This emulator runs fine out of a win95 dos box, but for the best sound performance, run it from DOS - the sound is good from w95 but a little crackly, but from DOS it's nice and clean. The emulator is super-compatible - there are only a handful of the available HuCard images that it will not run. The games run fast and fluidly on my Penty 166, and if you use the Gravis joypad you can almost forget that you're playing on an emulator at all.
The only downside to this emulator is that the downloadable version is crippleware - you have to stump up $35 (20 quid, if you're in the UK) to get the fully-functional version. Mind you, that's not so bad, when you consider just how many excellent games you'll be able to play once you have the full version, and once you see the emu I think you'll agree that Monsieur Michel has done an excellent job of coding and richly deserves to make a bit of dosh out of it. Go on, send the man the loot. He's done us a great service, and deserves to be kept in Gauloises and Pernod for a bit :-)
You can download a demo version of the emulator which will allow you to load and watch the demo on any of the games, so you can check out the quality of the emulation; a playable version is also included, with the limitations that there is no sound, you can only load the smaller HuCard images, and no session will run for longer than 15 minutes. Download it and get a couple of good images - like Alien Crush pinball or Chan and Chan - and try it out. I reckon you'll agree it's worth twenty quid of anyone's money. If you are not familiar with the PC-Engine, or need further convincing, read on...
Some of you may not know the PC-Engine, or at least not by that name - it was almost released in Europe but never quite made it out, and was released in the US as the Turbo Grafx 16. It was easily the best of the late 80's 8-bit game consoles, eclipsing its contemporaries, the Sega Master System and the NES, in both sprite-handling capability and colour resolution. Dating from the glory days of the scrolling shooter, it features some of the best examples of that genre ever seen. Much of the PC-Engine library consists of solid, fun-to-play shooting and platform games that are still very enjoyable to this day.
My first sight of the Engine was round at my mate Tony Tak's place in London. He was a game journalist who had all the latest systems, and occasionally I would go over to his place and kick his arse around at Robotron, just to show him who was boss. (Hehe... if you're reading this Tony, I know that'll wind ya up :-))... anyway, so one time I was round there and Tony was playing what appeared to be a near-perfect port of R-Type, which impressed me. I assumed it was running on the nearby Amiga, and I was gobsmacked when instead Tony indicated to me this tiny little white box with a joypad coming out of it. Being both a gamer and a geek, I had to have one, and with Tony's help arranged for my Engine to be shipped out from a Tokyo department store (done up rather nicely, I seem to remember, in all this wrapping-paper and meticulously tied bows).
Over the next few years me and Tony bought no end of HuCards, the little credit-card sized game carts that the Engine used - often in Japanese language format, because for a while the Engine wasn't sold in English-speaking countries. I enjoyed the great conversions of R-Type and Fantasy Zone and many a scrolly-shooter. In due course the CD-ROM was released - at that time it was a great novelty for any system to have a CD-ROM - and we got that, too, and spent way too long playing Super Wonder Boy in Monster Land. My dad even got his own Engine and stash of HuCards.
For a while it looked like the Engine was going to be officially released in Europe, much to the delight of UK gameheads - but then the deal never happened, and no incarnation of the Engine was ever officially sold there. In the US the system was eventually released as the Turbo-Grafx 16, but by then it was up against stiff competition from the Genesis and eventually the SNES, and never really caught on the way it would have if it had been released earlier. So many people missed out on the Engine/TG16, and therefore missed out on some of the best games of the 2D era.
Scrolling shooters were the forte of the Engine, and you'll have hours of fun perusing those titles alone. There are some gems in other genres too - puzzle games and scrolling platformers are well-represented, and there are a couple of truly great pinball games (when Naxat Soft's Devil Crash arrived at my place in Wales, the lads made a special trip up to come and play it, and we spent all weekend getting sore arses in front of the magic Engine). And there are a couple of weird games that you'll see and you'll just have to say... only in Japan!!
Another reason to register the Magic Engine is that you'll be able to get future updates - and soon ME should be able to play PC-Engine CD-ROM games, which means I shall be playing heaps of Super Wonder Boy in Monster Land again :-)
Here are some screenshots taken from the ME emulator, along with some of my recommendations...
Galaga '90 (my original HuCard was Galaga '88, but it was the same game). A fast, challenging and very pretty update on the Galaga theme. Scrolling sections, Galactic Warps, aliens that look surprised when you shoot them, Fat Boys that inflate like balloons when you shoot them, firework explosions... this is probably the definitive implementation of the bottom-shooter style of game design. And dig the bonus rounds - "That Is Galactic Dancing", where the enemies come out and boogie to ballroom-dancing-type tunes, and you get to kill them. Too weird. :-)
Super Star Soldier, one of the many impressive vertically-scrolling shoot-em-up games on the Engine. Smooth, fast scrollers with a ton of powerups, a zillion sprites on screen, and fast shooting action were a trademark of the Engine. Check out others such as Gun-Hed and Truxton, and excellent conversions of Xevious and Raiden (complete with little cows wandering about down on the planet below).
More shooting action in the form of Konami's Salamander (sequel to Gradius/Nemesis and known as Life Force in those parts of the world where Nemesis is known as Gradius). Konami always knew how to do a good scrolly-shooter, and the Engine has excellent versions of the likes of Gradius and Parodius, not to mention Irem's classic R-Type, the game that first introduced me to the joys of Engineering...
