Topic: Commodore Amiga drivers - help out the SWOS community

[Retrieving]

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 Besides, the netcode is obsolete and doesn't do justice to the original gameplay (the game is as fast as modern 2D beat'em ups and require pixel-perfect accuracy and great timing) over long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.exe

The sensiblesoccer.de promo video (for gameplay videos just check the links in my signature):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7HWt9uENcA&feature=related

[Barry Harris]

I am aware of Sensible Soccer and wasted many hours on it in my youth. Sadly though an Amiga driver is unlikely because;

- Supercade is violating our license so you won't get any support here for it
- An Amiga driver would be a very complex thing to add to FBA for numerous reasons
- Money has also been offered for development of such a driver and like the Mortal Kombat experience showed we are not in the game for the purpose of making money

[Retrieving]

So, let me get this straight, AFAIK both GGPO and 2DF/Supercade are violating your license (is it because they won't release the source code?) so you guys would rather see great games literally drop dead and being totally forgotten by the new generation of players than having them on there?

I don't mean to be disrespectful but the point is, there's no alternative to GGPO and Supercade as of now, is there (I'm not very knowledgeable in the field so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), so how are we supposed to play our favourite games online (which is 100 times as fun as playing single player for sportsgames and the likes)? What is exactly your purpose then if preserving and promoting timeless classics such as SWOS doesn't seem to be on your priorities list?

Just wondering.

Look, @sensiblesoccer.de (which is a 100% free website managed by fans) we've been putting insane amounts of time and efforts into keeping the once humongous SWOS community alive (I've just spent a week updating J.League teams for a huge 2010 rosters update, for instance and there's people spending their own spare time and money to organize plenty of off and online tournaments as we speak), it really is a masterpiece which was 10 years ahead of its time and whose gameplay remains unparalleled (it puts alleged "next-gen" footie games like Pro Evo and FIFA to shame), the problem is that after 8 years or so we're to the point that we either get some help or we're screwed because Kaillera's online is unstable (and wireless connections proliferation made it worse) and the OS compatibility issues and un-user-friendliness of the emu makes it really hard for people to get into the game.

If you need technical support there's a few people in our community who are programmers and know how/got the hardware to interface the Amiga with modern PC's.

I'd go as far as sending you my (perfectly working) Commodore Amiga 1200 to work on it if needed be.

[Haze]

So, let me get this straight, AFAIK both GGPO and 2DF/Supercade are violating your license (is it because they won't release the source code?) so you guys would rather see great games literally drop dead and being totally forgotten by the new generation of players than having them on there?

You're being over-dramatic.

WinUAE is one of the VERY best emulators out there.  SWOS isn't just going to drop off the face of the earth.

Those guys clearly violate the license, and the people making those builds should be lined up and shot.  Coming begging to the original team of developers to support them when they can't even be bothered to follow a few simple rules is just plain ridiculous and highly disrespectful.  You expect a team of developers to put a HUGE amount of work into developing something specifically for you and at the same time, expect them to allow you to rip them off, and not bother following the most simple of licensing rules?  Who do you think you are?  Your request is laughable at best.

If you guys can't be bothered to play by the rules, then please, go and crawl back under the rock from which you came.

The entire reason your old beloved netplay builds are dying is the very fact that you supported people who couldn't be bothered to share properly with the community but would rather lock you in to their own systems, just as these illegal FBA builds attempt to do.

[Retrieving]

We don't support 2DF/Starcade and GGPO in any way, shape or form so take your hatred to their creators, please. It's just that, let's face the truth, there's no alternatives. So many games run on those platforms and several thousands of people play them day-in, day-out, so why can't SWOS be one of them?

Alternatively, can you point us to any other easy to use and effective netplay middleware that work with nFBA and doesn't violate your "license"?

[Haze]

We don't support 2DF/Starcade and GGPO in any way, shape or form so take your hatred to their creators, it's just that there's no alternatives. So many games run on those platforms and several thousands of people play them day-in, day-out, so why can't SWOS be one of them?

Can you point us to any other easy to use and effective netplay middleware that work with nFBA?

Maybe that's what you should be looking for somebody to develop instead?

A modern effective, OPEN Netplay solution for WinUAE.  It makes more sense, but developers really don't like demands being made of them.

