- To anyone who has an opportunity I highly recommend taking any chance you get to try and play any of the bigger "moving" arcade machines like the AX Monster Ride shown in the video.
Even for really old stuff like Space Harrier the feeling of moving along with the screen gives you a more visceral experience than almost any VR setup. Hard to fake the effects of gravity!
[0] has a list (in japanese) of moving arcade machines. Mikado in Takadanobaba has some of these. These things are getting older and older of course so the window of opportunity is unfortunately shrinking as time goes on.
(EDIT: just realised that list itself is over 10 years old at this point so YMMV)
[0]: https://www.space-harrier.com/arcade.html
by BHSPitMonkey
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- I'm always left in awe by not only the Dolphin team's work, but the quality of their articles and release notes. This was no exception!
- Incredible the pace gaming companies in Japan did innovate with chips and boards and everything during this era. While PCs were following a somewhat slow pace, guys at SEGA, Nintendo, Namco, Capcom and similar were literally making innovation by the hour, and commercializing it. A lot to learn from their stories.
by bigstrat2003
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- I have seen Mario Kart arcade cabinets, but had no idea about the history behind them. Thanks to the Dolphin team for a great article, and hats off on the emulation work!
by stackghost
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- The Gamecube aspect is particularly poignant to me. Splayed across my workbench right this very moment is a Gamecube that has a failing optical drive. I am currently trying to resurrect it with a RP2350 so I can load roms from an SD card.
It was a pretty great console, in its own way.
- Thats a long article for what amounts to "Dolphin now supports F-Zero AX" =)
Must have taken a heckin' amount of work!
- I was expecting this to be about The Legend of Zelda.
- What I think is truly amazing is how truly rare it is to see a home console move into an arcade platform, instead of the other way around. Almost always, the home system was derived from lessons learned from more expensive, rugged, and elaborate arcade hardware.
Sometimes, this overlap was quite profound but not 100%. NeoGeo home consoles famously use the same hardware and software as their arcade counterparts, but the game cartridges were not pin-compatible. The Nintendo VS line were technically the same as a Famicom/NES, but not the same build; the software has subtle differences. Perhaps the Nintendo PlayChoice would count but again, it's not like they used NES mainboards to build those.
So, the idea of taking a Nintendo console mainboard and grafting it to SEGA-designed components so it can run in a dedicated arcade cabinet, is just wild to me.
by whateveracct
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- This is absolutely beautiful. There's so much to be done when you stop looking forward and start looking at points in time in computing.
- The local arcade/bar has two Mario Kart GP 2 cabinets (so you can play linked head to head). I'll have to go check it out after reading this.
- I played the F-Zero game recently in an Arcade nearby, it was amazing! I was so suprised when a buddy of mine went like: "Yeah, there is just a Gamecube in this".
- For all the thousands of slop coders trying to cash in with low effort app store clones of better (often free and open) apps, the Dolphin team does amazing quality archival quality code and documentation for free. Bravo!
- Kickass article. Really took me back to the days of playing FZero AX in the arcade. Incredible game. Great work, Dolphin team!
by mongrelion
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- The article touches a bit on how Sega basically lost.
There is literally a whole documentary about this: Console Wars, where they go deep into how Sega lost the battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Wars_(film)
- I lol'd right clicking to "Open LINK in a new tab". Not quite as funny when I got there, but great none the less.
by SuperHeavy256
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- A fantastic new addition to Dolphin
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by dankwizard
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- [flagged]
by 2001zhaozhao
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- Somewhat of an aside but I had the thought reading this that arcades would be a great format for games heavily involving GenAI. The pay-per-play model is probably the only model where you can either affordably use a lot of LLM tokens per game. Alternatively, having large commercial arcade machines is the only way to guarantee the very high hardware specs needed to run capable models locally.
Perhaps as a result, we might see LLM and video model-powered games become mainstream in arcades before any home consumer platforms.