Am I losing it? Was RAINE available in the late 90s?!

[Alpha]

Hey ya'll. It dawned on me today that I recall using Raine in the late 90s (aging myself here lol). The question is, how? Are you the original author, Tux? And I'm curious how has the emulator changed (majorly) since then? If I'm not mistaken, I ran it on MS-DOS. 🤨

[Tux]

Yeah it was created by Richard Bush, Antiriad, in 1998, that was the old dos days.

In 2000 he wanted to give it up but he opened the source, at that time I was interested by a linux version, so I took the Tux name to work on it, except that slowly but surely, everybody gave up, and I was finally the only one left. The big difference is that I didn't work on it like crazy like what Antiriad did, it was more, "when time permits", but I never succeeded to completely stop, I stopped for a few months and always came back to it.

Antiriad left but after helping us to port it to windows and to linux, so we had the multi platform release.
More than 10 years ago, I switched from allegro to sdl to be able to use opengl which was greatly needed, it was version 0.50.

Lately I finally succeeded at the impossible, making a version without any assembler in it so that it could be compiled in 64 bits or for any platform, version 0.90. That's what I wanted to do before stopping completely because this way the source can live on, except that of course nobody came to do that. Eventually add sdl2 support instead of the current sdl 1.2 would be nice, if I succeed to do that I think I'll be able to call that version 1.0 and stop !

Richard Bush is still available by mail even if he never comes to the forum, I send messages from time to time. He works in a computer games company, so he doesn't want to touch the code anymore though.

That's the big lines !

(and while you are here, this new defaut white theme for the forum is quite horrible you know ? I am thinking maybe I should resurrect the old forum backup I stil have to work around that !).

 

[alocacoc]

I'm glad you are so dedicaded to Raine.

 

I try to follow the development of all emulators the I make work in Arch, even though I rarely play anything, its just so cool to follow on.

 

And no emulator can be replaced, they are just somehow all unique. Lets imagine ZSNES, I just start it sometimes to see the water effect in the GUI for a moment and remember the times when I used the emu so many years ago.

 

Or other old obsolete emus like Zinc, VivaNonno or U64Emu to play Killer Instinct and other arcade games that time was just very nice.

 

I even miss some Windows emus, like Model2 emu, but no, no Windows anymore please.

 

Sorry to bore you all, just having some memories.

[Tux]

No no, this kind of nostalgia is a common disease around here, absolutely not boring !

I agree about not replacing them, zsnes was a major emu no matter what, I didn't play much with it because I actually played most of my snes games on the psp, using a snes emulator on the psp, but I tried it a few times and I liked its spirit (quite similar to raine for the spirit). Even though the graphics are outdated, there were some very good games on snes, and I finished some on the psp ! (and arguably there were probably more good games on snes than on the psp, what made it excellent was actually the homebrew scene but you had to hack the firmware to be able to fully enjoy that !).

I still have zinc somewhere, but I just tried it, and it segfaults now, very old binary anyway, January 2005, I guess I'll probably have to delete it then... ! Yeah I know, zinc was an experiment which was merged into mame after a while, so I guess I should try the mame version some day... !

I don't know the other 2, VivaNonno or U64Emu, but I tried a few very experimental n64 emus which have disappeared now, but they were good at the time ! (on the n64, the latest crazy experiment where some guys were able to get the source of the original mario 64 cartridge and able to rebuild the rom image from the sources. I tried it, it works, you get exactly the same rom image in the end, but the sources are not very readable, so it would be hard to use them to make a modern version on pc, plus you would be sure to win some justice problems coming from nintendo in the process, but it was interesting to try anyway).
Don't know this model 2 emu too... !

Edited March 28, 2021 by Tux

[alocacoc]

I still think the the SNES was one of the best consoles on the market. It didn't only have a high variety of games, but also high quality content. Much better and more than the Sega Mega Drive, if I can call it the times "rivaling" system. On the other hand put the Mega Drive with its 32X and CD AddOns together, they had nice games too. I am still proud of my Multi Mega in my basement, but the ports for both systems are 90% SNES better than MD, the good system exclusives were mainly on SNES. But I don't want to miss any of them. 

 

And about ZSNES, everybody has to consider what the PC CPU power could deliver that time to the emulator, and it was few, so ZSNES was really fast and the filter effects like sai or eagle algorithms were impressive and fast at the same time too. Another good point was the option to play games from different locations.

 

I can still remember I had (still have) a US SNES only to play Super Mario RPG, because it couldn't pass a specific point on a PAL SNES with an adapter cartridge. It was an awesome game that time, it still is.

