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The Guide to Emulating NeoGeo and CPS:a must if you’re into quality&FREE arcade games
You may have already heard of NeoGeo and the Capcom Play Systems They’re excellent 2D arcade consoles – much better than most other 2D ones. Some of the titles released for these consoles are still much better than anything comparable on Windows Mobile. Therefore, if you’re into platformer or fighter games, you MUST check out the emulators running them.
(Speaking of the the Capcom Play System, it's abbreviated as CPS and should not to be mistaken for Capcom CPS Changer. There have been three major revision of them, CPS-1, CPS-2 and CPS-3 . The latter doesn’t have many games and isn’t supported on Windows Mobile).
Up until recently, it has been pretty impossible to emulate these platforms under Windows Mobile (WM for short). If you read the only related (and highly outdated) article at pdagameguide.com, dated back to 2003, you’ll see emulating NeoGeo was pretty much impossible then – all you could do is running NeoGeo Pocket Color games, which, being made for a not very powerful handheld platform, aren’t as sophisticated as desktop NeoGeo titles and should, therefore, not be preferred over the desktop versions. (Let alone their emulators being pretty outdated and incapable; for example, NeoPocott v0.38b R1 (also see THIS) hasn’t received any update for over six years!)
Pretty recently, well-known Windows Mobile coder Masterall has released the WM port of FinalBurn Alpha, the first emulator for WM that does deliver excellent emulation capabilities and SUPERIOR speed. And it’s free – as with the ROM images themselves. Finally, in addition to emulating NeoGeo and CPS-1/2, it’s also capable of running Toaplan and Cave games.
Masterall also has some other ports he can be VERY proud of. Picodrive, for example, is the best Genesis (Sega Mega Drive) emulator I've ever seen (I’ll elaborate on Genesis emulation in a later article). He’s also the author of pocketGBAdvance, a GBA emulator, of which he’s promising a usable version very soon.
All in all, he’s pretty much comparable to the other “big” names of emulator porters like n0p (Genesis Plus/Pocket PC, PocketSNES, DOSBox and Stratagus), PocketInsanity (PocketUAE) or Sunbug.net (PocketGBA).
In addition to the related pdagameguide.com article being completely outdated, I’ve decided to write an all-in-one guide on these questions because the related information currently available is very hard to digest for a non-professional Windows Mobile geek. Hope this guide will help a LOT.
Why do I recommend this emulator and these games? Why should you bother?
Because
the emulator runs just GREAT on most current hardware, even with sound
even the most CPU-intensive games run OK (with enabled sound!) on the (for gaming) best, fastest current handhelds (Dell Axim x51v, for example)
the games are available for free
many of the games are MUCH better than anything else (comparable, in the same genre) on Windows Mobile. Very few native Windows Mobile games (for example SKY FORCE Reloaded is the only comparable title, as far as, say, 1942 clones are concerned)
if you do follow this guide, you can run these games REALLY easily - I've tried to explain it really clearly how the emulator must be configured, where to download games from, what games to get and so on
Difference between NeoGeo and the two CPS versions
Unfortunately, the NeoGeo emulation (as of the recent, 0.008 build is concerned) is certainly less featureful than that of emulating CPS games. Therefore, you will always want to check out whether a particular title is available as a CPS game and if and only if it isn’t switch to the NeoGeo version. Note that the developer has been promising fixing these problems very soon.
The problems with the NeoGeo emulation are as follows:
with NeoGeo games, it’s not possible to save / load game states, unlike with CPS games. This is a big problem if you would like to continue your game after exiting FinalBurn
auto fire doesn’t work with them either (while it worked with all CPS games I’ve tested)
Getting, installing
Get the latest version in the first post of the the official FinalBurn thread at Modaco – it’ll always have the latest version (you will need to register your nick in there).
That there are four RAR files there. One is named FinalBurn.rar. This is the WM executable. The other three contain the desktop Windows version of the emulator, are named fbauds.part01.rar … fbauds.part03.rar and should only be got if you will need to create cache files of the titles you’d like to play. Use WinRAR.
Note that the latter emulator does differ from the official desktop Windows version of FinalBurn Alpha downloadable here. The latter is far newer (and is, therefore, preferred to the version available at Modaco) but doesn’t support creating cache files. That is, do download the fbauds.partX.rar’s too. (And, again, you may also want to download the official desktop Windows version of FinalBurn Alpha here, should you want to play the titles on your desktop computer.)
To play NeoGeo games in the emulator, you will also need to acquire the ROM BIOS file, Neogeo.zip (you won’t need to do this if you ONLY want to play CPS games!). This ZIP is different for the desktop Windows version (downloadable here; also see THIS) and for the WM version (accessible here). Put the ZIP file (do NOT decompress it!) in the ROMs subdirectory of FileBurn (with the desktop version, you can also put it in the home directory where the main executable EXE file resides – it’ll find it. The WM version won’t), which is auto-created upon the first execution of the emulator (see later).
Finally, for the desktop version, you will also need kailleraclient.dll. It’s for example available in the official desktop FinalBurn Alpha distribution - just download the ZIP file and it’ll be right in it. You won’t even need to start the main executable, fba.exe. Or, alternatively, get it HERE as a separate download. Again, this only applies to the desktop version – with the WM version, all you will need to do is getting Neogeo.zip and copying it to the ROMs directory. Note that you may also need to download and install the free DirectX 9.
Game ROM’s you download must be put under the ROMs dir as ZIP files (that is, you don’t need to decompress them). This directory will be automatically created when you start the executable on both the desktop (fba.exe with the official FinalBurn version, fbaud.exe with the cache-generating debug version) and mobile (FinalBurn.exe) Windows.
Getting games (ROM images)
Probably the best ROM source is emuparadise.org, where you can download a lot of games from. The games there are all in a format compatible with the emulator. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean ALL the available titles are indeed compatible: it’s only with CPS games that they are. There are still a lot of NeoGeo games that are just plain incompatible (and aren’t even listed by FinalBurn as compatible). Nevertheless, the ones that are recognized are, in general, really worth playing.
CPS-1 ROMs should be here (but seems to be empty now); CPS2 here. Finally, NeoGeo ROM’s are here.
Keep in mind the following while downloading files from emuparadise.org:
you can only download one ROM image at a time. emuparadise.org, in addition to checking the same browser instance, also check for the same IP. That is, you can’t fool the server into thinking it’s serving another completely independent user when you leech images from IE and Firefox at the same time.
don’t use Internet Explorer to download images because it’ll very often time out. Prefer Firefox (Mozilla) – it has never timed out on me, as opposed to (the latest version of) Internet Explorer.
There are a LOT of very cool games in there; games that are MUCH better than most (or, with horizontal scrollers, ANY) comparable, native titles on Windows Mobile. There is nothing on Windows Mobile comparable to, say, Metal Slug. Yes, FirePower-onrush uses a lot of textures / graphics from Metal Slug (see Sponge’s comments HERE, after my review, for more info on this) but is still WAY worse.
I’ve also tested many titles under the emulator, in the next subsection, I list and elaborate on them.
NeoGeo titles, links & compatibility reports
Captain Tomaday: works great (kids’ vertical scroller)
Ghost Pilots: great, even at 44 kHz (let alone 8!) (vertical scroller)
NAM – 1975: Operation Wolf clone: works great, even at 44 kHz, highly recommended if you like
Metal Slug 2: One of the BEST! A MUST!
Metal Slug 3 : in order to run this title on anything with less than 128M RAM, you will also need to download the non-encrypted version in addition to the default one. Make sure you run the latter on devices with free RAM less than 40 Mbytes.
Metal Slug X: Great game, working also great
Samurai Shodown: works great, even at 44 kHz
King of the Monsters: OK, even at 44k
A list of, as of the current version, some non-recognized games:
Metal Slug 1
The Last Blade
Blazing Star
Metal Slug 4
(both versions of PocketCultMAME recognize them but can’t run. The desktop MAME runs them all. The desktop FinalBurn Alpha doesn't.)
As of now, it’s pretty futile to try to download these games. The situation may change in the future, though: FinalBurn Alpha is constantly been updated to support as many NeoGeo games as possible.
CPS-2 titles, links & compatibility reports
1944: a really good 1942 clone! A must have!
19xx: another excellent 1942 clone, works great even at 44kHz! Another must have!
Alien vs Predator: fighting, not that good IMHO
Armored Warriors : not very good either
Battle Circuit: side scroller, not very interesting
Dimahoo: too, another good 1942 clone (not as good as 1944 / 19xx though)
Eco Fighters: side scroller, not very interesting; you still might want to give it a try
Night Warriors: typical Street Fighter clone
All these games run flawlessly, mostly with 44 kHz sound, on the x51v – and even on the HTC Wizard (with, particularly with 19xx, 8 kHz sound). The 520 MHz WM5 VGA HTC Universal is pretty bad (very slow) for emulation, so is the 624 MHz WM5 (2.01) VGA HP iPAQ hx4700 (which is only a tad better and DOES require and external BT game pad because of the completely gaming-unfriendly touchpad). The WM2003SE VGA Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720 is acceptable (but, of course, visibly / audibly worse than the x51v), so is the WM2003 QVGA HP iPAQ 2210.
Also note that FinalBurn Alpha supports (almost) all CPS games, unlike with the case of NeoGeo.
Using the emulator I – starting games
The desktop and the WM versions of the emulator are, fortunately, pretty similar. This means if you learn how, for example, the ROM selection screen works, what the main directories of the emulator are etc. in the desktop version, you will also be able to utilize this knowledge under WM.
Starting the emulator is pretty easy: just start the main executable file (after decompressing it anywhere (under Windows Mobile, preferably to a memory card because it’ll look for the ROM images in a subdirectory) and, with the debug desktop version, also adding kailleraclient.dll): fba.exe with the official desktop FinalBurn version, fbaud.exe with the cache-generating debug desktop version and FinalBurn.exe on the Pocket PC.
When first run, the executable file will also create the necessary directory structure, including the ROMs subdirectory. You can start putting your ROM games in there (and, of course, Neogeo.zip containing the NeoGeo BIOS if you do want to play NeoGeo games). Under WM, you’ll be presented the following screen:
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Here, go to File / Load Rom. It’ll present a long list of all games compatible with FinalBurn. You don’t necessarily want to see this list but only the accessible AND compatible games; therefore, you will need to tick in the “Show Only Available” checkbox at the top. Now, the listing will become far more manageable as it will only list the games that you can run:
By single-clicking an item in here, the emulator starts it after creating a so-called ‘cache file’ as can be seen in here.
Creating cache files can be a real nuisance. If you do this on your handheld, it may take quite a time (1-2 minutes at most; if it takes more time, you can be pretty sure your handheld has crashed and needs to be reset). Furthermore, with ZIP files exceeding 50-60 Mbytes (for example, the excellent platformer Metal Slug 3, which is a whopping 79Mbytes), all your dynamic RAM memory (independent of the available free memory on your storage card or internal storage) will be all quietly consumed and the handheld will either crash (as is pretty common with WM5+ in these cases) or just display it has run out of memory (with WM2003(SE)).
Therefore, if you do encounter such situations, you will want to create the cache images on the desktop Windows, using the above-introduced debug cache-creator version of FinalBurn Alpha. To do this, just start fbaud.exe (after copying neogeo.zip and the ROM image ZIP of the to-be-converted game to the ROMs subdirectory), go to Game / Load Game (F6), select the game you’d like to convert (screenshot here; I’ve also made sure to hide non-available titles by ticking in “Show Available Only” (see the mouse cursor) and click OK. The cache file will be created and named exactly the same as with the ROM ZIP file name – with the extension “cache”. That is, for example, if you create a cache file of the unencrypted Metal Slug 3 (mslug3n.zip), the related cache file will be named mslug3n.cache. It’ll be put in the “cache” subdirectory of the desktop emulator. Make sure you copy this file to the memory card, in the same ‘cache’ directory. It’s also here that other cache files are stored.
By the way, don’t forget to delete partially created cache files from this directory (that is, files that weren’t finished because of the dynamic RAM memory or the storage card getting full). Messed up cache files are the main reason for messed-up graphics in the emulator.
