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Games Entertainment

Saving Our Video Game Heritage 154

Posted by CmdrTaco from the flap-flap-flap-flap dept.
felis_panthera writes: "SecurityFocus has a great article on the preservation of the old arcade games like Arkanoid and Pac Man through the MAME program. MAME, which stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is an emulator for the old, stand up arcade games. This story has SecurityFocus's Kevin Poulsen chatting with a few people involved in the project."
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Saving our Video Game Heritage More

Saving our Video Game Heritage

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  • Ever notice how the really popular projects, don't rhyme with "LAME".

    Rader

  • Because a classic will always be a classic.

  • GPL (Score:1)

    by Valar ( 167606 )
    I agree that GPL needs an update, though perhaps BSD liscensing isn't the exact way to do it. More of just a change in wording to reflect the changing face of commercial software.

  • EPROMS self-erase (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Eproms self-erase, so some of the se old video games self-destruct. someone needs to go out and harvest the ROMS for posterity.

  • Mame.dk (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is the best MAME site I've ever found: it seems to have every single game that mame supports.

    Mame.dk [www.mame.dk]

  • If it was about Preservation why are so many of the game authors and there employers upset ?

    Ohh... Because they don't want these games preserved, they want all the old classics forgotten so they can sell new games and make more money.

    Just goes to show that raising the duration of copyright to such an FSCKing long time as it's at now was a very domb idea.

    Sure running a game on MAME isn't necessarily a copyright violation. But can we prove that ?
  • I see nothing wrong with MAME. It is a fun way to play those old classics that the big guys (Nintendo, Atari, etc.) have forgotten about. "Abondonware" fits the whole deal nicley. The companies don't make any money off of the machines anymore, so the should allow MAME to live on. If anything, MAME makes people think "Man, that was a good game, I wonder if that company has any more good games". In the end, only good can come out.
  • In the article, it claims that any modern PC has enough power to run MAME and still have enough for a spreadsheet and two word processors...is that all that our modern technology can afford us? Running Nesticle (although it runs "illegal" "unoriginal" software) doesn't slow my 333 down a wink, so why would MAME take an ancient system of coding and let it completely hog up the processes of a comparitable juggernaut? On the same note, glad to hear someone remembers whats important out in the computer world, fighting Bill can only hold so much amusement.

  • This is important (Score:5)

    by exploder ( 196936 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @09:58AM (#945175) Homepage
    Game design is an art form. Currently, it's all to common for new-release games to sport the latest whiz-bang 3D graphics and sound, while the game itself is absolute crap. Obviously none of the games from the 80s would win any awards today for technical excellence, but what made the classics great in their time was solid design and attention to gameplay. Game designers of today ought to study the history of games as well as the latest version of DirectX. That's why we need to keep these old games around.

  • cabinets are the really tricky part now (Score:3)

    by happystink ( 204158 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @09:59AM (#945176)
    I've been watching and using MAME for a while now, and it's wicked, so great. The trick will be when some company creates a kit to easily make a cabinet to play these from that almost anyone with a bandsaw can put together.

    Imagine if someone sold complete plans and hardware (joysticks, etc, but not counting the computer itself) that you could buy, and then all you'd have to do would be buy the wood, bandsaw it to size and insert a standard PC into, and boom, a full-sized arcade machine of your own with almost every game invented. Mmmmm, that gets me excited just thinking about it :)

    And as sick as it is, yes I'd like an option to stick quarters in to play:)

  • I just checked the list at mame.net [mame.net], they don't even have Pong listed.

    They better get with the program.

    George

  • been playing for years .. (Score:3)

    by Pfhreakaz0id ( 82141 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:00AM (#945178)
    With old MacMAME on my mac. Now MAME32 for Win32.. I love it. Despite lots of new games I have, I play the old MAME one's more, like Elevator Action and hypercross and Track and Field and Spy Hunter, the list goes on. Note: you can get just about every ROM from www.mame.dk [www.mame.dk]
    ---
  • Untrue! Apache was originally named Apachame and Linux was originally named Liname. Know your history boy, or grandpa is gonna whup you!
  • Well, MAME can also emulate a NeoGeo, thus enabling you to play games such as King of Fighters 98 (over 30Mb), now that might be a reason it slows down computers.

    Mikael Jacobson
  • While this article points out that you can't really emulate the arcade experience, I believe that MAME does an excellent job.

    I found http://www.classicgaming.com [classicgaming.com] about a year ago and, suddenly, I was 8 years old again, watching some teenager play starwars, except now I was big enough to reach the controls.

    Then end result, and this is blatantly apparent in today's video games, is that technology (better sound, graphics, etc.) does not mean better game play. These games were/are great because they were built with game play in mind - not the technology. So, when something like Daikatana comes out it's easy to see why we keep playing Battle Zone, Dig-Dug, etc.

    IMHO, video game corps want to keep you from playing the old games so you don't knw what you're missing.

  • I forget the exact details, but about 1.5-2 years ago, excellent sites like davesclassics.com were nearly shut down permanantly (Dave's was off for a long time) and are now but shadows of their former selves. Seems that some company or organization (I forget exactly who) took them to task and threatened major legal action. The whole affair was detailed pretty well there (I can't remember much of it.) So *that's* why you won't find any well laid-out ROM sites in the US anyway. I'll bet the guy was from www.mame.dk (looks familiar?) Personally I think MAME rocks and is an effort that should be supported by the makers of all those great games, from Atari to Taito....
  • You know you do...but perhaps the best way to deal with the legal issues is to for the people working on MAME to directly contact the copyright holders. Most would probably be willing to sign a legal agreement that MAME is fair use. They won't mind people playing for free, but if someone starts selling, then they will want part of the profit, is my guess.
  • Did pong even come in a stand-up arcade form? I think it was just a console game for the 2600. The MAME people are definitely "with the program", apparently a bit more than you are:P
  • I gotta say, this -is- a neat idea (unlike the whole videogame to Mozilla port thing we saw a few days back). I remember playing a lot of these old games back in my misbegotten youth (my favorite being Joust), and the though that I can pick up MAME and play the original Joust again (if I could find it) kind of warms the cockles of my heart.

