Some time ago Cesaniel (aka ACStriker) from Venezuela, who runs a blog about games and emulation Arcadex Machina, wrote to me. He asked about the possibility of an interview, interested in the history of playing Tekken 3 Online. The goal was to provide a behind-the-scenes look at our Polish Tekken 3 Online community, and later other fighting games, which thrived under the Honmaru brand thanks to the capabilities of emulators and plugins.
Honmaru is a non-profit project dedicated to fighting games, which I created in 2005.
Let me just say that the online mode in fighting games or the presence of top fighting games in general on PC was not a standard. There was no Tekken on PC and many other top fighting games were missing. We’re talking about 2005, when Honmaru.pl saw the light of day for the first time, or rather, for the first time had contact with the server :).
Those who know me probably know that I have put an enormous amount of heart and even more time and work into developing Honmaru. Sleepless nights on coding, organizing tournaments, writing news. Full involvement in the project in every possible way. With time, there were even prizes in tournaments, sponsors, we had a super editorial team, a large community of players, etc. To this day, I treat everything related to the old days with great fondness. This adventure in part continues to this day, I am still a fan and player of Tekken, although no longer to the same extent as before.
The opportunity to give an interview was a great pleasure for me, but it also took quite a lot of time. It involved many hours of reminiscing and digging up archival materials. Thanks to this, however, I myself recalled and arranged in my head how it was exactly with the beginnings of the development of the FGC community in the context of online gaming.
I hope the end result is not exaggerated and those interested in the topic will find it interesting.
Enjoy your reading and thanks for being here ✌️
One of the ideas I wanted to work on for an article here was the History of Netplay in Emulation; a topic which is fascinating to me not only because of how emulators took a big part in allowing certain games being played with others through the internet (unofficially), but also the way it made hundreds of communities have a way to enjoy their favorite games with others, cooperatively or competitively.
ACStriker on Arcadex Machina
Now, while that’s the general gist of the planned topic, that would be split in three factors: The emulator, the netcode/netplay method (which could be brought down to a few as some shared these), and the communities. While the netplay implementations were brought through either emulator-designed methods (ZSNES, Dolphin, Slippi), an middleware implementation (GGPO and Kaillera), or an method external to the emulator (Parsec), as well as tricks varying to make it work better, like Hamachi and the Frame over Delay Input approach for NullDC in recent times.
Of course, online is only possible if emulators have a netplay function, which is given to the emulator developers, either trying to develop their own way, or implementing a pre-made base. But the most important thing that gives emulators online feature a purpose, are the communities. And with this said, after interviewing the developer of the CyberPad plugin for ePSXe and the owner of FGC Arcadia, the interview with Dumian has finally got here!
Dumian is the founder and owner of Honmaru, a Polish FGC-dedicated site and community, which not only had quite an important footprint in its native country through several Tekken and other game tournaments, but also was one of the earliest instances of netplay and emulation usage; while the CyberPad PSX plugin made in 2001 would be predated by Nesticle and ZSNES in age, Honmaru would be one of the earliest known communities with surviving material to have thrived with online emulation.