Hi guys, here's a thought I had this mourning. Warning, it might suck.
So I was thinking with MAME emulation progressing slowly last I heard, it doesn't look to me as if any form of emulation => game => online sort of set up will be viable, yet alone have a satisfactory result any time soon. So then it it hit me. Now hear me out, mugen is an engine built to be able to support a wide variety of 2d fighter mechanics, from super meters and guard meters to bursts and coins. Granted, mugen is normally a very unbalanced fighter due to the very concept of putting characters against characters their original designers never intended for them to fight, yet alone the broken monstrosities that run wild in many of the versions of mugen.
That said, perhaps we're going about obtaining the holy grail known as online GGAC the wrong way. Perhaps it isn't required that we find the probably impossible solutions to the problems caused by emulation => game => online. Perhaps, it is possible to make the problem simpler. Perhaps, we could reduce this dreaded equation down to game => online.
How is this possible? Well if I recall correctly, the need for emulation seems from the fact that the emulated games were not themselves designed to be played on the PC. If said games were designed to be played on the pc, then emulation would not be necessary.
What does this have to do with MUGEN? Well unlike GGAC, mugen was designed to be played on the PC. Not only that, but it is also light on recommended specs, likely due to it's very concept, allowing to it to be played on low-end systems. For instance, An associate of mine was able to play it on a crappy laptop that took forever to copy 100 mbs of data.
Putting this all together, what does this have to do with GGAC? Well, if it is possible to modify every mechanic, nook, and cranny of mugen to perfectly resemble GGAC, then the community would have a PC version of GGAC that doesn't require resource devouring emulators.
Now with a PC version of GGAC available, it should be a far simpler matter of giving the game GGPO, which I believe is something that everyone could appreciate.
Now to admit my own faults, not only is my expertise in the subject of emulation and GGPO does it's online limited, but I'm also not sure if any this is possible or how it would be done or etc to infinity. However, wouldn't it be awesome if it is?
Thoughts?