    What really strikes me as very cool though is the idea of supporting old hardware and software on newer platforms. Not only does this mean my kids will get to play all the great games I grew up on, but it also looks like this is the first step towards Vernor Vinge's idea of a massive database of source code which could be used and modified in the future to really do anything we wanted. (He explains this a bit better in his novel 'A Deepness in the Sky').

    Hell, in twenty years time you might well see people hacking toegther software with little algorithms ripped from old arcade game ROMS :)

    Now -that's- a legacy system!

  • I think (if memory serves) that Atari pong was primarily hardware based (?) and had extremely little in the way of actual software.

    In any case, write your own damn pong emulator!!! :)

  • now all i need (Score:3)

    by drglen ( 209517 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:05AM (#945187)
    is a quarter slot inserted into an open 5.25" bay so i can invite my friends over for some gaming!
  • They could teach a thing or two to the Wine [winehq.com] and VMware [vmware.com] people. MAME's success in emulating the most oddball hardware/software configurations imaginable is nothing short of heroic. And yes, you guessed it, I'm an early-80's arcade nut. :)


    "Standing up to an evil system [pcshop.com.br] is exhilarating." --Richard Stallman
  • Did pong even come in a stand-up arcade form? I think it was just a console game for the 2600. The MAME people are definitely "with the program", apparently a bit more than you are:P

    I remember seeing Pong in a stand up version at the Roller Rink in the mid 70's, way before the 2600.

    George
  • XMAME / XMESS should be on every linux user's hard drive.

    there are many public domain games from companies who have either released them or gone out of business, and at least one company does sell rom images legally.

    I'm one of the people who has about 1000 of these roms on my linux machine (sorry, don't shoot me) because they are fun. The nostalgia is great, and since the games themselves don't even exist anymore except in pieces or maybe somebody's basement or garage, it's the only way you can still experience many of them. It's a worthy cause, too bad they can't get more of the game companies on board to volunteer to release their old roms, it definitely wouldn't hurt them.

    ________

  • Remember (Score:5)

    by / ( 33804 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:07AM (#945191)
    The benefit of MAME doesn't lie just in preserving the playing experience. It's also in providing an incentive for people to preserve the roms themselves. Bit rot is consuming old arcade machines like there's no tomorrow, and the problem is only going to get worse as the iron gets older.

    This exposes a real problem with the way copyright is currently enforced. Yes, after a century, the roms will be in the public domain (unless Rep Sonny Bono comes back from the grave and hands another century to Disney). But if you're not allowed to copy the rom in the meantime, then the rom won't still be around. And don't just say that individuals have a fair-use right to make backups, since I'm talking about the harm to society as a whole by lost works in the public domain, not the harm to individuals.

  • Saving our heritage... HARDWARE... (Score:3)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:08AM (#945192)
    I am one of those people who is "Saving our Video Game Heritage"... by saving the actual hardware. Although I am a hardware purist, I must applaud MAME. It has helped many an arcade collector determine what a game is, and what it should act like (as I used to discover a flaw in my GORF).

    But the last paragraph is true... MAME really doesn't compare well to the actual hardware. (Especially the phosphor glow of vector [non-raster] games.... MAME can't do it.) And the presence of having a Gauntlet II arcade game in your living room far exceeds that of having Gauntlet II on your PC. People will run up to your arcade game and want to play it. They don't really do that with your PC.

    BTW... excellent article and good focus on some of the hardware.
  • They've really gone to a lot of trouble to emulate the hardware correctly. The ROMs play back almost exactly like the original arcade machines. I've lately been trying to best my record on the original Mario Brothers (heh, most of you l33t kiddies out there think I mean the Nintendo version, I'm sure.)

    Now, what would really be interesting and entertaining would be an entirely 100% Java implementation of MAME. If you created a web site that could serve up the Java applet and a selection of, oh, I don't know, maybe 1000 games or so (don't think there are that many? Check out the MAME compatibility list, sucker!), you'd pretty much be able to own a huge amount of web traffic.

    You throw muliplayer compatibility in there, an IRC add-on, and I bet you'd really have something. A wall of fame, for high scorers, guilds (I'm the leader of the Blood-Sucking Ms.Pac-Clan, how 'bout you?) and prizes, and you'd pretty much be GOD of the web.

    Alas, it will never happen, though, thanks to the fookin' Mickey Mouse copyright laws. *sigh*. Hmmm... *thinks for a moment...* I've got it; how about a Gnutella-type open-source distributed app? ;-)

  • Pong was one of the games that pre-dated the use of CPUs in video games. (The other popular one was Breakout.) It was made entirely with discrete logic chips, just like the old Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminals. Even the home versions that condensed the circuitry down to a single chip still used discrete logic.

    A couple of years ago I found a book about making video games out of discrete logic: counters and flip-flops and big AND gates. Now that's what I call making furniture with a axe!