Now, after having created the cache file, the game will start. You will, however, need to do some additional configuration to be actually able to play games. This will be needed to done only once – fortunately, the configuration options you make will be stored in the cfg directory. BTW, these files are all human-readable and editable; they contain the game-specific button settings. That is, the ones you’ll always need to set up.
The first step in making the games playable, after loading them, is setting up the hardware buttons.
Using the emulator II – setting up the buttons
After you’ve loaded a ROM image (and clicked the screen so that the execution stops and the menu is displayed), you must go to Options / Keys. It’s there that you must assign hardware buttons to functionality.
Doing this is pretty simple: you click an on-screen button and, then, press the hardware button you’d like it to be assigned to. For example, click the Coin and, after this, click a button you’d like to use to simulate feeding money into the arcade machine (the first step in starting a game; after this, you’ll also need to press the Start button). You will also need to assign the A, B, C and, with NeoGeo, D hardware buttons too. (These will have different functionality: for example, in Metal Slug, firing, jumping and throwing a grenade. Button D isn’t used.) Note that the emulator also supports WM5 hardware soft keys as can also be seen in the screenshot below (C and D buttons). If your mobile has a built-in keyboard, you can also use most (not only alphanumeric) keys on it.
You will also need to set up the D-pad directions; always treat the D-pad in Portrait mode, even if the game itself is in Landscape.
You can also tick in the “Enable Auto-Fire” checkbox if you want auto fire; remember, however, that it, currently, only works with CPS games, NOT with NeoGeo ones, unfortunately.
A typical screenshot of setting up the hardware buttons is as follows:
Finally, keep in mind that you can only set up the buttons for Player 1 in here. Should you also want to set up the Player 2 buttons, you will need to edit the game configuration file in the cfg subdirectory.
Using the emulator III – setting up the on-screen keys
If you have a mobile device with a touch screen (that is, not a plain MS Smartphone / WM6 Standard model) AND your device isn’t a 2.8” HTC model (HTC Wizard, Trinity etc.), you will also find on-screen buttons REALLY useful.
In Options / Screenpad, you WILL want to tick in “Enable Screen Keypad”.
I recommend staying with Mode 1 (emulating fire buttons on the screen) – Mode 2 emulates the D-pad in there. Click OK.
Note that
these settings are NOT game-specific (unlike assigning buttons); you’ll only need to set it once; preferably right after the first execution of the emulator.
as has been pointed out, you won’t necessarily want to use on-screen buttons on HTC’s new WM5+ devices having the standard 2.8” QVGA screens. These devices, unfortunately, all exhibit a VERY bad digitizer bug explained for example HERE. This means if you constantly tap and hold the screen (for example, to activate auto fire with CPS games), the CPU will need to spend a lot of time on serving this and the emulation speed will drop considerably, which will be very annoying particularly if you enable sounds. That is, if you do need auto fire, then, use a hardware button instead of the screen with these models.
Using the emulator IV – setting up the sound
Finally, particularly on slower models or with CPU-intensive games like all parts of Metal Slug, you will want to make sure the sampling rate is either set to the minimal 8 kHz or the sound is completely disabled.
Go to Options / Sound and set the sampling rate accordingly. If the sound is unbearable even at the minimal, lowest-quality 8 kHz, disable it completely. Otherwise, with non-CPU-intensive games and/or on, for gaming, very fast handhelds (like the Dell Axim x51v), you will want to turn it up to 22 or even 44 kHz as can be seen in here.
Note that you’ll need to reload the actual ROM image for these changes to be heard.
Fortunately, most games will work with enabled sound even on slow(er) models like the HTC Wizard (overclocked to 260/273 MHz). You will only encounter sound choppiness with very few titles; most importantly, with Metal Slugs, which do have a choppy sound even at the lowest-quality (8 kHz) setting on even the Dell Axim x51v running at 624 MHz.
Using the emulator V – setting up the orientation
If the game you’d like to play uses Landscape (only few titles like, for example, 19xx, use Portrait), you’ll want to know the emulator uses Landscape Right by default. If you’re right-handed (and, therefore, want the D-pad on the left of the screen), you’ll want to switch this to “Landscape Left” in Options / Display.
Using the emulator VI – resuming the game; suspension concerns
Now that you’ve set up everything, you can run the game. If it’s NOT a NeoGeo game, you can save / load the state any time you want, using any file name (that is, you can have any number of states for any games).
Note that the emulator is prone to crash if you suspend (and, then, resume) a game while it’s running off a storage card. To combat this problem, you will ALWAYS want to pause the game first and only then suspend the machine and only resume the game 3-4 seconds after powering up the handheld again. During these 3-4 seconds, the handheld will have sufficient time to recreate the storage card file handles.
This helped me a lot. If you, however, still encounter crashes after this (which can be a REAL pain in the back, particularly if you’re well into a game like Metal Slugs and don’t want to replay the first few maps), copy the entire directory structure to the main storage, where storage card handle invalidation isn’t a problem.
As both ROM images and, particularly, cache files can take up pretty much memory, the latter is really only usable on devices with 256+ Mbyte built-in storage (like the Dell Axim x51v). Most current devices with 128M built-in Flash ROM can only have few (if any) games in the main storage.
Note that you can pause the game by tapping the screen. If you have enabled on-screen buttons, in an inactive area; if you haven’t, anywhere.
Saving / restoring game state
You can also save / restore the game state (after you’ve loaded the particular ROM).
As the emulator uses the standard operating system-level file access dialog, it’ll
list all the files under My Documents, the root of storage card(s) and one subdirectory under them
only lets for saving to these locations.
In the official FinalBurn thread at Modaco many people recommend Tillanosoft’s tGetFile to fix this problem. I don’t, because it’s a commercial application. Use Mad Programmer’s free (!) File Dialog Changer instead. Its installation is explained in HERE.
Note that, again, this only works with CPS games, NOT NeoGeo ones! This may change in the near future.
What about MAME ports, you may ask
You must have heard of MAME, the well-known emulator project, of which PocketCultMAME is probably the best port (also see this PG thread), also offering a lot of features (feature-wise, it’s excellent).
While, on a sufficiently fast desktop computer, the NeoGeo emulation of MAME isn’t worse than that of FinalBurn, under Windows Mobile, the situation is completely different.
Unlike with the desktop MAME (which can be pretty hard for a newbie to use without a front-end), the Windows Mobile port, PocketCultMAME is pretty easy to use. After decompressing the distribution file (and, with the 0.5 preview, also overwriting one of the EXE files with the separately downloadable NeoGeo update), copying your ROM ZIP’s to the ROMs subdirectory and starting PCMAME.exe (with 0.5, PocketCultMAME.exe), it lists the available titles.
Too bad its NeoGeo compatibility is really bad. For example, the latest version, 0.5WIP (with, of course, the NeoGeo update patch) couldn’t run any of the NeoGeo games I’ve thrown it at (without converting them to another format). It’s only the NAM-1975 title screen that it gets to – but, after you insert the virtual coin and start the game, it exits, as with all the other tested titles. The old version, 0.4a, is similarly incompatible.
In the Modaco thread, some people have also reported being able to run Golden Axe under PocketCultMAME. However, the speed was clearly inferior to that of FinalBurn Alpha – that is, it’s just not worth the effort.
That is, for the time being, you will want to forget (current) MAME ports entirely – if you need NeoGeo or CPS games under Windows Mobile, the only way to go is FinalBurn Alpha. The only real utility of it is the broader compatibility of the desktop MAME with existing NeoGeo titles – for example, it was able to play Metal Slug 1, unlike with (both the desktop and the mobile version of) FinalBurn Alpha. I’ll report on updates / enhancements / optimizations to PocketCultMAME. In the meantime, stick with FinalBurn Alpha on your Windows Mobile handheld.
(Note that FinalBurn also runs on the MS Smartphone platform!)
thank you so much for this great guide. i was playing metal slug on FPSEce, but i think it might run much faster on an NeoGeo emulator than a play station emulator especially that i have k-jam (wizard). i was overclocking to 260 without the boost. i think i must try it with the boost even if i get only 1 extra FPS it is still worth it. thanks again mate.
i too tried some of the demo games on FPSEce, couldnt be bothered to get my disks and rip them... though might do it later my biggest problem is the controls, the i300 has some extra buttons that could be used, i seen some articles about maping but they all have to do with reg edit, i wish for a program to capture or remap to run as some kind of plugin, to use ALL the buttons, all but the on/off reset cause that would suck heh, but the call, win key and the ok/close buttons are all a must IMO, even the volume button can be used, for buttons such as select/menu/start etc...
FPSEce ran ok with the demo, but without proper controls not that playable, the fps was decent too, with this cpu, im just wondering if these emu's will utilize any other co processors... such as most have them im sure... how else are we able to play/record in mpeg4 and the such
thanks for showing that emu here. its one of best emus available, just try blazing star to get image of what masterall have done for emu fanatics.
+1 for you, too.
emu fanatic..
btw, isn't it sad, that i STILL cant have snes emu with sound on wizard? i've checked every that exist.
Alien vs Predator: fighting, not that good IMHO
Armored Warriors : not very good either
Battle Circuit: side scroller, not very interesting
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
...BLASPHEMY. <_<
Then again, playing 'em on your PPC is probably pretty awkward, without a BT gamepad.
In any case, I love this emulator, and I'm waiting patiently for Ninja Masters to be loadable.
(I need to get a better unit than the Atom. Sheez.)
NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 (also known as the PC Engine) is a well-known and, at least in Japan, hugely successful fourth generation (8/16-bit combo) gaming console.
It was released (October 30, 1987) about a year before Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) (October 29, 1988) and three years before Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) (November 21, 1990), the, technically, directly comparable, other fourth generation consoles. This means it was probably the first real competitor to NES having decidedly better hardware capabilities (for example, MUCH better and stereo sound), even if you take the custom chips (“mappers”) of the latter into account. This also means emulating a TurboGrafx-16 game may result in a much better experience than a NES game - TurboGrafx-16 games have generally MUCH better sound and somewhat better graphics than NES ones.
It also had several quality titles; most importantly, the three-part Bonk series: Bonk’s Adventure, Bonk's Revenge (which was only ported to the GameBoy, unlike the first part; the latter had an Amiga and a NES port too. Note that the Amiga port is a free, official download, along with Katakis and R-Type) and, finally, Bonk's Big Adventure. These games are of pretty much the same quality as the Sonic series on the Genesis and the Mario series on the Nintendo consoles. Also see The Bonk Compendium for more info on these three titles. I've also taken a shot of a related article from the 07/1992 issue of German games magazine Power Play:
There are some other, remarkable games on the platform. For example, because of the hardware superiority to the other consoles (but not the Commodore Amiga!) of the time, its Turrican port was excellent and is well worth playing even now (if you don’t have the Genesis version or can’t play it). Also see THIS and THIS for a complete list of TurboGrafx-16 games.
Fortunately, there are some usable emulators for Windows Mobile capable of emulating TurboGrafx-16. Read on to find out what they are and how they compare.
Why should you bother?
While the currently available emulators are in no way up to par with, say, the emulators of NeoGeo, Genesis, SNES or NES (see my earlier roundups of ALL these platforms), you may still have a good time playing these old TurboGrafx-16 titles. Again, don't forget that, technically, these games are pretty good, particularly if you also listen to game music / digitized sounds. NES games had (unless they used some custom sound chips, "mappers", as is explained in my previous, NES-related roundup), in general, very simple in-game music; TurboGrafx-16 games, generally, are much better in this respect. That is, if you, for example, have a game in NES and TurboGrafx-16 formats only, you may want to prefer the latter because of the better music / sounds / graphics.
Current Windows Mobile devices run the currently available emulators without problems; this even applies to devices equipped with the "slow", 195 MHz TI OMAP CPU if you overclock them to 260-273 MHz (unless you use SmartGear, which makes it possible to avoid overclocking).
Why a full roundup?
