| This page was updated on: Sunday, January 02, 2000 |
HiVE
Larry Bank's "High Velocity Emulator"
HiVE is a Win32 program which emulates classic arcade games such as Galaga and PacMan. This project was formerly known as CAGE (Classic Arcade Game Emulator), but has been totally rewritten with support for more games and much more speed. The author, Larry Bank, has been away from the scene for quite a while, but he has returned with a vengeance.
Screen capture of Jr. Pac-Man & Dig Dug 2
emulated with HiVE
The main goals of HiVE are as follows:
Nearly every supported game runs at full speed on a 486/66MHz. So far, the only game which requires more horsepower is Gaplus, and Larry is planning to optimize it further.
HiVE is a Win32 program
designed to accurately emulate many classic arcade games. Emulation means that the
program is mimicking the microprocessors, video, sound and input controllers of classic
arcade games so that the original game code can be run. In other words, classic
games like Pacman can be run on your PC; these are not imitations, but the actual game
code with all of the original behaviors and sounds. Emulation also means that these
games can be preserved and enjoyed long after the last working arcade machine vanishes
from the face of the Earth.
Larry has tried to design HiVE to be flexible and have a feature set which should satisfy
most user needs. However, this is not a commercial product, but is distributed as
freeware. You may encounter problems running the program. If so, please report
them to Larry Bank at bitbank@pobox.com
Screen capture of Rally X emulated with HiVE
Here are some of the unique features of this outstanding emulator:
Save/Load Game
State
At any time during gameplay, you may save or load the state of the game. Press F1 to
load a game state; press F2 to save a game state. Each game supports up to 5 game
states with an optional description. For example: if you are playing a particularly
long game and you are interrupted, you can save the state and come back into the game at a
later time exactly where you left off. Another use of this feature is to avoid the
long initialization times. Many games (e.g. Galaga) have long initialization times
that can be avoided by saving the state of the game at the attract screen.
Performance Testing
HiVE is designed to run as efficiently as possible so that it can run on less capable
machines. To measure the performance running on a particular machine, from the
Settings Dialog check the box next to “Display Average FPS on Exit” and uncheck
the box next to “Throttle Frame Rate”. This will allow HiVE to run as fast
as it is capable on your machine. Start a game and let it run through several cycles
of attract screens and then press ESC to exit. A message box will display the
average frames per second achieved during game play.
Screen Capture
During game play if you would like to capture a bitmap image of what is on the display,
simply press the PrintScreen key on your keyboard and a file named CAPTURE.BMP will be
saved in the directory where HiVE is running.
Custom Keyboard Definitions
HIVE has default settings for the keys used in each game, but they can be overridden to
your own custom settings. Click on the toolbar icon for DEFINE KEYBOARD. To
define the keyboard for a specific game, first select the specific game you are interested
in from main window.
Go to the HiVE homepage
This emulator can be downloaded directly from it's
homepage.
NOTE: In order to run this emulator, you must have the emulator itself, and a copy of the ROM's from the original system. The emulator itself is Freeware. The ROM's are copyrighted by the programmer or the manufacturer. You are only legally entitled to do so if you own the actual game, or a PCB/ROM Cartridge from the game that you are emulating. If you decide to download ROM's to test out an emulator, you must delete the ROM's within 24 hours unless you own the equipment mentioned above.
ROM's may be found at many sites, including EMUCLASSICS.