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Did anyone ever tried or thought about programming on an emulated arcade machine?
I was looking at this speech from a mame developer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAUnUWYaA5s He talks about creating non existent imaginary machines inside mame.
I think it would be great to create a specific 8 bit machine with great gfx/sound capabilities inside the emulator and
have the scene try to program demos etc on that.
I asked him he told it would be totally possible to even some way run an OS on an imaginary machine with many emulated cpus like z80 etc.
Arcade were not limited as our 8 bits computers of that era and it would be interesting to see what can be done on a machine like that.
For example let's say build a computer based on a pcb arcade like for example "Psychic 5", this was based on maincpu Z80 @6 MHz, audiocpu Z80 @5 MHz.
However if you check the game http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=psychic5&arcade_only=0&autosearch=1 it doesn't have the limitations of your typical Spectrum.
Any thought?

p.s. that machine has also some audio chips: mono Speaker, ym1 YM2203 OPN @1,5 MHz, ym2 YM2203 OPN @1,5 MHz

How about you try it out?

Look through the discussions about what computers should be allowed in oldschool compos, and then ask yourself what the chances are of anyone agreeing about one single aspect of such a fantasy machine.

Why limit a fantasy platform to existing components though? You could build an 11-bit (or whatever you like) CPU with your own custom graphics and sound chips inside an FPGA, and it would even be real hardware instead of software emulation.

well I didn't say it should be limited. I am saying that it would be interesting to see an 8 bit machine built off arcade specs with far less limitations as the 8bit machines we had at home.

even through fpga if you like it that way

isnt that pretty much what pico8 is (ok its limitations are inspired by 8bit handhelds, not the vast power of arcade machines but maybe thats even more fun for many coders?)?

IIRC you program for Pico-8 by writing Lua code which is executed as fast as your CPU is able to. That's pretty far away from assembly programming on an 8-bit era CPU, but it all depends on what kind of limitations you want.

Sounds like Arduino and three resistors glued together for VGA. Another point, there are already a gazillion oldskool platforms out there, no reason to add another.

1. Design this as hardware
2. Get 10+ units built, and delivered to parties with an easy way to load and display demos, so competitions can happen
3. Also make an FPGA implementation available for people to download
4. And an emulator for people to develop on
5. ?
6. Underpants

Waiting for that dual mc68000 sega board massive sprite demo ...

and if you die in the mame demo, you have to insert coin

No idea whether any demos were released on the first generation or so of arcade platforms; although at least one game was written that used the Space Invaders board hardware.

The game is called Pac Manic Miner Man - was written and produced as a one-off (although there may be at least one other duplicate system) by a UK coder called Jim Bagley. This setup has often been on display at various UK retro-gaming events over the years.

I did. but first you need to configure mame/mess and find proper format of media.
for Dragon32 seems it is best solution - debugger etc.

deadline has been posting about hacking an outrun arcade machine for a few years now, not sure if he still plans to make it a demo though

That is seriously cool (especially me being a bit "manic" about Matthew Smith-games).

I've toyed with the idea of a demo for Bubble Bobble hardware for a while, and even looking into a disassembly and MAME code for it, but didn't progress further than that.