GOING STRAIGHT
It’s a good rule of thumb to say that emulation
of gaming hardware generally runs two full generations behind the
current state of the art. When your reporter started to write about
emulation seriously, almost a decade ago, the 32-bit Playstation and
Saturn were just getting into their stride, and decent emulations of
the 16-bit SNES, Mega Drive and Amiga were all just pipe dreams. Now
we’re a generation on, those machines can all be recreated to
perfection on even the humblest PC, and the world’s tireless emu
coders are finally nailing the next hardware generation up – the
pioneers of 64-bit gaming.
Alert readers will recall that a year ago this
month, Emu Zone brought you the first news of Project Tempest, the
Atari Jaguar emulator. While an impressive technical achievement, it
wasn’t all that playable, but a year on the emu has progressed in
leaps and bounds. Speed, sound, compatibility and graphics have all
been boosted, to the point where the awesome Tempest 2000 (the game
the emu was created to play, hence the name) now runs full-screen at
full speed with full sound and joypad control on Emu Zone’s creaking
Athlon 2000XP with cheapo graphics card. Ten years after its release
T2K remains one of the most overpowering gaming experiences ever
created, and if you haven’t played it before then you owe it to
yourself to sample it now.
Meanwhile, the ill-fated 3DO console (whose
failure directly, sort-of, led to the blight on gaming that was the
Army Men game series, and you don’t get fates much iller than that),
which shared the vanguard of the 64-bit revolution with the Jaguar,
has finally also been caught in the EmuNet. FreeDO (do you see what
they did there?) is still at quite an early stage (comparable, in
fact, to the first time we looked at Project Tempest), but is
already capable of running 3DO game images at a playable speed with
sound.
In its very short life the console played host
to a handful of excellent titles, most famously the classic
two-player tank battle Return Fire, a Need For Speed game that EA
have failed to live up to ever since, and the first fully-3D version
of FIFA International Soccer, which blazed the trail for all sports
games as we know them today. Emu Zone isn’t entirely sure if that’s
something we should thank the 3DO for or not, but there you have it.
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