Just a fast very honourable mention of the large efforts that the MAME community undertook in order to preserve the original Game & Watch LCD handheld games from the 80ies.
As of MAME 0.223 every Game & Watch handheld is supported in MAME. While previous emulations, such as the Retroarch Core, were not based on the original dumped roms, I understand that MAME versions actually preserve the data of the old handhelds. Huge kudos for this, this was the time of sitting together and sharing the handheld from one friend to another. I particularly liked Mickey Mouse (screenshot below). This is very nice to look back.
However, if you only have the roms availabe, there is no way to play them properly. You also need the artwork.
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| Mickey Mouse without Artwork |
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| And here it is, with artwork included! |
Some hints here for conveniently getting it running:
- The good news: Game & Watch roms are no Software List Roms. All roms have the format gnw_xxxx.zip, so you can conveniently identify them. The MAME UI also finds the games if you search for 'Game & Watch'.
- There are two main repositories for Game & Watch Artwork: here at Progetto and here on a Google Drive. I personally rely on the Google Drive respository, it contains absolutely outstanding artwork. As always, place this zip files in the artwork repository.
Nothing more required. If the artwork does not appear when launching a Game & Watch title, you did something wrong.
Two further eye candies, all headsets are really worth a look:
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| click to enlarge |
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| no idea that there were even tabletops! |
Hi, I'm trying to play Game&Watch in Retroarch using MAME core, but performance is poor: < 40fps, while it's quite powerful MBP with apple silicon M Pro CPU (or even on legacy Apple iPhones etc!). The same games run perfect in standalone MAME, but it lacks HiDPI support and many feature Retroarch has, so I'm trying to figure out how to solve the issue. Have you tried Retroarch for Game&Watch emulation?
ReplyDeleteHi, such a good idea to run G&W games in RetroArch MAME current, never tried before. I tried two games briefly, and they ran far too fast! I then realized that I had bad core options, since I had Emulation Hacks enabled, so that the game ran at 200%. With this corrected to 100%, everything runs perfectly here.
DeleteThis is a great inspiration to actually move over all the overlays for G&W games to RetroArch, because without them, playing doesn't make any sense. Another task for my koko-aio shader repo.