 

You cannot really compare the SNES to the PSP, but the PSP had a very nice advantage, that many companies republished lots of RPG games with an english translation, many of them previously only been japan and japanese language exclusive.

 

Before I had ZINC in an AUR packet, but after they switched the AUR, it was never brought back. It should work on ARCH, but if its useful, maybe not, because you can use MAME, but MAME don't upscale to higher resolution I think, or I don't know how to do. Once I asked to port zinc to libretro, but they said, its posible and maybe even easy, but too much hassle for an outdated emu with better alternatives, and they might be right.

 

VivaNonno played only 2 games, Ridge Racer 2 and rave Racer I think, its development was also used to enhance the code in other emus like MAME I think, also obsolete nowadays, but that time, quite fun to test.

 

Model 2 emulator was an emulator by ElSemi, that could play model 2 games, like Sonic the Fighters. Most other Model 2 games had ports for the Sega Saturn, so they were less interesting for me. This emulator could separate the emulation to multiple cores, like CPU and GPU each to a different core, which was quite useful that time.

 

U64Emu could only emulate the Killer Instinct games, since I only owned the SNES version of KI 1, which was also fantastic, it was a nice emulator to see the much superior arcade version.

 

Yeah, using a hacked source code from a game will work to recompile the game, but legal issues are there like you said. Many games source codes are also apparently very buggy, but I don't want to judge that, since I have no knowledge in this.

 

But one interesting fact I like to mention, in MAME, apart from the audio, the graphic emulation of the Hyper NeoGeo 64 hardware is quite playable since the last update a few days ago. And since a development version of Samurai Spirits 64 was found some weeks ago, which looks really different (the nearer camera make it clip more, but feel much closer to previous Samurai Spirits games I think), I really like to test it once the roms are dumped.

[Tux]

45 minutes ago, alocacoc said:

You cannot really compare the SNES to the PSP, but the PSP had a very nice advantage, that many companies republished lots of RPG games with an english translation, many of them previously only been japan and japanese language exclusive.

The unofficial translations are legion on snes too ! And congratulations to the team who did that too, it was without the sources, and they made miracles to patch the roms there...
 

Quote

Before I had ZINC in an AUR packet, but after they switched the AUR, it was never brought back. It should work on ARCH, but if its useful, maybe not, because you can use MAME, but MAME don't upscale to higher resolution I think, or I don't know how to do. Once I asked to port zinc to libretro, but they said, its posible and maybe even easy, but too much hassle for an outdated emu with better alternatives, and they might be right.

I am no expert for mame, although I have read the source quite a lot for some drivers, but you simply need to launch it in opengl, it might even be the default nowdays, if not just do "mame -video opengl -rp your_rom_directory 'game name'", and it should work. Didn't try any zinc game yet though...
edit : I just tried it, and I confirm, it works (although I had to update gdarius2.zip and get some bios).

It's hard to say what makes it to segfault here, it might be one of the recent changes from the binutils package which prevented execution in data and stack segments, but I don't think it uses any assembler code, so it shouldn't be affected by that, but anyway it crashes before even displaying its graphical window so it's during initialization. Hard to say without the source. If you have a link to the source, I can have a look !

Quote

VivaNonno played only 2 games, Ridge Racer 2 and rave Racer I think, its development was also used to enhance the code in other emus like MAME I think, also obsolete nowadays, but that time, quite fun to test.

Thanks for the info, I didn't play ridge racer 2 anyway... !

 

Edited April 5, 2021 by Tux

[_MADrigal]

Tux, the story of your work on Raine is worth being recorded in an interview.

As you know I am part of the old Zzap!Raine team, we have known each other since 2001. I am now working on a massive project to bring Zzap!Raine into a book, it is stiill early days (I am 30% in the project) but when I am finished, I would like to include a section just for you, an interview, or a diary, or anything that you wish to say about this massive experience.

As I said, still early days, I am working non-stop on this, but it is a huge effort, hopefully will finish phase 1 by November - and I hope you'll still be around when the time comes to finalise the publication - and I really hope you'll be on board

[Tux]

Eh, I don't have that much to say about all that... in fact I am surprised I lasted so long, well along the years many times I thought about giving up and sometimes I spent months without touching the code, but I always finished by coming back to it. Now I play less and less with raine, so it's really time to finish this, that's all, but it was good while it lasted for sure !

 

[_MADrigal]

You never know. I have thought about stopping my G&W project so many times, but after 22 years I am still here, always doing something, improvements. At times slowly, other times, working like I was on fire. Passion never ends, but at times we need a rest