Internet Archive Launches Arcade of Classic Games In the Browser 94
A reader tips news that the Internet Archive has launched the "Internet Arcade," a collection of over 900 arcade games from the '70s, '80s, and '90s that are free to play in an emulated, browser-based environment. The Arcade makes use of JavaScript Mess, which the crew at the Archive has been working on for several years.
Obviously, a lot of people are going to migrate to games they recognize and ones that they may not have played in years. They'll do a few rounds, probably get their @$%^& kicked, smile, and go back to their news sites. A few more, I hope, will go towards games they've never heard of, with rules they have to suss out, and maybe more people will play some of these arcades in the coming months than the games ever saw in their "real" lifetimes. And my hope is that a handful, a probably tiny percentage, will begin plotting out ways to use this stuff in research, in writing, and remixing these old games into understanding their contexts.
Sweet!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sweet!! (Score:5, Funny)
Goodbye productivity!!
You can really say this with a straight face while surfing slashdot?
Re:Sweet!! (Score:5, Funny)
But he produced a first post!
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i've made the mistake of playing Street Fighter 2. i had such fond memories of the game from childhood. some things are just better left as memories.
i wonder how i'm going to perceive today's "realistic" 3d games in 10 years.
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Re:Sweet!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it interesting that my kids, who are used to playing the newest and prettiest editions of the Tekken series, still go back to Street Fighter 2 Hyperfighting. They weren't even alive when it came out and have no nostalgic feelings towards it, so clearly the game has got something to it which stands the test of time.
Re:Sweet!! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it does. Her name is Chun-Li.
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While there was plenty of crap some of the best ones really do stand the test of time.
Personally I rather Like Street Fighter II Championship Edition. Good balance, special moves possible to master, etc. Robotron is another excellent one but requires a dual joystick. There's something about the control technique of that game (one stick to move, one to fire in the direction of your choice) which is incredibly absorbing.
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Re:Sweet!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I felt the same way when I re-watched some episodes of Voltron on Netflix. I remembered an exciting, top notch animated show. I saw cheesy dialogue and plot holes that you could pilot a giant space robot through. There are somethings that you can relive the glory of - that stand the test of time - and other things that just are better left in your memory.
Re:Sweet!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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The same thing happened when my boys and I watched some 80's He-Man episodes. I began to cringe at how bad they were but my boys were just enjoying them too much. They didn't care that the animation was subpar or the dialog was cheesy. Their enjoyment tempered my reaction and made the entire experience more enjoyable.
Re:Sweet!! (Score:4, Funny)
Five manned aircraft inexplicably in the shape of cats that can unite into one giant sword-weilding robot somehow synchronously controlled by five people? I don't possibly see how you could be disillusioned by watching that show as an adult.
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Interestingly, it wasn't the "manned lion robots form humanoid robot with sword" part. I'm willing to suspend disbelief for that component. It was bad dialog, character motivation that seemed to be "the plot needs us to do X so let's do X", and unexplained, story changing events (they break out of a prison on the enemy's planet and somehow wind back up on their own planet. How? Don't worry about that... they just did.). I didn't even get to the "Why don't they use the big sword as their first weapon si
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Well, that was at least partly tongue-in-cheek. I had my own jump the shark moment with GI Joe, which I watched devotedly as a child. I caught an episode as a teenager and watched out of curiosity. "Fire at will," Zoltan said, and one of his flunkies responded, "Uh, which one's Will?" I tried to remember if the series was always that dumb, or if the new version had gotten worse (the rest of the episode just went downhill from there) but I decided I didn't really want to know.
You had another post about He-Ma
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The Alone in the Dark remake on the Xbox 360 tries to recapture that same sense of "why the fuck am I still playing this" from the very start.
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The 3D games become worst with age because of advances in technology.
The 2D games, on the other hand, age much more gracefully since there's a limit to what you can do in 2D, apart from adding lighting and glowing effects. I can still look at Super Metroid and think it's fine, but Zelda on the Nintendo 64 looks like crap by comparison. And Zelda is newer than Super Metroid.
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Well, consider that you're comparing the first generation of 3D games against the last generation (in their heyday, that is) of 2D games. It's not really a fair comparison. Personally, as I move away from the awful first generation of each, I reach a "good enough" threshold, where I'm no longer distracted by the bad graphics. Halo on the original Xbox still looks reasonably good. I've recently been playing Final Fantasy X in HD on the PS3, and it looks great for being two console generations behind.
Besi
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i've made the mistake of playing Street Fighter 2. i had such fond memories of the game from childhood. some things are just better left as memories.
Most of the arcade games of yore don't translate well to a PC.
The controllers are very different, and not stationary. This makes a huge difference.
And for most ports, the input is also severely laggy compared to a console where the inputs were generally hardwired in and would be guaranteed[*] to be read once every fixed frequency cycle.
[*] Apart from the second and cheaper version of Pac-Man consoles, which was horrible in its control lag, killing the tactic of standing still by moving the stick back and
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two things, a) virtualsupernes & others use roms without permission to use them and b) the emulator is written in java, not javascript..
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Leonardo DiCaprio, is that you?