  • Those games need to be saved! (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:10AM (#945195) Homepage Journal
    The feeling of nostalgia and the memories those games bring back make them worth saving even if nothing else does. But the fact remains that most of those games are as engaging and playable as they were when they first came out. They represent the golden age of coin-op game creativity. Of course in those days the current software patent idiocy wasn't so much of a problem and you didn't have to worry about someone suing your ass out from under you because you violated their patent on, say, the extra life.

    Of course, assorted evil companies are trying to control these games and it is their right to do so. The moral implications are somewhat more dubious, though. They may never do anything with the copyrights, and those games are the heritage of a generation.

    While I'm generally pro-copyright and would, in fact, be willing to pay a reasonable price for the MAME ROM images of the games in question, I'm fully behind the sites that keep the ROMs and hope that they remain free for download for personal use. No one should be forced to install Windows to play those games, and a company's idea of what's a marketable game may be different than mine. Some of the cheesiest games of that era bring back the most potent memories.

    Seems like a company could make a reasonable sum of money just selling hardware to support some of those games. Spy Hunter just isn't right without the steering wheel with 4 buttons, the gear shifter and the gas pedal, for instance. Discs of Tron is another one that could benefit from real controls. I'd definitely spring for a 720 degrees spinny joystick. A whole retro industry could spring up around that stuff. Perhaps we might even start seeing truly creative games again...

  • Wow, the MAME project seems to be coming along very nicely, but I think they should consider porting their software to more platforms.
    Sorta like Apache.

    I for one would love to see MAME run on an old Apple II, or Commondore 64...The old good gaming platforms...
    [/noclue] -- Wait, it emulates what?
  • I believe MAME's primary intent is to provide as much accurate emulation of as many games as they can. It's more of a historical endeavor than anything else.

    The fact that stuff generally turns out to be playable is a nice bonus, though.

  • Pong was entirely hardware based. At one time Pong was added into MAME, obviously not using emulation but recreation, and I believe it was taking out shortly thereafter because it broke the purpose of MAME, which was to be a documentaiton project.

    Adam
  • If anyone is looking for a good book that goes back to those wonderful days of black-and-green block graphics video games, can I recommend 'Joystick Nation' [amazon.com] by J.C.Herz. There's also a chapter arguing why Doom was possibly the best video game ever, though you don't need MAME for that!

    \\//MJG.
  • please, think of the children!!
    in other words, our kids should be playing these games on the long trips to saturn.
  • Sheesh. The very first commercial Pong game was a stand up arcade machine. It was in the Andy Capp's bar in Silicon Valley. It had been around before, played on IIRC oscilliscopes, and wasn't even as old as Spacewar, but it's generally regarded to be the first arcade video game.

    The story goes that the day after it had been set up, Atari got a phone call from the owner of the bar. He complained that the damn game was already broken. Having blown all of their cash, they sent a guy to check it out. He discovered that there were so many quarters in the machine that it had filled up the little cardboard box inside that caught them, and that the slots were totally full. Then they knew that they were going to make a lot of money.

    And so they did until Atari crashed terribly in the early 80's.

    As an interesting note, it took a while before they let go of the pong idea. There were a lot of pong variants. About the last was Breakout, in which a pong paddle used a ball to disintegrate bricks. The employee who ostensibly worked on it was Steve Jobs, and he recruited his friend Steve Wozniak to do the actual work. Then cheated the Woz out of most of the money.

    One of the motivations Woz had when designing the Apple was to be able to play Brickout.
  • Checkout this [8m.com] from last week's quickies. Click on Sporty's link. He built a pretty cool cabinet relatively cheaply.
    Matt
  • I have to agree with some of the posts and go with the whole "it's not good enough unless you've got the whole kit". Such as the little doohickey in arkanoid, or a steering wheel. And personally, I can't get enough of Pinball (which is now officially dead!). But there is a way to get hold of these things, albiet expensively. Go to ebay and check out gaming, and then antiques or retro (can't remember). You can grab some sweet equipment.
  • While I understand what you're implying about the older games not winning on technical excellence, I have a few slight reservations on the comment.

    The amount of work that the designers of 80's coin ops were able to get out of such limited systems was and still is amazing. We're talking back when the 64 in C64 stood for 64 K. In the days of feature creep and bloatware, this is something we should keep in mind.

    The oft cited gameplay of the old games was often mindless and repetitive. However, is was incredibly addictive. Kinda like hitting the 'Reload' button when visiting /. =)

  • One would be inclined to think that the oldest games are the ones in most danger of disappearing. Fortunately, at this time, most people realize that the truly rare games are of value and keep them for resale, and eventually reproduction. Many of these games continue to plug along year after year, and some will still be working in thirty years or more. Unfortunately, for video game "preservationists", Capcom has been including a battery, on the boards of its CPS2 (and some of its CPS1 games) and if not replaced on its boards, the data on the boards dies with the battery. The CPS1 games are already dumped and emulated, but a rather nasty form of encryption, so far unbroken, protects CPS2. CPS2 games will slowly die, and without a verified correct dump, we may have the ROMs on which to build an emulator. CPS2's most famous game is Marvel Vs. Capcom. Now with M vs. C 2 taking the spotlight off of M vs. C at the arcade, it perhaps may be time to consider working on cracking the encryption and saving CPS2 before it rots away. Personally, I love CPS2. My favorite beat-em-up of all time is sitting in my basement right now, Dungeons of Dragons Tower of Doom (the four-player arcade game with the most buttons per player at four each plus player start). One day my battery will die and the game will be no more. I hope that I will be able to use an iMicro to output RGB to the monitor and wire the controls to a USB Happs interface, but with no roms, and eventually no more working boards, there will be no D&D: TOD, ever again :(
  • wow , that was almost funny, thanks for sharing
  • Is MAME something that "just" converts all the coin op machines? Or does it cover the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Intellivision, Nintendo, Sega, and other bizarre combos?

