Retrocade (Preview)

Retrocade is being developed as a higher quality emulator than MAME, not that the emulation is that much better, but that it is a lot nicer to use. Whereas the MAME team are trying to document every arcade game they can lay their hands on, the retrocade team are focussing only on the real classic arcade games from the late 1970s and early 80s.

The whole purpose behind retrocade is to produce and emulator that's brimming with all the features the user wants, as well as reproducing the original game as accurately as possible. In some cases where the games sound generation is near impossible to emulate, the sounds of the original machine have been sampled so they can be played back when required during play. Also where the original game flickered because of the primitive hardware, this is emulated too - it's this sort of attention to detail that makes retrocade such a quality emulator. All the vector (line plotted) games that are emulated can be set to use glowing vector dots, translucent lines or anti-aliasing to make them appear as smooth as you want them. Backdrops are also plotted on behind the vector lines to add even more realism to the emulation.

Other features include a very nice frontend which lists all the games that the emulator supports (currently 100) with the ones that it can't locate greyed out - that's right, it automatically locates the still ZIPped up ROMs, whether you place them in the same directory as the executable, or in a special ROM directory, so none of the command line hassles of MAME. It's the sort of program you can just run and you know how to use it without having to read the manual, something which certainly can't be said of MAME. You can select a second list of 'Favourites' from the total list and then flick between displaying the two at the press of a key so you can easily get to the games you want to play.

Each game can be configured to use specific keys for that game as well as being able to configure the individual games DIP switches. You can even save the games position and reload it later as can be done previously with many console emulators. During gameplay you control the brightness and the volume easily and can select to display information about the emulation, such as the frames per second and even the percentage of time spent on emulating things such as CPU, blitter, plotting etc.

At the moment Retrocade is only available for the PC under DOS and is written entirely in x86 assembly language. This cannot be ported to other platforms as such so instead must be converted by manually translating the x86 assembly into ARM code or any other platform's assembly language. Gareth Long is working very hard doing this and currently has over 2Mb of ARM assembly source code done for the project. Eventually he hopes to have at least some of the emulated games working on lower end machines as well as RISC PCs. It's an incredible task he's undertaken, and very many people have called him insane (in the nicest possible way) for doing it. Gareth is to be thanked eternally for trying something that most of us would have turned our noses up at in disgust, but which will hopefully result in this superb arcade emulator being brought to life on our Acorns.

ARM Retrocade page
Official Retrocade page

Recommended software:
Amidar, Arkanoid, Armor Attack, Asteroids Deluxe, Battlezone, Demolition Derby, Demon, Discs of Tron, Donkey Kong Jr, Frogger, Galaxian, Gyruss, Joust, Rampage, Star Wars.