Welcome to the Next Level
Since the beginning of the year, the emu community has been hearing about Retrocade, mostly with the rallying cry of "Star Wars at full speed with sound on a Pentium 60!" or similar claims. It was in mid January that we started hearing about Retrocade, but it has been in development fpr quite some time before that. In fact, many people may not know it, but Neil Bradley's standalone Major Havoc emulator that was released last year in fact used early Retrocade code.
 |
 |
But beyond the GUI is the real meat of Retrocade: The emulation. Blazing fast CPU cores and graphics routines place Retrocade squarely among the fastest emulators in the business (think Pacman at 1,200 FPS... What? You can't play Pacman at 1,200FPS? What kind of a wimp are you?) but raw speed is all but a moot point, when all that really matters is having games run at playable speed. Even Spy Hunter, long notorious for speed (or lack thereof) in MAME, breezes along at full speed. On my p233, everything runs at full speed or better (or quite a bit better, per the example above.) For the vast majority of people out there who still use older systems (such as myself, having mostly older Pentiums for computers,) Retrocade is a godsend.
But the bells and whistles don't end there. The Atari vector games take on a whole new look with the addition of trandlucent and anti-aliased vectors, as well as backdrops. Not only do the Atari games get this treatment, but also the Cinematronics vector games, such classics as Armor Attack, Star Castle and Warrior. And if the eye candy isn't enough, Retrocade is one of the best sounding emulators in existence (how good? Let's just say I'm looking for better speakers to play Gyruss with...)
 |
To gain some more insight into Retrocade, I have conducted a brief e-mail interview with Neil Bradley, one of the primary authors of Retrocade, to find out what he thinks of his creation:
Geez... For me alone it's greater than 2000 hours easily, plus Mike and everyone else. I'd say > 4000 hours. Too much. ;-)
-As with anything else out there, there are already quite a few critics out there, as well as those people who seem to think that any emulator which duplicates games emulated by MAME is a waste of time, and even those who still believe that Retrocade is a hoax! How do you think these people are going to react to Retrocade when it comes out?
 |
Retrocade also has the Cinematronics games, a nice and easy to use UI, backdrops for vector games (and a few rasters like Space Invaders), save state, JPG screenshots, and of course, the performance.
As far as how I think the people who think Retrocade is a hoax will react? Maybe they won't be as critical of other announced but unreleased emulators in the future. Retrocade has taken a LONG time, and that's mainly because we've backed up and rewritten sections of it sometimes as much as 4 times. If it's not right, we don't hack it, we redo it, andthat hurts time to market. If Retrocade was a commercially developed product, we would've been dead long ago.
The problem in software development is everything takes longer than you expect. If you release too early when it's not ready, you get pummeled with a bad reputation of making crappy software. If you release it too late, your product is called vaporware or a hoax. Though, I'd much rather be in the latter camp than the former.
 |
-We've already seen a great deal of the bells and whistles that will be part of Retrocade when it comes out, such as the backdrops, translucent and anti-aliased vectors, as well as a GUI unmatched by anything previously (not to mention the blazing fast speed.) The comparisons to MAME will start almost immediately, but do you think that Retrocade is going to become a standard by which other emulators are judged?
I think immediately Retrocade will be judged against MAME, and therewill be some irritations at first (such as the "system" function keys being different from MAME).
The two emulators serve two different masters. MAME is not designed tobe an end user product, it's purpose is to document the games and playability is nothing more than a nice side effect (according to MAME's documentation itself) - something that MAME accomplishes nicely. Retrocade is designed to be an end user product, designed for speed and ease of use. So while they both wind up emulating a crossbreed of games, they serve two different purposes. There's room for both in the emulation scene.
What I'm hoping is that people won't start dumping all over MAME because of performance issues as compared to Retrocade, and I'm sure that there'll be at least a small amount of it. In some cases, Retrocade outperforms MAME by as much as 4X (with 2-3X being the median across virtually all games). There's no need for competition between the two other thancausing the respective teams to push themselves a little. FWIW, I host the MAMEDEV list on my site and several MAMEDEV members are Retrocade developers as well, so there's no secrecy or unfriendly warfare going on.
As far as Retrocade becoming a standard by which other emulators are judged, time will tell. It'll certainly shake a few things up I'd bet.;-)
-What, in your opinion, is the best feature of Retrocade?
 |
-Once this version of Retrocade is released, you have indicated that development is going to continue, but will slow down. Can you give any indications what we may be seeing added to Retrocade in the future (not necessarily what games will be added, but what features we can expect to see?)
It'll slow down a bit meaning I won't have as much to do (hopefully).The first thing I'm going to focus on after release is fixing the problems that exist within several of the emulations. It won't be 100% when released, but it'll be close. After that, I'm going to focus on the Windows/Mac/UNIX version. After that I'll be adding more games, record session abilities, more sound cores, etc... I'm quite partial to theAtari System 1 games, so expect them to appear fairly soon.
-Other than getting some sleep for a change, what else do you plan to do once Retrocade is released?
I'll get a chance to actually play the games. ;-)
-=>W<=-