game that mimics reality? Is this reality enough at work, at the university, in public transport?
Here we are, retrograde, and are looking for entertainment of the last century. You can return them in several ways.
One of them is to download an emulator (for example, FCEUX), find the ROM-images of the cartridges from your favorite console, adjust the video and sound, and - away we go, vagrant! =)
But this is for people who are fond of. To do this, you need to spend time searching, downloading, setting up - and if you just want to select a game, click on the “ON” button and relax the overloaded mosk? All this bothered me, Google did not prompt satisfactory decisions. I had to take the bull by the horns and do everything myself.
What came of this?
Clear business, it is necessary to implement the emulator directly in the browser. In order to play it was possible for users of any OS, the choice fell on the Java platform.
It turned out that there are already a number of projects involved in emulating NES (if anyone does not know, this is so smartly called Dandy) under Java. For example, NEScafe Emulator , or vNES.
The first of them immediately attracted with its customization capabilities. But when I tried to launch Contra, I quickly cooled to it. The emulator slowed down on a not-so-frail machine, and the implementation of control caused me an acute allergic reaction: for example, it was simply impossible to direct the character’s gun obliquely in any direction. Those who played Contra (and there are those who did not play?) Will confirm that playing in this mode is a sophisticated masochism.
But vNES pleased: he was fast. Compared to NEScafe - VERY fast, and I immediately imbued him with a warm feeling. One thing was depressing - few settings, and the control is hard-coded in the code. Actually, the video settings did not interest me, but the control needed to be changed. The default layout seemed unnatural to me: the direction arrows correspond to the arrows on a regular keyboard, and the buttons A and B correspond to the Z and X keys. That is, quite the opposite than on the console joystick.
The vNES developer left me a loophole - the system is distributed under the GPL, and therefore the possibility of modification is limited only by laziness of the user. After dancing with a tambourine and a file around the sources, I made a system that satisfies me! =)
The rest was a trifling matter - the web-interface for choosing a game and control settings was created as a spirit and as a result it turned out what happened.
Meet me! Dandy Online! =)
The project so far includes a few games, but over time their set will be replenished. First of all, of course, I will add those games that users request. One limitation: the site will only have games for which I can find the original cartridge.
Comrades! I ask for comments.