Where to buy and how to play also on Apple OSX the fantastic shoot them up Arcade game ROM "Rayforce"
We as the team behind our “line-of-reasoning” are passionate about highlighting challenges and opportunities in everybody’s life in the information age. Currently we are researching a specific sub-niche of the software market for games. We will share with you in the following article some interesting parallels of the digital marketplaces for Arcade / Retro games on the one hand side and the Music market on the other. We will express our hope that Apple will step into the Arcade / Retro market place and make it as easy for consumers to buy and enjoy these digital games as they have done with the itunes / ipod combo for digital music.
From your reactions, we know that you like our articles and you enjoy even more our concrete and practical tutorials (examples: Task management with Microsft´s Onenote; Practicing Google document security issues). In the article below we are going to explain how you can already today play Arcade / Retro games on your Apple Macintosh OSX right away, without having to wait for Apple to also solve the issues of the digital market for Arcade / Retro games.
Because the best is just good enough for our readers we picked the famous Arcade game “Rayforce” - one of the greatest shoot them ups of all times (read this review, or this to see what we mean) - as the example for our little “how to” Arcade / Retro gaming guide on Apples Macintosh OSX. But to be clear: there is no such thing as a free lunch here, we will show you where to buy Rayforce (so it will cost you some $) and how to make it run in Apple´s OSX (so it will cost in addition also your time).
More fun after the click!
Arcade gaming is a good example of a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model that worked already in the past successfully. Customers (today mostly in Japan) are walking into an Arcade, choose the game that they are interested in, maybe even wait (and watch how others are performing) in a line until it is their turn, throw in their coins, enjoy the gaming experience and leave. If you are interested to understand why the quality of Arcade games is usually considered to be much higher than the quality of PC and console games then this article on insomnia.ac is one of the best places to start.
Nintendo´s Wii console offers an interesting feature called VirtualConsole. Basically Wii´s VirtualConsole is allowing Gamers to play games from old consoles (Snes, Nes, ..). Nintendo is offering an Online shop where players can buy very easily the games. The technology behind the VirtualConsole is called Emulation. Nintendo recently announced that 10 million VirtualConsole games have been sold.
In the last years we have seen an increasing number of Retro / Arcade games reproduced for different consoles and the PC (only very rarely if at all for OSX).
There is no question: Emulation of games is today a successful business.
Modern PC´s are able to run Emulation also for Arcade games without issues. But the market place for emulation of Arcade games looks today a lot like the Music market looked before Apple itunes / ipod changed the rules:
- Consumers have to buy today compilations of Arcade (and old console) games while they are maybe only interested in one or two of the games included. This is comparable to the pre-itunes age where people bought a “Music CD”.
- It is as simple to download illegally Arcade game ROMs from the Internet as it was (and still is) to download Music MP3 files. But since years itunes (and now also Amazon) is making a big difference: More and more people prefer to buy their music because it is easy and convenient, it works on Windows and OSX and it is legal. There is not yet (early 2008) an itunes like online service that would allow players to buy and play legally Arcade / Retro game ROMs on Windows or OSX.
There is another eye striking parallel between the pre-itunes music market and the Arcade Retro game market today:
Someone else tried it before and was not successful.
A company called StarROMs offered for a while legal Arcade game ROMS that could be used with the great freeware emulator MAME (Windows, OSX and a lot of other platforms). ROMs were priced between $2 to $6. Even better deals were available by using your credit card to buy StarROMs credits in bulk. Once you bought games, you were allowed to keep them. There were no restrictions due to digital-rights management, something thing that came as a new thing to itunes Music just last year. But StarROMs is no more and it had probably to close the doors also because the company seemed to be not able to close enough deals with the majority of digital right owners for Arcade games.
Now this is bringing us back to Apple: The most difficult aspect of Apples itunes business is probably not the software and the hardware itself: it is to get the Publishers and Studios to sign up so that Apple can sell the Music and Movies on itunes. As Apple has proven to be able to overcome the complex issues of copyright management for Music and Movies and as Apple in the context of the iphone also expressed just recently their interest in the market of digital games it seems to be only rational to ask:
Apple, could you please offer on itunes besides Music and Movies also Arcade game ROMs and create also for this type of digital good a win-win situation for consumers and digital right owners?
While it is certainly entertaining to look at Apple as the holly grail for any digital consumer need that so far is not properly addressed, it can also get boring to wait and wait for Apple to deliver on those hopes and wishes.
Tutorial: How to buy and play Rayforce on OSX?
While you are waiting you could also follow our guide of how to buy and play the famous Arcade game Rayforce on Apples Macintosh OSX. Not only you will hopefully enjoy this game after you have gone through all required steps (and there are several) but probably you will also understand much better why we really hope that Apple would make this whole Arcade gaming experience for all of us a lot easier.
