> It is insufficient to simply state that previous versions are not supported, they are aggressively not supported but I was not to be deterred.
Amen. The time I've spent building old versions of MAME. I have a mountain of Donkey Kong replay files from top players. Game replays are only guaranteed to run under the version used to record them, so get ready to build binaries if you want to watch old replays.
MAME is such fun code to work with. I remember being in a small apartment in Germany with my wife in Dec 1998 and hacking MESS to get saves working in The Legend of Zelda so she could play it through. That kinda systems work can be initially intimidating but the complexity of something like a 6502 is nothing compared to a middling webapp today.
Interesting distribution method of the source code (zip file uploaded to mediafire), any reason not to go for a git hosting service like Codeberg, GitLab or even GitHub?
For a similar, albeit a little older, game that you can play in mame today, check out Gremlin's 1981 game Eliminator.
There are threads on arcade-museum talking about cabs of this popping up on the wild and being played at arcade/cons.
Also, interesting editing on the title. "The Predators" is a name of an arcade game. Little t "the Predators" could refer to anything, like Predators in the Capcom videogame based on the Predator films. Of course the article makes this clear and I understand the article got the title case incorrect, but editing the title opens it up to being incorrect in a different way, so it's best to leave it as is.
Seems pretty obvious to me just from “four-player, four-monitor arena battle with full eight-way scrolling and AI drones for players not present”.
And it’s clarified with “As a social experience had it been released in 1986, this would have been the grandfather to games like Fortnight; a multiplayer PvP battle arena where each player was supposed to have their own dedicated set of controls and display.”
The main question I had was what was the form of combat. There was no mention of shooting. So what was it? Ramming? Lasers? Magnetism? Bullets? Turns out it is bullets. Boring.
But they did say "a four-player game that was said to resemble Sinistar" but it would have been more accurate to have said "it's literally a 4-player version of Sinistar" and I would have had zero remaining questions.
Sure, people have been putting different sprites on their projectiles for a long time. But whether it flies in a straight line, drops from the top of the screen, or follows a ballistic arc, a bullet is a bullet. It doesn’t matter what sprite you use.
Amen. The time I've spent building old versions of MAME. I have a mountain of Donkey Kong replay files from top players. Game replays are only guaranteed to run under the version used to record them, so get ready to build binaries if you want to watch old replays.
https://www.mamedev.org/oldrel.html
There are threads on arcade-museum talking about cabs of this popping up on the wild and being played at arcade/cons.
Also, interesting editing on the title. "The Predators" is a name of an arcade game. Little t "the Predators" could refer to anything, like Predators in the Capcom videogame based on the Predator films. Of course the article makes this clear and I understand the article got the title case incorrect, but editing the title opens it up to being incorrect in a different way, so it's best to leave it as is.
And it’s clarified with “As a social experience had it been released in 1986, this would have been the grandfather to games like Fortnight; a multiplayer PvP battle arena where each player was supposed to have their own dedicated set of controls and display.”
But they did say "a four-player game that was said to resemble Sinistar" but it would have been more accurate to have said "it's literally a 4-player version of Sinistar" and I would have had zero remaining questions.