    I ask because the article talked about the interviewee as the one who read and "uploaded" the ROM's from the old machines... So I was wondering if the same process was used for everything. Has anyone worked with the actual emulator code? I'm curious if they need to check to see "what type" of machine the game came from so that it knows what type of emulating to do.

    Game on!

    Rader

  • its *important* for these old games to be saved. one of hte few things i remeber *distinctly* from my childhood is the video games. I would always get so excited when my family would to to "the black-eyed pea", not because i liked the food, but because i always got a handfull of quarters to play the one game in the restraunt, Mrs Pac Mam [and not the stand-up one, one of the old flat table-top style ones. that was *the* thing that made it so exciting to go out and eat there. what seven-year old girl *really* wants to go somewhere like that just to get a good meal of vegitables? no, it was for the video game! and the same thing, when we went to Ninfas, s good as thier food was i didn't care about that, i jus wanted to go to play Galaga. I've got coppies of both these games, and other old games such as 'asteroids' and 'joust'and the *original* super mario brothers, from *gasp* the NINTENDO--no number, no extension--on my machine now [although not thru running MAME], and i play them a heck of a lot more than any new flashy game i own. so my brother bought a dreamcast a couple weeks ago. i looked it it for about ten minutes, was suitably impressed, being the geek i am, with the three-d effects and such, critiqued the game where the scenery was too polygonal, watched the new sonic game, realized it was just like every other Sonic game ever *made*, and wandered back to my game of asteroids on my trusty computer. no contest. the games may be flashy and technically impressive but the *gameplay*, the *plots* are wothless. there is no creativity. all efforts are going into making a bigger flashier cooler game *visually* than theother guys, and neglecting all other aspects of gameplay. i could care less about the new whatever-the-heck nubmer Sonic exists now for the dreamcast, whatever new flashy game will appear in a restraunt next. i doubt i'll be forming any memories off of *those*. for me, give me my old games, with their fond memories and terribly-unimpressive-by-todays-standards but functional graphics. you can keep your N64's, your dreamcasts, your new fancy PC and Mac games. give me mrs pac man and i'm happy. now if you'll excuse me? tetris calls...

  • I love MAME and Retrocade... (Score:4)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:17AM (#945209)
    It's great that so many old arcade games are being preserved in ROM images and played by programs like MAME and Retrocade. I'm especially glad that the companies who own these old games haven't come down hard on the ROM sites, at least not yet. Even though the games are effectively no longer marketable, the companies involved could still throw a fit and destroy the top ROM sites, because unlike the warez scene the emulation scene tends to try to stay open and above-board; they just want to be able to freely use old games which are more useful to nostalgics like us than to the game companies themselves.

    This is one of the big reasons that copyright law needs to be changed back to something like its original shorter terms, instead of this bullshit corporate agenda of "life of the creator plus 100 years." This is especially true in the information age, when things get out of date very quickly and the media we use doesn't last very long. Books can exist for a thousand years if stored in a dry place, but the boards used by old arcade machines are more likely to last 10-20 years unless they're stored extremely well and even then there can be damage from the board just getting burned out--that's why it was so important for the emulation scene to get these ROMs into a digital, downloadable format and distribute them to as many sources as possible. But to do that, they had to break copyright law, over something which isn't very marketable anyway. Arcade collections for the PC put out by authorized companies only contain three or four games which were unusually popular in their day, but if it weren't for the emulation scene 99% of the arcade games, part of our history, would probably have ended up disappearing forever.

    There are currently several sites which are all very big and carry tens of thousands of ROMs, but with a few cease and desist orders they could disappear. I'd name my favorite one, but I don't want to lead the corporate lawyers who doubtless read Slashdot to their door, especially since Microsoft of all companies has a couple of arcade-derived collections. The corporate, abusive extension of copyright terms has to stop, or else we may lose other digital artifacts, not just video games.

    And as a final note, MAME plays far more games, but Retrocade plays over 100 games with the slickest UI you could ever slap onto an emulator, it's just unfuckingbelieveably cool. Check it out.
  • I can't agree with you more.

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/07/08/16542 33&cid=151

    These place is horrible when it comes to stuff like that.
  • Someone I just can't quite imagine pacman on a 19" high definition monitor, with a force feedback joystick, digitally remastered 3d sound, and high speed network-based multiplayer options.

    Just isn't the same :)
  • Dang, y'all know how to make a guy feel old! Yep, Pong came in a standup version. There were also a lot of consoles sold - long predating the 2600 - that played only Pong (or an un-branded version thereof). Some of them had minor variations, but basically it was a "bounce the 'ball' off the 'paddle'." Mattel's Intellivision was one of the first home console systems that allowed you to play different games. This would have been circa 1975 by the way.

  • If you are interested in old video games, you should check out the VAPS [vaps.org]-Site. VAPS is the Video Arcade Preservation Society and tries to collect old video arcade machines, especially old and rare games.
  • Too many excellent games never make it big. I couldn't let this discussion go by without a link to the best archive of games that never got the recognition they deserved:

    The Home of the Underdogs [theunderdogs.org]

    It's a killer site. Though it doesn't have any ROMs of old arcade games (making this post slightly off-topic), it has all the lost and forgotten classics. Check it out.

  • Leave the poor fucking guy alone!!

    I think they should consider porting...