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I think I broke my keyboard playing Track and Field.
How long will it last... (Score:5, Interesting)
Roms are being deleted all the time on the internet, I know...because I've constantly tried to find the original Arcade Pac Man roms, but the copyrights are still in effect as various companies sell retrogames themselves, which they hold the license to.
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Re: How long will it last... (Score:4, Informative)
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They may end up in a sort of limbo, with nobody left to actually sue for copyright infringement.
If nobody can sue, it's effectively public domain.
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When a company goes out of business, it is because it owes more than it has. Those debts are (partially) paid off by selling the company's assets, which includes copyrights. This is the job of the receivers. So either the receivers sold the copyrights to some 3rd party to help clear the debts, or else the copyrights were transferred to some bank as part payment. Either way, the copyrights belong to *someone* now.
OTOH this is the Internet Archive so I'm assuming they either have permission or (somehow) c
Re: How long will it last... (Score:5, Informative)
Which is one big reason why I advocate for shorter copyright terms. Let's say you remembered a great, somewhat obscure game from the 80's and wanted to remake it. You wanted to do it properly, however, and get permission from the copyright owners. The company that owned the copyright is likely long since bankrupt and following the ownership of the copyright can be murky at times. You might even locate one company, get permission, and find yourself sued afterwards by a second company who claims ownership. Often, two companies will claim copyright and it will be up to the courts to untangle the mess. If the courts have trouble with this, what hope does your average producer of content have to find the right company.
Now, if copyright expired 14 years after registration (with a one-time 14 year renewal), like it originally was set, you could be sure that any game from 1986 or before was public domain. As for games after 1986, you would know who renewed the copyright under 14 years ago so you would only need to sift through 13 years or less of copyright transferals - instead of 30+ years now.
A 14+14 copyright system would drastically reduce the number of orphan works out there.
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Hmm... let's see: the way it would work is that only the original creator could live off the royalties, but his heirs would have to actually do something productive. Sounds good to me!
Indeed! The cost to society of all that content not being available like it sh
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Hmm... let's see: the way it would work is that only the original creator could live off the royalties, but his heirs would have to actually do something productive. Sounds good to me!
Who is the original creator of the movie Top Gun?
What you said sounds great when talking about a book that one person wrote at home, it falls apart a bit when you move that to movies and other works that involved a lot of people and a lot of money to make.
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Everyone who worked on it and negotiated themselves to get a cut of the royalties (as opposed to a salary).
How so? It would not be any sort of disaster for the folks involved to get royalties for "only" 28 years instead of for life.
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You're thinking of the people who might be getting royalties...
Top Gun is likely still owned by Paramount and they are earning the lions share of money from it...
Now, the question becomes... A VHS copy from 1989 might well become public domain, but what about a 2009 Blu-Ray copy?
Real work and real money goes into taking older films and making nice pretty high def versions of them.
Is the old copy public domain but the new copy protected?
If so, I don't know how much is gained, but fair enough. If not, you w
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First of all, who cares? Even leaving aside the fact that somebody would inevitably put a laserdisc rip up on Bittorrent, Blu-Ray does not make Top Gun a better movie any more than colorizing Casablanca or "special editioning" Star Wars would.
Second, and more importantly, think of the oppo
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First of all, who cares?
I do, Top Gun was shot in 35mm film, VHS and even LaserDisc are bad copies of that... Blu-Ray is closer, 4K will be as close to a perfect copy as we'll get (since 35MM film has about 4,000 lines of resolution, give or take since it is analog medium).
We wouldn't even be watching Casablanca if your idea was in place, it wouldn't have been put on VHS to begin with, since copies would be free.
While I get the idea, I understand the problem with copyright being "forever", just cutting it off at the knees isn't t
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TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS is "cutting it off at the knees?" That isn't even remotely reasonable.
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Meh, you act as if your view is gospel and anything else is just stupid.
Think about that for a minute...
Is 28 years more or less reasonable than 18, or 38?
Then we have to address revisions to works. My example, I believe, was quite reasonable for VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray.
Gone With The Wind was expensive to restore and redo for Blu-Ray:
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/... [blu-ray.com]
If you are being honest, you'll take 5 minutes and read that, the work that was done to make the modern copy look so good was not cheap.
How abou
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If having the old stuff available meant that new stuff wasn't watched, then Netflix would kill movies being released in the Box Office. After all, why watch the latest movie when there's a ton of older movies available? The answer, of course, is that the old content being in Public Domain would spur on more creativity. For example, Ghostbusters was released in 1984. It would be in the public domain. And Ghostbusters 2 - released in 1989 - would enter the Public Domain in 3 years.
This would mean that a
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For example, Ghostbusters was released in 1984. It would be in the public domain. And Ghostbusters 2 - released in 1989 - would enter the Public Domain in 3 years.
This would mean that a fan could make a movie based off of Ghostbusters (perhaps with new actors taking over the roles or as a "next generation of Ghostbusters" movie).
You're confusing copyright with trademark.
Just because Ghostbusters enters the public domain doesn't mean you can make a movie called Ghostbusters 3. The Ghostbusters name is trademarked.
