Impact

1. An impinging or striking especially of one body against another.
2. A forceful contact, collision, or onset;
3. The impetus communicated in or as if in a collision.
4. The force of impression of one thing on another : a significant or major effect.
5. A Next Generation Arcade emulator.

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Q. What is IMPACT?

A. Impact is a Next Generation Arcade emulator. It emulates some of the best arcade games that you will see in your local Arcade. Impact will run both Capcom ZN-1 and ZN-2 type games. The January 2nd 2000 release of Impact will run the following games:

• Street Fighter EX Games
  
• Rival Schools
  
• Toshinden 2

These games are very hardware intensive and running Impact requires a robust computer to say the least. The Official Impact FAQ recommends that you have a PII 450MHz with 128Mb RAM and a fast 3D card. You will also need boardrom.bin to run Impact.

This release of Impact is a beta release. The beta does not support games newer than 1997 and only contains limited documentation. Impact only supports OpenGL in this release but a later release will bring Glide support.

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In this section I will go through the options of the program and try to explain what each one means.



GUI: The Impact Graphical User Interface is very simple and easy to use. From the opening GUI you can choose which game you wish to run, configure the rendering method, configure sound options, change controls, and launch net play.




Config: The Config option has three choices: Renderer, Sound, and Controls.




Renderer: This screen controls how Impact displays its amazing graphics. First you have your typical FullScreen or Window choice, which is pretty self-explanatory. Next you have Texture format. For this I suggest you use the default OpenGL driver.

Texture caching is a very important setting. It controls how many textures are kept in the memory(I think). If you have a lot of memory set this higher and if you have a limited amount of memory set this lower. I have 64MB memory and Type 1 and Type 2 are very fast but Type 3 causes Street Fighter EX to become a Matrix fighting scene.

Double Blending- I don't know what this is but it slows down my frames rate by about 70% (more on this later).

Color dithering- I think this tries to combine the surrounding pixels to produce less Doom like graphics.

Bilinear filtering - "A method to make textures appear less pixilated. The process involves the creation of a final filtered pixel by interpolating and averaging the values of four texels. This interpolation is done with the red, green, blue, and alpha value of each pixel."

Fast 'Excel' mode- I am not sure what this does. In benchmarking it didn't really hurt the scores but it didn't help them either.




Sound: The Sound config screen lets you do several things. The enable Music choice lets you turn on and off the game's music. This music causes a performance hit so you might want to leave it off. The music can also get very annoying after a while. Just pop in a CD if you want music. You cannot disable the fighting noises or commentary.

You are given several choices for audio quality ranging from 44100 to 11025. The lower you get the worse it will sound. Mono will enable non-stereo sound (only one speaker). Auto Level will auto choose a level of sound quality for you I believe. I am not sure what Low Pass Filter is.




Controls: Just your typical control screen. I am not sure what the "Background" choice is. Impact does not support Game Pads or Joy Sticks yet...

Net Play: I was going to test this but I could not get Impact to work on my brothers Celeron 450. It would just give an error and not start. Once I get it working I will post on playing Impact over a network.

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Here are some benchmarks of IMPACT in action. These are merely for comparing the different graphics modes to each other and are not meant as an example of how fast the system is. I had several other programs running at the time I recorded these numbers.

All tests were conducted at the resolution 1024x768 at 16bit color with Type2 texture caching. The default OGL driver was used. Music was disabled for these tests. To test I used Street Fighter EX.


The test system:

• CPU: Athlon 650
  
• Memory: 64MB Ram
  
• Graphics Card: Voodoo3 3000 AGP
  
• Sound Card: Sound Blaster Value Live!
  
• OS: Windows98

Normal (no special graphics options enabled) - 55 to 80 fps
Double Blending enabled - 17 to 25 fps
Color dithering enabled - 50 to 60 fps
Bilinear filtering - 45 to 50 fps
Fast 'Excel mode - 50 to 60 fps

Street Fighter EX and IMPACT are very playable with any of the graphics options except double blending. I am not sure why double blending hurts the performance so much. The double blending method might be slow because of my Voodoo3 as I have heard reports that double blending works great on the TNT2 and GeForce graphics cards.

Screenshots

(Click for full size picture in new window)

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I can't wait for the next release of IMPACT! Hopefully the next version will be non beta and have a better controller setup. Great work Impact Team!

Help With IMPACT:
Since Impact is a beta here are some tips for you to get it to run.

• To get Street Fighter EX to work you might need to rename sfp-04 to sfp-04a if you have that dump.
  
  
• SciTech Software has a program that will imitate OpenGL using Direc3D. You might want to try this if you are having OpenGL problems.
  
  
• Antos gave the tip that if you are having problems with getting your Voodoo2 work you should try the following: Go download the latest V2 drivers and extract the ICD(3dfxVGL.dll), than rename the ICD to OpenGL32.dll and put it in the Impact folder, select full screen and try it.

Feel free to email bwb@emuhq.com with your help tips and I will update as I get them. Also remember that you need a good system to run Impact. Some people are getting only 9fps with a P2 300, 128MB, and a Banshee.

Reference sites:
Official Impact Homepage

Impact Roms (Please dont hammer any one site):
Arcade@Home
EmuMania

Conclusion: IMPACT Rocks!