Taito Type x2 Hacked – so what?
Taito Type x2 has been emulated / hacked / bootlegged.? What does this mean to us?? Not much.
SonicTempest reports:
It’s not so much an emulator as a loader. The Type-X2 hardware is already basically an x86 PC running Windows XP embedded. The only special things are obviously the specialized hardware as well as a hardware dongle that must be present for games to be booted. The loader being used here is basically simulating the hardware dongle so that the software can be loaded on any old Windows computer.
I’ve been running it on my Windows box at home (Core 2 Quad 3.0Ghz, nVidia GeForce GTX275) and it runs pretty well. I have to force my video card not to scale the display, though, otherwise the image gets scaled and the quality suffers. It doesn’t seem to recognise any input other than the mouse and keyboard too…
The youtuber below is playing using his SFIV stick.? The question that remains in my mind is, so what?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDYR76RJUBY[/youtube]
SNK was certainly a victim of piracy.? Probably 70% of the so-called fans who loved SNK never paid a penny to play the latest release of a KOF game.? I remember the roms being released literally a few days after the games release.? Without new hardware, SNK was f*cked before they could even think.? When they brought out new hardware, no emulator could touch it, unfortunately, the consumers didn’t want to touch it anyway.? Tough break.
Tsubaki Yayoi
Today the PS3 remains more or less unhacked and the 360, while hacked, has banned 1 million players from going online.? And that’s what makes the gaming companies breathe a sigh of relief.? Without being able to go online, the gamesplayer has got half a game, and that’s not even considering DLC.
Arcades are dying, if not dead.? Yes, we have tournaments but the average fighting enthusiast today goes online to get their kicks (literally).? Yes, the veterans still go to arcades (and still play old games) but the busy man, the noob and the new school, all stay at home, occasionally going to their friend’s house.
So let’s say all these people get a copy of Blazblue, arcade perfect, running 100% on their pc, armed with proper joysticks.? Then what?? Well, it’s simple.? It’s called limbo, which they’ll realise they’re in, as soon as a patch/upgrade or DLC comes out.? You can’t tell me these people won’t want the newest version with all the bells and whistles.? These are the same kind of people who ran around collecting the latest roms just to say they owned them.
If you have a tight community that can all play together at one guy’s house without bother from their parents/partners/children/jobs/personal hygiene/game story and extras, then hey, sorted.? But how common is this?? The only benefit of having a rom is being able to practice before the console version comes out. Well, alright, I think I’ve just given you incentive to go get the rom.? However, you know that you will still get the console version so you can challenge people and get all the game extras (remember, there’s no practice mode in this rom), so Arcsys shouldn’t really give a crap.
On the other hand, perhaps you’re happy to play on your own with your five friends, forever, and can’t afford BB.? Well, er… good luck to you then.? Let’s just hope by the time you actually get a job and can afford to get the full game, Arcsys hasn’t crashed and turned to making pachinko games in order to try and recoup their losses…
Will K' return?
In other Blazblue news, a new patch has been released, with country colours and er… minor bug fixes.? It’s available in the US, too – not that Europe even has Blazblue yet.? This kind of scenario, where the sequel has been released before we even get the first, hasn’t happened since SF2CE.? Good grief.? It’s arguably more incentive to get the rom… but by the time everyone else gets the console version, wouldn’t you be bored of it?
Btw, KOF XII runs on the Taito X2 System.? In terms of sales, this doesn’t matter to SNK as most people interested in the game would have bought it by now.? However, in terms of XIII, if SNK release the game without DLC and an incentive to go online (i.e. good netplay), they are quite simply… finished.? In the end, emulating the Taito x2 actually means a f*ck of a lot, at least to SNK and is definitely good news for all the poor/unemployed/cheap so-called fans.? History will repeat itself.
Grasping at straws, it can be argued that the new school can’t even play anything more complicated than SFIV so who cares about them?? Sales are sales, man.? SNK also relies on people that listen to hype to buy games.? If those people have already tried the game personally, they won’t even listen to reviews, they won’t bother to try it out in the store… word about free games gets around faster than anything else.? Sales, what sales?? Thanks for the games, SNK, it was nice knowing you.
… did somebody say GGPO?
Ratings
- The King of Fighters ’95 4Gag Battle
(5.00 out of 5)
- The King of Fighters ’95 4Gag Battle
About Oyaji
“The only benefit of having a rom is being able to practice before the console version comes out.”
