M. Neko

What's interesting is that it's presumed to have a MIPS processor running at a significantly higher clock speed than the processor in the PSP. This would naturally lead one to assume that this could do emulation twice as well as the PSP, but due to a number of factors (including a worse GPU, perhaps?), that's just not the reality. NES games play well, so do 8-bit Game Boy games. Genesis games play well too, as do 68000-based arcade games. SNES it doesn't do well, and the Game Boy Advance? Forget about it. By contrast, the emulation scene- both official and homebrew- is far, far stronger on the PSP.

I'm wondering if that could change, or ever will change, considering the SF2000's small user base. I would dearly love to see a custom firmware that would wring every drop of power out of this admittedly dated chip.

A whole lot of things, but in particular, the streamlining of the interface. You waste so much time waiting through corporate logos and loading time and health warnings and who knows what else before you're able to get your arcade fix. I hate this. I haaaaate this. Playing emulators on my computer has pretty much reduced my tolerance for waiting through bullshit to nothing. El zippo. I just want to play the game, NOW, while the mood strikes me. It's how things were in arcades- you just walk up to the machine you want to play and pop in a coin- and it's how I want things now.

Also, everybody who makes commercial emulators goes nuts with presentation, and no one style really meshes well with another. There's no consistency. I just want to pick the game and play the game, and some of these commercial emulators (case in point: the most recent Sega Genesis collection) actively interfere with you trying to reach the game. No, I don't particularly want to search through a fourteen year old's bedroom for their Sega Genesis. That's creepy and weird. "Officer, it's not how it looks! I just wanted to play Billy's Sega Genesis!"

So yeah, I buy the classic collections whenever I can, to support the companies and to stay at least somewhat legit. I whined for these games to be made legally available, these companies have made that possible, and I suppose I'll have to put my money where my mouth is. It's not where I actually want to play these games, though. Having an all-in-one, no-nonsense solution with consistency in the interface is far preferable. Since that can no longer be the Xbox Series, I'll have to find another solution, and none of them were this convenient.

My escapades with the Namco Museum cabinet have demonstrated that MAME 2000 can be a powerful tool for not-so-powerful devices of all stripes. Just for shiggles, I copied my MAME 2000 romset over to my Playstation Vita, just to see how well the games would run on the Vita version of RetroArch. The answer is "surprisingly well." Games that had no hope of running at full speed on Final Burn Neo are like buttah on MAME 2000... even OutRun comes close to a full framerate, although it hits a few snags at the start of the race.

The downside of MAME 2000 is that much of the emulation is the result of meatball surgery. Things like raster effects and sound channels for specific types of arcade hardware weren't fully understood, so the MAME team had to make do with what knowledge they had, and make everything work on the limited technology of the time. What results is slight weirdness, whether it's missing title graphics in Ninja Emaki or painfully tone-deaf music in Time Soldiers or broken color strobing in Robotron and Stargate. There were constant issues with games not running quite right after uploading them to my Namco cabinet, and they continue to vex me on the Vita.

What I wish is that someone, or someones, would revisit MAME 2000, not adding games but rather sharpening up the emulation of existing ones without adding significant overhead. The obvious answer to emulation issues in MAME 2000 would be to upgrade to a more recent version of the emulator, but that just isn't an option with potato-class hardware... the toys by MyArcade and Basic Fun, old Android tablets that would otherwise take a trip to the dumpster, and aging handhelds like the 3DS and Vita. For those devices, a leaner MAME build is absolutely necessary, but it seems like there would be enough of a ceiling to fix the emulation errors in MAME 2000 without increasing its resource demands.

While playing with that damn Namco cab, I've been noticing some interesting quirks about the design language of MAME. For instance, if you're running MAME from a device with limited inputs (like this one) and you can't ESCape out of a key assignment, double-tapping A will force the key back to its default, and you can go back to changing settings without fear that you've just assigned B to reset and that you're completely boned.

One other fun thing! Say you're short on inputs, or you can't find the specific input you need for a particular game and it's not assigned by default. While in the RetroArch menu, temporarily assign a button like coin or start to the on-screen display, then resume the game. Press that button to open the OSD, then assign any keys to any functions you'll need, without RetroArch's limitations. You can even assign combinations of buttons to a specific input, which offers some fun possibilities. Right now I have Xybots set up so that holding down the B button and pressing either left or right will make your space hero turn 45 degrees in the chosen direction. It's intuitive, and it's as close as I could come to mimicking the arcade game's twisty, turny tactile joystick.

When you do make changes, you'll want to save the control scheme in the RetroArch menu, for that particular game. If you choose a control scheme for the core and not the game, you're going to get those same button assignments for every game which uses that emulator, and you're probably not going to be too happy about the resulting frustration and wasted time.