TILTING AT WINDMILLS 

Hello, viewers! As I, a roving freelance journalist, travel the length and breadth of the globe in search of the finest in gaming entertainment to share with all my mag-reading chums, one of the recurring things I hear, in various languages and from gamers of all shapes, sizes, colours and strange personal habits, is this. "One of the defining characteristics of the last generation of videogaming, Stu", they say to me on the hot windswept prairies of the Gambia, atop the icy steppes of Siberia, and amidst the fetid squalor of Chipping Sodbury, "has been the rise in the "post-pub" game. That is to say, those games which offer simple yet instantly rewarding play, with rules and gameplay simple enough for a bunch of half-drunk yobs to master to a functional level without a six-hour drying-out period. You know, like Bomberman and Wipeout and stuff."

And of course, all these people are right (which proves beyond dispute that we’re all brothers under the skin, and ought to end all wars immediately and love each other in peace for all eternity, but that’s another story entirely). "Post-pub" gaming is great. However, the PC has always traditionally been left out of the fun. Firstly because instantly-accessible and fun games have been in short supply on our cream-coloured wonderboxes for years, and secondly because those PC games that do provide easy-to-grasp multiplayer laughs usually require either an online connection or a LAN setup, neither of which are very advisable things to be tackling when you’re halfway out of your box and still giggling about that last fart your mate Dave did in the pub toilets. After all, you just can’t gather around a PC in the same way you can sprawl across the living-room floor in front of your big telly, you can’t plug three or four joysticks into the machine (in fact, given the size of PC joysticks you’ll be lucky if you can get four of them into the same room), and you can’t use a mouse on your lap.

DID YOU TILT MY PINT?

There is, though, an area of post-pub-style gaming where the PC ought to excel, and that’s the game that you only really find in pubs in the first place - pinball. While it’s a genre of game traditionally not well catered-for on console, the PC has a small handful of truly excellent pinball games. Addiction Pinball, the Pro Pinball series, Microsoft Pinball Arcade and the likes of Judge Dredd and The Avengers from cunningly-named developer Pin-Ball Games are all terrifically entertaining, but their big drawbacks are that (a) they’re not based on real-life tables (except Microsoft’s offering, but most of Pinball Arcade’s tables are clunky old relics from the 1950s or even earlier), and (b) chances are you won’t have bought them in the first place, because a pinball game with its single static screen and old-fashioned points-based gameplay seems a bit of a frivolous purchase on the PC when the same money could get you a huge, expansive Deus Ex, a life-swallowing Age Of Empires 2 or, God have mercy on your miserable souls, a Championship Manager 4. But what if, when you all staggered back home, you and your chums could play the exact same pinballs that you’d just been playing in the pub, and for free to boot? Wouldn’t that be brilliant? Well, you can’t. Sorry.

TELEGRAM FOR MR. BUNNY!

Ha ha! I’m joking, of course. In fact, the fastest-growing community in the world of free software since the advent of the mighty arcade emulator MAME is that which has sprung up around the astonishing Visual Pinball, the sole work of Californian Randy Davis.

"Visual Pinball originally started, in 1997, because I was working on a set of ActiveX components at work," says Davis, "which could be dropped into a Visual Basic form and scripted together to produce more complex productivity apps. Somehow I got the idea that it was similar to a pinball game which had many parts that could be hooked together to form a complex game. I had always wanted to write a pinball game, because I had no clue how I would even begin the physics engine. Thus the first version was born, but it wasn't that good – it was 2D, the physics were a mess, and the VB interface, while cool from a techie standpoint, wasn't up to the task of designing pinball games. I put it on the shelf until last year, when I got to brainstorming about physics engines, and I decided that I could pull off the pinball idea much better than before. As I played around with my new engine, I realized that I had something pretty good."

The good thing that Davis realised he had was a program that could not only build pinball tables generally, but could also, for practically the first time in history, bring real, arcade pins to a home-gaming audience. Until now, the entire history of videogaming on all formats could offer gamers fewer than a dozen conversions of genuine coin-op pinball games to play, but in just a couple of months, VP’s simple construction-kit-and-editor setup has caught on like a dose of foot-and-mouth, as keen pinballers have used it, in conjunction with original artwork and sampled sound either archived on the web or photographed and recorded from their own tables, to construct exact playable replicas of well over 100 arcade pinball machines ranging all the way from the birth of pinball in the late 1920s to the hugely successful machines of pinball’s heyday, the 1970s. And with some of those machines only known to have one or two surviving examples in existence, the resurrection has come just in the nick of time.

WILD, WILD WEST (WICKY WICKY WAA.)