As with my previous emulation-related articles (see the reader feedback (also at AximSite and at PocketGamer.org, the leading Windows Mobile gaming site, where the SNES roundup has also made its way to the frontpage) I’ve received to my, say, SNES emulation article), it was because of many reasons that made me publish this roundup:
There are absolutely no comparative, let alone up-to-date roundups on emulating this platform.
There are a LOT of apps to choose from (see Michu's related, excellent link / archive repository HERE), which really makes a newbie cry, given that there has been almost no comparative information on these titles on the Internet.
Users’ reports you can run into in different Windows Mobile forums are really unreliable. So are the advertisements of some software developers ;-) (never EVER believe any advertisement without reading an unbiased expert’s report / evaluation!)
Finally, the generic games (which I and Allen Gall have cleaned up last year - after that, we haven't received any criticism) and, particularly, the Emulators category received so much negative criticism (see for example THIS and THIS) before my starting to completely update & rework the annual Best Software Awards at Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine that I found it absolutely necessary, now that I’ve been appointed the Awards Nomination Manager, to, finally, show the whole world the right person (someone that REALLY knows what he’s doing and REALLY knows everything about the available software titles for Windows Mobile) was chosen for this task .
Getting ROM's
As usual, I am not allowed to give you direct links. If you, however, know what Google is, you already know what you should do ;-) Of course, you must own the original cartridge of all games you download.
After you've downloaded your ROM files, transfer them to your mobile, after unZIPping, if the particular emulator doesn't support archived images. (See the File handling: ZIP row in the Comparison Chart).
Please also see the remarks on Mad Programmer's File Dialog Changer for more information on where the ROM files should be placed on a storage card or the internal memory.
Available Emulators I - Recommended ones
1. MorphGear 2.4.0.9
MorphGear is a multi-purpose emulator for Windows Mobile. While, in general, it's a bit (or, as far as SmartGear is concerned, a lot) slower than the other, recommended emulators, it's pretty good in the following respects:
it supports Landscape
it has no known MAJOR bugs, unlike, say, PocketEngine (under WM2003+) and XPCE (sound desynchronization)
it is free.
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Unfortunately, in addition to speed issues (which, again, ONLY affect slower devices - all games run flawlessly on my 624 MHz Dell Axim x51v under MorphGear), it's the only emulator NOT to support stereo sound with TurboGrafx-16 games (all the other games have stereo sound; most games are stereo and MUCH more fun with stereo enabled). This is another problem with the emulator. Hope it will be fixed some time - it can't be THAT complicated.
Getting and installing MorphGear is easy: download THIS (main program) and THIS (TurboGrafx-16 module) CAB files; unzip them, transfer them to your PDA and click them for installing. Then, click the new MorphGear icon in the Programs / Games group. Click the
icon in order to select a ROM to load. After this, the game will start (if it’s compatible).
Note that, if you transfer your ROM images compressed with ZIP, you will explicitly need to switch to displaying ZIP files in the file dialog box.
2. SmartGear 0.12
SmartGear, introduced in the NES article, is a REALLY- REALLY fast emulator - WAY faster than any of its alternatives. Unfortunately, this comes at a price: it's incompatible with many titles the other emulators are compatible with. In addition, it's a commercial application - but, taken the speed and the number of systems it emulates into account, it's still a excellent tradeoff. Finally, it's useless on high-resolution ((W)VGA) devices.
However, if you have a slow(er) Windows Mobile device and / or you don't want to / can't overclock it, SmartGear will become a very nice alternative to anything else. Also, it’s the only alternative when you want to play all the available Bonk titles. The same stands for underclocking your otherwise very fast and responsive (say, 624 MHz Xscale-equipped) mobile to save (considerable) battery life. Sticking with current Xscale-equipped devices, at 208 MHz, the emulation still works flawlessly (unlike with any of the other titles).
Please read the NES roundup for more info on using and configuring both MorphGear and SmartGear. Note that, as far as the former is concerned, the module name is "HuGo (TurboGrafx-16)" - look for this one when you change its settings:
3. PocketEngine 1.0 beta 1
This free and, unfortunately, long abandoned emulator would be excellent because of the Landscape support and sufficiently large on-screen tap areas (in Landscape) - the two main advantages of this title.
Unfortunately, it's plain incompatible with all operating systems starting with WM2003 (including, therefore, WM2003, WM2003SE, WM5 and WM6 and only excluding PPC2k and PPC2k2). Pressing Button 1, which is used to pause the emulation of the current title and bring up the menu completely crashes all (more) recent operating systems. However, if you do learn to live with the bug (for example, you don't want to frequently change the game you play and resetting the device after finishing playing isn't a problem), you may find this title excellent because of the above-mentioned landscape and screen tap zone support. It's also compatible with VGA devices (unlike SmartGear) and has no sound problems (unlike XPCE ver0.22).
The other major problem with the title is the lack of save loading/saving support, as opposed to (almost) all the other titles.
The menus of this title are really simple, unlike most of the alternates (1 2 3 4).
Available Emulators II - Non-recommended ones
XPCE ver0.22
This title wouldn't be THAT bad - if it had decent sound support. Unfortunately, it doesn't have - it has awfully desynched sound makes this a bad choice – unless you are ready to play without sound.
To find out how bad the sound support in this emulator is, listen to the music of any game having a, say, rhythmical music (for example, the in-game music of Bomberman '94). You'll see the emulator completely messes up the rhythm of the track. Unfortunately, disabling auto frameskip (the trick that helps with many SNES emulators upon encountering the same problem) doesn't help either.
bfEngine v0.1b
This title is REALLY bad. It has a very low compatibility ratio. And, if is compatible with something, it’s way too fast - unless you enable Throttle in the settings (see the link for other settings capabilities). Finally, it has no sound support at all. Absolutely not recommended.
TGEmuCE
(the homepage of the developer doesn’t list it; neither does its Download section)
This is another title you'll want to avoid. It's VERY slow and the frameskip parameter (Option / Misc) doesn't help this at all (I bet it doesn't even try to read this value under Windows Mobile - the app is a native WindowsCE application). What is more, the settings you (manually and VERY awkwardly – examples: 1 2 3) enter in the configuration dialogs don't stick - they're all forgotten upon restating the emulator. All in all, it's in NO way recommended.
Finally,
YameCE 0.38g
(the old homepage doesn’t work any more)
This emulator was supposed to be a direct port of the, on desktop Windows, (some 8-9 year ago) well-known, (then) pretty good and compatible multi-console Yame emulator.
Unfortunately, the project was discontinued back in 2002 and, now, it's REALLY hard to get hold of the emulator - except for Michu's homepage (ARM download HERE), you can get it nowhere else.
Unfortunately, the currently available only version (the latest one), 0.38g, doesn’t support TurboGrafx-16 on Windows Mobile models with ARM CPU’s - that is, ALL Windows Mobile devices starting with the Pocket PC 2002 operating systems. This is caused by, as is stated by many, a compiler problem. Previous versions (0.38f, 0.38e etc.) did still support TurboGrafx-16 but these versions are, unfortunately, nowhere to be acquired.
If YOU have them (preferably 0.38f) somewhere lying around, PLEASE let me or Michu know so that we can make it online! It'd be REALY worth making it public again because the Yame emulation core has better compatibility ratio than other cores currently used in Windows Mobile emulators. For example, it's the only emulator to correctly (without major bitmap problems) run Street Fighter II Champion Edition and Shinobi.
It's only on VERY old MIPS devices that you can have TurboGrafx-16 emulation (the MIPS build doesn't lack TurboGrafx-16 support as can be seen in, for example, THIS screenshot taken on my E-125). For this to happen, however, you must have a Casio Cassipeia E-750 overclocked to 280 MHz so that you can have usable emulation speed. On a 150 MHz E-125, emulation is uselessly slow even with the sound disabled. See the Bible of Windows Mobile Games – Part I for more information on MIPS devices.
Also see THIS, THIS and THIS for more info on the lacking TurboGrafx-16 support of version 0.38g.
Emulators for the desktop Windows
You may also want to know how you can run TurboGrafx-16 games on your desktop computer. As the related Wiki article is just a list and doesn’t contain any evaluation / recommendation / comparison of the available desktop emulators, I've decided to review and compare them too.
The four recommended titles (Ootake 1.03, Xe (Build: Nov 1 2006), Magic Engine v1.0.0 pr10 and Yame 0.38) are elaborated on and linked in (with several screenshots) from the Comparison Chart. In here, I only list and quickly elaborate on the desktop emulators that I do NOT recommend.
Hu-Go: couldn’t start it (even when installing GTK). BTW, this is what the MorphGear module is based on.
The in 1999 discontinued xpce v0.11a crashes upon trying to load anything.
Mednafen: doesn’t start on my XP desktop.
PC2E: as can be seen in here, the emulator is no longer available for download
The comparison & compatibility chart
It's HERE. DO CHECK IT OUT, it contains a LOT of additional information best elaborated on in tabular format!
As with all my previous emulation-related articles, I've made a LOT of real-world compatibility tests with both the freely and legally downloadable Chris Covell's Creations and commercial games.
As can be seen, current emulators, except for the non-VGA-compliant SmartGear, can't run all parts of the Bonk series (only the second one - except for MorphGear, which crashes on the first in-game screen).
None of them (except for the, currently, as of 0.38g, MIPS-only YameCE) is able to correctly render the bitmaps in Street Fighter II Champion Edition and Shinobi either.
As the current desktop emulators - even free, open source ones - have no problems running these programs (see the compatibility info in the chart), someone (Masterall?) may REALLY want to consider porting a CURRENT emulator core to Windows Mobile with all he necessary goodies (stereo sound, Landscape support and on-screen tap areas) so that all (including all the Bonk) games become playable.
Recommended links
Chris Covell's Creations - free graphical demos. Note that they won’t really do what they are supposed to on the Pocket PC!
Michu’s related link collection
My other game emulator reviews in the Games section of the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine's Expert Blog. I plan to cover / discuss ALL emulators available for Windows Mobile and have already published some of these articles. Do make sure you follow / read these articles - nowhere else will you find a better source of emulation-related information, I'm absolutely sure.
UPDATE (05/28/2007): New, 0.24 version of excellent multiplatform gaming console emulator SmartGear out! It is definitely an enhanced version with a lot of new functionality (lowered CPU usage (no need to underclock your device to conserve battery life), configurable rapid fire, working Landscape support with NES emulation, in-game menus now accessible, screen size settings, new, even more effective “quick and dirty” rendering mode) and fixes some problems. Unfortunately, it still has the same, not very good game compliance ratio and still doesn’t support high-res VGA devices.
See THIS for more info. Note that I will NOT edit the original article below to reflect the changes – after reading the original article, move on to reading the changes so that you’ll see what has been changed.
UPDATE (05/25/2007): getting the Sticky status, along with ALL my other emulation-related tutorials & roundups, in the Emulators forum of one of the most active Windows Mobile forums, AximSite. By no other than Michu, the manager of the well-known Emupage! This certainly shows – along with the other for example PocketGamer.org and YAMM frontpages – these tutorials & roundups are simply the best.
Arcade games... If you have ever read WikiPedia's related article, you know it well enough arcade machines had the status as the forefront of new game releases and, by using the latest, sophisticated graphics and sound chips, used to present a far better gaming experience than any home computer or even home gaming console of that age for about 15 years - at least before 1995.
The golden age of arcade games was, as has been stated, probably before 1995. The arcade titles of that age were considerably better than anything achievable on a home computer or console. For example, consider the game Scramble. When it came out in 1981 as an arcade title, at the age of the Atari 2600 (home console) and the VIC-20 (home computer), naturally, neither of these home systems were able to provide at least something close to the gaming experience of the "real" arcade title. For example, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (which was only released a year later; the game even later: in 1982, Melbourne House's "Penetrator" and in 1983, Bug-Byte's "Cavern Fighter") had much inferior ports, and this is true of almost every home systems of the early eighties.
This trend continued through the entire eighties, well into the early nineties. It was only in 1990, with the release of SNK's dual (AES (home) and MVS (arcade)) system NeoGeo, that a home console hit the market with exactly the same games as its arcade counterparts. NeoGeo has received some really nice games; most importantly, the vastly successful Metal Slug series, which is a very popular 2D platformer title even today.
