Anybody tried NewRetroArcade?

[smsithlord]

What seems to be a newly formed UE4 design team named Digital Cybercherries released an AMAZING demo yesterday to their site: http://digitalcybercherries.com/

It's an extremely well done 1980's arcade environment with some built-in classic arcade games for you to play all within the VR environment. It is a very very well done VR experience with at least a few hours of entertainment packed into it if you can get into playing the retro games in VR.

Even if you just check it out for a second, it is worth it because DAMN it is immersive. They barely have any Twitter followers at all, so they are asking for help on spreading the word.

BTW, they say they don't have plans to keep working on this demo and it was just a learning experience for their team to get used to UE4 and the Oculus, but what a fun experience it is.

Everything in the arcade is hard-coded so it's not for customization, but because of that everything that it DOES have runs perfectly within the VR environment. The insanely high quality 3D models and art assets and the in-game gameplay are really inspiring for me because I'm working on a VR desktop. NewRetroArcade is a glimpse of what the future might hold for your actual Windows desktop! How exciting is that! But for now, it's just fun as hell to play, so check it out!

[SM_Sith_Lord]

I don't think NewRetroArcade is intended to be a real emulator frontend. It only has a Gameboy emulator library embedded in it, and as people have mentioned, you have to manually swap roms out. I think its meant more as an immersive nostalgia experience. After all, those are Gameboy versions of the games, not arcade versions.

"Falan" wrote:
actually lock them in that environment where they cant even play those awful games but have to watch other older people play them because they are too poor to feed the machines at the local arcade. That would be closer reality for me lol 🙂

LMAO yeah, I had the same experience. 🙂 Except I thought the games were freakin awesome because I could never afford to beat them, so I never knew what was gonna come next in the game. 😄

"freshflesh1" wrote:
To be fair, I would rather my 80s/90s retro experience to be totally separate from a 3D desktop environment

In general, I agree. I usually want to experience anything I play, like a retro game, a new game, or a movie, to be totally separate from a 3D desktop environment because these types of things already immerse you in their own environment. Showing these types of things on small in-game screens in an unrelated environment takes away from the experience.

I do play retro games often, but I have to admit I only played them on the in-game screens for a couple minutes. It might be the fact that it was on the in-game screens, but I just didn't get sucked into the game like I normally do when I play their full versions.

Even through NewRetroArcade isn't something I'll be using on a daily basis as a 3D desktop, it is an excellent VR nostalgia experience. It really feels like you're there. And making the games playable, even if they aren't arcade versions, added a lot to the immersion of walking around that room.

[RosevilleReaper]

If this is a Gameboy emulator why can I play flappy bird and why does doom look like the pc version of the game when I walk by it? Im pretty sure it never looked that good on the Gameboy if it was even ever on the Gameboy... Any way I cant play doom I can just see a little demo running on it and I can hear the sounds... Still haven't been able to get anything working 😕 and if I add a Gameboy rom what am I supposed to play the games in black and white??

[AnotherCrazyCan]

"FictionX" wrote:

"AnotherCrazyCanadian" wrote:
Runs really well, but 99% of the arcade cabinets are black. most of them have game volume playing, but no roms for me. Still, it says I can replace them, so I might try that. Other than that its really immersive. apparently one guy picked up the gameboy, and had to go under a light in the club to play it. And then it hit him; Talk about Nostalgia.

(Edit: I tried replacing some of the Rom files as a ZIP or the file itself, but nothing happened. Anyone know how to fix this?)

I struggled with this issue as well. For me, what fixed it was to move the demo out of my Download folder and to C:\<somefolder> . I think in my case it was because my user folder had a danish character in it (å) - which I guess a crazy Canadian wouldn't have (depending on how crazy he is, of course 😉 ) - but you still might want to try it out.

Sorry bud, nothing. Thanks for the info though, it could've helped.

[opamp]

Looks like all the rom zip files are empty for me.
Will try to download again...

[DRock]

Same boat for me. Rom zips show up in the content folder but they are empty. Tried disabling my firewall didn't help. I downloaded some GBA roms and put them in the appropriate zips but only KLAX worked and it showed up on every machine.

[Rashim]

I finally found gameboy bomberman rom that worked, but also on every machine.

Unfourtnatly i can't find the place to enter a url source.

I think the i need to edit the links to the roms in the .pak file. but i don't have the unreal sdk..

could anyone with access to the pak file condifm this?


curiously blog and news reporting on this app seem to have all roms working.
or maybe they haven't and just pretend they do, because theyre ashamed to admit they don't have them working.

[JasonAhart]

I got a perfect score in bowling. The trick is to use a basketball.

[SM_Sith_Lord]

In the readme it says ROMs are automatically downloaded from 3rd party sites. I heard that the sites that the original version used are down now. I *think* if you download the new new version of NewRetroArcade it has updated download URLs to get stuff working properly again.

[Rashim]

there is no new version.

and with the devs not working on it anymore, it up to us to get this experience working again.

therefore i asked on page 1 if womeone, who had it all working could share his version.

[Clockeye]

I'm hoping you guys eventually figured this out, but I thought I'd share what I did under similar circumstances. When I first downloaded and opened NRArcade, it worked perfectly. I had access to the music and games and whatnot, everything the package offered. Then my laptop died and I had to replace it. When I re-downloaded and opened it, no dice. The only things that worked were the games that came pre-loaded, like PONG and Asteroids. I checked the readme.txt, which said the ROMS could be replaced. All you have to do is put ZIPPED Gameboy and Gameboy Color ROMs in the Rom content folder, but replace their titles with the titles NRArcade uses.

So what I did was:

1.) Start New Retro Arcade at least one time. I only recommend this because when I tried adding ROMs without having started it before, I couldn't find a "Roms" folder. This lead me to believe that the folder is generated after the initial start-up. Which might not be true, I don't know.

2.) Go to your New Retro Arcade folder and find the config file (NewRetroArcade-1.0-2 > NewRetroArcade > Saved > Config > CleanSourceConfigs) Open the file and scroll all the way to the bottom. Here, you will find a list of titles. You will use this list to re-name your roms. So, for instance, if your Rom is titled "Legend_of_Zelda_Link's_AwakeningDX.zip" you must re-name it to Zelda.zip.

3.) Put zipped ROMS under (NewRetroArcade-1.0-2 > NewRetroArcade > Content > Roms). Re-title them according to your config document.

Boom bam. That's all it takes. Bear in mind that I still have no access to the radio, which makes the whole experience a little weirdly austere, and I haven't tried figuring out how to load my own tunes. The readme.txt says is MIGHT be possible, but just getting the ROMs to load was thrilling enough for me. Also, sometimes the Gameboys will try to load GBC titles. You'll find them sitting around, frozen, with a color title screen. These are totally unplayable. When that happens, go back and check the ROMs folder and delete the .zip.gearboy file associated with it. Again, I believe these files are generated when the game loads, but that might not be the case. Deleting these files should stop the Arcade from trying to load them on the Gameboy, but again, this is not something I've test extensively.

Hope this helped somebody somewhere.