"I’m certainly surprised how popular it has become", says Davis. "I remember getting mail just after releasing the first beta - somebody had posted the first user made table (the conversion of Wild West from Codemasters’ Psycho Pinball) within 5 hours of VP being available. That was a pretty amazing feeling to finally get such positive feedback after months of working in the dark."

Even more exciting developments were to come, though, with the incorporation by some of the dev team behind arcade videogame emulator MAME of PinMAME - a little-known MAME offshot project - into the program. While PinMAME didn’t actually let you play anything, it produced perfect emulation of the ROM chips of the pintables of the 80s and 90s, giving table authors, for comparatively little effort, the dot-matrix displays, video modes and sophisticated sound and music that characterised the pins still found in pubs and arcades to this day. Obviously, combining VP’s table physics and PinMAME’s ROM emulation enabled authors to produce the most accurate emulation of modern coin-op pinball possible without getting a hammer and nails out and building one yourself. At the time of writing, around 40 tables have had the full VPMAME treatment, but new ones appear almost every day. Visual Pinball had already grabbed the emulation public’s attention, but the advent of VPMAME, and the infinitely more complex modern pinball games it enables pin-lovers to play on their PCs, is what threatens to take the whole scene mainstream. And that, PC ZONE readers, is where you come in.

Caption: Like Microsoft Pinball Arcade, VP caters for tables all the way back to the birth of pinball in the 1930s, such as this oddly addictive flipperless bagatelle from 1934.

Caption: Williams’ legendary Black Knight table has been the subject of at least two separate conversions, including this bright, almost cartoony interpretation.

Caption: Some tables have even had their playfield graphics perfectly recreated by hand from photographs, like this beautiful job by artist Chris Drum.

Caption: Creature From The Black Lagoon even simulates the moving holographic display of the Creature in the centre of the playfield.

Caption: In technical terms, probably the most impressive VPM table to date is Fun House, which includes the fully-animated moving, talking head of the game’s mascot "Rudy", whose eyes follow the ball around the table.

Caption: The Addams Family was one of the first VPM tables, but is still among the most popular.

Caption: Even pretty recent tables like 1999’s Medieval Madness present no problems to VPM, and run beautifully as long as your PC is up to the job. (All VPM tables need a P600 or better to run well with sound enabled, whereas "normal" VP tables will be perfectly happy on a P266 or even lower.)

Caption: Pin-Ball Games released a licenced Judge Dredd table on PC a few years back, but strangely it wasn’t a conversion of the coin-op JD pin. This is.

Caption: Deficiencies in VP, like the inability to display graphics on drop targets, have been circumvented by table coders using cunning trickery, as seen here in Joker Poker.

Caption: There are few more rewarding sounds in gaming than Arnie’s approving growl of "Awesome" when you pull off the cannon shot in T2.

Caption: Space Invaders, one of the comparatively rare "widebody" tables popular in the early 1980s.

Caption: The terrific Getaway boasts ZZ Top’s "La Grange" as its theme tune.

Caption: All of Williams’ 1980s videogames and pintables shared the same library of sound effects.

Caption: Magic City, another electro-mechanical classic.

Caption: A whole bunch of grizzled rock bands lent their names to pintables in the 70s.

Caption: F-14 Tomcat is another table that’s had its playfield lovingly recreated by hand.

Caption: Earthshaker even pulls off the original’s table-shaking earthquake effect.

Caption: Williams’ own website provided the beautiful playfield and backdrop art for the brilliant Attack From Mars table.

Caption: Theatre Of Magic: tasteful.

Caption: Party Zone: loud.

Caption: Some tables, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, come supplied with a choice of backdrop art.

Caption: Fishing: not always tedious.

The world of emulation is a curiously underexposed niche of PC gaming. Despite being far more popular than, say, online gaming (statistics suggest active emulation fans number in the //millions//, compared to the mere tens of thousands who regularly play online), it’s an area that receives little coverage in the press. Perhaps it’s the stigma attached to the nostalgia that underpins much "retro" gaming, or the slightly suspect legality of the whole thing, but whatever the reason, the everyday PC gamer is missing out on some of the greatest and most wide-ranging gaming entertainment money can’t buy, not to mention a glimpse at some gaming history that, were it not for the timely intervention of the emulation community, would risk being carelessly lost to posterity for good. For your information and amusement, then, here’s a round-up of the latest (non-pinball) developments in this uniquely dynamic area.

GOING FOR THE BURN
The PC finally gets some decent beat-‘em-ups.

