FEATURE Meet The Company Bringing Classic Games To Switch, PS5 And Xbox "By Mistake"

[Gamernyc78]

Meet The Company Bringing Classic Games To Switch, PS5 And Xbox "By Mistake"

"We reached out to Sony to start an experiment"

www.timeextension.com

I've always wanted to resurrect retro games," Lavallée explains. "There are too many forgotten games that are just completely lost nowadays, usually due to legal and hardware reasons. Also, even with quality-of-life improvements, setting up those old consoles can be complicated on modern televisions. It became clear that we needed a simple solution to emulate classic games on new consoles. This is where the SYRUP Engine came from. It's named after the wonderful Maple Syrup that we enjoy in Canada. I have a sweet tooth."

We asked Lavallée how the technology works and how it is different to other emulators available already. "Open-source emulators already exist, but they have various levels of quality and robustness for production-level games. When you emulate a console game, you can't expect the user to tweak through multiple configuration settings to find the best experience. So, we aim to make it easy to use."

Implicit Conversions' SYRUP Engine has also helped overcome some of the issues surrounding legal emulation that can be stifled by not owning the original hardware BIOS. "We reverse engineer the BIOS and write a new compatible version," says Lavallée. "We also use a High-Level Emulated (HLE) BIOS which is another rewrite of the BIOS but without implementing all its parts. This enables us to avoid implementing some of the code that was necessary for the old console hardware."

Implicit Conversions has worked on many titles since its launch and Lavallée points out some of the highlights as well as the challenges his team has overcome. "Some of my favourites are Jet Moto, Grandia, The Legend of Dragoon and several Star Wars games. We also built a great relationship with Namco and were proud when Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny and Tekken 6 came out. Valkyrie Profile was a challenging game as it required lots of tweaks to get correct. There were changes needed to upscale textures and the movies were improved using AI to insert missing frames. Finally, the game used lots of features of the PSP system software that other games did not, so there were tons of bugs to fix as well. The result is awesome, though!"

Currently, the team are working with Sony to bring PlayStation 1 and 2 titles to PS5, we asked Lavallée how the relationship came about. "My co-founder and friend, Jake Stine, worked with Sony bringing PlayStation 2 games to PlayStation 4. After he left, we reached out to Sony to start an experiment to do more emulation. One contract led to another, and we started hiring people to help us in this adventure. I like to say that we started this as a project, and it became a company by mistake."