Bringing the Predators to Life in MAME | Hacker News Reader

Bringing the Predators to Life in MAME

lysiwyg.mataroa.blog

76 pointsmsephton18 comments

> It is insufficient to simply state that previous versions are not supported, they are aggressively not supported but I was not to be deterred.

Amen. The time I've spent building old versions of MAME. I have a mountain of Donkey Kong replay files from top players. Game replays are only guaranteed to run under the version used to record them, so get ready to build binaries if you want to watch old replays.

Can't you just download old binaries?

https://www.mamedev.org/oldrel.html

Those are all windows binaries.

MAME is such fun code to work with. I remember being in a small apartment in Germany with my wife in Dec 1998 and hacking MESS to get saves working in The Legend of Zelda so she could play it through. That kinda systems work can be initially intimidating but the complexity of something like a 6502 is nothing compared to a middling webapp today.

Interesting distribution method of the source code (zip file uploaded to mediafire), any reason not to go for a git hosting service like Codeberg, GitLab or even GitHub?

All three of those services require signing up for an account, mediafire doesn't.

For a similar, albeit a little older, game that you can play in mame today, check out Gremlin's 1981 game Eliminator.

There are threads on arcade-museum talking about cabs of this popping up on the wild and being played at arcade/cons.

Also, interesting editing on the title. "The Predators" is a name of an arcade game. Little t "the Predators" could refer to anything, like Predators in the Capcom videogame based on the Predator films. Of course the article makes this clear and I understand the article got the title case incorrect, but editing the title opens it up to being incorrect in a different way, so it's best to leave it as is.

I’ve never heard of this game, so I’m particularly interested in how it played. Unfortunately, the article still leaves some questions unanswered.

Yes and the screenshots of game play left me with no better understanding than I started with.

Seems pretty obvious to me just from “four-player, four-monitor arena battle with full eight-way scrolling and AI drones for players not present”.

And it’s clarified with “As a social experience had it been released in 1986, this would have been the grandfather to games like Fortnight; a multiplayer PvP battle arena where each player was supposed to have their own dedicated set of controls and display.”

The main question I had was what was the form of combat. There was no mention of shooting. So what was it? Ramming? Lasers? Magnetism? Bullets? Turns out it is bullets. Boring.

But they did say "a four-player game that was said to resemble Sinistar" but it would have been more accurate to have said "it's literally a 4-player version of Sinistar" and I would have had zero remaining questions.

It’s from 1986, so of course it uses bullets.

Flicky is from 1984 and uses tea cups as the projectile.

Sure, people have been putting different sprites on their projectiles for a long time. But whether it flies in a straight line, drops from the top of the screen, or follows a ballistic arc, a bullet is a bullet. It doesn’t matter what sprite you use.

Not quite. A bullet is a specific type of projectile. Arrows, rocks, and even teacups can be projectiles, but they are not bullets.

I think it might be this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJliQ2fsiUA

Thank you!

My brain immediately went to thinking this was about adding the Nashville predators hockey team to an old NHL game

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