Coming out of nowhere, and vanishing almost as fast, not many emulators are better named than Final Burn. Initially designed to run a bunch of old Sega arcade games not covered by MAME, such as Afterburner, Thunder Blade and Galaxy Force 2, the emu world really sat up and took notice when Final Burn developed support for CPS-2, the name of the coin-op hardware standard used by Capcom (right up to the present day) for the majority of their renowned 2D fighting games. Suddenly, from being almost bereft of even halfway-decent examples of the genre, PC owners are now spoiled for choice, with titles like Marvel Super Heroes, Vampire Savior, X-Men: Children Of The Atom and Street Fighter Alpha 3 (as well as non-beat-em-ups like Dungeons & Dragons and Super Puzzle Fighter) all running perfectly on even pretty clunky PC setups. Final Burn itself is now no longer being developed (there’s basically no need – it already does everything it set out to do), but new games continue to be made available for it (CPS-2 games require special decoder tables to run, and the emu community is observing a self-imposed embargo on releasing games which are still making money in arcades), and CPS-2 support has also been incorporated, albeit requiring considerably higher system specs, into recent versions of MAME.

Caption: Marvel Super Heroes – the good guys, twatting each other senseless. Surely that can’t be right.

Caption: X-Men Vs Street Fighter – why can’t they all these fighting games just get along, eh?

SEND THREE AND FOURPENCE
…we’re going to Advance. (What? – Ed)

Until recently, the darkest days of emulation were widely held to be those of a couple of years ago when the Nintendo 64 emulator UltraHLE was released. Not that it wasn’t a superb emulator – it’s probably still technically unrivalled – but because at the time the N64 was still (just about) an economically-viable console, and given the relatively small and hence easily-downloadable size of N64 games (from 4-30MB), it seemed reasonable to claim that the emulator stood a real chance of doing the company whose games the authors purported to love some genuine damage. Recently, though, a clutch of emus (Flock, surely? – Sir David Attenborough) have been released which, while technically less dramatic, actually came out BEFORE the machine they emulated had been released anywhere in the world. The successful pre-launch emulation of the Game Boy Advance sent shock waves through both the emu scene and the games industry, and got Nintendo in particular into a right old lather, much as you’d expect. To be truthful, it’s a bit of a fuss about nothing at the moment – none of the GBA emulators (there’s little to choose between the three major ones – Virtual GBA, iGBA and Boycott Advance - though each is better for running particular games) have sound, they only run a few games and you need a pretty tasty PC to get full speed out of them. But given the speed of emulation development, it won’t be long until those deficiencies are ironed out, at which point things should get really interesting.

Caption: F-Zero runs beautifully, albeit silently, in iGBA.

Caption: So far, only Virtual GBA runs the mighty Kuru Kuru Kururin.

WHEN I’M A 64
Two years on, UltraHLE gets a challenger

The N64 emulator UltraHLE set not one but two benchmarks in emulation. As well as being the most technically-stunning emu ever (which it still is), it was also the shortest-lived, notching up mere days on public release before being discontinued by the authors under the threat (albeit a threat largely unfounded in law) of heavy legal action from Nintendo. It’s taken until now for another N64 emu even vaguely as good to come along, and as the console splutters its last, hopefully the lawyers will keep their hungry beaks away from this one. The Windows-based Project 64 does an excellent job (although like its predecessor it’s a bit choosy about video cards), and is slightly more compatible with game software than UHLE was. If you’ve got the right card and a fairly chunky CPU, stand by for fun.

Caption: PC owners should feel right at home with the pixies-and-elves storyline of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.

Caption: As you can see, Project 64 can run in a window, if for some reason you want to, I dunno, do your accounts and play N64 games at the same time or something.

Caption: Wave goodbye to life-crushingly dull F1 games with the masterful Mario Kart 64. (Much better than the SNES one, whatever anyone says.)

Caption: Goldeneye, but with PC-sharp 1024x768 graphics? You know where you can stick your Half-Life, don’t you? (Steady. – Ed)

SIGN YOUR MAME (ACROSS MY HEART)
The Big Apple of emulation gets a brand-new core.

Hopefully, PC ZONE readers, you won’t need to be told too much about MAME by now. From a simple Pac-Man emulator four years ago, Nicola Salmoria’s Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator has grown into a gargantuan many-authored project which offers perfect recreation of almost 3000 old coin-op videogames. Recently, however, MAME had its most significant overhaul since its birth, when the entirety of the core code was re-written as a Windows, rather than DOS, program. The most significant results of this were the additions of several new features like picture-stretching and smoothing (all games now automatically occupy the maximum possible amount of screen space while remaining in proportion, and have authentically fuzzy edges rather than PC-monitor jagged lines), and a dramatic boost in the speed of many newer games, such as the Midway "Wolf" and "Y-Unit" series (including titles like NBA Jam, Ultimate Mortal Kombat, Total Carnage and Terminator 2 – Judgement Day), which are now realistically playable in MAME for the first time. In fact, MAME now more or less goes all the way up to the very end of the PCB-based coin-op. (Most modern arcade games now run on dedicated hardware with very game-specific control setups, rather than the circuit-board-in-a-generic-box model that persisted up to the late 1990s.) With this latest version, the chances are that the PC you’re using now is finally capable of running just about any PCB-based arcade game ever written.

