Good Game Peace Out

I think it's time to talk a little about online arcades. I don't mean those cheesy flash "arcade" sites that are all over the internet, I mean playing MAME against other people online. We'll start with my personal favorite, GGPO.

GGPO (Good Game Peace Out) is pretty much only for fighting games, but it works really well for them. People from all over the world come to play and there is some serious talent around.

Getting GGPO to run isn't really hard, but it's not dead simple either. I'll try to cover some of the more common problems people have with it.

(The official instructions can be found here.)

Step 1 and 2 are pretty straightforward. Download and install Adobe AIR and the GGPO client.
Step 3 is a little more difficult. If you are behind a router you need to forward the following ports to your computer:
UDP ports 6000-6009 (inbound/outbound)
TCP port 7000 (outbound)

Port forwarding sounds harder than it actually is.
Here is a pretty simple guide.

Basically you just need to get into your router and tell it not to block connections to your computer from the GGPO server.

Step 4
Find the folder you installed GGPO to and create a new folder called ROMS. This is where you will put your MAME roms.

Step 5
Launch GGPO.exe and you will come to a login screen. Click on where it says create account and follow the instructions to recieve your username and password. Enter your info on the login screen and click Login.

(Here is where things may get weird.)
If everything is working well at this point, great! If not, you may have to do one more thing.
You may click Login and have nothing happen at all. If that is the case, you need to download this .zip file,
and make a new folder on your desktop. Name it whatever you want, but DON'T name it GGPO. Extract the contents of the zipped file you just downloaded directly into your new folder. Create a new ROMS folder and place your roms in it. Run GGPO.exe to launch GGPO.
Now it should be (hopefully) working for you.
If you still have problems, visit the forums.

After you are in, you need to configure your controller. As far as I can tell you can only do this while you are in a match. I'd suggest playing a friend first, or challenging yourself and then taking a look at all the options available.
5 is insert coin and 1 and 2 are player 1 & 2 start respectively.

It sounds difficult to get GGPO running, but it's well worth it. Once you get to beating up a total stranger while others are watching a lot of that arcade excitement will come back!
GGPO has other neat features, like being able to watch others play so you can just chill and watch if you don't feel like playing.
Lots of people regularly set up tournaments for different games on various forums and spectators can watch and record the matches.


Here is a list of games that are currently supported:
Breakers Revenge
Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara
Fatal Fury Special
Final Fight
Garou: Mark of the Wolves
Hyper Street Fighter 2
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Karnov's Revenge
King of Fighters 2000
King of Fighters 2002
King of Fighters 97
King of Fighters 98 (by far the most popular game, it has three rooms.)
Last Blade 2
Marvel Super Heroes
Marvel Super Heroes vs.Street Fighter
Marvel vs. Capcom
Metal Slug X- Super Vehicle-001
Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge
Samurai Shodown 2
Samurai Shodown IV
Samurai Shodown 5 Special
Street Fighter Alpha
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Street Fighter II Koryu
Street Fighter II: Championship Edition
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
Super Gem Fighter: Mini Mix
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
Vampire Savior
Windjammers
X-Men Children of the Atom
X-Men vs. Street Fighter

One last thing...GGPO seems to go down all the time, if it's not working for you then try again later or check the forums to see what the issue is.
I hope that was helpful for everyone, if you want to play sometime or need any help with it drop by the chat or our forums and we'll see what's up!
Peace out!




I made these vids of some people playing today while writing this post :)

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How to Convert MAME .inp Files to .avi Files

This is a question that comes up a lot, so I'm going to show you the method that works for me with Windows 7.
There are more ways to do this, and if anyone has a better method, I'd very much like to hear about it, please let us know in the comments :)
Just a quick overview: Some versions of MAME let you record the keystrokes of your game while you are playing, so you can watch it later or share it with other people who may want to watch, these are recorded in an .inp file. The only drawback is that in order to watch a replay, you must have MAME, it must be a compatible version, and you must have the ROM of the game you are trying to watch. This makes it hard to share your games with most people.

