Virtual On, More of It!

After searching the web for, I would say so myself, a really long time, at last I have managed to find and at the same time get a few emulators working to play a few games, which during my little kid days, did not manage to play and just hear the vast amount of talk these games had at that time. One of the most popular games, arcade games, which was the in thing at that time if I remember correctly, was Virtual On. Other than those games, some of the popular ones that I remember my brother talk and find the time to play was Virtua Cop and also House of the Dead. All of these games were produced by SEGA, which at that time had their own console, something called the Dreamcast, and the Saturn which was before that.

(Above) The SEGA Virtual On arcade machines which every time I spotted, would make my eyes shine~

(Above) House of the Dead 2, which if my memory serves me right, was also extreme popular. The new House of the Dead 4 is currently quite popular, and I play it with much enjoyment!

(Above) Virtua Cop, I played this a lot since back then, it was one of the few games we owned.

Now, back to the main topic. Recently I had purchased Virtual On Marz, which was available only for the Sony Playstation2 (I never owned one...). But shortly after, my friend lent me his PS2 shortly after I finished an important exam. However, this game a disappointment to me. I didn't regret the purchase, just having the game was something I was okay with, but undeniably, the gameplay was leagues off that of the original Cyber Troopers Virtual On. 

(Above) If you watched the video, I must first apologize for the bad gameplay, but it was mainly to show some of the graphical difference as well as how fast the gameplay is. The game is as sluggy as it looks, and that in an arcade game is not really good...

Moving on, I enjoyed as much of the game as I could, but the lack of the extremely fast action the original had, left me wanting more. After reading much about the Dreamcast emulator, and I managed to get my hands on the game for the original Dreamcast (was not easy, not many sell them), I started trying to get the emulator to actually work. This took quite a while, as most of the websites for the developers of the emulators had stopped updating them. Obviously, its old hardware, and you can't hold on to them forever. And the compatibility of the emulators, was up to Windows XP, which made me doubt that I could get the emulator to actually run (compatibility mode was available, as you could select it to run on XP, but still, that stuff doesn't really work for emulators). However, to my surprise one day, I managed to get the right emulator, Chankast was not compatible and it was the other less known NullDC which actually got the game running. And here's a short video, much of it after I got used to the controls as well as managed to get it to run without much of a slow down :

As you can see the game runs much much much faster than the newer Marz (yes, it needed that many "much"s). However, as fun as Virtual On Oratorio Tangram is, and how nice some of the new virtuaroids for that game was, most of the original designs look better due to their simplicity in my opinion. Looking forward to playing more games on the original Dreamcast, which is funny with all the new consoles out and due to be released. That's pretty much it!




Farid