First of all please read this legal disclaimer: We are describing to you below of where to buy the ROM for Rayforce (it is included on a Windows game CD that you can buy from Amazon) and how to make it run in OSX. But as strange as it may sounds to some of you it depends largely on the country that you are living in, if it is legal to use the ROM in the way as we are describing it. We are no lawyers, we can not tell you if you are allowed and we can not take any responsibility for whatever you are going to do with our technology/feasibility demonstration.
Having said that: Those nagging legal questions -especially from a global perspective- are already a first and very good reason for everyone interested in great games to ask Apple to step into this market immediately.
Please also note: We tried this procedure several times on different machines and it worked every time. But because things can always go wrong there is no warranty that this method will work for you too. Good Luck!
Necessary preparation steps:
1) Go and buy “Taito Legends 2″ for Windows (for example here from Amazon).
You are right, we are going to show you how to play Rayforce on OSX, but because there is no OSX version of “Taito Legends 2″ available you have to buy the Windows version.
And yes, you are also right that Rayforce is not even mentioned in the product description of Amazon for “Taito Legends 2″, but just trust us (or better you double check this Wikipedia entry and this discussion in one of the greatest shmups forums).
And yes again, we agree with you, this is all very strange: To play on Apple´s OSX one of the best Arcade games available you have to buy a Windows CD where the publisher does not even tell you that the game you are interested in is included on the CD.
We did mention before that the market place for Arcade games and Emulation is ready for an overhaul, right?
2) Download the shareware program FileJuicer for OSX from Echo One. You will need this to extract the ROM of Rayforce from the “Taito Legends 2″ CD. Please buy FileJuicer if you find it after your testing period to be useful.
3) Dowload the freeware OSX MAME game Emulation software and put it into your Applications folder. Create in your Documents folder a new Folder called ROMs. Start OSX MAME, goto preferences and select as ROM folder the one that you just created.
What to do next?
As already mentioned, “Taito Legends 2″ will not work on your Macintosh and OSX, it works only on Windows. But the CD contains the Arcade games in a format that the freeware OSX MAME Emulator can make use of them. To play “Rayforce” you have to:
1) Extract the Rayforce ROM file from the Taito CD and put it into your OSX MAME Roms folder
- Put the Windows CD of “Taito Legends 2″ into your Macintosh CD/DVD drive.
- Start FileJuicer.
- Drag the file “data2.cab” from the “Taito Legends 2″ CD onto the FileJucer Window as show in the screenshot below:
After some minutes a window should open that will show the content of the Data2.cab file, see screen shot below:
Copy the folder “gunlock” ( “Rayforce” is named in some regions of the world “Gunlock“) and its content to your MAME ROMs folder (that you setup earlier).
Side remark: Our testing happened with a European version of the “Taito Legends 2″ CD. According to the experts the US edition of “Taito Legends 2″ is exactly the same:
“I get the impression that the US PC version IS the EU version. Even though they aren’t advertised on the box, Rayforce, Pop ‘n Pop, Cadash, and Bubble Symphony are all present. All ROMs are the parent versions and play as the world version when played using the included shell (aside from Rayforce, which uses a Gunlock ROM, but uses a cheat to play as Rayforce. Also, Puzzle Bobble 2 is the Puzzle Bobble 2 version and completely intact). The US PC version has “Xplosive” on the splash and install screens and uses the exact same version of Star Force the European PC version uses. “
Source here.
If this would turn out to be not true we would have to feel sorry for you US guys. It would be great if someone from our US readers could confirm that the steps described here work also together with the US version of the “Taito Legends 2″ CD. Right now we are confident that it does.
2) Rename some files in the “gunlock” folder so that OSX MAME 0.122 will run it
You will have to rename manually the following files in the extracted “gunlock” folder so that OSX MAME will run Rayforce:
- Rename “D66-18.ROM” to “d66-18.24″
- Rename “D66-19.ROM” to “d66-19.26″
- Rename “D66-21.ROM” to “d66-21.37″
- Rename “D66-24.ROM” to “d66-24.35″
Your gunlock folder inside your OSX MAME Roms folder should now look like this:
We are not sure why this is required and if this maybe will change with a never version of OSX MAME. But for OSX MAME 0.122 this renaming was a requirement (if there is another or easier method please let us know! Thank you).
3) If everything went OK, start to play Rayforce with OSX MAME
Start OSX Mame, select Gunlock (aka Rayforce), say OK, and play.
Some simple tips for MAME beginners:
- Double click on the entry “Gunlock”, maybe you have to type “OK”
- Insert coins works by pressing “5″
- Start a game by pressing “1″
- Press “Tab” and select “Input” to change key assignments (this will also allow the configuration of gamepads and more)
Happy gaming!
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März 30th, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Identified Issues, Recommended Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 3rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
If you had zipped the roms then renaming them would not be necessary since they will be loaded by crc.