Arcade

Preserving arcade games

Preserving arcade games was presented at Recon, T2, Area41, !NuitDuHack, !RaumZeitLabor, CCC and other locations.

Abstract

Old-school arcade games were so protected that hacking is the only way to preserve them before all boards are dead, and the games are lost.

• an overview of famous old-school arcade games
• their incredible hardware
• the permanent piracy
• the awesome protections (designed to commit suicide !)
• what was required to preserve some of them from being lost for ever.

This talk is a homage to Michael Steil's Ultimate Commodore 64 presentation at 25c3: you should watch it, it's inspiring in content and quality !

Contents

The slide deck initially started as pure b&w text, then evolved to pictures only, and lastly fully animated with custom recorded (some are tools-assisted) lossless videos, presented via a tweaked version of AdvanceMenu (an arcade frontend) (full deck download soon)

Why? This talk was rejected a lot - often without even an answer despite requests - so I just kept improving it anyway :)

Please give me feedback here.

The best version was presented at the CCC (hi-res video + download)

<wiki:video url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg7LPcFUxg8"/>

A static version of the slides is available as PDF, viewable online and directly downloadable.

You can download the full animated presentation (~1Gb) with extras on archive.org.

special versions

An extended version (more details) is also available <wiki:video url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiRIc0LDlu4"/>

french J'ai aussi donné cette présentation en Français <wiki:video url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2X0YyxHg5Q"/>

extra

you can find here some hi-res version of some of the slides (facepalm, timeline) http://i.imgur.com/PJbYtpB.png

The Q&A screensaver uses !AdvanceMenu and the video set from its website (6 Gb)

tricks

• images
• original slides from the first PDF version were converted to PNG via ImageMagick + "-density parameter"
• video

1. create your own video / download video via youtube-dl
2. extract all/specific frames as PNG via MPlayer
3. manipulate frames via imagemagick (crop, colors, perspective...)
4. reencode via advmng

• mame recording

1. save game just before recording position
2. restart Mame and record audio & video via Mame's mngwrite & wavwrite option, load savegame
3. trim start on both MNG & WAV via this script (only works before any advmng-specific compression)
4. audio levelling via replaygain

• or use !AdvanceMame direct MNG + WAV recording

• Tools assisted videos: Mame-RR with MacroLua and my inputs scripts

• some videos were 'cleaned' at emulation level to prevent the display of some specific tiles (if you have a better solution, let me know!)

• used !WinKawaks Shot Factory to identify the tiles more easily (blinking state)

• patched tiles functions in Mame & recompile.

• compression

• pngout, advpng, advmng

• !AdvanceMenu works better under Wine for correct playback.

• the configuration was tweaked so that it's as big as possible on screen (it's still windowed)

• taskbar color is set to black, W8 settings "Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen" mus be disabled.

• a patch to prevent !AdvanceMenu to restart at the first frame was implemented by Philippe Teuwen. Because the official build couldn't compile under Windows at the time, I did a crossplatform diff patch on the official Windows binary

ack

Thanks to everyone who could make this presentation possible (Raz, Andreas, Charles, Dave, Phil), and to anyone who made preservation possible, and in particular CPS2.