For those lucky members here that own an Oculus Rift or Vive, you owe it to yourself to bite the bullet and spend the $20 for this experience. Read through the forums and find the few ready to go arcade rooms for download and step into the time machine. The default program comes with an arcade with 3 rooms and lots of cool extras like a bowling alley and air hockey. The arcade cabinets are generic. Once you transfer in the artwork and roms, the cabinets come to life with any game you choose and the experience is wonderful. Your hands do not currently grab the joystick but the joystick does move in sync with your hand held device and it makes mechanical noises. You really feel like you are standing in front of an arcade cabinet and you can lean over and put your nose on that old crt monitor. There is a boom box with cassettes lying around to give you some music. A nintendo64 sits in one room with cartridges. Pop them in and watch the Television turn on. Start playing!
Really all its missing is people. Multiplayer is possible but I don't know anyone with an Oculus yet.
As far as I know, this is it for VR arcade emulation.
I own a Vive, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of paying a company $20/20EUR for what amounts to an emulator frontend - something which would be inherently worthless without the multitude of emulators and the people who contribute to them for free - when the people who make that frontend keep 100% of their revenues to themselves, and do not have any kind of revenue-sharing arrangement with emulator teams.
Quite frankly, the fact that you can download emulators within the emulator itself without agreeing to any possible emulator-specific EULAs or licensing agrements leaves an extremely bad taste in my mouth, especially when considering the fact that many emulators have inherent restrictions on being integrated into commercial products due to using GPL code. The NRA:N team have attempted an end run around the legalities surrounding this, by simply having the NRA:N download the relevant RetroArch cores at run time. It's technically legal in the same sense that in the USA, running up to someone in the street and shouting loudly in their face about how they're going to die is technically legal: it's legal, but it's still fucking obnoxious and you'd be a shitty person for doing so.
The fact is, there have been free 3D arcade frontends before, and there undoubtedly will be again. There's nothing stopping someone from writing a AAA-quality engine to interface with bgfx, other than time, so progress will eventually march forward.
You have a point and I agree with what you have to say. The writer of NRA:n should be contributing a portion of the revenue to the emulation community. I don't know him personally but I will compel him to do the right thing. I am guessing that the cores are how they are so as to make the installation process easier? The cores are not downloaded at run time. They have to be found and installed as do the roms and the art. You are correct that the cores use to be installed at run time as needed. Likely the steam store didn't like that. I assume that NRA:n is an offshoot of Retroarcade or Retroarch that is on android or Kodi devices? The installation process is similar along with the cores being found elsewhere. Really any program like this amounts to a front-end to the game classics. Midway Arcade Classics, Nintendo's greatest hits, even Pinball arcade to a lesser extent. In those cases the producer owns the rights. These titles I have purchased as well both for enjoyment on my console and also to help keep the interest in classics alive. I do hope that some will take a look at what has been accomplished here and build on it. It is an excellent first attempt and really shows what is possible in furthering the emulation experience. Building on this would be things like putting the sketchup models of cabinets to work, an arcade builder where we could recreate the arcade itself, games like Aztarac would be possible. Maybe Space Invaders can actually be 3D. Revenge from Mars might now be possible. Imagine stepping inside an Enviromental discs of Tron. SubRoc 3D could actually be in 3D. So many possibilities.
> I assume that NRA:n is an offshoot of Retroarcade or Retroarch that is on android or > Kodi devices? The installation process is similar along with the cores being found > elsewhere.
It's literally Retroarch glued to Unity3D, as I understand it. Pretty much the only reason we don't have something similar or better in MAME is our inability to clone MG.
Oh, wait a sec.. Got it. Man I just totally misunderstood that sentence. I'll keep an eye out for a cloning hammock.
Moogly Guy, tell you what. As appreciation for all the hard work you've put in over the years for which I have benefited from, I would like to gift you NRA:N on steam.
If trying that way would be acceptable then we both benefit. You get to try out the app and perhaps we can check it out together as it is rather lonely in there.
Someone should mod a bishop of battle to chase you out of the arcade!
> Moogly Guy, tell you what. As appreciation for all the hard work you've put in over > the years for which I have benefited from, I would like to gift you NRA:N on steam. > > If trying that way would be acceptable then we both benefit. You get to try out the > app and perhaps we can check it out together as it is rather lonely in there.
