arcade question

[Dylan]

So the classic "X-Men:Arcade" from '92 was released
for the xbox ps2 and a few phones running particular platforms and i
was just curious, do arcade games run on regular software-scripted
game engines? could i learn c++ and start fooling around with arcade
games maybe altering characters, making new ones that kind of thing,
i
looked at the wiki page(yay for cliche's!) and on game pages there is
normally game engine info listed in the side box at the top but all
there was were the arcade system that the game itself runs on, surely
there is scripting behind all these games if there is emulators/phone
platforms/xbox&ps3 correct?

[Mark McDougall]

On 5/06/2011 3:39 PM, Dylan wrote:

> So the classic "X-Men:Arcade" from '92 was released
> for the xbox ps2 and a few phones running particular platforms and i
> was just curious, do arcade games run on regular software-scripted
> game engines? could i learn c++ and start fooling around with arcade
> games maybe altering characters, making new ones that kind of thing,

No offence intended, but this is so far from the mark in several different
ways I don't know where to start.

But to answer your specific questions: almost certainly any game released
before '92 was written in hand-crafted assembler. I'm not sure what a
'software-scripted game engine' is supposed to be (as opposed to what - a
non-software game engine???), but there would be very little in common
between various arcade titles (back then) except perhaps for sequels, which
may have been based off earlier (assembler) source code.

Regardless, learning C++ would have nothing to do with 'fooling around with
arcade games maybe altering characters'. The required skill set is
completely different, involving reverse-engineering assembler, decoding
graphics formats, and writing tools for 'ROM hacking'. There is actually a
scene for this, primarily involving translations of Japanese RPGs to English.

Finally, releasing of X-Men:Arcade on modern hardware would either be done
by emulation, or porting of the original source code to a higher-level
language, like C/C++ etc.

Regards,

--
| Mark McDougall | "Electrical Engineers do it
| <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> | with less resistance!"