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Alpine Surfer now works in MAME, completing the Namco Super System 22 full set...a win for preservation

VGEsoterica

Member
For the LONGEST time if you wanted to play Namco's Alpine Surfer you have just one option....find an exceedingly rare, unicorn status cabinet and put quarters into it. Those giant amusement cabinets from back in the day? Where you stood on skis or a snowboard for controls? They got absolutely ABUSED and not many of them still exist out in the wild. If you see one...you found the arcade equivalent of Bigfoot.

But MAME has always been around to preserve these experiences long after the physical hardware sadly ended up at the recyclers / in the landfill...except in some instances MAME doesn't work. No judgements...but occasionally you find one game on an entire system that just won't run.

Alpine Surfer was that game. Everything else Super System 22 you could just load up and enjoy...and now with recent updates the percentage has been brought to 100%

Awesome for preservation, awesome for people that have nostalgia for the game and extra awesome for people who get to experience it for the first time now.

But GAF...what's the one game you want 1:1 emulation for that isn't here yet? For me that is Fighting Bujutsu on the Konami Cobra. It works, but its not playable. Close second is Hyper Neo Geo 64. I have all seven games but I'd love more people to experience the system...but its just not great under emulation

 

Drew1440

Member
System22 was amazing hardware for its time, does this also mean the full scale versions of Ridge Racer are playable?
I think the next step for System 22 was to get the LAN side of it working since many games made use of multiplayer, there was a fork of MAME that supported this but the main releases didn't.


As for other games, I think Model 2 emulation for MAME still has a long way to go but they are making progress with it, plus Konami M2 support aswell.
 

VGEsoterica

Member
System22 was amazing hardware for its time, does this also mean the full scale versions of Ridge Racer are playable?
I think the next step for System 22 was to get the LAN side of it working since many games made use of multiplayer, there was a fork of MAME that supported this but the main releases didn't.


As for other games, I think Model 2 emulation for MAME still has a long way to go but they are making progress with it, plus Konami M2 support aswell.
Konami M2 needs more love. But maybe someone is working on it…
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
The hook of these games was the cool arcade system where you actually stood on a snowboard controller, emulating them is about 10% of the fun at best so usually quite pointless, even worse than playing for example lightgun games with the mouse (but in that case, similar to wheels or flight sticks, there are lightgun products to use instead that are far more readily available and affordable than anything you could recreate as a snowboard or other elaborate controller - skis, jet skis, motrocycles, 360 degree flight cockpits etc. - replacement). Still good another arcade board is at 100%.
 
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VGEsoterica

Member
The hook of these games was the cool arcade system where you actually stood on a snowboard controller, emulating them is about 10% of the fun at best so usually quite pointless, even worse than playing for example lightgun games with the mouse (but in that case, similar to wheels or flight sticks, there are lightgun products to use instead that are far more readily available and affordable than anything you could recreate as a snowboard or other elaborate controller - skis, jet skis, motrocycles, 360 degree flight cockpits etc. - replacement). Still good another arcade board is at 100%.
at some point I want to mod in a Wii board to run
 

Danknugz

Member
For the LONGEST time if you wanted to play Namco's Alpine Surfer you have just one option....find an exceedingly rare, unicorn status cabinet and put quarters into it. Those giant amusement cabinets from back in the day? Where you stood on skis or a snowboard for controls? They got absolutely ABUSED and not many of them still exist out in the wild. If you see one...you found the arcade equivalent of Bigfoot.

But MAME has always been around to preserve these experiences long after the physical hardware sadly ended up at the recyclers / in the landfill...except in some instances MAME doesn't work. No judgements...but occasionally you find one game on an entire system that just won't run.

Alpine Surfer was that game. Everything else Super System 22 you could just load up and enjoy...and now with recent updates the percentage has been brought to 100%

Awesome for preservation, awesome for people that have nostalgia for the game and extra awesome for people who get to experience it for the first time now.

But GAF...what's the one game you want 1:1 emulation for that isn't here yet? For me that is Fighting Bujutsu on the Konami Cobra. It works, but its not playable. Close second is Hyper Neo Geo 64. I have all seven games but I'd love more people to experience the system...but its just not great under emulation


for me it would be nice to have everything work in name instead of having to use am2, teknoparrot etc
 

oldergamer

Member
for me it would be nice to have everything work in name instead of having to use am2, teknoparrot etc
Not likely to happen. as that would mean windows only. Mame works on all sorts of platforms, but I can't see them shift direction to focus only on windows, since newer arcade hardware is customized windows PC's.
 

Tarin02543

Member
I remember playing this game in a roadstop coming back from a schooltrip in Switzerland, must have been 1998. It was a lot of fun jerking my legs around!
 

I Master l

Banned
I dont know how will did this game run on the original hardware but clearly it's not stable 60fps here
 
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The hook of these games was the cool arcade system where you actually stood on a snowboard controller, emulating them is about 10% of the fun at best so usually quite pointless, even worse than playing for example lightgun games with the mouse (but in that case, similar to wheels or flight sticks, there are lightgun products to use instead that are far more readily available and affordable than anything you could recreate as a snowboard or other elaborate controller - skis, jet skis, motrocycles, 360 degree flight cockpits etc. - replacement). Still good another arcade board is at 100%.

Sega Water Ski is quite fun even without a proper cabinet. A well-designed game's a well-designed game.

It's like how you don't need a car cabinet for Outrun or Ridge Racer, but a cabinet with the intended controls can enhance the experience for sure.
 
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