There might not be any alternative for you right now, but if you think that anybody involved in a project like FBA (or MAME) is going to go out of their way to add something for the sole reason of causing MORE people to use the illegal builds you're wrong.  A hard line has to be taken against them.

You do realise how complex to emulate (properly) the Amiga is right?  Even the MAME/MESS Amiga drivers are pretty atrocious.  UAE has been around since 1996, 15 years.  In the time it's taken them to emulate a single family of computers the likes of MAME have emulated 3000+ arcade systems.

As for your argument.  Thousands of people contribute to open projects each year, making their code freely available, following the rules and giving back to the community, day-in, day-out.  Why can't the guy providing the netplay builds be one of them?  They are the problem.

[Retrieving]

As for your argument.  Thousands of people contribute to open projects each year, making their code freely available, following the rules and giving back to the community, day-in, day-out.  Why can't the guy providing the netplay builds be one of them?  They are the problem.

I thoroughly agree, I wonder if there's a way to make them change their mind? Why won't they release the source code anyway...I don't get it.

EDIT: just out of curiosity, are you guys talking about the modded FBA code alone or do you mean the whole thing, netcodes included?

[Haze]

I thoroughly agree, I wonder if there's a way to make them change their mind? Why won't they release the source code anyway...I don't get it.

EDIT: just out of curiosity, are you guys talking about the modded FBA code alone or do you mean the whole thing, netcodes included?

The MAME code at least requires there to be no linking (dynamic or static) against closed (non-OS) libs, so in the case of MAME everything has to be open.  This prevents the project from being hijacked by people linking in closed platform-locked code.  ClientServerMAME/MESS ( http://10ghost.blogspot.com/ ) seems to be the only one currently even remotely interested in playing by the rules but sadly due to the number that simply don't bother he'll probably struggled to get a foothold again showing why the other illegal, closed clients only do harm.

Amiga emulation is a mess for similar reasons, the people doing the 'secure' disc dumps are keeping information private, and requiring you to use their DLLs, which isn't good for anybody and again just holds back projects like MESS which aim to be open.  Their DLLs can't be used without MESS being tied to a single platform, with non-debuggable code which wouldn't be good for anybody which is why the license disallows it.  It's not futureproof, or safe in an archival sense at all which is bad.  Thankfully(?) the MESS Amiga emulation isn't good enough in general for people to start making hacked MESS builds with those DLLs.

Hopefully this gives you some insight into why license violators are seriously looked down upon.

the FBA guys will have to clarify the FBA situation with you.

[Retrieving]

They have agreed to release their sources to their fba build. We did not ask them to release the sources to their closed-source dlls.

Caught this in the MK thread...does it mean that GGPO isn't an "unlawful build" anymore? I'm confused.

Cause you know GGPO would be just fine.

[manliodp]

Hi Simone,
the problem is the fact that both GGPO and Supercade (FBA license violator) are based on FBA that's currently not sporting any Amiga driver.
They're currently offering the best online experiences for the games they support but their authors are only developing the middleware between the FBA clients and have no clue how to code a proper driver.
As Treble Winner said (the main FBA project owner), they're not going to spend years to code this driver, that is a real complex one, as Haze (probably the most active of the mame/mess devs) suggested.
You could only hope for an new, alternative, opensource and efficient online infrastructure to be used with WinUAE but it's actually unlikely to happen.
I hope this helps you to understand better.

Ciao

[Haze]

Caught this in the MK thread...does it mean that GGPO isn't an "unlawful build" anymore? I'm confused.

Cause you know GGPO would be just fine.

As pointed out, that doesn't really change the fact that it would be an incredible amount of work, because aside from using a 68k doesn't really fit into the design / architecture of FBA at all.

There are arcade games on Amiga hardware (which is why MAME has preliminary support from MESS) but the Amiga hardware is very unlike 99.99% of arcade systems in the way it works.

[Retrieving]

Thanks everybody for the replies, looks like we'll have to stick with the archaic WinUAE+Kaillera combo for the time being...it just boggles my mind that there isn't even a single emulators developer in the whole damn world who would be willing to free SWOS from the emu/Kaillera incipient obsolescence (just look at Codemasters "remake" for Xbox LIVE Arcade from a couple years back for instance, despite the seemingly unlimited resources and the LIVE online infrastructure its netcode is so shitty that the game is borderline unplayable online, such a wasted opportunity...).