Mortal Kombat 4 Arcade Emulation Progress (MAME)

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Mortal Kombat 4 Arcade Emulation Progress (MAME)

Post by Gambid »

MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) has been supporting all Mortal Kombat arcade games for years with a perfect quality of the emulation that surpasses even some of the official re-releases of the classic games. That is if you don't count the emulation of Mortal Kombat 4. After the game was initially added to the list of supported game, there has been very little progress and the emulation has been suffering from graphical glitches, sound and speed problems.

There has been however some progress lately, mainly in the emulation of transparent sprites. Previously existing problems in this area have now mostly been fixed. Take a look:
Mortal Kombat 4 Emulation With Transparency Mortal Kombat 4 Emulation Without Transparency
Sadly the emulation of Mortal Kombat 4 is the one most interesting for the community as there is no arcade perfect home version of Mortal Kombat 4 and there are currently no plans for one.

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Re: Mortal Kombat 4 Arcade Emulation Progress (MAME)

Post by Roy Arkon »

I had a thought in the past that NRS should release a pack of a couple of classic games from the MK4-MKA, like they did with MKAK. I think they should releaase MK4 (vanilla, since that game was the final one to hit the arcades) and MKDA and call it Mortal Kombat: 3D Kollection or something, and of course release it to PS4, XB1 and PC. That way you will have a perfect port, or at least a close-to-perfect port of MK4, plus another game. Of course WB will probably have to get another studio to this, just make sure that it is a studio who can do a good job, not like Ocean who screwed with MKAK, although that Ocean thankfully fixed MKAK (I think they were the ones who fixed, correct me if I'm wrong).

On the same token, maybe they should do both that and re-release MKAK for PS4 and XB1 as well, that will be totally awesome. I will buy them all :D

As for MAME, back when I used to download stuff I did tried MAME and I tried to play Soul Calibur 1 on it, no matter how hard I tried the game didn't work. I guess that it is very diffcult to play 3D games with MAME, if it is possible to begin with.
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Re: Mortal Kombat 4 Arcade Emulation Progress (MAME)

Post by Gambid »

It is possible. The problem with 3D games is that they ran on a completely custom hardware. For Mortal Kombat 4 that is the ZEUS hardware developed by Midway themselves for the game. This kind of hardware remains completely undocumented for the public.

The only way to implement an emulation layer for it is to reverse engineer the game. With 3D games the complexity of the logic is much higher, thus the emulation problems.
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Re: Mortal Kombat 4 Arcade Emulation Progress (MAME)

Post by Roy Arkon »

I see, it does seems very hard.

I still hope that NRS and WB will release an MK: 3DK-like pack in the future, that way everyone will get the arcade-perfect port (or at least a very close one to, hopefully) of MK4 vanilla. That would be cool.
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