However, the NeoGeo didn't really sell to home costumers as well as, say, SNES or Sega's Genesis; mostly because of the price of the cartridges (about the twice of those of SNES) and the comparative (compared again to SNES and, before its release, the technically even less comparable NES and Genesis) rarity of titles. This means it was only with the advent of really powerful home computers that the age of arcade machines started to decline. Still, a LOT of these games are of very high quality even by today's standards, particularly when compared to the lack of quality games on mobile platforms like Windows Mobile. Therefore, emulating arcade machines (and running arcade games) on mobile devices is much more important than on desktop Windows with, at times, much better native titles.
When you hear the word "arcade games", don't think of 25-year-old "crap" like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Frogger and the like. Some people only like referring to these really old titles as "the" arcade games. That's in no way true: the Metal Slug series and the 19XX-series (starting with the old 1942) are also arcade games. Therefore, anyone stating "arcade games are very old and technically very bad games not worth emulating" only shows he/she doesn't have a clue about what he's saying. Or, if he's an arcade emulator developer, he may just be explaining why he hasn't implemented any support for any new system ;-)
As arcade games were produced even in the 2000's, there are really quality titles around. For example, I don't think you'll be able to show me a 1942 clone for Windows Mobile that is better than 19XX or 1944 written for the CPS-2 arcade machine (and perfectly runnable on a better Windows Mobile handheld!) This means there is a plethora of up-to-date, visually and, sound-wise, absolutely stunning action games well worth emulating on our mobile devices.
Keep in mind that, in this complete guide & tutorial & roundup, I refer to all the games ever released for arcade machines - both 25-year-old early games and 5-10-year-old, really advanced ones. Of course, I'll put definite emphasis on emulating newer systems to ease the lack of high-quality, comparable 2D action titles on Windows Mobile (WM for short).
Why should you bother?
To bring up memories (or, if you prefer simple games)
To play (more recent) games better than anything else on Windows Mobile in the genre
and, of course, because Windows Mobile is able to run these titles.
Downloading games
Look for “MAME” sections on ROM sites. Some ROM sites have dedicated NeoGeo and/or CPS-1 and CPS-2 sections. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to give you links. If you open your eyes and use Google, I'm sure you'll find the ROM sites in a fraction of a minute.
Don't be afraid of these sites - I've tested the ones coming up as the first after some quick Google searches. Not one of them continued any viruses and all MAME downloads were usable and CRC error-free.
After downloading the ZIP files, just copy them in the roms subdirectory of your emulator. Do NOT decompress them!
Note that MAMECE3, unlike the two other, more recommended emulators (Finalburn and PocketCultMAME, which must be manually copied to the handheld) comes with a CAB installer. This means you'll manually hunt for the roms subdirectory. If you install it to a storage card under WM5+ or in the built-in storage with any operating system version, it'll be at \Program Files\MameCE\Roms\ (with WM5+, on a storage card, prefixed with the path of the card itself). With operating systems prior to WM5 and a storage card-based installation, it'll be in \MameCE\Roms\ on your card.
Finalburn Alpha 0.09
First and foremost, the most important arcade game emulator you MUST check out is the WM port of Finalburn Alpha (current version: 0.09), the only REALLY usable CPS-1 / 2 and NeoGeo emulator. You can read a complete review & tutorial on the title HERE (click the link!); therefore, in here, I won't really elaborate on it - except when directly comparing its features, speed and compatibility to other arcade emulators.
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Its main strength is its speed (in which it's just unbeatable), sound quality (in that, not even PocketCultMAME comes close, let alone MAMECE3!) and features like on-screen tap areas. Its main disadvantage is, however, the complete lack of running non-NeoGeo / CPS games. That is, it won't be able to run anything released before 1990 - and only about 10-20% of later games. However, the titles still available for the platform (and playable on a current WM device) are still overwhelming - this emulator is really nice!
Finally, it's capable of running even (most of) the latest (NeoGeo / CPS) games. For example, 1944 - The Loop Master was released for the CPS-2 in 2000. Still, Finalburn emulates it flawlessly.
MAME-derivatives or ports
MAME is probably the most widely know multiplatform emulator emulating almost 10 000 arcade games, starting from the oldest and ending with the latest titles. It runs flawlessly even on slower Windows devices (for example, even, CPU-wise, underpowered UMPC's) and is REALLY recommended for a quick test to see what kinds of games you can (hopefully) also play on your mobile device.
To do this (test and/or play arcade games on your desktop Windows computer), you will need to download and utilize the desktop MAME. I'll explain this in the following section. Note that this has nothing to do with WM - just a quick explanation of what you should do in order to be able to play these games on your desktop computer (including UMPC's, notebooks and the like).
The desktop MAME
Download mame.rar from here - there, you’ll need the topmost file (now, it’s mame0115b.exe). UnRAR it to anywhere. Move your ROM ZIP files to the roms subdirectory of the emulator. For NeoGeo games to play, you’ll also need THIS file. Just put it in the home directory of MAME.
To start a given game, directly execute MAME.exe (in the home directory), passing it the name of the ZIP file (also the official MAME name of the game) like this:
mame 19xx
This will start the game (if everything is OK). Upon the first running of each ROM set, you’ll need to at least once press Left and, then, Right on the cursor block of your PC. Then, after the game has loaded, you’ll need to press 5 (with two players, 6) to insert (virtual) coins and, then, press 1 (with two players, 2) to start the game. In one-player mode, the games are controlled by Ctrl / Alt + D-pad; in two-player mode, the other player is controlled by D: left; F: down; G: right; R: up.
Now, back to the question of Windows Mobile: what arcade emulators are there on the platform? Now follows PocketCultMAME, the best generic MAME port.
PocketCultMAME
(main game selector of version 0.4a)
(main game selector of a 0.5 preview)
Currently, this title is by far the best generic MAME port. This means it's able to run both 25-year-old classics (which Finalburn Alpha is fully incapable of) and (comparatively) new titles.
However, it should NOT be used for NeoGeo / CPS emulation - in that, Finalburn Alpha is WAY better. Should you be unsure about what runs under Finalburn Alpha and what needs the more generic, but slower PocketCultMAME, you may want to deploy the ZIPped ROM files under both emulators. If Finalburn runs the game flawlessly, then, just stick to it and don't even test the game under PocketCultMAME - believe me, it'll be FAR slower with should enabled (if it runs at all).
For emulating significantly older stuff (games from the entire eighties - not just the 25-year-old titles), however, it's the emulator you must check out.
There are two versions of the emulator: 0.4a (currently the fastest version with, compared to the newer one, more limited compatibility) and 0.5WIP, a MUCH slower, experimental tech demo with much broader compatibility.
This means you should download both versions. Always try to run a title under 0.4a first and only give a try to 0.5WIP if it doesn't run in the older emulator.
Note that version 0.4a has two additional EXE files as a separate download. One of them, noCYCLONE, is related to the Motorola 68000 emulation and using it instead of the default one will result in a certainly visible speed penalty. It, however, offers somewhat improved compatibility with some titles otherwise incompatible with PocketCultMAME 0.4a. That is, if an otherwise as compatible listed game doesn't run in the standard version, just exit it and run these two files instead to see whether, then, it runs or not. Affected games are for example 'Black Tiger', 'Rampage' and 'Pang'; see for example THIS for more info.
Conveniently, unzip the two additional EXE files in the same directory where the traditional executable of 0.4a, PCMAME.exe, resides. As these files are named differently, they won't override the default file, PCMAME.exe. Putting it in the same directory results in not having to copy the same ROM files in more than one directory on your memory cards.
Still speaking of add-on downloads, 0.5WIP also has an additional download fixing some NeoGeo issues. As PocketCultMAME should NEVER be used to run NeoGeo games (it's just too slow for this), you don't necessarily want to download / install it.
Using these emulators are pretty straightforward and if you know how Finalburn Alpha is used you also know how PocketCultMAME is: after starting the application (PCMAME.exe with version 0.4a and PocketCultMAME.exe with 0.5WIP), you're presented a list of the compatible, playable ROM's in the roms subdirectory. You select one and start the game. During the game, you insert virtual coins to the game, (keep) press(ing) the Start button and, then, play.
Also, you can do some settings. For the two current versions, I've compared these in the following chart. Make sure you follow the links to see the screenshots of the individual settings. This will really help you in discovering the emulator.
The chart is available HERE (CLICK THE LINK!).
Note that you WILL want to fine-tune these parameters; most importantly, you WILL want to disable sound, should you encounter speed problems. Also, if you have a Dell Axim x50v / x51v, you MUST enable 2700G support for greatly increased speed.
To demonstrate why it's worth fine-tuning these parameters, I've made some very serious benchmarks to find out what the speed culprit is (it turned out to be the sound, unlike with, say, Finalburn) and how the different settings have an affect on speed.
I've run the tests on three different devices: the Dell Axim x50v / x51v (VGA WM5 device with the 2700G 3D chip equipped with a 624 MHz Xscale CPU), the HP iPAQ h2210 (an older, QVGA WM2003 model with an older, less efficient, 400 MHz Xscale CPU) and a Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720 (520 MHz VGA WM2003SE).
Note that the chart only contains data on the first two models; with FPS display enabled, nothing runs on the Pocket Loox 720 (only a black screen and a part of the "FPS" text is displayed in the bottom left corner). (Note that this problem may be pretty common with all F-S models; see THIS.) This means I don't have quantitive results on the Loox. However, it, subjectively, delivered pretty playable results. With the Loox, I could only display the FPS in MAMECE3 (in 1941, 38 fps without sound; 20 with it). Note that, except for the last column, I've only en/disabled one feature / changed one parameter a time to see how it affects speed.
The chart is available HERE (CLICK THE LINK!).
As can clearly be seen, you WILL want to disable sound with more action-packed games. With much older, less CPU-intensive games like Scramble, you can safely keep it on. If this doesn't help or you still need additional speed, you may also switch to the "Steplines" mode to only display half of the scan lines. And, of course, if you do own a 2700G-enabled Dell Axim, make sure you enable the 2700G support. While it, because of the pixel doubling, results in for example hard-to-read text, its speed gain is enormous.
Note that the "doc" subdirectory of both versions contains the lists of compatible games and a quick intro to the emulator.
Fixing your ROM images with RomCenter
The author of PocketCultMAME frequently asks users to fix the ROM’s they plan to use; that is, to convert to the (ancient) MAME format used by the emulator. Unfortunately, as using the recommended application RomCenter isn’t really explained anywhere (except for some not very detailed forum posts still missing some very important steps like THIS, THIS and THIS) this may prove to be an impossible task for many. This is why I’ve written a mini-tutorial to fixing ROM images.
Download RomCenter from HERE (don’t get the 3.0 Alpha; the latest stable release, 2.71, accessible on the Download page, will do just fine), install and execute. Go to File / Open datafile manager and click Add…. In the file selector dialog, look for pcmame.dat (or, as far as version 5 is concerned, pcmame05.dat) in the home directory of the (two) Windows Mobile PocketCultMAME’s. Note that you can safely import both if you plan to convert the format of your ROM’s into both 0.4a and 0.5WIP. Click Close after finishing adding the file(s).
Now, open the drop-down list under the menu bar of the menu bar of RomCenter. Select the file you’ve just added (pcmame.dat for 0.4a or pcmame05.dat for 0.5) as can be seen in here.
Now, go to File / Add ROM path. In my case, it’s c:\ArcadeRoms\. The items will be quickly scanned and loaded, but still not displayed. To do this, just click the name of the path (NOT “Games database”!) in the left pane.
Now, right-click ALL items in the right pane that have a yellow (NOT a green and NOT a red!) icon in front of them. Select “Fix ROM” in the menu. The file will be fixed. The resulting (fixed) file will be placed in the same directory, overwriting the old (bad) ROM image.
Note that because of the overwriting behavior, you may want to fix a COPY of your original ROM files.