    Did you READ the FUCKING ARTICLE!! This is NOT some GIANT FUCKING CORPORATION putting this project out!! It's ONE GUY with an OBSELETE GAME fetish.. and he's PROBABLY not terribly interested in an OS/2 port!!

    Now maybe if you want to PAY him.. or HIRE him.. you might have something.. as it is you're probably just making him VAGUELY NAUSEOUS at the prospect of porting his lame little emulation program to OBSELETE ARCHITECTURES.

    Jesus! Try being NICE TO PEOPLE! Didn't your mother teach you SHIT?
  • They probably won't do it, but I sure wish I could purchase these game images legitimately from the copyright owners. I'd happily pay $10/pop for those game images...

    I guess I'm not too worried about companies like Sega or Nintendo, since I figure they still have their source code and game images, but good grief, what about some of those now-extinct game companies? Hmm.

  • Cabinets ARE available! (Score:5)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:21AM (#945217)
    See ArcadePC [hanaho.com] , a Cabinet/PC/control system, all packaged and ready to purchase. Small & large versions available. I think they're working on a cocktail-type platform, too. Kinda pricey, though. The standard ArcadePC with a 19" monitor & a mini-cabinet is around $800, and the one with a 27" monitor & a full-size cabinet is around $2000.

    If you just want the control panel, they're using the Hot Rod [hanaho.com] , available in 2 versions, that you can use with your current computer. The 'classic' is around $180, and the SE (with more buttons, same layout as many modern coin-op control panels), is around $200. They connect via a PS/2 port, but mention on their site that USB support is in the works (that's what I'm waiting for).
  • But you'd need a circular-stop soft joystick for Pacman, a cross-stop soft joystick for Ms. Pacman, a cross-stop hard joystick for Gauntlet, a nice big trackball for Centipede and Space Invaders, a cheesy wheel for Pole Position, etc..

    The cabinet would need to have exchangable control surfaces on it!!

  • Recreating the classics, badly (Score:4)

    by staplin ( 78853 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:22AM (#945219) Homepage Journal
    I'v played with MAME a little, and I've become convinced tht preserving the classics in their original form is more worthwhile than some of the recent attempts to "modernize" and recreate the classics. (I really don't understand the fascination with rehashing games every decade or so, it fits right in with making a 90's movie of "Leave It To Beaver")

    For example, I recently bought Centipede for the playstation in a fit of nostolgia. And it's ok, the original mode is there, but the "new" version has been slaughtered with 3D graphics and awkward controls. But at least it really does have the "real" classic interface.

    Much worse yet, not so long ago, I saw an arcade machine featuring 4 "classic" games (ala NeoGeo). I played a round of Pac-Man and was disgusted! Everything had 3D shading, the pellets bounced in place, pac-man was green!!! Absolutely stomach turning.

    Give me the originals, and I mean originals any day, they were carefully crafted masterpieces that bring back memories like these recreations never can. And when tools like MAME can play nearly anything you can remember, you truly have a wonderful preservation that surpasses any "recreation" I've seen come out in the last few years.
  • my first was a triangular shaped one, I think it was in the Telstar family?

    It came with a Pong, a tank battle, and a race game, and you rotated it to choose your game.

    Sound familiar?

    George
  • Too true. The hardware is very important. You gave one of the best examples, that Gauntlet I/II arcade cabinet with 4 controllers is just too cool.

    I've been meaning to build a cabinet myself. How do you feel about such efforts ? Obviously, not the same, but a good compromise ? It just (at least for me) really sucks to play these fine games sitting down in front of my desktop computer :(
  • MAME's success in emulating the most oddball hardware/software configurations imaginable is nothing short of heroic ---> And the Mame core is portable to damn near everything. Someone once said that Mame has been ported to everything but the common toaster, and that is almost correct. There are versions for everything from Linux to Amiga to Mac to... I think there is even a version for Palm and/or WindowsCE.
  • Links to home built arcade machines and plans:

    http://www.arcadeathome.com [arcadeathome.com] has message boards as well as links to homebuilt projects some including plans.

    http://www.arcadecontrols.com/arcade.htm [arcadecontrols.com] has message boards and is more focused on building the control panel from arcade parts easily purchased online. Also with examples.

    Vermifax

  • trolling for VeryAngryGuy. i love you VAG!!!!!

    ...send me an email dude... im working on a troll bot ;-)

    Ramen

    So here I am; The highpoint of my day.

    Lunch-time.

    No longer am I content with such concepts as female companionship, wealth or pleasure; I find all that I need in Ramen.

    The ceremony commences. I enter the break-room. A medley of microfiche machines contrast the smooth curve of coffee pots filled with steaming liquid. I turn, facing the altar. I bow to my god Maruchan, the smiley face god, for he brings me ramen in such a pure form.

    Cuidado: Caliente! screams out the sacred Japanese vessel in Spanish. I extend my hands, never taking, only receiving. Maruchan smiles upon me as he bestows the vessel upon me. I find it strangely cool. The delightful feel of a smooth woman's skin on my flesh. My Ramen.

    I approach the fiery cauldron of water. Pure springs splash down into the pot, warming and bubbling. Steaming with cleanliness. My Ramen meets the water in a joyous union.

    Maruchan smiles in heaven.

    and i have 24 dr. pepper cans stacked in my cube!
  • I have MAME and love it....I have gotten to the 3rd level of Tron and gotten to maybe around 10 or 11 on Discs of Tron....its so nice to play these games....but I was truly overjoyed when I went to COSI....they have *takes a breath* Pac-Man Asteroids Space Invaders Space Harrier Atari Football Defender and a few more... Its simply wonderful playing these old games....I truly think game designers back then were better then quite a few we have now. In closing....get MAME...play the old games....and if you can...save a real arcade game....its the least we nerds can do to preserve the good old days. -Sarkdas (How sweet it is!)
  • I can vouch for this one trick pony known as pong.

