![]() ![]() This version has some different enemy placements (including enemies that don’t usually appear until much later on present in the first stage) but with the overall difficulty toned down somewhat. In the arcades however there were a couple of other versions of Raiden II, the most famous one being the ‘Easy’ version, identifiable by the solid black background on the high score screen. The best known versions of Raiden II are the PSX and PC ports, these have been accessibly by the masses for years, so they’re the version of the game most people are familiar with. One of the best things about emulating things is the history you uncover, the little forgotten facts. With the emulation of Raiden 2 it was many Shmup fans declaring MAME to be complete and fully representative of the most important eras of the genre, saying that a book had finally been closed. This is the one that really got people talking, it’s from 1993, so 21 years ago, and until the progress made last year was still one of the most high profile cases of unemulated protection. It also puts something else into perspective, people who were fond of unemulated games from the 1990s (anything before 1997) have actually had to wait longer to see those memories come to life in MAME than people had to wait for Pacman, we’re a very old project now, yet we continue to improve and evolve.Įnough introduction, let’s start with what the majority considered to be the biggest news of the year. If we assume MAME was ‘born’ in 1997 (February 5th 1997 was the first release under the name ‘MAME’) then at that point Pacman, one of the first games that MAME emulated was 17 years old at the time (it was released in 1980) Fast forward to 2014, and MAME is now 17 years old! The original version of MAME is as much a classic piece of software as Pacman was when MAME was first released, I find that mindblowing. It’s probably worth putting the age of MAME into perspective at this point too. This is of course not really an accurate reflection of where in the project life we are, but as a large percentage of our current user group only have fond memories of the most popular games in the 80s90s period it is one that is easy to understand when you look at the progress made (although even then we still have significant holes in what we emulate, Sega’s immensely popular 3D systems for example are not well represented at all yet) Some of the improvements that were made throughout the year resulted in a number of people saying that MAME now covered every memorable game from the 80s and 90s and was therefore essentially complete. ![]() 2014 was an important year in the life of MAME.
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