(Mega)MAMECE3 9.5
(in game)
(in the game selector screen)
This very old, but still usable emulator may also be of interest, particularly if, for some reason, PocketCultMAME isn't able to run something. This is because PocketCultMAME is much better in every respect, particularly screen tap, auto fire and sound-wise. With MAMECE3, you definitely will NOT want to enable the sound because it's really annoying and really bad.
There are two versions of the emulator: MAMECE3 and the much larger Mega MAMECE3. Now that, with the advent of very cheap memory cards, the 6 Mbytes difference in size doesn't really matter any more, I recommend the second - theoretically, it supports more than a thousand games, as opposed to the 100+ MAMECE3.
Unfortunately, it's, along with the sound problem and not supporting auto fire / screen tap areas, is definitely less compatible with newer titles than even the 0.4a version of PocketCultMAME, let alone 0.5WIP.
You may also want to reconfigure game keys (1 2). Note that UI Menu stands for the in-game menu.
Finally, a not really recommended title,
iMAME v0.07
This title is based on the very old MAME version .261.
This application, reviewed for example HERE, is very restricted in that it only contains drivers for 19 arcade games of the early eighties. The lack of support for other titles means you can't even play for example Scramble or Zaxxon on it - you can in no way make it run any other titles than it contains built-in support to.
As with the other titles, you need to download ROM images off the Web to make it work. This may turn to be pretty problematic because most of the images of the games it supports have been removed from ROM sites because of ESA - that is, it's much easier to get hold of, say, the Zaxxon ROM than that of, say, Pac-Man.
As it is REALLY limited, playable ROM-wise and doesn't have anything to show up with (not even Scramble or Zaxxon), I don't really recommend this title. BTW, this - the complete lack of support for extra functionality like on-screen tap areas and the lack of support for anything else than the 19 classic games - was the reason for my not including it in the Comparison Chart either.
Verdict
get Finalburn Alpha. When compatible with a (newer, NeoGeo or CPS) arcade ROM, it'll deliver by far the best results.
get both versions of PocketCultMAME. When Finalburn Alpha isn't compatible with a (non-NeoGeo or CPS) title, the two versions of PocketCultMAME may still be. Always try running a given game in 0.4a first and only if it turns out to be incompatible move to 0.5WIP because of the much lower emulation speed. Also remember to check and, when necessary, convert your ROM sets before playing to avoid later incompatibility problems. If a as compatible marked title still doesn't run under 0.4a, make sure you give a try to the two alternate main EXE files to see whether they help.
You can also get Mega MAMECE3, but remember to prefer PocketCultMAME to it. The latter has better (on-screen) controls, autofire and WAY better sound.
Only get iMAME if you don't need anything else than the 19 built-in games.
The comparison / feature / compatibility chart
It's available HERE. DO CHECK IT OUT!
As usual, I present you a reliable, dependable chart comparing all the reviewed titles (and the desktop MAME). In addition to comparing features like state loading / saving, screen tap areas, auto fire etc. (please see my earlier emulator reviews for an explanation of these; I won't do this again in here), I've also checked the compatibility of many titles.
Recommended articles
My other game emulator reviews in the Games section of the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine's Expert Blog. I plan to cover / discuss ALL emulators available for Windows Mobile and have already published some of these articles. Do make sure you follow / read these articles - nowhere else will you find a better source of emulation-related information, I'm absolutely sure.
Other articles / links of interest
Rich Hall’s Play Arcade Classics on Your Handheld and Pocket PC. Note that, the article being some six years old, the links to the ROM repositories don't work any more.
An iMAME review
A shortish article on MAMECE3 and iMAME
It's possible to run Metal Slug X in the PSX emu
The reasons for PocketCultMAME to be slow on x50v / x51v
Some compatible games with Cult
RomCenter - how it shoud be used? 1, 2, 3. Note that you will still want to prefer my mini-tutorial instead.
pocketcultmame 0.4: there's a way to save
Compatibility reports of, for example, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs
Game speed reports
Reports on Time Pilot, Time Pilot 84, 10 Yard Fight, Zaxxon and Super Space Invaders
What ROM versions there are; which to prefer if there are more than one
A MegaMAMECE3-related AximSite thread
New MAMECE release with 68k ROMS support
MAMECE3 compatibility reports: THIS, THIS, THIS (with for example a lot of WonderSwan, PlayStation discussion and elaborating on THIS generic PPC emulation article. Make sure you read the feedback in the thread before believing everything in that article!) and THIS.
PocketCultMAME preview available (PG)
Hi-res issues
.36 ROMsets torrent (additional explanation)
It's unlikely MAMECE3 will ever be updated (a 2004 post - nothing has been released in the meantime)
A related Russian language thread
top thread gotta look into this
Do finalburn and MAME only play there "own" roms or do they play nes for example to?
marcovit said:
Do finalburn and MAME only play there "own" roms or do they play nes for example to?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No NES support - check out my NES Emulation Bible for NES-related emulators at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=306705
Now that I’ve finished introducing and comparing almost all the gaming console emulators, I’ve embarked on publishing reviews and tutorials on emulating 8/16-bit home computers under Windows Mobile.
The first home computer I elaborate on is the Commodore Amiga, which was no doubt the best computer, gaming-wise, in the late eighties and early nineties, which also means a lot of Windows Mobile users would still would like to know how it should be used.
First, I have some bad news. The emulator you will need to use, PocketUAE by PocketInsanity, while pretty much compatible with Amiga titles (after all, it’s based on the pretty stable UAE core), has severe sound problems. If there’s anything happening on the screen or the system is accessing the (virtual) floppy disk, the sound will most probably stutter.
Furthermore, even if you disable sound, you won’t really have 100% speed unless you skip at least 3-4 frames a time. This is perfectly visible with, say, the horizontal shoot’m up title Katakis.
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Never forget what I have stated in my previous articles: when possible, if a given game has been released for more than one platform, try to find an emulator that runs the game with a better speed. For example, Turrican is pretty unplayable on the Pocket PC with music (music is a must with the game – Chris Huelsbeck’s music really rocks). As Turrican was released on many platforms, you, therefore, want to look around . For example, the currently available TurboGrafx-16 (PC Engine) (see the emulation guide HERE), you may want to prefer it to the Amiga version. Granted, the Amiga had better (tracked) music, but you won’t be able to play the game without stuttering sound.
Again and again, don’t forget I’ve reviewed ALL the desktop and MOST handheld gaming console emulators, along with the MS-DOS emulator (and will also review other, 8/16-bit home computers like the Commodore 64 and the Atari ST(E)). Make sure you read them – the ports of the Amiga games, if exist, may run FAR better in other emulators than in PocketUAE.
Furthermore, it has some other problems; for example, you won’t be able to enter any text / use the on-screen keyboard if you have a VGA device. Fortunately, with VGA devices with built-in keyboards like the HTC Universal, this isn’t a problem because you can use the built-in keyboard any time.
Otherwise, the emulator is pretty cool: it supports high resolution on VGA devices, is free and REALLY compatible with MOST titles. If you can live with the, in most cases, (in most games) stuttering sound, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Usage
Download it from HERE (latest version: 21012006). Unzip the contents of the ZIP file.
if you don’t already have some games, you can get them from HERE and HERE. Unzip the games if they are ZIP’ed and copy the ADF files to the “disks” subdirectory of the emulator.
get the Kickstart ROM 1.3 HERE and, after unZIPing it, copy it to the “roms” subdirectory. (You can also do the same with the 3.0 ROM but you will rarely if ever need it – after all, Amiga 1200 games will run even slower than the original Amiga 500 titles and PocketUAE is known to work slower with the 3.0 ROM than with the 1.3 one. Note that most games will run OK with the 1.3 Kickstart ROM; exceptions are, for example, the Archon I and II bundle, which require the 1.2 ROM version not available for direct download anywhere.)
transfer everything to your Windows Mobile handheld and start Pocket UAE Launcher.exe from a file explorer tool; for example, File Explorer or Total Commander. (You may also want to create a shortcut to it in the \Windows\Start Menu\Programs folder for quicker access.) (A quick remark: Pocket UAE Launcher wasn’t part of the distribution with previous PocketUAE versions. Now it is – that is, no separate download is necessary.)
Go to the “Disk” tab and, in the Floppy Disk 0: drop-down menu, select the ADF disk image you’d like to play (Screenshot 1, 2)
Go to the “Chip” tab and make sure KICK13.ROM is selected and active in the Kickstart ROM File: drop-down list (screenshot 1, 2) (you will need to do this only once – as opposed to selecting a game in the previous bullet)
in the same tab, you may also want to enable Fast Copper and set Enhanced Chipset (A500, A2000) instead of the default Original one. (The latter isn’t compatible with, say, Xenon 2)
in the Audio tab, you will find the way of completely disabling the sound (if the stuttering gets on your nerves). Then, just make sure None is selected in the Sound Output: drop-down list
if you have a VGA device, you must go to Video and select 640x480 (VGA PocketPC) in the Screen Mode: drop-down list. Note that if you plan to use your device in left-handed landscape mode (if you’re either left-handed or plan to use the native orientation of most HTC Pocket PC’s with a built-in slide-out keyboard), make sure you switch the Rotation radio button to “Right”
go to the Buttons tab and, if your Pocket PC doesn’t have five application buttons (as is the case with, say, the HP iPAQ 2210), the fifth generally being the Record button at the top left, click Set under Joystick fire button and press the button you’d like to assign this functionality to. Also note that it’s also here that you can assign the left and right mouse click functionalities and quitting the emulator. As far as the latter is concerned, it’s, by default, assigned to app button 3. Therefore, if you reassign the fire button there, make sure you reassign it to, say, the (still) unused Button 4 to avoid clashes.
Of course, if you have more than four buttons and the fifth (sixth etc., as is the case with multibutton Pocket PC models like the F-S Pocket Loox 720) button is on the upper left side of your Pocket PC, you’ll want to prefer it to a fire button next to the D-pad. This way, you can use both hands to control the D-pad and the fire.
Note that, unfortunately, the emulator doesn’t support on-screen buttons.
Finally, if you have a device like the HTC Wizard, where the upper left (Wireless settings) button is the sixth, you will also need to redefine the button layout in the above-explained way so that it’s the least awkward.
also notice the Mem tab. When a given game REQUIRES you to give it a given amount of Chip / Fast (and, in cases, other kinds of) memory, it’s here that you will need to set these amounts.
now, just press Launch UAE in the bottom left corner and the emulator will launch. Just press the Exit button (by default, the third application button) to exit.
Compatibility issues
I haven’t encountered problems running the emulator on the following models: iPAQ 2210, Dell Axim x51v, Pocket Loox 720, HTC Universal and HTC Wizard. All run OK in the default GAPI mode. (With the Wizard, of course, you will want to overclock the device to, say, 273 MHz to achieve acceptable results – without sound, of course.)
It doesn’t work with the HTC TyTN / Hermes because of the ATi video controller. See THIS, THIS and THIS.
Unfortunately, it is NOT compatible with MS Smartphones (Windows Mobile 6 Standard), not even QVGA ones (thoroughly tested on the HTC Vox (s710)). The lack of the compatibility front-end isn’t a problem; that of UAE.exe (after all, you can just create / modify the .uaerc by hand or with the front-end running on a real Pocket PC) is. It’s the latter that doesn’t run (entirely crashes the Vox, which means the need to take out the battery to reset), even with all the parameters set correctly.
Text input problems on VGA devices
As the Amiga is mostly a gaming platform, you’ll very rarely need text input. If you DO need it (for example, with Ghostwriter - the screenshots below have been made showing the loader of this program, which also requires text input), however, you will want to know that the (excellent, n0p's DOSBox-like) on-screen keyboard is only usable.
While the on-screen keyboard is displayed on QVGA devices without problems:
on VGA, it’s messed up:
Unfortunately, it seems the original position of the keys can’t be (blindly) clicked / the keymap rolled either.
Fortunately, if you have a built-in keyboard in your VGA device (for example, the HTC Universal), it can be used for text input. Also, the emulator can run in low resolution on some VGA models (like the Universal but NOT the x51v). The latter will, of course, mean you won’t have high-resolution images, which is quite a big problem with the Amiga (just compare the two screenshots above, text readability-wise!)