    I have one.

    Yes, I'm a dork. No, I don't know if it works.
  • OH DANGIT I FORGOT TO MAKE IT PLAIN TEXT AGAIN!

    -Sarkdas (I need to remember theres a selecter there)
  • What will be the abandoned and obsolete games of tomorrow ?

    Today's networked games.

    I've been wondering, what will happen to the Half-Life (TFC, cstrike), Quake 3, EverQuest games in the future ?
    These games are very popular today, but maybe in a couple of years they will not be supported and you won't be able to play them ? Specially EverQuest, when they shut down their servers, how would you play it ?

    Are these the next type of games to be resurrected by a future MAME like engine ?
  • Yea! What I really want is one of those two-player Pac Man tables they used to have at Pizza joints! That would be a nice addition to the living room. :)
  • I agree, the music from some of those games (TMNT and Contra stick out in my mind the most) was excellent, still is. Does anyone know of a project which would let you listen to the music from a game without actually loading the game itself? That would be excellent to have some of those tunes to listen to while you are working :)

  • Re:And Everything Old is New Again (Score:3)

    by dsplat ( 73054 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:30AM (#945231)
    Not only does this mean my kids will get to play all the great games I grew up on, but it also looks like this is the first step towards Vernor Vinge's idea of a massive database of source code which could be used and modified in the future to really do anything we wanted. (He explains this a bit better in his novel 'A Deepness in the Sky').


    Actually, when I read A Deepness In the Sky (nominated for a Hugo this year, BTW) I thought of open source. In almost the same thought, I remembered Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust [acm.org]. I hope someone (RMS maybe) has copies of gcc and login that have never been compiled with uninspected patches.
  • I remember seeing an exhibition of old video games at the museum of the moving image in london. They explained that they had seen so much in the way of old movies which had been lost because nobody had taken care of them that they had made a deecision to start collecting and archiving video games also.

    It's a shame the museum itself has closed down - I hope the collection is still maintained though.
  • Even better, Pong was originally built with an oscilloscope. There was not really any discrete logic. I had an optional project in one of my electrical engineering classes that consisted of building pong on an oscilloscope with no digital logic.
  • WOW ! Now that could save me a lot of time ! Great link.

    But $2,000 ??? This is going to be a hard sell for my wife :-(
  • <A HREF="http://www.vaps.org">VAPS</A> The Video Arcade Preservation Society is what
    it is all about. I mean it is not easy work to
    obtain and preserve an old stand up but it very
    very worth it. If you look hard you won't have to
    pay more then a few hundred dollars, although
    shipping can be a big hassle.
  • The most amazing thing about the old classic video games is how they differed from one another, in comparison to alot of today's games...

    Maybe it's been a long time since I went into an arcade, but it seems a lot of the games today are either simulation games (Racing or Flight Sim), or 1v1 fighting games (Tekken, MK, SF)... I remember when I was younger, I wanted to play every game in the arcade, but as I got older, I started focusing on Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats...

    Whatever happened to the Ikari Warriors, 1942, the Double Dragons, Crystal Castles, Guantlents, Karnov's, Russian Attacks, Robocops? Are they still out there? I think MAME's idea is a great one, especially for me, but is there a limit to its emulation power? Does anyone know where one can read up on this?

    The great thing is the old games are sometimes just as challenging as the new games... I remember getting a bigger rush beating a level in the original Star Wars game, then beating D Maul in Power Battles...

    Does anyone share the same feelings?

  • Last I checked, xmame didn't support drawing on the root window. Pity, since I think it would be very cool to have some of these video games as my screensavers via xscreensaver [jwz.org]

    Does anyone know if this has changed, or how hard it would be to get a "-root" option to xmame?

  • Not MAME, but an emulator written in Java ...

    http://web.utanet.at/nkehrer/main.html#Java Arcade Emulator

    I've only tried Donkey Kong, and it's pretty good. The sound is a bit off, but that's probably just limitations on the old .au file sound mechanism (Java 1.0.X). Newer VMs should fix this.

  • THE classic video game (Score:5)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:37AM (#945239) Homepage
    SPACE WAR can be played right now right here [mit.edu] (if you have Java) - it runs the original PDP-1 code in a Java emulator. Story of it's development in early 60's here [enteract.com]

    (Thanks JL)
  • Build your own cabinet? Great. But if you're going to sacrifice an existing classic cabinet, make sure its something that nobody is going to want. Convert a Galaga into a MAME cabinet (as mentioned in the story)? Well, you've just screwed a collector. Convert a Bad Dudes into a MAME cab? You've just done the world a favor. :)
  • VAPS [vaps.org] The Video Arcade Preservation Society is what it is all about. I mean it is not easy work to obtain and preserve an old stand up but it very very worth it. If you look hard you won't have to pay more then a few hundred dollars, although shipping can be a big hassle. Opps, needs to be HTML formatted, tags to text does not do links :{p.
  • Noooooo....!

    Somebody moderate this down! www.mame,dk [www.mame.dk] is the greatest site out there, and I don't want 'Them' to find out about it and shut it down!

    Seriously though, if you like MAME, you'll love mame.dk

  • Abadox for the NES..
    The game music rocked, especially the intro movie.
    It's a damn shame the game sucked so badly.

