Developer Rich Whitehouse has been releasing beta versions of his Killer Instinct arcade emulator to Patreon subscribers and it’s performing really well. It’s got a lot of the same features as Rich’s amazing BigPeMu Atari Jaguar emulator, including running the game at higher resolutions, savestates, VR 3D support and even netplay! As with BigPeMu, Rich will be releasing this to the public for free eventually, however he just started a new paid project and might not get a public release out for awhile. If you’re a fan of KI, signing up to support is a small price to pay. More info after the link:
Latest Version: https://www.patreon.com/posts/biginstinct-v1-0-134044021
First, in order to build your roms for use with the emulator, you’ll need to download both a chd file and MAME roms for the the game (just do a web search for both). Then extract all of those to the same folder as “BigHardMaker” and run the exe file. That will automatically convert them to “kinst.bighard / kinst2.bighard” files, which are what the emulator loads; After confirming those two files work, you can delete the originals. Honestly, it’s exactly as easy as it sounds and only took a few minutes. Just note that the fully supported versions are v1.4 and v1.5d. According to Rich:
“You’ll need to use the BigHardMaker tool to create .bighard images from your KI/KI2 data. It expects the data in the same form that MAME currently expects it in. You can modify the included .json file if you want to generate images for versions of KI/KI2 other than 1.5d and 1.4 (respectively), the emulator will work with any version. However, it’s strongly recommended that you stick to those versions if you want all of the enhancement options/scripts to function. You can just drag-and-drop a folder or a file in your ROM images folder onto BigHardMaker.exe, and as long as your kinst.zip (or loose ROM files) and kinst.chd files (same for KI2) can be found on that path, the .bighard file(s) will be generated wherever BigHardMaker.exe is located. Check BigHardMaker’s included documentation for more detailed usage info.“
After booting, you’ll just need to map your controller buttons via the menu, which is super easy. I then suggest setting the resolution and refresh rate to match your display – I was able to set mine to 4K144 and it seemed to play fine, even with an older graphics card. There’s also some great CRT filters and a few other options you might want to tweak, but that’s all you need to get started: Make the roms, map your controller, set your resolution and go!
I’ll of course follow-up once the software goes public, but until then, I hope Rich’s Patreon supporters continue to spread the word about this awesome way to play KI!
If you’d like to hear more from Rich, check out an interview we did awhile back. You can watch it here, or just search any app for “RetroRGB Whitehouse”:
