Game:

Ghouls 'n Ghosts (1988)

Duration: 11:19

116 views

6

Well, this is a bit of good news. Actually, a majority of the emulated games supported by the ONAN GAMES emulator, which I have managed to run, are, indeed playable. So, this is how I discovered it.

I decided to give it a try and record all the emulated games, in demo mode, which I managed to run. The first game was Ghouls'n'Ghosts, which is a CAPCOM's arcade classics, already ported to various devices.

When I started to record, the first thing I saw, was the copyright string which said 1988-2009, akin to the Street Fighter Alpha, and then a blinking line in the middle which invited the player to PRESS ZEEBO BUTTON 1 OR 2. But no key which i pressed on the controller made the game to react.

If the developer already made the changes to the text, then the game should be playable. So maybe, just maybe, the developer did not use a Zeebo joystick, but some kind of other joystick?

And then I remembered - in the Zeebo SDK it is written that the Zeebo supports USB HID devices, joysticks with up to 12 buttons, four axis and a direction pad, keyboards and mice. It is specifically indicated that the Zeebo controller currently does not have all the buttons specified in the SDK. The SDK also states: "Development can also be done with Logitech Dual Action gamepads. Please do not consider the second layer of shoulder buttons while developing your game."

In the internal filesystem of the Zeebo there is a hidden file which provides for the button mappings of the Zeebo Dragon controller, Zeebo classic gamepad, the Zeebo Boomerang controller, but also for Logitech Dual Action, Logitech RumblePad2, Logitech Cordless RumblePad2, XBox360 Controller, and some 'Genius' and 'Gamer' controllers.

I do not have the above-mentioned controllers but I do happen to have in my hardware stuff a clone of the PlayStation2 controller which was initially for a French set-top-box released by free. It has 12 buttons and it is a HID device detected in Windows.

When connected, the console was reacting, but all the buttons were mapped incorrectly. However, when I pressed the SELECT button, the CREDITS counter increased. And then, I could press the START button to effectively start the game.

In fact, the emulator supports the controls, but the Zeebo joysticks just do not have one button which is needed to insert CREDITS.

The rest was just a matter of time. I plugged my old joystick from free to insert credits and then re-plugged the Zeebo controller in to play the game. The MENU button on the Zeebo controller acts as a START button.

Ghouls and Ghosts supports 2 players, but they cannot play simultaneously.

Other Statistics