    You could always record the music from the emulator and compress to .mp3...
  • I was shocked at the MAME page to see just how many arcade games there were in the early 1980s that I never saw in a 7-11 or arcade. Many of them are quite original and challennging.

    Now only if getting uncorrupted MAME roms was easier and MAME32 didn't lock up every 5 minutes,

  • Re:No CPU, no Pong (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've done a little programming for MAME a while back, and I'd sure would like to see Pong, Breakout, or other discrete componet games enulated. It can be done, but one needs the schematic of the original machine. If anyone has access to schematics for these types of games (such as may be found in a service manual), don't hesitate to scan them in and make them available.
  • Hey ! Bad dudes was cool when I played it as a kid ;)

    I'd probably wouldn't buy a cabinet from a "classic" game, but one of the more generic ones. (you know, like the plain white ones that are used for any game).

    The fun part would be decorating it, with pictures of "classic" games.
  • I believe, if memory serves, that Pong comes "built-in" to the current version of MAME. No ROM required.

  • A wife? You have no business reading /. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward


    You can't be a techno-geek if you have a wife. Real techno-geeks consume too much time exploring oportunities for regular expressions rather than meeting women. They don't have wives unless they have parlayed their skills into a lucrative and cushy job that affords them plenty of free time and fancy cars that some women find attractive. If that were the case for this poster, however, said trophy-wife wouldn't be able to control the purse strings over the purchase of this techno-geek holy grail.
  • It's been awhile since I've played with mame (xmame), but what I really liked was finding out the internals of those old games and poking around in the memory. With Mame you can set watches on memory locations in a pretty cool way, and it allows you to change memory as the game runs. This allows for some hardcore cheetin'!

    Set up a watch for when your deflector shield in the old Atari vector graphics Star Wars game gets hit, then fly straight through fireballs & towers without taking damage. Or give yourself powerups in other games. I finally got past that old Nintendo Punch-Out game, and without using $10 in quarters!

    cheetin' like crazy

  • I disagree - while the ROMs may be gone, the sites themselves are still quite good.

    --

  • If you want to get music out of the NES, I know there is a plugin for winamp which works nicely for nsf files, which are just the sound samples ripped from the rom. Here [ncsu.edu] it is. Something like this for arcade games, now... that would be sweeeeeet (doing poor cartman impression)
  • Although it doesn't really say anywhere, I am assuming that the Kevin Poulson referred to here is the phone phreak god of the 80's. Man, when I was young(er) I worshipped that guy...
  • Here's a thought someone online mentioned recently. A freind of his was thinking of buying a bunch of old arcade machines and opening a "classic arcade." I was think that, what with 80's nostalgia and all (or has that died out?) that an acrade sporting classic machines, some period music, and so on would be a hit. I was thinking that this was a pretty neat idea. And, of course, you could also perserve pinball machines, which simply can't be preserved the MAME way. So, are there any places out there that are classic arcades? I hear a lot about people having a few games in their basements... but what about places you can actually go and play? (hopefully still for a quarter, unlike the $0.50 - $1.00 that some places charge these days).

    Classic games do seem to pop up some odd places, though.

    There's a pretty large arcade place north of Boston that has some classic games sitting forlorn in a back area. I forget what they had, specifically, but they didn't have my all-time favorites (Galaxian and Spy Hunter). A few seeme to be busted, as well. Maintainence must be a pain.

    Then there was the Holiday Inn in Iowa I was in last year, which had Tron and a few other classics.

    Oh, and the obligatory "mame rocks" comment: It's great fun to recall a game I saw, way way back in a dinky little arcade in New Hampshire, and be able to play it within a few minutes of hunting around (Tail Gunner, specifically). If only other aspects of my mis-spent youth could be summoned up so easily...

  • Copyright is not a right, it is a privelege (Score:3)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @11:26AM (#945266)
    Of course, assorted evil companies are trying to control these games and it is their right to do so.

    It disburbs me to see how effective pro-intellectual property propoganda has been -- they have convinced most of us to think in their terms, without our even realizing it.

    Copyright is a misnomer. It isn't a right, it is a privelege which our government has granted various authors, publishing houses, software enterprises, etc. A privelege which they look upon as a right, and have convinced most of the rest of us is their "right." It is a privelege which has been sorely abused in the last century and will be abused even more in the years to come.

    Losing our digital heritage is just one cost this privelege is exacting from our society.

    Movies are decaying, by the time they enter the public domain many of them are unrecoverable, lost forever.

    The same is often true of other media as well -- recordings which go out of print and are never released (or recordings which were never made, of concerts for example, except by fans doing so illegally).

    Restricted copy priveleges are costing our culture our digital, cinematic, and musical heritage, all to protect the revinue streams of Disney, Time-Warner, and their ilk.

    Still think we have a government "by the people, for the people?"
  • Yes, he's the same guy but his name is Poulsen

    goddamn, for a guy who spent two years as an English major I sure can't spell names... one of these days I'm going to get around to correcting my misspell of Bill Gosper's name in my .sig.

    He's a really cool guy with a lot of neat stories to tell!

    no doubt. I used to think I was pretty hot shit cos I could get LD off of elevator emergency phones and I could use my $10 EdTel ball cap and toolbelt to get into PBX rooms.... Then I saw America's Most Wanted. Pretty humbling...

  • I actually yanked my Nintendo out of retirement and sampled the game music to Abadox and Contra..

    Nice to know you can do it without the hardware though!
  • That's right -- use any arcade game supported by XMame [mame.net] as an XScreensaver [jwz.org] or in your root window (aka "wallpaper").