Speed issues
If you’ve ever seen how the excellent, Linux-based GP2X 250 MHz (that is, theoretically, slower than most PPC's) handheld console runs the UAE4all emulator (related info & video links also HERE), then, you’ll be pretty disappointed – PocketUAE is MUCH slower. (Incidentally, while we’re at the YouTube GP2X videos, in addition to the UAE4all emulator, it’s also worth looking around in other GP2X videos on YouTube. Related threads are for example HERE and HERE.)
Also note that emulation on QVGA devices isn’t faster than on VGA ones.
Unfortunately, as with UAE4ALL, it’s highly improbable there will ever be a WinFellow port either.
Finally, while there are some tweaking capabilities offered by Pocket UAE, they won’t really help in getting rid of the sound stuttering problems. I’ve thoroughly tested all these tweaking capabilities with Katakis, which, using the default settings, has really stuttering sound and choppy animation (the latter is far better in Turrican I and II, as with the sound, albeit marginally).
Video / Frame skipping (default: 3): with it set to 6: definite gain in speed, but still stuttering sound. 1 (without sound): about 30-40% game speed, showing you should almost never use 1 frame skips because current Pocket PC’s are just not capable of emulating Amiga this fast.
CPU / Chip slider (default: 10): 20: a little bit better speed compared to the default (10) case; the game, however, becomes unplayable because of the bad / slow screen updates; 3: a bit worse.
Chip / Fast Copper: enabling this resulted in no speed gain at all
Video / Fast Blitter: enabling this resulted in no speed gain at all
Audio / Interrupts (emulated) and Audio / None: No sound at all; video still very choppy.
UPDATE (06/18/2007): Let me also elaborate on swapping disks, which is required by a lot of games.
First, currently, it's not possible to swap disks from inside the emulator (while it's running), as opposed to the original, desktop UAE. Some two years ago (that is, well before the release of the current PocketUAE version), the developer promised to look into a problem and implement an in-emulator menu to do the disk swapping; unfortunately, this has never realized.
Unfortunately, just overwriting the first ADF (disk image) with the just-requested one (by, say, quickly popping out the memory card it's on and doing the file overwrite in another computer / handheld) doesn't work either (I've tested this too; with Operation Wolf).
With games that don't support more than one disk drives (unfortunately, Operation Wolf is one of them), you can't just map the second (third etc.) disks to the additional three drives. This is also explained HERE.
Currently, the ONLY way to play games that don't check for additional drives is transferring these disk images to a HDD image; see THIS and THIS for more info.
Many of you may have heard of ScummVM, THE multiplatform (including Windows Mobile) interpreter for LucasArts (and similar) adventure games.
In my emulation-related article & tutorial series, I’ve deliberately waited for the final version of the brand new and pretty much groundbreaking ScummVM 0.10.0 (AKA Tic-Tac-Toe, coming from the Roman numeral form 0.X.0) to appear so that the article doesn’t get outdated too soon. (BTW, this is the reason I haven’t come up with a FPSEce article either. I’ll only publish it when the new release, which is slated for the near future, is released. In the meantime, go give a try to the current version – it REALLY shines at emulating the Sony PlayStation!)
I think it was worth waiting: the new Tic-Tac-Toe edition is really great and indeed represents a breakthrough in interpreting many graphics adventures released in the late eighties and during the entire nineties.
Some of the adventures ScummVM supports include Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; Wyrmkeep's Inherit the Earth; Coktel Vision's Gobliiins; Westwood Studios' The Legend of Kyrandia and games based on LucasArts' SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system such as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more. You can find a thorough list with details on which games are supported and how well on the compatibility page. (Note that the latter reflects the state of the latest nightly build. The official 0.10.0 compatibility chart is HERE. As of 07/02/2007, it’s only Sierra’s Gold Rush! that has better compatibility rate than with the 0.10.0 version).
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Important note: PocketScumm used to be the name of the PocketPC port of ScummVM, but that name is now deprecated. Now, the official name is “ScummVM for Windows CE”. Don’t use the former to look for reviews or downloads as it will only show very old versions.
1.1 Why should you bother?
It’s very simple: no other emulator is capable of emulating these games so well. There surely are several Amiga, MS-DOS, Atari ST, NES, C64 etc. emulators out there for Windows Mobile, but none of them runs these games so well – if at all.
As far as MS-DOS is concerned – that is, the platform that both
quantity (it has ALL the titles - for example, all titles released after 1994 are MS-DOS and Mac OS only and not any more released for other platforms) and,
except for some VERY rare exceptions (for example, the FM Towns version of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders because of the 256 colors and/or the CD music tracks), quality-wise (for example, games and/or remakes released for MS-DOS, starting with 1992, have native 256-color VGA support, unlike the, say, 32-color and, therefore, much worse-looking Amiga versions)
is the best, the available native emulators (see their FULL review & roundup HERE) all
are restricted to playing pre-1994 games (no 32-bit, Windows, 80386 and/or high-res VGA games, sorry), while many, excellent adventure games were released for platforms that, currently, isn’t possible to emulate on Windows Mobile. Examples of these games are Broken Sword I/II, Monkey Island 3, The Dig etc.
have mouse pointer problems (for example, NONE of the current MS-DOS emulators can emulate the cursor in DOTT – see the related info in the MS-DOS emulator article)
if they at all (for example, the commercial PocketDOS doesn’t emulate anything else than the beeper) emulate Adlib / SoundBlaster sound, it will most probably be stuttering, even on the fastest, 624 MHz devices
use the CPU excessively, meaning short battery life, device heatup and, when used together with A2DP, excessive sound stuttering and additional slowdown (because of A2DP’s being CPU intensive).
In addition, there are no other interpreters at all to play these games. There is only a Sierra AGI interpreter, PocketSarien (see review & tutorial HERE), but it, if AGI games are sufficient for you, suffers from several problems (Portrait mode only; no SIP on VGA devices etc). ScummVM, fortunately, supports AGI games (while getting rid of the above-explained problems with PocketSarien) – and a LOT more!
It’s worth pointing out that FM Towns, one of the most remarkable platform having received the, technically (256-color VGA graphics and CD audio sound even as early as 1989!), best possible ports of these old games between 1988 and 1992, has no emulators for Windows Mobile. That is, you can not rely on emulating these platforms to play the games ported exclusively for them.
As far as other, in general, home systems are concerned, which also have ports of these old adventure games, they are either (vastly) inferior to MS-DOS (for example, the mouse-less NES and the C64 or, strictly as far as the visual quality of Lucasarts titles – number of colors – and emulation problems (with the Amiga emulator, lack of disk swapping capabilities; stuttering, useless sound etc.; with the Atari emulator, mouse dragging problems) is concerned, Amiga / Atari ST) or have no emulators (Mac OS). Needless to say, these emulators put MUCH more burden on the CPU than ScummVM – 100%, apart from some excellent NES emulators (for example, SmartGear).
Finally, there is only one native Windows Mobile port of the games emulated by ScummVM; that of Broken Sword. However, even with that, in cases, you will want to prefer playing the original version under ScummVM than the native one (as opposed to the general rule of native apps / games being far better than emulated / interpreted ones). I’ll elaborate on this later, in a separate section.
(Note that as far as the recently added Sierra AGI support is concerned, there's no SCI support, albeit there's talk of integrating the FreeSCI engine HERE. See the above-linked article for more info on running Sierra SCI games on Windows Mobile. Also note that PocketSarien automatically skips the age verification system in LSL1; ScummVM doesn’t. As it’s not possible to press Alt-X, unless you are ready to jot down the right answers, you may want to prefer PocketSarien to play this game. Speaking of passing initial code entering, if you get into problems with Monkey 2, you’ll want to read THIS and THIS).
1.2 The Tutorial: Downloading, installing and playing games
In this entire 1.2 section, I explain what you can play, whether it’s worth playing, where you can download / get the games from and, finally, how you can play them.
Note that, in here, I will also frequently refer to three important, additional documentation (in addition to the ScummVM Wiki pages). The most important of them is SirDave's PocketScumm Manual in the WindowsCE forum of ScummVM. The two other files are in the distribution ZIP file of ScummVM, in the Doc subdirectory. In there, ‘README’ contains generic and ‘README-WinCE.txt’ contains Windows Mobile-related information.
I recommend reading all these three documents (in any order) to get a full picture of ScummVM. However, in here, I also present you a self-sufficient tutorial, should you find reading all the linked tutorials and manuals far too overwhelming (I would) - it will suffice in most cases. It's only with, say, extracting CD audio tracks and ripping / compressing CD-only games that you will REALLY need to consult the other documents; most importantly, SirDave's tutorial.
First, what games are playable?
A LOT – and not just Lucasfilm games, but from a lot of other software companies. As has already been stated, you will want to check out THIS page for the list of supported games.
Even VGA games (Touche, Broken Sword etc) are playable – on VGA Pocket PC’s, using high-resolution VGA. These games even run on QVGA Windows Mobile devices, with downscaled, resized graphics – with some zoom-in capabilities to magnify the upper and lower half of the screen to make text more readable. I’ll elaborate on scaling issues later.
1.2.1 What about Broken Sword, the only old game having a native PPC port?
ScummVM may even be better at emulating an old title than native games for Windows Mobile. Take, for example, Broken Sword, the only game that has been natively ported to the Pocket PC.
The emulated version of Broken Sword is, generally, superior to the native one when played on a VGA device, particularly in the following respects:
much better music and sound: much higher sampling frequency, no compression effects and, at times (for example, the sound of the wind right at the start of the game), stereo.
Much lower CPU usage (~17% as opposed to ~42% on a 624 MHz device) and, therefore, better battery life
It has somewhat lower memory requirements
In this case, shouldn't you have the original Broken Sword disks but if you still want to prefer it over the native PPC port, I recommend buying the latter. Then, you hit two birds with one stone. First, you support continued native Windows Mobile development by supporting the company that ported Broken Sword, AstraWare. Second, then, you will have the right to get the PC version of Broken Sword off, say, Bittorrent for free - if you only have one version installed at a time, you can righfully use a version originally written for another platform.
You will, however, want to stick to the native Windows Mobile version if:
you have a QVGA device and you MUST read the text at the bottom of the screen. Then, the native port is the way to go – just compare THIS QVGA screenshot of the native version to that of the emulated game running on a QVGA device. Zooming only partially helps the bad readibility of the latter as can be seen in HERE.
you need the additional, really useful “Tool” functionality of the native WM version, which is an excellent way to combat the lack of a “free look” mode (see THIS with enabled tools; also see THIS “What's Free Look is for?” thread).
1.2.2 Downloading / getting games
While it’s pretty hard to find these old games in shops, most of them can be found on eBay. Also see THIS thread for more info.
Of course, you can also download them pretty easily from abandonware sites (which I will NOT link) or different torrents. It is illegal in most cases, though; and, with several games, you’ll also run into copy protection problems you won’t find a solution to. An example of them is Future Wars, which asks for copy protection codes at start; they aren’t available anywhere, as is also explained HERE.
Note that the official ‘Extras’ download page of ScummVM has two full games ('Beneath a Steel Sky' and 'Flight of the Amazon Queen'). You may want to start with them.
1.2.2.1 Source platform considerations - what version should you use?
ScummVM is not only able to make use of MS-DOS data files, but also those initially created for other platforms: Amigas, Atari ST's, Commodore 64's, NES'es, Acorns.
Unfortunately, these data files are, in cases, vastly inferior to the MS-DOS versions, particularly color depth-wise. A typical Amiga game uses 32 colors and is, therefore, visually much less appealing than a 256-color MS-DOS version.
Furthermore, you will need to do some manual work to extract the files from these versions. If you have the original machine and you have a way to transfer them (via, say, some kind of a networking connection), you can do this from the operating system of the given platform. If, on the othe rhand, you don't have these, you will need to turn to various disk and ROM image file extractor tools to do the trick as the C64 / Atari / Amiga / NES games are mostly distributed as .D64 / .AMS / .ADF / .NES disk/ROM images, respectively, and ScummVM isn't able to parse these disk/ROM images.
