Prometheus Engine FOCAL Emulation Gemini Online Multiplayer
Prometheus Engine FOCAL Emulation Gemini Online Multiplayer
Prometheus Engine FOCAL Emulation Gemini Online Multiplayer

Prometheus is an abstracted cross-platform engine design and tool suite intended to ease game development on today's diverse lifestyle devices. Game code built within the engine's framework can be simultaneously deployed without modification on, for example, both Windows-based PC and iOS. Prometheus is the product of decades of experience in cross-platform abstraction.

All major display, audio, input and even in-app purchase transaction needs are standardised and portable. It can target desktop computers (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux), smartphones and tablets (e.g. iOS, Android), consoles (e.g. Xbox 360, PlayStation 3), handhelds (e.g. PS Vita, Nintendo DS and 3DS), and even web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera). Prometheus is intended to be an ideal launching platform to take a game to the broadest audience quickly, while minimising redundant porting effort. With Prometheus, you just concentrate on making the game.

What's more, Prometheus's adaptive display functionality allows one to implement both GUI and game elements that adapt fluidly to today's diverse array of display devices, making a game look at home on any device, be it widescreen, standard, or even portrait. (You can see this in action in our titles such as Patchworkz and Lost Treasures of Infocom.) This adaptation even works on-the-fly, allowing the game's presentation to respond seamlessly to orientation or aspect ratio changes. This feature is essential to modern gaming where Android, iOS, PC and even console present a broad range of display offerings on a single platform. With Prometheus, the one platform binary can cover it all.

Prometheus leverages familiar tools, too. For example, a "WYSIWYG" pipeline allows one to lay out the GUI within Photoshop exactly as you want it to look and, with a straightforward export, see the result in the game test build seconds later (even without restarting the app). Adaptive GUI features can be annotated directly within Photoshop itself, putting the full design-test-revision cycle under artist control without any technical participation. Audio and game assets may similarly be modified using familiar tools and viewed within the game test build without a restart. Prometheus is extensively data driven, with many game parameters easily exposed via spreadsheets that may be directly edited within Excel or similarly popular tools.

If you're looking for a game developer and want to learn more about what our technology can do for you, contact us!

Emulation technology is used to bring classic games back to life. Our team members were pioneers in the retrogaming genre, in 1994 creating the technology that became the foundation of retrogaming developer phenomenon, Digital Eclipse. Prior to forming Code Mystics, our coders have been responsible for nearly 100 classic gaming SKUs, from Namco Museum: 50th Anniversary to Midway Arcade Treasures and beyond.

15 years and millions of sales later, our team has built upon this expertise to create a new breed of emulation. FOCAL (an acronym for Flow-Optimised Code AnaLysis) marries the efficiency and accuracy of emulation, with a new data-driven approach that can achieve solid frame rates on modest platforms and still take advantage of the cross-platform efficiencies of our Prometheus Engine. FOCAL can target any console, desktop or handheld gaming platform. Its data-driven architecture is even capable of embedding in other scripting languages and engines such as Unity. Thus, emulated games can now be deployed with arcade quality within web browsers, for example, and then ported to PlayStation 3 and iPhone alike with lightning speed.

FOCAL's unique architecture allows us to adapt the emulation to platforms unreachable by traditional techniques. It forms the foundation of many of our novel retrogaming products from Atari Greatest Hits on Nintendo DS to Taito's classics on Jakks' TV Games plug and play standalone gaming device to the PlayStation Home renditions of Atari and Konami classics to the in-browser renditions of classic Atari titles. It is also the same technology behind our retrogaming products on mainstream platforms, like iOS's and Android's Activision Anthology and multi-million seller, Atari's Greatest Hits. FOCAL has quickly established Code Mystics as the new torch bearer for accurate quality recreations of the classics.

And we don't just aim to support arcade games... FOCAL is the ideal technology for efficiently rejuvenating any platform back-catalogue for the 21st Century market. For those timeless classics people are itching to play again, talk to us about FOCAL and how we can bring your beloved games to an audience like never before!

Over the last decade Code Mystics has been perfecting its netcode in the highly discerning arena of online fighting games since its release of Killer Instinct Classic in 2013, an Xbox One launch title. These days, Code Mystics' proprietary rollback netcode, featured most recently in several SNK titles, is considered by many fans to be "state of the art", offering a seamless online competitive experience that feels as responsive as local play, even across continents and pings exceeding 150ms. We're humbled by the enthusiasm of our fans, with many players lauding an experience superior to the previous de facto fan-favourite solution for long-distance online multiplayer in these fighting games, Fightcade.

Of course, this netcode has application to all genres, with earlier iterations being featured in the console versions of Atari Flashback Classics, Risk of Rain, Nidhogg, and more. It is also compatible to all platforms from desktop to console to mobile.

For partners interested in such features, the full Gemini suite includes multi-user (more than two-player) online experiences; cross-platform matchmaking; leaderboards; NAT traversal solutions; and, coupled with our FOCAL Technology, the capability of "join-a-game-in-progress", spectating, tournaments, and "play-while-you-wait" (i.e. play a local game while waiting for a matchmaking partner, and return to it after your online game is done).

To learn more about rollback netcode in general and Code Mystics' offering in particular, check out this instructive video:

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