Hello everyone, I'm Simone from Italy.
Dunno whether you guys remember the game named "Sensible World of Soccer" or not, to keep it brief, it's one of the best sportsgame to ever hit the shelves (meritocratic gameplay at its best), one of the biggest hits of the 16-bit era (at least in Europe) and it was also included in the "ten most important video games of all time" list by Stanford University researchers alongside classics such as Spacewar, Tetris, SimCity, Super Mario Bros, Civilization and Doom.
It is, by the way, a 2D game.
Several thousands of fans have been playing it on and offline for the past 15 years, Online competitions take place since circa 2002 and are mainly managed via the sensiblesoccer.de website. A "live" World Cup is held every year in August.
A special version of WinUAE with Kaillera client (which features custom database and netplay) makes it possible to play the Amiga version through the internet.
The emulator however is getting old (Vista and 7 got several compatibility issues with it) and its un-userfriendliness has been scaring away most of the newbies for quite some time now. Besides, the netcode is obsolete and doesn't do justice to the original gameplay (the game is as fast as modern 2D beat'em ups and require pixel-perfect accuracy and great timing) over long distances (anything beyond 100 ms of ping in P2P is basically unplayable).
a couple months back I asked Supercade creator damdai if he could've added Sensible World Of Soccer "96/"97 to Supercade titles lineup, that woulda fixed both the emu obsolescence and the sloppy netcode issues, turns out that he isn't able to do so because there's no Commodore Amiga (the system that used to run the SWOS version we're currently using online) drivers for Final Burn Alpha!
So here I am, asking if anybody in the team that develops FBA could write some Commodore Amiga or SWOS specific drivers for FBA to allow SWOS to run on modern online multiplayer platforms such as Supercade.
The sensiblesoccer.de website community is willing to pay whoever ends up working on this project for his help if necessary. There's still about a few hundreds of active users who play online competitions on daily basis and the community is comprised of thousands of members, although for exact numbers we'd have to talk this out with the sensiblesoccer.de members and admins as I'm just a member myself and I can only speak on my behalf.
The point is, we're all very passionate about the game and we just don't want to end up with a dead game (and community) because of technical issues so name a price and we'll do our best to raise up the money. Most of us spend hundreds of euros on yearly basis to play the most important European offline tournaments (like the World Cup, aka "SensiDays") and we'd be more than glad to pay something in exchange for an overall better online experience, whether it's on Supercade or on another client.
Anyhow, I apologize for the huge wall of text and I'll be impatiently looking for your replies. If you got questions, by all means, feel free to ask.
for reference, check out our website:
http://www.sensiblesoccer.de/This is the version of the game that we're currently using online (it ain't warez seeing as those who own the rights to the franchise, Codemasters, and the game main designer Jon Hare officially endorse our website and its activities and sponsor the annual offline World Cup):
http://sensiblesoccer.pl/Setup_ASWOS2.exeThe sensiblesoccer.de promo video (for gameplay videos just check the links in my signature):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7HWt9uENcA&feature=related