To extract the needed data files from these files, you'll need the various disk image extractor tools in the Tools package available for a separate download HERE. As you most probably won't want to use them (again and again, try preferring the MS-DOS or the FM Towns versions because of, at least, the superior graphics), I don't provide a full tutorial to using them.
Note that as far as the Commodore 64 version of Zak version is concerned (Maniac doesn’t work per the documenation), the version accessible at c64.com isn’t recognized (with side A being disk1 and B disk2) and the data file extractor doesn’t find anything. This means you may encounter incompatibility issues like this with other games too.
1.2.3 Installing ScummVM for WinCE
After downloading the archive file containing the emulator, you'll need to extract at least SCUMMVM.exe from it (and the two MODERN.* files if you need gradually colored dialog boxes -if you don't use them, then, the ScummVM dialogs won't have a gradient-colored background as can be seen in HERE – as opposed to the normal, default case).
Transfer SCUMMVM.exe (and, if you need them, the two MODERN.* files) anywhere on your handheld. As the EXE file is pretty big, I recommend a storage card, but you can also put it in the main storage (making sure you do NOT put it in the root directory of your PDA - then, running auto scan will most probably result in a crash). Note that, as opposed to what SirDave's tutorial states, you do NOT need to put the games into a subdirectory under the SCUMMVM.exe executable file.
Note that there are some other files in the ZIP distribution archive as well. They are additional data files for some games. You can easily guess, by their name, which game they stand for (Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Flight of the Amazon Queen). You won't need them unless you want to play these games.
Finally, there's a file called pred.dic in there. If you plan to play Sierra AGI games using the predictive touchpad (simulator), you'll want to make sure you also transfer it to the destination.
(Of course, you can safely copy over all the files to your handheld, without ever thinking of what you can leave out.)
1.2.4 Installing games
First, create a directory to store the files of the particular game (separately for each game). It can - as opposed to some remarks and recommendations - be named anything, ScummVM will correctly identify its platform, game, language etc. This means you do NOT need to put the (data) files of, for example, Maniac Mansion in a subdirectory named "maniac"; the same stands for for example Day of the Tentacle. That is, you don't need to use the directory name "tentacle" to store its data files in – it can be given any name.
If you want to play more than one games under ScummVM, I recommend putting all the games, in separate subdirectories, under a common parent directory (for example, \Storage Card\ScummVM Games); then, you will be able to make ScummVM recognize all your games with a single click (by just selecting that parent directory). These mass game addition capabilities are really useful and let for really reducing the number of taps needed to deploy more than a handful of games.
If you don't want to fuss around, just copy all the files of your game to this directory (as a rule of thumb, you can safely leave out .EXE files). If you do want to save some storage space OR you're trying to put an originally CD-based game in there, you will need to do some more serious work.
First, there is a great Wiki page on the needed datafiles HERE at the ScummVM Wiki. SirDave's PocketScumm Manual also has some excellent subtutorials for Zak McKracken-FM Towns, Monkey Island 1-CD Version, Loom CD Version, Monkey Island 1-Floppy Disk VGA Version, Monkey Island 2, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, Curse of Monkey Island, Beneath A Steel Sky-WinCD Version, Simon The Sorcerer DOS and Windows Talkie, Simon The Sorcerer 2 DOS and Windows Talkie, Broken Sword 1 & 2 and Full Throttle. That is, should you need to know how these mostly CD-based games need to be installed (for example, the audio CD tracks extracted, the sound / music / video files compressed etc.), make sure you read the relevant section in the tutorial.
As far as the games not discussed in SirDave's PocketScumm Manual are concerned, the "just copy everything over" approach works in most cases (as these games are mostly non-CD-based). Should you still want to know what files can be deleted, again, consult THIS page.
Note that the SirDave tutorial discusses a previous version of CDex, a CD audio track extractor program; the current one uses a slightly different GUI and needs a different approach. In the following subsection, I elaborate on this.
1.2.4.1 Differences in using CDex
While extracting the CD audio tracks with Cdex is done pretty much the same way as is described in the " Monkey Island 1-CD Version" section of SirDave's tutorial, the following needs to be added:
1, you MUST explicitly set the file name format. By default, it'd add a number before the manually entered "TrackX" name, which confuses ScummVM (that is, it just won't play back these tracks). To do this, go to the Filenames tab and make sure you only leave %4 in the Filename Format field as can be seen in THIS screenshot.
2. In the Encoder tab, you don’t need to touch anything. You can decrease the value of Output samplerate, but I don’t recommend it – playing back MP3 files at 44 kHz instead o, say, 32 kHz doesn’t put much additional burden on the CPU. This also means I do NOT recommend using low sampling rates like 22 kHz: why should you use low-quality sound when, with almost no additional CPU usage, you can have MUCH better sound quality? This also means I recommend using 128 kbps MP3's, as opposed to 64 kbps ones (the latter are sufficient for 22 kHz MP3's but not for 44 kHz ones).
1.2.5 Starting games
After you've copied the (data) files (along with additional stuff like MP3'ized CD audio tracks, if present) of your favorite oldies to their directories, you can fire up ScummVM. I recommend creating a shortcut to Windows\Start Menu\Programs (or any subfolder) so that you can avoid having to start it from a file manager. Including them there also fixes one (possible) problem described in THIS and THIS threads, which discusses the question "What to do if the on-screen keyboard pops up when clicking its standard place". The solution, as has been explained, is just starting it from a menu (for example, Start menu) where no SIP icon is displayed - this will be inherited by the interpreters.
After the main GUI is presented, click 'Add Game…’ and navigate to the directory you've stored your game(s) in (note that you'll be presented a "Do you want to perform an automatic scan" dialog there. You can safely press Yes; if nothing is found, you'll be taken back to the directory selector screen - that is, the same as with the case of selecting No). Either highlight the directory as can be seen in HERE or step into it and select Choose.
Now, if you've indeed transferred all the needed (data) files, ScummVM recognizes the game, its language, version etc., and shows it in a new listbox. Then, just select the game you want to play and click the now-enabled Start button.
(Another screenshot of the directory selection dialog; you can also select the parent of it to avoid having to add all games one by one; the results will be like THIS.)
1.2.5.1 Key / button mapping
If the game requires (for example, Gobliiins needs mapping the right click action, Broken Sword requires a keymap to quickly hide / show the toolbar etc.) additional, mandatory key or functionality mappings, you'll be prompted before launching a game that requires the given functionality to be mapped to a hardware button. For example, starting Gobliiins will result in THIS dialog to be presented.
Note that these key mappings are generic and need to be done only once. That is, if you fire up a game that requires the right click functionality to be mandatorily assigned to a hardware button, this setting will be used in other titles too, upon subsequent starts. Currently, there are no separate, game-specific settings, unlike with some other emulators / interpreters (for example, Finalburn Alpha with Neo-Geo games and button mappings).
To map a specific functionality to a given button / key, select it in the list (screenshot HERE, showing assigning a button to right-click), click Map (result HERE), and press the button to map the functionality to (result HERE). When you're presented a mandatory (optional) button mapping dialog at startup, you'll also need to press OK after different mappings to move to the next mapping (or the game itself, when there are no more mandatory / optional mappings). Note that, with optional mappings you don't necessarily want to do (for example, the absolutely useless double Zoom mapping on a VGA device when playing VGA titles), you will want to click Cancel right away, without losing two buttons for the (useless) zoom mappings.
There are several useful mappings:
Right-click is very important with many games; for example, Gobliiins
Hiding the taskbar is very important in some cases; for example, Broken Sword. With these games, you’re, as usual, prompted to assign the rihgt mouse button and to hide the toolbar.
Without hiding the toolbar, you won’t see the transcript as can be seen in HERE and HERE (first screenshot with displayed toolbar; second with hidden).
The Zoom (which is very useful on QVGA devices playing originally VGA games to make the text somewhat more readable ) mapping is optionally asked when starting a VGA game. Note that VGA Pocket PC users are also asked to set it as can be seen in HERE; naturally, this is a bug - on VGA devices, there's no point in defining zoom buttons, only on QVGA ones.
Mapping the four directions may also be VERY useful, particularly with Smartphone devices with Sierra AGI games. With these titles, you may want to direct your character using the D-pad, while using other buttons / keys (or phonepad buttons - for example, 2/4/6/8, that is, the traditional phonepad buttons for directions) to direct the cursor itself. In order to do this, you'll need to assign the four directions to, say, 2/4/6/8. Then, D-pad will be exclusively used to emulate the cursor keys on an IBM PC keyboard, while the 2/4/6/8 phonepad keys to control the mouse cursor (not that important with old Sierra AGI games). Note that, if you add at least the up/down arrows this way, you'll also be able to navigate lists in the ScummVM GUI's (but, unfortunately, not the entire GUI - unlike with most native WM5+ GUI's).
And, of course, the multi-function mapping is also of high importance. See the dedicated section for more info.
On Smartphones, the default key mappings are as follows:
* Up, Down, Left, Right : (dpad) arrow keys
* Left Click : softkey A
* Right Click : softkey B
* Save : call/talk
* Skip : back
* Zone : 9
* Multi Function (for example, predictive input dialog with Sierra AGI games) : 8
* Bind keys : end call
* Keyboard : (dpad) enter
* Rotate : 5
* Quit : 0
Again, note that direction mappings are NOT implemented by default. Should you need them (in a, say, Sierra AGI game), you'll need to manually add them.
1.2.6 Toolbar icons
When the game starts, you’ll be shown some icons. They are pretty easy to use:
The Menu icon (only displayed in Lucasarts games) brings up the standard menu.
The Escape icon helps a lot with quickly skipping animations and other non-interactive scenes.
The Mute icon quickly mutes / unmutes sound.
The Button Assignment icon takes you to the already-known button assignment dialog. You WILL want to use it to make your life much easier.
The Change Orientation icon lets for changing the screen orientation. Note the following: in many cases, you’ll only be able to switch between left- and right-handed Landscape mode. You can only use Portrait mode with originally 320*2x0 games played on either a QVGA or a VGA screen; the latter in the default, 1x scaling mode.
1.2.7 Predictive dialpad support – even onscreen!
With Sierra AGI games (that is, games that require excessive text input), if you plan to play them on a Smartphone (or any Pocket PC device with a built-in dialpad; for example, some ASUS PPC PE edition models – for example, the P525), you will be able to use the phonepad in predictive mode, with a special dictionary built up from the dictionary of English language Sierra AGI titles. It’s pretty much similar to using predictive (T9) input on Smartphone devices and is really a pleasure to use.
If you have a Pocket PC without a hardware dialpad but, like me, really dislike the really bad on-screen keyboard of ScummVM, you will want to assign the Multi Function functionality to a hardware button as can be seen in HERE. After this, in a Sierra AGI game, you’ll only need to press this button to quickly bring up the predictive keyboard and tap the on-screen buttons corresponding to the command; for example, in THIS example, ‘look’. After clicking OK, the command will be executed just great.
Incidentally, “Multi Function” button does a lot more in other games. A quick search for “Multi Function” in README-WinCE.txt reveals the following:
Full Throttle -> win an action sequence (cheat)
Fate of Atlantis -> sucker punch (cheat)
Bargon -> F1 (start the game)
All AGI games -> bring up the predictive input dialog
1.2.8 Built-in QWERTY keyboard support
Fortunately, built-in QWERTY keyboards are (at least as far as Pocket PC’s are concerned) supported, which is VERY good news for Sierra AGI players. As the game also supports left-handed landscape mode, you won’t need to continuously turn the device between Landscape and Portrait mode either, unlike with the Portrait-only PocketSarien.
On my test HTC Wizard, everything worked OK (as opposed to what is stated in HERE). Note that the keyboard must be opened AFTER the GUI comes up – NOT before starting ScummVM!
On my test HTC Universal (WM6 VGA): everything is OK too.
Note that some xv6700 users reported keyboard problems – see THIS and THIS.
As far as MS Smartphones are concerned, the HTC Vox (s710) has the same problem as in many other games / apps / emulators: numbers are used on keyboard, and not the original letters and this can’t be fixed. That is, only a subset of original English characters is accessible.