    (I submitted the patch way back on Nov.8th 1999 to XMame & didn't get credit, but it was trivial...so no fuss. Read the man page for XScreensaver [jwz.org] and look at the text covering vroot.h. This is easy to do with other programs because -- duh -- the source is available.)

  • Yes, you can run XMame games using XScreensaver. I just posted a note about it here. [slashdot.org]

    Let me know if you need help setting it up, though there are some details in the release notes for XMame.

  • I was going to write this in as an Ask Slashdot, but it seemed a little small.

    Does anyone know if you can purchase the rights to old video games? I was just thinking of buying my favorite NES game and putting it in the public domain or something. Any idea how much that would cost? Would that even happen?

    In my opinion it's a great way to legalize the whole ROM thing. Hopefully the old games wouldn't cost too much.

    Is this even worth considering? Anyone? :)
  • A nice article, if a little out of date, but with one discordant note at the end. I was very worried to see a, rather throwaway, reference at the end to "taking a Galaxians or defender cab and putting a PC inside". Now, we all know that MAME cabs are becoming more and more popular - but this tendancy to destroy the very thing that MAME is trying so hard to preserve is absolutely flabberghasting.

    A little story to illustrate my point. About two months ago I was browsing loot (UK free ads paper) and found an ad for a "1979 asteroids tabletop" in good condition. I rang the bloke up and was told "The game didn't work, but it's alright, I ripped it out and I've fitted a Playstation in it - it's lovely" (or words to that effect). Quite frankly, words fail me.

    Please, please, please, if you have an original cab (even if it doesn't work - especially if it doesn't work!) try and resist the temptation to drill a few extra holes in the control panel and fit a PC inside it. Get it working! Or, if you don't fancy the challenge, find someone else to take it off your hands and keep it dedicated! http://www.vaps.org is as good a place as any to start.

    Good condition dedicated cabs are already as rare as hen's teeth, and this kind of practice amounts to barbarism.

    This has been a public service annoucement. Normal bickering may now resume...
  • Actually, I thought that the Atari Video Computer System (aka Atari 2600) and Magnavox Odyssey predated Intellivision by some time. The intellivision wasn't in wide release until 1980.

    In fact, Magnavox patented the concept of the home video game system. Atari reportedly licensed this patent at a very low fee. Magnavox later realized their mistake, and demanded hefty royalties from Mattel. Mattel's legal department thought the patent would never stand up in court...but it did, leaving Mattel on the hook for a few megabucks in damages.

    Incidentally, if you want to talk about limited system resources...the Intellivision used a GI CP1610 16-bit microprocessor running at about 0.9 MHz (no, that's not a typo, less than one megahertz), a display resolution of 160x96 at 16 colors, about 1K of RAM total, and a few K of ROM containing an elementary "operating system." Despite those limitations, they were able to make some very compelling games...

    A good source of info about Intellivision is the Blue Sky Rangers [webcom.com] page, created by the programmers who wrote many of the Intellivision games. Recommended.

    Eric
    --

  • Not exactly instant gratification; though if it was instant grafitication, the owners of new, expensive games would be motivated to sue it out of existence to avoid losing sales to it.

    This way consumers looking for a quick arcade fix without much hassle will go to the game shop and buy the latest first-person shooter for their PlayStation, while the arcade trainspotters whose interest lies in the historical value of these old games will jump through the requisite hoops. The games' corporate owners are more likely to sue ROM traders if they're running a mass consumer-oriented operation than if they're just geeky hobbyists catering to the anorak brigade.
  • I strongly applaud the Techno-archivists saving our videogaming heritage. These games are pure history - Diablo II, Quake III, Half-Life, all started out with Space Invaders and a plumber jumping over barrels. MAME's ROMs, as corny as it sounds, are living history of how we got to an age of 3D polygonal mapping and Direct X version-whatever.

    When I find an old arcade game in some out-of-the-way-place, it's a reminder of so many things - how I got to be a programmer, how far we've come, what stood up over time, the challenges faced in the day. It's history with bits and bleeps.

    It's a shame that there are copyright concerns over this - it certainly shows that copyright law needs to be strongly considered and re-evaluated. Certainly there's no malice and no profit involved in MAME sales and ROM copying.

    Technology is transitory these days, and preserving history and information is of utmost importance - especially when media change (anyone use 5 1/4 disks anymore?).
  • I'm not separating; I'm distinguishing. It's a natural distinction, since the constitutional mandate for copyrights perceives two benefits secured thereby: the benefit to individual authors/inventors for the protection of their works and the benefit to society at large by encouraging authors/inventors to produce works. If, however, Congress's current enactments prevent society from receiving the fruits of their half of the agreement, then there are severe constitutional issues afoot.
  • Regarding where it started at - actually a game of Pong-like was set up at one time that was played on an occilliscope - mid to late 60's (can't remember who or when - I just know it was a little before Bushnell, Atari and PONG) - it was called something like electronic tennis or something - not sophisticated in any manner, hard wired, and very ugly - but that would be probably the beginning of video games...

    As for 5.25 disks? Yeah - I use them still - have an old TRS-80 CoCo 2 and Tandy CoCo 3 sitting right next to me, with an FD-502 5 1/4 disk drive for programs - still works like a champ!
  • ...Then do it! Maybe it may never run on another machine in it's current form - but maybe someone with a masochistic bent might want to convert it to a newer language (say, C or something) - just for the experience. Worse case scenario, putting it out on the Net will keep it alive (if done right), a little bit of extra code to help teach the future...

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