Arcade Hardware Coding Heroes!

[Nes4life]

Supply names of those you want to highlight as Arcade Hardware & Coding Heroes! Even if they've been mentioned before please feel free to encourage them again.

• Hurray Banana - countless things inc. pwned Pac-man hardware
• cmonkey - countless things inc. Chuckie Egg 2 on L System
• Baggers69 - for being a coding hero (congrats on the Guinness World Record)
• minwah - 1942 music swap
• edwoodjnr - Atari Food Fight free play
• philmurr - Galaxian improved free play
• PaulSwan, Judder, Dave2084 for their Arduino In-Circuit Tester efforts
• guddler - Vectrex homebrew in C, Asteroids hacking and Arduino ICT contribution
• Macro - coding guru amongst other things
• Porchy - where do I begin?!
• ColinD - countless things inc. SLAGS, Slapstick
• SilverFox - for being a supreme pcb maker and tinkerer
• dj_yt - reverse engineering OutRun
• eddcross - a reverse engineering machine
• Battlezone - slapstick work

Keep your lists coming!

Nes4life2016-04-13 11:37:16

 

[Equites]

You need to include the mighty macro (Mike)

 

[cmonkey]

I certainly wouldn't class myself as any kind of hero.

There are a few people who I definitely would class as heroes though and that's every single person (both past and present) who has worked on the MAME effort, from it's founder, Nicola Salmoria, right the way up to every member of the present day MAMEdev team. Not only are they constantly maintaining and enhancing a truly incredible emulator but, much more importantly than that, they're preserving a vital piece of our computing/arcade gaming history. They are the true heroes IMHO, and always will be in my eyes. Without them I doubt this section of the forum would even exist as it would be an order of magnitude more difficult to develop/test/debug without the MAME debugger. So a huge thank you from me goes out to every single person who has provided even the tiniest little bit of knowledge to make the best emulator in the world even better as time passes.

The other hero in my eyes is dj_yt for his amazingly tireless work on reverse engineering Out Run, re-engineering the game engine in C++ and open sourcing the entire effort. That's dedication beyond what most people can comprehend.

Also Sokurah deserves hero status in my eyes as he's doing some great games on L System at the moment and he gave me the confidence to believe in myself that I could also create a game on that platform.

An honorary mention should also go out to Nes4life for the excellent work he's doing on Vectrex (vecpong and Dance Dance Vec).

 

[silverfox0786]

cmjones01 is another

and

eddcross for Capcom reverse engineering
silverfox07862016-04-12 13:38:30

 

[Alpha1]

Battlezone and ColinD for slapstick work!

ColinD for slag work!

 

[cmonkey]

Not so much coding heroes but still arcade heroes in every sense of the word, in my eyes :-

porchy - PAL dumper extraordinaire and maintainer of the largest PAL and decrypted Sega rom dump repository on the net
Charles McDonald (although he's really covered under the whole MAMEdev umbrella)

MikeJ @ fpgaarcade for his stellar reverse engineering work on customs

ColinD for his SLAGS/Slapstick/etc work

 

[Hurray Banana]

You definitely need to add neil (Mitchell Gant) to the list epic work on vector hardware.

Honoured to be on the list but I consider myself personally to be a bit of bullsh*tter compared to everyone else on this list

 

[silverfox0786]

i think rather than just CODING

you should add arcade hardware heros as well to the list

at the end of the day its just not people that make an impact via code but also the impact that people make with new hardware improved hardware conversion hardware like colind and philmur and new hardware to make arcade gaming easier

 

[pobtastic]

Should add Ivan Mackintosh to the list as well, his early work on Neo Geo hardware was groundbreaking. On googling him I see that he's now moved over to making games for the Neo geo pocket!

 

[Equites]

Also the legend Paul Swan.

 

[Nes4life]

My list is not definitive by any means! Keep your lists coming.
Sarj you're one of the hardware heroes mate

 

[dj_yt]

Dave Spicer for coding the first arcade hardware emulator pre MAME.

Thierry lescot and nao for the original System 16 emulator and emulating OutRun pre MAME on pretty slow DOS based machines.

Hardcore reverse engineering is a MASSIVE time sink which is why you see so many talented people fade away over the years as life gets in the way!

 

[Alpha1]

Damn yeah deffo Dave Spicer for SPARCADE!! And the Firefox ld replacement!

 

[Arch]

Jochen Hippel for churning out all those high score saving kits. Most of them add freeplay options and other neat features.

 

[Hurray Banana]

Jochen Hippel for churning out all those high score saving kits. Most of them add freeplay options and other neat features.

+1

 

[Alpha1]

Porchy!

 

[muddymusic]

Porchy is the man! He's helped me out more times than I can count with all kinds of things.

 

[Nes4life]

Although not a creator of new hardware / code; special mentions for Gunblade, RGP and Virtvic for helping me out with repairs. Vic is also a hardware hero for all the joysticks and metal work he's done.

 

[silverfox0786]

well if we going into anyone we can think of thats impacted arcades then

JROK - JROK Boards
Jeff Kurtz - High Score and DKII
Clay Cowgill - Many things (Arcade SD and multi Jamma Boards, Asteroids 6 bullets)
Matt Osborne - Konami and other high score code, PAC-MAN 96 in 1
Souza - PAC-MAN High Score
Braze for his Braze Stuff

im sure i can think of many more
silverfox07862016-04-13 13:31:58

 

[porchy]

Charles MacDonald would have to be my hero. Super nice guy to talk with, puts up with all my stupid questions, has played major parts in a lot of things including CPS2 reversing, PAL dumping and extracting the key information from Sega encrypted CPUs.
Also the writer of many a fine emulator.