1.2.9 “Zone” mode for MS Smartphones
ScummVM has excellent Smartphone support – something not at all supported by most emulators. Apart from some bugs (for example, the lack of working (!) Zone mode on QVGA Smartphones) and the pretty hard to read text on low-res Smartphones, it has an excellent feature: Zone mode (it’s not available for key binding in the Pocket PC, that is, touchscreen-enabled version).
Zone mode stands for quickly transferring the cursor between the Action verb area, the inventory area and the main screen when you press the assigned button (by default, it’s 9 on Smartphones). Example screenshots of this (I’ve just pressed ‘9’ between these screenshots and didn’t touch the D-pad to control the cursor): the cursor is in main screen; in the middle of the Verb area, in the middle of the (in here, empty) inventory area. See how faster it is to quickly switch the cursor between the three most important areas? This really saves a lot of time.
Again, note that this, currently, ONLY works on low-res (176*220) Smartphones, NOT on QVGA ones. This bug will, hopefully, be soon fixed.
1.3 What are the problems?
Unfortunately, ScummVM also has some (minor) problems.
1.3.1 Pretty much useless on-screen keyboard
The biggest problem with the emulator is the bad, two-line, non-qwerty keyboard, in which respect MOST alternative methods are FAR better (particularly the transparent keyboard in n0p’s DOSBox port and PocketHobbit, but even PocketDOS’ on-screen landscape-mode keyboard is better)
Just compare the easiness of entering any text on the following on-screen keyboard:
to that of n0p’s DOSBox (in transparent mode; a non-transparent screenshot is HERE):
Fortunately, it’s with very few games (typically, Sierra AGI games) that you’ll need to use this on-screen keyboard. With non-Sierra ones, you will hardly need to bring it up (for example, with Touche to tap ‘y’ to exit). If you absolutely hate it, don’t have a built-in QWERTY keyboard in your handheld and don’t want to use the predictive on-screen dialpad (see the related section) on your Pocket PC either but would prefer the standard SIP keyboard, you will want to switch back to PocketSarien.
1.3.2 Lack of MIDI / MT-32 support
General MIDI or MT-32 support is very important with games released in the early nineties, when digitized music was still not used, except for some titles with CD audio tracks. An example of the former is almost all titles (for example, Monkey 1, Loom etc.); of the latter, the CD version of Monkey Island 1 (in some versions, it also contained Monkey 2; the latter didn't at all use the audio tracks of the CD). As far as CD audio is concerned, if possible, try preferring these soundtracks to emulated, bad-sounding Adlib music.
To hear the difference (if you haven’t already done so – in my MS-DOS emulation article, I’ve elaborated on this issue), you may want to download THIS file (linked from HERE), extract MT32_PCM.rom and MT32_Control.ROM from it and transfer them to the home of your desktop (!) ScummVM home directory (\Program Files\ScummVM\ by default) and make sure you set MT-32 in the Audio tab (as can be seen in HERE) before starting for example Monkey Island (MI supports MT-32). The difference in music quality is really staggering!
Unfortunately, the PPC version doesn’t support MIDI / MT-32 at all. The reason for this is the huge CPU usage of midi emulation, which just can’t be provided by current Windows Mobile-based hardware. See THIS for more info.
This is why there’s absolutely no support for it as can be seen in HERE and HERE. The first secreenshot is a PPC screenshot of the Options menu; the second is a desktop one.
It, however, supports playing back the audio tracks of some (even early) games like the CD version of Monkey Island or the FM Town version of Zak. Games, for example, Broken Sword, that entirely have digitized music are supported very well. See the CDEx-related parts of the WinCE tutorial for more info.
1.3.3 Minor QVGA Smartphone bugs
Unlike on 176*220 Smartphones, the interpreter running on QVGA Smartphones doesn’t support zoning. (See section 1.4.2.)
Furthermore, while the built-in, slide-out or clamshell keyboard worked on all my test Pocket PC’s, it failed to do the same on my HTC Vox (s710). It produced the same problems as with many other SDL-based games / apps: numbers were input instead of letters. (Also see the dedicated section on keyboard usage.)
1.3.4 No scalers for VGA Portrait mode and Portrait doesn’t work on many QVGA devices
It’s a well-known fact many Pocket PC’s (and, of course, Smartphones – like the HTC s310 (Oxygen)) have severe polarization issues in Landscape (see for example THIS for more info). Therefore, it may be preferable to be able to switch to Portrait mode on these devices.
On VGA devices, you can only play QVGA / 320*200 games in Portrait mode in the standard, non-doubled case. This, however, means the actve screen content will only occupy a small portion of the screen as can be seen in HERE. That is, there is no 1.5* scaler to at least horizontally make use of the full screen estate.
On QVGA devices, while there’s a 0.75 scaler (to convert the originally 320-pixel-wide screen to fit the 240-pixel wide screen), it seems to refuse to work on many QVGA models (example screenshot of this mode HERE); for example, my WM5 AKU3 HTC Wizard and WM6 HTC Vox (s710) Smartphone. It, however, does work great on my WM2003 HP iPAQ 2210 and my PPC2k2 Compaq iPAQ 3660.
1.3.5 No D-pad-based quick focus transfer in the ScummVM GUI
Unfortunately, when accessing the GUI (menus) of ScummVM, you can't use the D-pad to quickly transfer the focus from one GUI element to another. This is a real pain the back on no-touchscreen Smartphone devices. It's only the lists (for example, the button mapping list) and the on-screen predictive input engine that supports quick focus transfer. The latter, of course, isn't really needed as you will most probably use the phonepad keys to quickly enter the command (and, then, press the Action button) instead of slowly transferring the focus to the on-screen buttons and pressing Action with every single letter.
Hope this functionality will be added for Smartphone users some time.
1.4 Generic compatibility and speed
It’s compatible with both Pocket PC’s (VGA, QVGA and 240*240 square-screen devices alike) and MS Smartphones (both 176*220 QQVGA and QVGA ones). The latest, brand new version, 0.10.0, no longer supports non-ARM architectures and Handheld PC’s.
As the CPU usage of ScummVM is REALLY small (MUCH-MUCH smaller than even most native games or other emulators), it flawlessly runs, with enabled (and, in most cases, even high-quality) sound / music, on even the lowest-end, Pocket PC 2000 / 2002 devices like the Compaq iPAQ 36xx series. If you (still) have a PPC2k2 device, don’t hesitate to install ScummVM on it: you’ll like it very much!
1.4.1 Down- and upscaling issues
If you’ve already read my Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulation articles (see THIS and THIS), you already know there must be some kind of scaling when trying to “squeeze in” the original screen size of CGA / low-res EGA / low-res VGA / low-res MCGA, 320*200 games, into Portrait-mode QVGA, that is, 240*320 (but not in 320*240 Landscape: in Landscape mode, no downscaling is necessary because the physical, available screen width is the same as the original and the screen height is even bigger) or 176*220 Smartphone screens. Also, the same stands for downscaling originally high-resolution (VGA, 640*480) games into QVGA screens.
During this, inevitable problems surface because when you downscale an image, information loss will happen. In the following two subsections, I explain the issues coming up. In the next section, however, I speak of the opposite direction – that is, upscaling a game to a Pocket PC with a (W)VGA screen.
1.4.1.1 Downscaling
If you squeeze a 320*2x0 (where x is either 0 or 4) image into Portrait orientation, you practically throw away every fourth column (and, if you keep the aspect ratio – which is NOT necessary and can be configured in ScummVM -, also rows). That’s not much of a loss and text, generally, remains pretty well readable. (This also applies to square-screen, 240*240 devices). An example of this downscaling can be seen in HERE.
Incidentally, the same happens when running 320*2x0 games on the 240-pixel-wide screen of current square-screen models. The square-screen converter (the one that renders 320*2x0 games on these models) works exactly the same way as the Portrait converter.
The situation is worse with traditional, low-resolution 176*220 Smartphones. First, they’re only used in Landscape mode but, even then, the text readability becomes definitely worse than with QVGA screens in Portrait mode because of the width of 220 pixels (which is 20 pixels less than the width of the QVGA screen in Portrait mode). Most games are on the verge of playability on these Smartphones.
Example screenshots of a 176*220 Smartphones running 320*200 games are HERE (GUI menu), HERE and HERE.
The worst happens when you try to downscale VGA to QVGA (because you play a VGA game on a QVGA handheld), you practically throw away every other row and (!) column. This may result in major quality degradation, particularly text readability-wise. Needless to say, you can’t downscale VGA to 240*240 square-screen devices, let alone 176*220 Smartphones – then, about two of every three pixel rows / columns should be thrown away. This also means you can’t play VGA games on a QVGA device otherwise allowing Portrait play (for example, the HP iPAQ 2210) in Portrait mode either, unlike with traditional 320*200 games.
An example of the results of VGA -> QVGA downscaling can be seen HERE and HERE; the latter using zooming. These are Touche screenshots; I’ve provided some VGA vs. downscaled QVGA screenshots with Broken Sword.
Note that zooming only works with vertical zooming (zooming into either the upper or the lower half of the screen): other people have also recommended using four quarters to make it possible to use a 1:1 rendering mode, as is the case with, say, PocketDOS.
1.4.1.2 Upscaling on VGA devices
Note: this section ONLY applies to VGA device users. Just skip it if you “only” have a handheld with a QVGA (or even worse) screen.
If you run ScummVM on a VGA device, you’ll quickly find it uses only the quarter of the available screen estate (as can be seen in HERE) in both games and when using the ScummVM GUI. To quickly fix this, click Options in the game launcher screen and select for example 2xSAI in the “Graphics mode” list as can be seen in HERE. Click OK. After a restart, both the GUI and non-VGA games will use the full screen estate – but in Landscape only. (This means if you are sensible to the Landscape polarization problems of your VGA Dell Axim x50v/x51v, you will NOT want to use pixel doubling, but stay with the original mode because it offers Portrait, no matter how tiny the actual game screen will be.)
Note that there are several options in this drop-down list. The original documentation of ScummVM (see section 5.3 Graphics filters) emphasizes there are major speed / CPU usage differences between the different video modes. Using Windows Mobile, I haven’t encountered ANY difference (including CPU usage and animation speed), except for the simple pixel doubler 2x. That is, you can safely use any of these options (except for the blocky 2x) – for example, 2xSAI. You won’t want to test the other modes.
1.4.1.2.1 Pixel doubling (2x mode) vs aliasing filters
As has already been pointed out, the standard, non-enhanced 2x mode results in blocky, badly pixelizated results. ALL the other options result in a FAR better visual experience as can be seen in for example HERE. I REALLY recommend comparing the “blockiness” of both the icons, the text and the background images. Only the blind don’t see the difference.
All in all, NEVER use the 2x mode. The other modes deliver MUCh prettier modes – as if the original game were native VGA, and not just a low-res QVGA one.
1.5 Recommended links
My other articles on emulators and game interpreters – they are a MUST.
Adventure Gaming on the Go by David Dolan (pretty old and outdated, but still a good read)
See the following links for more info on (some) of these games:
Cinematique evo1 engine (Note that Cruise for a Corpse (which is no longer based on the evo1 engine) is NOT supported as yet. See THIS for more info.)
Future Wars (asks for code; there is no code accessible anywhere)
Operation Stealth
GOB engine: Bargon Attack, Gobliiins, Gobliins 2, Goblins 3, Ween: The Prophecy
Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer series
LucasArts' games:
Maniac Mansion
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. Note that the vastly enhanced FM Towns version wasn’t converted back to the IBM PC as can also be read in HERE
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
Loom
Day of the Tentacle
The Dig
Full Throttle
The Curse of Monkey Island.
Wow thats pretty darn comprehensive dude...mm maniac mansion, DOTT, and Monley island would be pretty funky to play away on from time to time and on the move...5" VGA screen of the Athena is certainly a good size for it.
Whence I can find the time to track down those old games, I shall endevour to try this emulator, until then I thank you for your detailed tutorial to emulating 'old skool' games