So what we're going to do is take the .inp file you have made and convert it to an .avi file for uploading to a video hosting service like Youtube, Veoh, etc.

Things you will need:
Xvid Codec
Grolwer Guncam 

These will both require installing.
Once you have Growler Guncam running there are some settings you will want to change.
First you need to set a Trigger key. in Setup\Trigger. Try to use a key that will not be pressed during the game you are recording, I use the backslash key \
The trigger key tells the software when to start recording and when to stop. If you are recording a MAME game, the recording automatically stops when you exit the game.

I had to tweak a few setting in order to get everything to work right. I'm just going to show you screen captures of some of my settings now. (Click these to make them bigger if you want.)

Capture Setup

 

Advanced Setup

Video Export Setup

With Growler and MAME both running, start your MAME replay and then hit the Trigger key you assigned earlier to start recording. When you are done recording, hit the Trigger key again or just press escape to leave the game and it will stop recording.
After you've made your movie, it will be saved in a .gcf file format, which will probably be a gigantic file.

Select your video by clicking it and then click Export Video as GIF, JPG, AVI.

At first you will only see a picture in the left frame, click the Append Selected Film arrow in the center and then when you're ready, click the as AVI button in the Export Destination Film.
Now you should have a nice little .avi video of your game. Unfortunately the quality of the video isn't going to look as good as watching in MAME, because of compression, and when you upload to a video hosting site it will be compressed yet again, so you may want to consider not using compression.
That's pretty much all there is to it, here are some videos I made with Growler. They don't look super good, but they get the point across.
(These are all me playing :)

Samurai Shodown III Level 8 One Credit Completion MAME



Samurai Shodown V Special Level 8 One Credit Completion MAME



Street Fighter Alpha 2 Expert Level High Score MAME



Samurai Shodown Level 8 High Score MAME





Good luck with your videos and don't forget to delete yor .gcf files after you're done with them, as they tend to take up lots of space!

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Musashi and Ganryu

******WARNING! MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE SPOILERS.******

So I just got finished reading Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa a few weeks ago. I wanted to read this book after I got heavily back into Samurai Shodown. After reading lots of articles about Samurai Shodown I found that a lot of the characters were based on characters from the book (and the characters from the book are based on real people.)
I won't go on and on about it, but I really loved the book btw.

So a few days ago I found an arcade game called "Ganryu".
I'm sure you'll remember from the book that Ganryu is the nickname of Sasaki Kojiro, Musashi's final enemy and rival.

In the book, the story ends after Musashi duels Ganryu and defeats him. It doesn't really make it clear what Musashi does after the fight.

Well apparently he fights ninja. Lot's of ninja. Oh and a bunch of demons too.

At the start you can select Musashi or Suzume.

Ok here' where thing's start to get weird.
Suzume is supposed to be Otsu's sister, except Otsu didn't have a sister, she had a brother, Jotaro.
Not only does she now have a sister, but her sister is an Iga Ninja. Who would've thought.

Ganryu is a pretty fun side-scroller.
 At the end of each of the five stages you have to fight a boss and argue with Kojiro (or a priest on level 2).

Yasha-hime

Kikunojo

Kojiro in his final Chaos form.

This goes on for way too long.

Uhh..Musashi already fought in the Battle of Sekigahara, when he was a kid.

What a long useless post., basically what I wanted to get at was I can't believe Yoshikawa left all of that out of the book! I never would have guessed that Kojiro became possessed by the power of Chaos, kidnapped a bunch of girls, including Otsu, then hired a bunch of ninjas to kill Musashi. Also, Otsu has an Iga Ninja sister who kicks ass! To top everything off, after Musashi defeats Kojiro yet again, he goes off and fights the Battle of Sekigahara ......AGAIN! Although maybe I should have guessed that.

 I can't help but wonder if that skirmish would have turned out differently with an adult master swordsman Musashi fighting in it this time.

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