Carbon Engine & How It Brings Retro Games to Modern Hardware

Retro games as a lot of fun to play, but some of the efforts required to get them to work on original hardware is not. Playing a retro game on modern hardware is my preferred way to play those games. I’m in no way a purist, nor do I want to use a CRT television unless I am playing a light-gun game.

What is the Carbon Engine?

Created internally at Limited Run Games, Carbon Engine is a multi-platform development tool that helps different emulators interface with modern hardware. It uses emulation as a base, on top of which the Carbon Engine builds features like UI, rendering, audio, data management, controller inputs, and console-specific SDK features like trophies. It allows Limited Run to put out highly accurate, emulation-based ports of classic games for modern hardware.

LimitedRunGames.com

Meet Modern Vintage Gamer

Modern Vintage Gamer is one of the developers. In this video, he discusses what he’s been up to.

What systems does the engine support?

The engine supports most of the popular 8 and 16-bit consoles from the 80s and 90s, and even the PlayStation. Limited Run Games specifically lists these:

• NES/Famicom
• SNES/Super Famicom
• Genesis/Mega Drive
• Game Boy, Game Boy Color & Game Boy Advance
• Game Gear
• Master System
• Sega CD/Mega CD (Coming soon)
• PlayStation (Coming soon)

LimitedRunGames.com

One system I see is absent is the PC Engine. Hopefully that one will be added soon.

Yesterday, I reported on Gex, Tomba! and Gargoyles. I’m more familiar with the later two. I am more interested in seeing what else is coming down the line. What what I can see, the games are coming to Xbox, PlayStation and Switch.