Now whatever a rom means this is stupid. The real arcade experience solo or not if actually brought to the house is unbeatable to the end, whereas the home machine version that should naturally be bought to commemorate such a game you love playing despite the inferiority to the arcade version is just to occasionally play around with people in the other modes offered for the scared indoor players who also have no idea what arcades really are.
?Hacker?: A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness?not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean ?security breaker.? Please don’t spread this mistake. People who break security are ?crackers.? ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Hacker )
Good points there, it got me thinking. I knew lots of KOF fans but they simply could not afford $300 Neo Geo carts. Ironically, now as those fans have jobs and can afford to buy the games, it’s too little too late. Luckily, PS3 remains generally unhackable so SNK is safe as long as the game is good!
To add to your point about non-fans and roms, they won’t play the game for more than a week anyway. Copy / Rom hoarders are like that – play whatever’s new then move on.
It is certainly true it is the fans that will make the company the most profit, which is why they make such moves as making XIII fan friendly, and bringing back fan favourites such as Mai; including fan service. – Check out my post on this.
http://orochinagi.com/2010/03/kof-xiii-news-predictions-mai
the problem with SNK and other great companies that are impacted by emulation is that they dont have a strong fan base.
like the video shown, this guy isnt a fan, he simply played the game because it looked good. most if not all the people who download roms arent fans.
here’s a extreme example, mona lisa. most people would want the original right? instead of a reprint. why? because the original is worth heaps? but why is that? cause its old? no its because leonardo has a fan base. u think a musuem that has his art actually cares about the picture? even if it was half rotted away it would still be worth more then a pixel perfect one.
this is why moves games and music are so easily pirated, because not many people are fans.
another example, what would a fan of star wars do and wat would some1 who enjoyed the movie do? 1 would buy the original and 1 would download it 4 free.
so i guess really its about marketing and changing our perception of the product as a whole 🙁 good example is Apple, lame products yet people buy them
so in a way emulation shouldnt be affecting SNK but because it relies on gamers not fans, then yeah it does. if this wasnt the case then the mona lisa would be worth the exact same as a reprint.
That is cool that we are able to take the rom, moreover, this opens up new opportunities.
3 gb ram? Yeah.
I got 3.0 P4 Hyper threading
1.5 ram
and 256 mb nvidia
it runs at 70% speed.
My laptop, which is 1.74ghz core 2 duo with 1gb ram just says NO.
So yeah, bring on the console port! I don’t live in Japan, and I’m too lazy to travel to the arcade… I want to go online to meet challenges. Fighting the CPU sucks.
I remember reading that the min specs for running it where something about.
3ghz core duo
3g ram
xp or post windows
dunno about video but it was probably good.
Really? I might just have to try it out then – just for journalistic purposes. My pc is 5 years old… what about yours?
Sorry for the repost, but for those who aren’t tech-savvy in terms of computers, my friend’s laptop is definitely below-average in terms of today’s laptops. Really, in any university, you’ll practically see everyone with a laptop (sadly, at my place, they <3 iMacs). If those people used their brains, and realized that a laptop with a discrete g-card is the same as buying one with an integrated g-card, then even your common person can run the game 🙂
Oh, and if you don't believe me about the statement I made, you're just not looking hard enough. It's amazing how the price difference between a laptop with a real g-card and one w/ a crappy integrated one cost nearly the same nowadays (slickdeals ftw, son?)
Big LAWLz @ Gunsmith.
As someone who’s played BBCS on the PC, I can safely say that my friend’s 2-yr old laptop (C2D @ 2.3 GHz, 8600M GT) played the game FLAWLESSLY — same FPS as the one in the arcades.
And yeah, so what if this game got leaked? The game isn’t as popular in the US (not to mention the fact that the arcade scene is rather BLEAK here), and according to my JP buddy, there’s still a lot of people in Japan who… still go the arcades to play this game! I’m guessing there aren’t / a couple of people who say, “Hey, let’s go to my place to play some BBCS!”
Of course, piracy is piracy, and any cut in profits will obviously lead to the company getting angry
Actually there is a sort of practice mode – hold AB+Start at the title screen and you can access ‘sparring mode’ where you can fight an AI opponent for about 15 minutes. Not quite training mode, but it’s the best you can get under the circumstances.
Also I don’t think BB needs a quad core to run – the Type X2 has a bunch of different hardware configurations, and it seems like it’d be possible to get it to run on a dual core. On top of that the newest graphics card it supports is a few years old at this point.
http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=903
Actually, the people that can’t afford BB are still screwed, as BB needs a powerful set up, minimum quad core to run the game properly. I had to laugh at the youtube comments wondering how to use the practice mode. Noobs! The rom is only good for versus a friend in your house.