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Politics is the art of the possible. There are big-money companies that really, really don't want some properties to go into the public domain... and I don't think it will be possible to make a simple scheme like 14+14 in the face of their opposition.
I think the best we can hope for, the best we can realistically obtain in the current political environment, is to allow copyright holders to renew forever, but absolutely require that renewal (nothing automatic).
So Disney will pay people to meticulously track
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A 14+14 copyright system would drastically reduce the number of orphan works out there.
How many 28 year old games can you name that are by companies that still are around?
I think it would make more sense to put a requirement that you have to make the game available to keep the copyright.
If you don't make any money of it there is no need for you to prevent people from using it anyway so you might as well let it free.
It will also mean that you don't have a long gap between the moment it was purchasable and when it is possible for enthusiasts to archive it and keep it available.
The last part is
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Actually, a company can go out of business just because the owners want to close the doors.
But in either case the IP held by the company before it closes is still held by someone - the original owners or the entity that buys the assets to satisfy a debt.
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When a company goes out of business, it is because it owes more than it has. Those debts are (partially) paid off by selling the company's assets, which includes copyrights. This is the job of the receivers.
Bankruptcy is only one of the ways a company can go out of business. A company can also be dissolved while solvent, where surplus assets are terminated without transfer of ownership. This is not uncommon for assets that carry a risk or a future liability.
I have gone through one company dissolution myself.
Re: How long will it last... (Score:1)
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come on, look at the list. defender, outrun and a few others.
but that outrun is there, but not other system16(or 16+16 whatever) games... ..I think they asked for permission to use these?
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Umm.... you could always download a full MAME romset via bittorrent.
36+ gigs, it's how I got the entire MAME set.
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Did they even TRY to actually secure the rights to any of these games?
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...before the copyright holders come to collect?
Roms are being deleted all the time on the internet, I know...because I've constantly tried to find the original Arcade Pac Man roms, but the copyrights are still in effect as various companies sell retrogames themselves, which they hold the license to.
Get on the Usenet, there is a very active MAME newsgroup and request your needs; they will be met. -Not Google Groups they are text only.
Myself I use Forte Agent (Windows) as an e-mailer and to access the UseNet. (1.93 as it's the best version, you need to run Stunnel for SSL, and place Agent as a DEP exception) versions after 1.93 you don't need to do those steps but have a folder setup that sucks, and will load html pages (I only do text).
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(I only do text).
I speak of E-mail, stops the beacons.
Wasn't this already available someplace else? (Score:1)
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I'm pretty sure I've played MAME emulated games online in the past ....
Of course. MAME started out as MS-DOS FOSS back in 1997 The interesting part in this web arcade is that the emulation is done in javascript. Back in 97, javascript was little more than a toy language for making animations in websites.
Oh, and its obviously legal to play them now.
MAME requires dumps of the original arcade roms which can generally not be aquired legally.
But sure, otherwise, anyone who wants old arcades has already known how to get them. Almost everything that matters has been pefectly
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Back in 97, javascript was little more than a toy language for making animations in websites
Some things never change :p
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Whereas today it's a toy language for making "immersive content" websites more annoying.
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Whereas today it's a toy language for making "immersive content" websites more annoying.
But on the upside with java you can play any MAME game on your cellphone. Bubble Bobble, Moon patrol, lots of fun. The MAME player is in the Google store, it's versions that keep changing that keep you busy.
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Oh, and its obviously legal to play them now.
How come? Has the Internet Archive negotiated permission with all the copyright holders for all these games?
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I thought it would be too bold to do such a thing without permission, have so much publicity and not worry about going to jail!
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In Java and Flash? Yeah.
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You're railing at Soulskill, but if you follow TFL down to an actual game you'll see the that they're referring to JSMESS (right or wrong) as the emulator used on the page itself...
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"emulated in JSMAME, part of the JSMESS software package."
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Again, down to an actual game [archive.org].
Re:Get your naming right, Soulskill (Score:5, Funny)
Relationship between MESS and MAME codebases (Score:2)
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No, in fact you can compile MAME with support for all of those using the same code as MAME, look up 'UME'
Planet of Zoom.... (Score:3)
Can hardly be called the Internet Archive anymore (Score:1)
"vector games are an issue"... (Score:3)
...so no Battlezone. :( There was ONE GAME that I played obsessively and mastered, and it's not there.
No, wait, there was one raster game I liked, but it didn't make much of a splash in the real world -- Reactor [wikipedia.org]. It's not there, either.
900 games, 850 of which I've never heard of, and the two that I look for aren't there. I want a refund.
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Here you go [youtube.com].
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main page: http://archive.org/download/MA... [archive.org]
Battlezone: http://archive.org/download/MA... [archive.org]
Reactor: http://ia601001.us.archive.org... [archive.org]
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Tac/Scan, Quantum, Star Trek are there. There may be others.
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Defender
Dig Dug
Frogger
Marble Madness
Millipede
Missile Command
Pretty damn cool. I might have to go home early from work.
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Even the marquees are in the wrong aspect ratio.
Similar project for emulators on iOS (Score:2)
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