Only in Japan, section 1... yes, the little man is farting in the general direction of the other little man, who is urinating up against a lamp-post. (Later on in the game you get to boot the other little man up the arse when you come across him having a dump in the bushes). Welcome to Chan and Chan, which is actually a nice little platform scroller which just happens to be richly steeped in lavatory humour. This game was actually released in the US as JJ and Jeff, but it had been heavily sanitized (you had a "spray gun" instead of a belly full of sprouts, and the other guy tended to just loiter near to lamp-posts instead of actively watering them). Get the original version, it's a lot more fun - and it's a genuinely nice playable little scrolly-jumper, and is, to my knowledge, the only game in existence where you can get 5000 points for farting on a dinosaur's nose.
But wait. It gets weirder...
And here was me thinking it was the British who had a reputation for lavatory humour... this title, only released in Japan, proves me to be udderly wrong. This, beasts and beastesses, is Toilet Kids. In which one or two players, comfortably enthroned upon the porcelain, scroll up the screen in a game which is basically Xevious with deeply scatological overtones. As you can see, the screenshot shows our hero in the act of dealing with three turd-emitting toilets on the ground. Note how the emplacement of crappers is tastefully located between two giant turds. Sometimes these large ground-based turds are covered in flies, which swarm off and attack you as you approach. Sometimes, a formation of (I kid you not) tiny penises will swarm onto the screen, aim at you and fire pee-coloured bullets at you. You will meet a variety of bosses, many of whom have comically large arses and fire brown missiles at you. Brown features pretty heavily in this game, if truth be told. I've only tried the first couple of levels - Ghu alone knows what awaits on the higher levels. I dread to think, if it involves curry...
Japan... it's another planet. Toilet Kids... flying penises... good grief!
Anyway, these are but a few examples, there are tons of great Hu-Cards out there - so go and download the emu, check it out, pay the French dude, and do some warezin'! The needed links are on my links page....
Many of you may not know Nemesis by that name - in the UK it was common in the arcades, but elsewhere I believe it was more usually called Gradius. But the game is the same - the first of Konami's canon of scrolling shooters that also encompassed the likes of Salamander (called Life Force in the same parts of the planet that Nemesis is called Gradius), and the very weird Parodius. One of the classic mid-80's shooters, and I remember personally depositing many a 10p piece in Nemesis games in murky London arcades, and playing home versions on the MSX and NES machines - and, indeed, an upgraded version of Gradius was one of the first three SNES games I ever owned.
I also remember that Nemesis was the first coin-op that invited one to record one's sex and star sign on the hi-score table! Luckily the symbol for my own star sign is suitably horned, so my Yak hiscores even look quite appropriate :-)
You scroll through various cavern-like levels, zapping bad guys, dodging bullet (the most important skill in any of the scrolly-shooters), getting powerups and killing boss ships. I've enjoyed the home versions I've played on other systems, but nothing beats having the actual coin-op code running on an emulation, especially when the emulator is as accomplished as this one. Apart from the fact that you're flying the ship with a Gravis gamepad instead of a coin-op joystick, all that's missing are the fag-burns on the control panel.
There is one major glitch in the emulator (which doesn't prevent you from having a good game though) - don't take the Laser powerup, coz as of this version (v0.99) the laser is thoroughly bust. It won't crash the game or anything - just that instead of a nice laser beam, all that comes out of your ship is a pathetic hyphen kind of a thing, which is about as effective as a fart in a gale.
I always found the best weapons to be a fistful of multiples and missiles and either conventional or 2-way shot anyway, so the nonfunctioninl laser detracts not a whit from my enjoyment of this fine emulator. Just don't press Select on the laser powerup accidentally, in the thick of battle though....
You can find the latest version of this excellent emulator here, and there is a link on that page to a ROM archive where you'll find the necessary ROM images.
Yes indeed, you can now play a proper game of one of the finest videogames ever made right on your PC, from win95 no bother, at the correct speed and with full sound. It's heaven. (I've been playing using a Gravis joypad, which works fine, but it took a little getting used to - after all, I used to fly Star Cruiser 7 with a good old Atari joystick, and flying with the left thumb instead of the right hand took some acclimatisation, and indeed on my first Warrior Mission I had a little difficulty keeping on track during warping into Hyperspace - but you soon get used to it).
And the game has lost none of its charm. It's still one of the best first-person space shooters anywhere, laughably crude graphics notwithstanding. Still damn challenging, especially on Commander Mission. I had a lot of fun this afternoon playing - you still get the old rush when you do an emergency warp out of a hostile sector when you've just lost your photons, your attack computer's been blown away and your shields are down... and you manage to limp back to a base star without running into an asteroid :-)
Aww, it's a fucking shame that my dad died before the emergence of the emulator scene. Like me he loved those old games, and Star Raiders in particular. He'd have shared my deep joy at seeing it again. Like seeing an old friend again after a long time, and finding out that you still really get on :-)
The only downside to this emulator is that it's a bit of a bear to set up if you've not had any experience of Atari DOS. A hint - get ahold of mydos45d.atr and set that up on d1:, then get the MegaImages and set them up on d2: to d8:. Disable the BASIC rom in the emulation. Most of the good stuff will run under that config.
You can pull down the emulator from here and then sidle over to a site that has plenty of warez, and get busy :-). The site I have linked here has the MegaImages, which contain just about all the good games, including Star Raiders and Behind Jaggi Lines (the pre-release name for Rescue on Fractalus), as well as some of the Llamasoft games for the system. Onea these daze I'll sit down and compile a special Llamasoft disk image and put it with the rest of my emu images.
Lemme know if you make it to Star Commander Class 1!