Is there any legal way of playing Arcade games?

[SpoonyBard]

I am guessing I just need 1 supergun and it will work like a console for different boards right?

Most arcade games made after 1985 use what's called a JAMMA pinout, and that's usually what a supergun comes wired to play. There are a few other standards, but you should be able to get adapters to hook your supergun up to most any other type.

I wonder if these boards die over time or need special maintenance

All older electronics are prone to some failure, and some will definitely need work. Probably the most commonly repaired boards would be Capcom CPS2 games, as they use a battery to store decryption keys that the game needs to run. When the battery dies (which is now fairly common, considering the age of the boards) it loses that data and the game stops functioning.

[indecks]

But thanks to guys like Razoola, dead (known as "suicided") CPS2 boards can be 'phoenixed' and brought back to life, as well as removing the need for a battery.

It depends on who you talk to though, some people prefer non-phoenixed CPS2 boards because there are sometimes minor things that are different after the process. Something like timing, or frames missing, etc. I only heard about this a few months ago.

I have a Phoenixed Marvel Vs Capcom board (that just so happens to be dead at the moment) and it plays just like I remember, but I'm no professional-goes-to-EVO fighter player.

[Ghegs]

I am guessing I just need 1 supergun and it will work like a console for different boards right?

Yep, that's it, with the caveat SpoonyBard mentioned.

I wonder if these boards die over time or need special maintenance . I am aslo amazed at the low price of the boards because I would imagine that there are a lot more console games than arcade boards, yet a console game can easily reach $60 and an arcade board is like twice that. Also , I am surprised how large a cabinet is while the actual game is just a small board

If you take care of them properly the boards can last a long time, but eventually something will probably need some fixing. At that point you can either try to fix it yourself or have someone do it for you. Basic electronics skills (soldering, etc) can help out a lot.

The boards' prices vary greatly. I've bought some for as cheap as $60 and as expensive as $400 and you can find games for both cheaper and way more expensive. It really depends on the game.

Where are you located? If you're in Europe, I can heavily recommend the work of RGB, the guy who made my supergun, he does superb work. It's probably the easiest to contact him through the shmups forum. If you're in US, the shipping costs could get prohibitively expensive and it might be smarter to look for a supergun over on that side of the pond.

[RCBH928]

Thanks everyone, all your info and tips were highly helpful.

... C) the game's source code has been lost, which happens much more often than you'd think.

I can't imagine that being an issue in an era when most retro "ports" are just roms wrapped in emulator shells anyway.

How hard is it to recreate a game made in the 80's/90s ? Even if the source code is lost , I would imagine it can be easily rewritten. Most of the arcade games were short. I think the more complex ones were the ones that started to be in 3D like Mario 64/FF7/MGS .

I would be more worried about the art work , which I think can be extracted from the ROM files? not sure...

[skate323k137]

You'd be surprised how much work went into those games. And many of the old devs of those games don't program any more, and you'd be hard pressed to find people who can program for those old processors now.

Superguns are definitely nice, especially if most of what you want is JAMMA era. Otherwise, MAME is a great option, even if it is borderline on the legality side. I don't think any end users have ever had any legal troubles just playing arcade ROMS in their own homes.

[MrPopo]

You'd be surprised how much work went into those games. And many of the old devs of those games don't program any more, and you'd be hard pressed to find people who can program for those old processors now.

To expand on this, let's say you do a sprite rip of the game (relatively easy to do) and try to recreate the game from scratch. Now you run into the issue of having the timing work exactly as it did on the original hardware. Usually this is dependent on the actual clock speed of the original processor, but then you have wrinkles from things such as the processor potentially doing intelligent pipelining, or the game using floating point math which can add extra no-op cycles due to their greater complexity per operation. This is the sort of thing that introduces the slowdown you see in action-heavy games. As has been shown in ports of shmups, that slowdown can be vital. Many games are balanced around the slowdown, so suddenly running everything at a constant speed can make those portions neigh impossible.

[Ghegs]

There's often a lot going on under the hood even for seemingly simple games, and recreating something from scratch will almost always result in some things behaving slightly differently. Especially if you're not the original developer so you'd at least have some idea of the game's internal logic.

Not an arcade title but still a case in point: R-Type III. Originally for SNES, it was ported to GBA with the end result being quite bad. But this was not merely the case of a crappy team handling the port. Irem has apparently lost the source code and all assets, so the team was forced to rip the graphics using a SNES emulator and just try to build the game anew to match the emulation. Of course that was doomed to failure.

[Hobie-wan]

Indeed, you'd be surprised how hard it is to program where A makes the character jump and it be good in game, on top of the timing things with checking the controller in between moving things on screen, running a timer, checking for sprite collisions, adding points, etc. This is why there are games with good controls and bad controls.

[RCBH928]

Indeed, you'd be surprised how hard it is to program where A makes the character jump and it be good in game, on top of the timing things with checking the controller in between moving things on screen, running a timer, checking for sprite collisions, adding points, etc. This is why there are games with good controls and bad controls.

But if they make stuff like GTA4 and Call of Duty I am guess they do have the capable to redo 90's games... just guessing since current gen. probably needs a lot more to handle.

[Hobie-wan]

But if they make stuff like GTA4 and Call of Duty I am guess they do have the capable to redo 90's games... just guessing since current gen. probably needs a lot more to handle.

For most modern games, one company makes an engine. Another company licenses the engine and puts their graphics in it and tweaks the engine a little or adds things. There's usually lots of documentation on what everything does in the engine. For older games, the programming was a lot more in the guts of the machine. There was a lot less documentation and people that knew how to do it might have forgotten.

It would be like having a box of raw shorn wool, a spinning wheel, some dried flowers, and some pointed metal rods, with no instructions versus a kit with several skeins of different colored yarn, needles, a pattern, and basic instructions on how to knit and expecting you to come up with a colorful sweater.