G-NET now emulated in MAME

[Demon Cleaner]

Good news concerning the latest MAME release v0.130u1. The arcade hardware G-NET is now emulated too, which can be great for shooter fans. Perhaps some people of you know Psyvariar or Ray Crisis.

Here's some information about the G-NET hardware and the supported games including screenshots.

Changelog:

New games added or promoted from NOT_WORKING status
---------------------------------------------------
Buggy Boy/Speed Buggy (cockpit) [Phil Bennett]
Chaos Heat [Olivier Galibert]
Ray Crisis [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Chaos Heat [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Flip Maze [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Super Puzzle Bobble [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Soutenryu [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Shanghai Shoryu Sairin [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Psyvariar -Medium Unit- [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Psyvariar -Revision- [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Zoku Otenamihaiken [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Usagi [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood, Angelo Salese]
Mahjong Oh [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood, Angelo Salese]
XII Stag [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Jumping Break [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]
Champion Super III [Mirko Buffoni, David Haywood, Angelo Salese]
Champion Super 2 [Mirko Buffoni, David Haywood]

New clones added
----------------
Millennium 4000 (version 1.5) [Mirko Buffoni]
American Poker II (bootleg, v4) [Mirko Buffoni]

New games marked as GAME_NOT_WORKING
------------------------------------
Go By RC [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Space Invaders Anniversary [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Night Raid [Olivier Galibert, David Haywood]
Tokyo Cop (Italy) [David Haywood]
California Chase [Angelo Salese]
Street Games II [Guru, Angelo Salese]
Street Games [Smitdogg, Angelo Salese]
Bonanza [Smitdogg, Angelo Salese]
Thunderbirds [AGEMAME]

[Harrison]

Now that is a cool addition. More actual changes to the game lineup that the main 0.130 release had. Just keeps getting better and better. However I only ever upgrade with each main release so I will wait until 0.131 is released.

[Demon Cleaner]

However I only ever upgrade with each main release so I will wait until 0.131 is released.

Me too, and I think that's quite often enough because I don't use it every day, and of course I have hundreds of other collections to upgrade

[Harrison]

Which is the reason you never actually play any game. All your spare time is spent updating the collections!

[Demon Cleaner]

I'm currently (since already 3 hours) updating all my emulators, I didn't do that for several years now, so I thought now would be the time

(Quite a lot of work )

[Harrison]

Quite a lot of emulators out there though, and if you haven't updated them in so long many now look and work very differently, and have many new cool features.

I've been playing around with the latest version of MESS recently and that has come a long way, able to emulate a lot of systems now.

[Demon Cleaner]

I finished about half of them, gonna do the rest this afternoon and can hopefully finish the whole upgrading action.

A lot of the emulators just have other versions with more features but mostly still work the same, which is positive. Other ones weren't updated at all, but then again I can understand that, f.ex. NG Pocket, or Virtual Boy.

I will probably also test some emulators that haven't been installed yet, to see the difference.

I played around with MESS a long time ago, and whilst I thought that it's not so bad, I thought that on the other side, emulators for a specific platform work a lot better. MESS worked fine for me for the Vectrex emulation, as there not many working Vectrex emulations out. Have to try some other again.

[Harrison]

MESS is a big project, so it was always going to take a long time to get the emulation right for each and every system supported. Plus more systems are being added all the time. I think it is more a merging of other emulators, and then the need to continue the development of that part of MESS that has taken the time more than anything else.

Console emulation also seems to work better in MESS than home computer emulation, and this is normally true for emulators anyway, because consoles are a fixed hardware design so there is only one setup to emulate. Where home computers can have different models and hardware specs so there are loads of variations to allow to be selected to set them up to work with a wide variety of software. Amiga emulation probably being one of the biggest to highlight this point.

But when I was playing around with MESS the other week it definitely seems to have come a long way since I tried it before a long time ago.

[Demon Cleaner]

The G-NET ROMs are now available at UG.

Btw, I now finished with the emulations I had, now testing some other ones. This now already took me a lot of hours, but I enjoyed it Gonna post a new screenshot when I'm finished.

I also tested LuSpace, which is quite a nice frontend.

[Harrison]

I've not tried LuSpace. Will take a look.