DIGITAL ECLIPSE

ere at Retro Gamer we depend on emulation. Without access to emulators, the job of illustrating features like this would be so much trickier. It’d be like stepping back in time 30 years, using a combination of photography and Heath Robinson capture devices to grab screenshots. Nightmare.

We rely on emulation, yet many often take it for granted. Emulators for almost every old system are available, either as free/shareware or as part of commercial retro-game packages. They’re so convenient that it’s easy to forget there was a time when emulating old games seemed like sorcery. This was particularly true of the coin-ops that we’d marvel at in the arcades. Then in 1994, Digital Eclipse conjured up versions of classic Williams games Joust, Defender and Robotron: 2084 for the Apple Mac. Commercial releases like this weren’t new – Microsoft Arcade and Activision’s Atari 2600 Action Pack were already available – but those titles were reprogrammed and/or ran in a small window. Thanks to Digital Eclipse and programmer Jeff Vavasour, you could play 100% accurate renditions and they ran at full speed in full screen. This was because Digital Eclipse emulated the Motorola 6809 CPU which powered the Williams games, so you were playing the actual arcade code, foibles and all.

The three Williams games were later released in a package called for both Mac and PC. In 1996 three more (aka ), and – and the pack was retitled and released for a wide number of formats including PlayStation and Saturn. For fans, the CD versions also featured video clips where the likes of Eugene Jarvis, John Newcomer and RJ Mical discussed the making of their games. In fact, it’s one of these tiny, grainy video clips that really highlights what Digital Eclipse achieved at the time. Speaking about the original Mac releases, and co-creator Larry DeMar said, “When I first saw the Digital Eclipse programs my mind was blown. All of a sudden the carpet sweep of the memory test appeared and I was like, ‘Oh my god you guys wrote a simulator!’ The games themselves, when they were done, were such a struggle against what could technically be done… if someone had told me in 1982 that in 1995 I’d be sitting at my computer, playing on a machine that’s simulating , I would have wondered what the guy was smoking.” The fact that one of the actual creators was staggered that they could play these old games perfectly is testament to Digital Eclipse’s groundbreaking emulation work.