Long Lost Arcade Version Of Quake Is Now Playable On PC
The long lost arcade version of Quake is now playable on PC thanks to GitHub user mills5.
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The 90s were a wild time for video games. With various technological barriers being broken on a yearly basis, gamers were never quite sure what to expect next. That follows with your current subject of the day: Quake. id Software revolutionized PC gaming and first-person shooters with both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but Quake was in a league of its own. It pioneered 3D tech that is still in use to this day, but it required something of a hefty PC to run properly.
That’s what makes the existence of Quake Arcade Tournament Edition such a curio. For a game with then heavy system requirements to have an arcade port is just wild. How, exactly, does one play a first-person game with an arcade stick? Well, by installing a trackball for aiming, of course. It’s such a weird product that has been chronicled by this lovely blog post.
Anyway, the existence of this arcade version isn’t news. People have known about it and even dumped the ROM years ago. The problem was that MAME, a rather popular arcade emulator, was never able to run it. Quake Arcade Tournament Edition employed a unique form of copy protection that required a physical dongle to be plugged into the machine. Hackers haven’t been able to reverse engineer this…until now!
GitHub user mills5 went through the painstaking task of removing this cabinet’s specific copy protection and has made Arcade Tournament Edition playable on PC. It still requires the use of MAME and some technical know-how of how to launch ROMs, but those willing to put in the effort can experience this strange piece of Quake history. It may not be complete without a trackball and sticky buttons, but you could always install your own arcade stick.
You can find the download for this decrypted ROM over on GitHub. In the above video, you’ll see that the most notable changes happen to be the removal of some enemies and a message displaying “Instaprize.” I imagine this was how arcade establishments utilized Quake to dole out prizes and I’m kind of pissed since I would have killed at this game back in the day.
Source: GitHub, PC Gamer
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/quake-arcade-playable-rom/