I have a very large library of videogames acquired over the years. You know that I myself am a fan of games going back decades, and getting them all to work on my various retromachines is quite a task. But it reminds me how I am an IT guy at my very core.

For my own posterity and potential future reference I've decided to record some of my solutions for getting certain games working here, so you might just skip this one unless you want to know all about some random game I got working the other day because of my internal nostalgia. But I guess if you didn't like some rando's nostalgia you wouldn't be here.

As a note: I am not encouraging the illegal acquisition of anything, nor will I share any information on doing so.

In the late 90s, Midway released Gauntlet Legends in arcades. It was the latest in the Gauntlet series, a very difficult hack-and-slash dungeon crawl arcade game that is well known for demanding quarters.

Legends updated the series to a 3d environment, and it was a spectacle at the arcade. Big FMV sequences, cheesy voice acting, tons of lights and colors. But the coolest thing about it was it had a save feature. Yeah, in the arcade!

Basically, you put in your initials and set a password and you take your little dude and send them through the levels and they get level ups and stat increases and then you get tired 'cause it's a long game and you leave but you come back and resume where you left off.

The goal of the game is finding some magic keys from world bosses to fight some demon king. But hidden throughout the game are 12 runestones, most being in very obscure places not easy to find on accident. When you defeat the final boss while having all 12 runestones (Between all the players, another advantage of the save system) you get to go down to hell and kick his ass in his house.

I spent a lot of time in the arcade playing this one in the 7th grade, which was one of the worst times of my life. Seeing my dude grow over the months was one of the very few points of pride I had while I was weathering the storm that is an authoritarian middle school. I remember some of the local cool kids being amazed that I had a level 25 minotaur, and being confused a weirdo like me liked anything cool, let alone was good at it.

One day, in the summer of 1999, some of those kids came over while I was playing and we pooled our characters together to finish the game. We sat together at Burger King afterwards. It was one of the rare times I felt camaraderie in that time of my life, and it helped me leave Santa Cruz with a lighter heart than I would have had otherwise.

So emulation in many ways is brute forcing a virtual environment to run a game. As such, it requires way more power than the original hardware had. For most videogames from the 90s, a standard PC of the era would suffice, but Gauntlet Legends was high end hardware even during that time period, and as such it struggles to be run on something simple like a raspberry pi. I'm running it on a standard office computer I pilfered from my company's outbound pile (A Dell Optiplex 5060 from 2018) and it runs great.

It was a struggle to get it working and properly set up, which is one reason I am writing it down now, in case I ever have to do it again.

There are all kinds of rom dumps all over the internet for various games and versions, some places will have a broken rom and not even know because they don't test them, or it might not be broken at all and is a dump for a specific set of software and hardware circumstances. What I am using and have verified works is above.

I'm using the frontend, Lutris, which further uses the frontend Retroarch, but I verified that it works in standalone MAME 2016. Remember that you need both the zip and the chd file, and the zip contains two files (legend15.bin (524.3 kb) and vegassio.bin (32.8 kb)). File sizes are not always going to be exact especially on different OSes, but they should be in the same ballpark.

Lutris is using gauntleg.zip as the launch file.

When starting it up, you will get a black screen. The first time I started it up I feel like the black screen was longer, up to a minute and a half or longer, and some folks on reddit reported the same, but others report nothing of the sort. If nothing comes up after a few minutes, check your files.

On subsequent startups, the black screen should only last 15-30 seconds. I use the fast forward emulation feature to cut that down. Yes, you can do that.

To load up the cabinet configuration, you will need to hold down the test menu button while the game loads up on that black screen (most systems default to F3). You will eventually receive a message indicating that the test switch is stuck or something like that, just release the button at that point. Once in the menu, you can change the difficulty and coin settings.

You do not need to mess with the dipswitches and I would highly recommend against doing so unless you know exactly what you are doing (very unlikely).

This past weekend I got the immediate sequel working. Gauntlet Dark Legacy is the same game, but much bigger, featuring double the playable characters and many more levels. I have never played it before myself, but the time I spent playing it last night showed it is definitely more ambitious in every way. It runs great on the Dell Optiplex 5060 from 2018 I am using.

I had a really hard time finding files that worked. It took me two years of trying now and again. It's probably better to get both files from the same place. The archive gauntdl.zip contains two files (gauntdl.bin (524.3 kb) and vegassio.bin (32.8 kb)). Lutris is using gauntdl.chd as the launch file.

Much like Legends, loading it up is going to have a long black screen, even longer than Legends because of how much bigger it is. Bringing up the cabinet configuration menu is the same as the previous game. Do not mess with the dipswitches per Legends.

So this is a comparatively simple one, with the trick mostly being to find the correct file with your setup. Again, this is for my own reference in the future in case I ever have to set it up by hand again, especially since I had to read the original arcade cabinet manual to figure out how to get into the configuration menu. Maybe some other lost soul will consider this helpful.