AusTralian made arcade machines, wiTh incredible aTTenTion To deTail
Old arcade and console games look their best when care and effort is taken to reproduce the original screen they were made on. All our arcade machines are configured to faithfully replicate the type of screen the game was intended to be displayed on.
For Nintendo this means our arcades have been tuned to replicate the green chunky LCD pixels of the Gameboy as well as the square-ish 8:7 pixel ratio used for the SNES.
For SEGA this means the MasterSystem and Megadrive is displayed using a pixel depth that matches your average 90’s TV.
For arcade machines it is even more complex. The various different arcade hardware manufacturers such as SNK-NEOGEO, CAPCOM and MIDWAY all used monitors for their games that had differing refresh rates. This adds a whole new dimension of complexity when reproducing the old look and feel, however all our arcades have been tuned to change the way the monitor works to match the game you have selected to play.
Game developers of the past would take advantage of some specific screen characteristics to create certain effects in their games.
The easiest example of this is with NEO-GEO games, where the hardware was not able to do semi-transparent colours on the screen. So instead the game developers would rapidly flick some images on and off frame-by-frame to create the illusion of a shadow or a reflection.
This was possible because the screen used on the NEO-GEO arcade machines had a lot of delay when it was refreshing colours, so by flicking images on-and-off so rapidly it would create the illusion of a shadow or reflection.
If NEO-GEO games are played on modern screens without the required tuning, they can look awful with large black shadows or seizure inducing image flicking… making the whole thing a bad gaming experience.
We are always tuning and refining the software and the screens on our arcade machines to get as close to the original gaming experience as possible. This is something that really sets us out from the other arcade producers out there.
Whenever it becomes possible to re-create the core behaviors of old hardware, we jump right on into the code and update everything. Unlike other arcade producers that use “off the shelf” software. Our emulators and encoders are optimised and maintained by us, not some third party.