TOP TEN MAME GAMES
Or at least, nine chosen entirely at random, plus Mr Do.

1. The Simpsons – a cartoon beat-‘em-up rumoured to have had the hands of legendary Japanese console developers Treasure behind it. More importantly, you get to charge around as Homer smacking everyone in the face.

2. Tehkan World Cup – famous for its two-player double-trackball cocktail-table cabinet, playing with a joystick makes it a lot easier to score tons of spectacular goals, like Beckham-style punts from inside your own half and running round the keeper three times before banging it in. (Personal best win in 90-second game: 19-0. Beat that.)

3. Scramble – seminal multi-stage scrolling blaster with some of the most perfect gameplay balance ever created to this day.

4. Akkanvader – aka Space Invaders 95, one of the lesser-known but most entertaining of the classic game’s numerous sequels, starring a puppy in a dish.

5. Mag Max – perhaps the first ever example of a giant mecha robot game. Build your big ‘bot bit-by-bit, then stomp around smashing everything.

6. Sky Kid – supercute scroller involving lots of aerobatics in a dinky little biplane, and bombing the heck out of sinister military installations. Ooh.

7. Irritating Maze – fantastically-named Neo Geo version of those games where you have to guide a metal rod through an electrified maze, except with all manner of fancy moving parts and traps. Disturbingly addictive.

8. DoDonPachi – insanely over-the-top vertically-scrolling shoot-‘em-up, of which this screenshot represents perhaps the most sedate moment ever captured.

9. Poker Ladies – Extremely rude and deeply bizarre Japanese animated strip video poker game, featuring disembodied groping hands, syringes full of water being squirted in odd places and people shining torches at each other in "unusual" ways.

10. Mr. Do – the Ed’s favourite, hence more than my job’s worth not to put it in. A true classic of its time, and any other time too. Oh yes.

I AM THE LAW
Emulation – great fun, but will it get you sent to jail?

As you probably know by now, emulation is a pretty grey area in the eyes of the law. While it’s generally accepted (except by Nintendo) that emulating consoles in itself doesn’t break any laws, using those emulators to play old games generally does (unless you own "legitimate" copies of every game you play on an emulator). Most emulation fans draw a moral line between emulation of old, "dead" systems like the Spectrum or Mega Drive, and emulation of more current machines from which publishers still make money, like the Game Boy Advance, whose emulation Nintendo have recently, and predictably, been making a fuss about. Even there, though, it’s difficult to see the harm – after all, the whole point of the Game Boy is that you can stick it in your pocket and take it on the bus, which is both impractical and uncomfortable with your PC. The US and European videogame trade bodies, IDSA and ELSPA, have done their level best to crush fan-run emulation websites wherever they’ve found them (short-sightedly storing up pointless ill-will and resentment among dedicated gamers as they do so), but a much more sensible approach seems to be being adopted by Williams, who not only haven’t thrown lawsuits around to prevent the distribution of their old pinball ROMs, but have made them freely available for download on their own website. Whether they continue to take this enlightened and admirable outlook as Visual Pinball grows in popularity remains to be seen.

STAY OFF THE ROOF, ROD
All the emus you’ll ever need are here.

www.mame.net – latest MAME news and downloads

www.retrogames.com – general emulation news, downloads and links. Also hosts CPS2Shock, which is the primary source of new decoder tables for CPS-2 games.

www.finalburn.com – Final Burn homepage

http://igba.multimania.com – iGBA homepage

http://boycottadvance.emuunlim.com – Boycott Advance homepage

http://www.komkon.org/fms/VGB/ - Virtual GBA homepage

http://www.pj64.net/ - Project 64 homepage

GENERAL PICS/CAPTIONS

Caption: Graphics-intensive mid-90s coin-ops like Darius Gaiden (you join us in the middle of some explosive smart-bomb pyrotechnics) are now no problem at all for your PC. (MAME)

Caption: Bubble Symphony, one of about eight different "semi-sequels" to the original Bubble Bobble. (MAME)

Caption: Kylie makes several PCZ readers’ dreams come true as Cammy in Street Fighter The Movie (MAME).

Caption: One more shot of Goldeneye? Oh, okay then. (Project 64)

Caption: It’s that little pixie man again, this time in the little known 1996 Neo Geo remake of Mr Do, snappily entitled Neo Mr Do. (MAME)

Caption: NBA Jam Tournament Edition, now properly playable in emulated form for the first time. (MAME)

Caption: The phenomenal Metal Slug X, now more unmissable than ever. (MAME)