MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME Opinions

I definitely had my fair share of consoles, growing up with an Atari 2600, Sega Master System, NES, SNES, N64, PS1 and PS2 (notably, I never had a Mega Drive as a kid), but by the time I was of adult age in the early 2000s (note that I do *not* identify as a millennial in generational speak) the 90s style arcades with Street Fighter, Metal Slug, Daytona etc. had all but gone in Australia, having been replaced with mostly Japanese/Chinese games (even in language) that I had absolutely no interest in. Not to mention the price (while the US used one or two quarters, we used one or two $1 coins, which are conveniently the same diameter, so arcade gaming had become a complete ripoff by then, and by the time game cards took over, they were even more expensive as they could have stupid shit like $1.20 or $1.50 per "token" since one swipe equals one credit).

[Warning, wall of Tekken approaching]

$2 to last 30 seconds against a "sleeper" professional in Tekken who deliberately plays "reasonably good" and/or gives you the first round and then wipes the floor (or air) with you in every round after with fifteen-hit juggles? May as well go to the casino and play a few 1c slots, it's actually cheaper on low bets (e.g. 20c to play 20 lines which is easily enough, until machines started enforcing that 50-lines-only bullshit with operators also changing them to 2c or even 5c denominations for max profit) and I might actually come out with more than I started with. I think the 80%-health-bar-juggle factor is also why I gave up playing Tekken after Tag 1. Fact, you can do damaging juggles in all Tekken games, even in Tekken 1, but the fun factor disappeared when Tekken 4 came out, it just became a generic fighter to me after that (having tired old Heihachi as a final boss in that game is laughable, especially after Devil, Ogre and Unknown - I don't mention True Ogre as that was also laughable due to his oversized hitbox making him stupidly easy). The only time I put Tekken 4 in the PS2 is to play Tekken Force. I bought Tekken 5 for the arcade Tekken 1-2-3 ports but they fucked it up by not saving anything so it was back to MAME straight away. Also, fuck Jinpachi. Just the sheer look of Tekken 6 and Tekken 7 makes me headdesk at the thought of it, and be glad that I stopped buying consoles after the PS2.

[End of wall]

For the 90s/2000s kids there is also a major lack of MAME emulation of their era's worth of consoles due to the complexity of the hardware and the huge system requirements if there is no DRC or anything like that. These are the kids who started playing games in the DVD era (Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/GameCube/Wii), if not the beginning of the HD era with the PS3/360, DS/3DS or PSP/Vita. MAME hasn't even got close to emulating a DS, let alone anything more powerful (even with MAME's advancements with the Dreamcast/NAOMI over the years, one look at the NAOMI driver shows that just about every game is still flagged MNW). MAME's emulation drops off abruptly with anything later than a PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64, 80486-based PC or a 68K-era Mac (correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think MAME even emulates a PowerPC Mac yet), with the sweet spot still being exactly where it was 20 years ago, firmly in the 8-bit and 16-bit era.

Also, with a lot of things being on the cloud and vanishing without a trace when the download-only, online-only game (with the physical 25GB Blu-Ray disc having nothing but a 2MB executable file that allows it to boot in the console and download the game itself from the cloud) is inevitably pulled from the servers, what hope do people from say 2040 have in reliving old games they had as a kid in 2020? Same goes with films that have been out of print for 30+ years yet stored untouched in archives without even the slightest thought of a release, because [insert brand new exty-million-dollar AAA production here] is more profitable than having to dig up, restore, remaster and HD-ify an ancient film that only applies to a niche group of people now aged in their 50s and up.

With the kids of the 2010s (can't say 2020s yet but I will assume it's the same), their PC is a smartphone, their game console is a smartphone, their TV is a smartphone and they read books on their smartphone. They might have a console/handheld like a Switch for the exclusive titles but that's about it.