Feel free to add me on Steam, but please PM me here with your username, as I've had a lot of people friend-requesting me lately. Here's my user page: http://steamcommunity.com/id/mooglyguy
I actually bought NRA:N once, but only to check the EULA and see what exactly it was that they were doing. Afterward, I requested a refund as I had not actually started it up.
So, I suppose I'd be willing to take it for a spin if someone gifted me a copy. But I will say that I'm going into it with a fairly dim view of it and the people who made it. People made and released, for free, a 3D emulator frontend practically a decade ago, possibly even further. To paraphrase Ghostbusters, the NRA:N developers, however, seem to view digital preservation as some sort of dodge, or hustle. Their frontend is the worst kind of popular tripe, their attempts to blot out copyrighted game marquees in their Steam Store screenshots are sloppy, and their business model is highly questionable.
Wow, that looks pretty awesome. Pretty similar to 3D Arcade. I'm gonna have to check it out
3D Arcade won't work on Windows 10 with the latest NVIDIA graphic drivers. You'll keep getting a macromedia error. They're aware of the problem but don't show any current interest in fixing it
Edited by Envisaged0ne (04/05/17 01:46 AM)
Windows 11 64 bit OS
Intel Core i7-10700
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB
32GB DDR4 RAM
Ok, I just purchased it & got it running. However, when I'm trying to get pacman to run on it, it crashes the program. Maybe it doesn't like the rom set. Were you able to get pacman running on it?
Windows 11 64 bit OS
Intel Core i7-10700
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB
32GB DDR4 RAM
First off, Disclaimer: There are no links to roms in this message.
It is using an earlier version of Mame. .158 I think? So yes there may well be a problem with your rom set.
I'm going to have to look at my home PC for the links to the prebuilt arcades. I know you just want to jump in, but in the meantime Take a look at the links below from the Steam Forum.
The Open Arcade I believe will get you going right away but I can't say for sure as this is a new file since last weekend.
I haven't used the Arcade Manager yet but it sounds like everything it there for building your own space.
Ok, I got it all setup and working. Was able to get a hold of the correct pacman roms that it wanted, so I can play it now. I'm using the NRA-N pack 2. I like the program, but just wish there were more arcade models you could setup. Maybe someday they'll release more packs for it. The only other complaint I have about it, is that you can't go completely full screen when you're playing the games. You can zoom in, but I'd prefer to go full screen. Overall, though, I think it's a lot of fun & I'm glad I purchased it
Edited by Envisaged0ne (04/09/17 09:12 PM)
Windows 11 64 bit OS
Intel Core i7-10700
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB
32GB DDR4 RAM
If you are playing just on your screen you should definitely be able to go full screen. You have to make some resolution settings in the settings section.
As for more titles to choose from, give the manager a go. Its suppose to have like 500 titles ready and more are being developed on the discord IRC chat.
I still haven't used the Arcade Manager yet but it sounds like everything is there for building your own space.
Some more advise for when you start using Arcade Manager A new version is due out very soon. These issues are present in ver 2.0.2
Arcade Manager does in fact require the game roms in order to work correctly. If the game rom is not available, then the manager will assign a neogeo cabinet with asteroids intro vid playing. As soon as I provided the correct game roms arcade manager worked perfectly.
I also found that attempting to use a shortcut for the roms linking to another hard drive does not work. It has been mentioned that it is possible to trick NRA into using a different hard drive location.
Arcade Manager Filters only work for one filter at a time. Their is no way to set up hierarchy and whatever filter is listed first will be the only one that works. So for example if I want to see games between 1980-1985 and I want to see roms that I have, it will only show me roms I have. Filtering by year is ignored.
The 4 specials refer to vertical games such as PAC-MAN.
Time has been limited for me lately so I've only had time to work out the issues with arcade manger. Now I can finally set up the arcade as I want it and move on to building some cabinets.
I know now that games like space invaders are not using the background art layers so ill be looking into any way to trick it into using the art. Then on to cabinets that haven't been built yet.
I'd like to see NRA be able to use more than 4 Special Arcades & have the option for the games to go full screen when you play them. Not just using the zoom function
Edited by Envisaged0ne (04/17/17 03:26 PM)
Windows 11 64 bit OS
Intel Core i7-10700
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB
32GB DDR4 RAM
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