This is so neat .. 'Mame' http://www.mame32-roms.chessman21.com/ Free old Arcade Games. I'm sure some of you know about this ...
Yea, MAME is pretty cool. I have been useing it for over 10 years now. When I was overseas last year, this became a major distraction for me. I collected over 3,000 ROMS, everything from Gun Fight (Midway, 1975) to Metal Slug 3 (SNK, 2000). What I enjoyed most was how it let me play games that I have not seen in decades. My goal someday is still to get around to building a MAME Cabinet. My biggest hurdle here is in trying to decide how to do the actual panel. I have been looking at Doc's for the last year or so, and am thinking of doing a variation on this sometime next year. http://www.beersmith.com/mame/wiring.htm
The smart home platform I work on has an integrated MAME player which will run vic20, playstation, atari 5200, c64, famicon, coleco, laserdisk, vectrex etc... adds bookmarks (save) integrated joystick mapping, pause, and of course the ability to sling the game to any media director (tv) using "follow me". Thom has been doing a lot of work in games recently. He has emulators for everything now, and wrote a media tagger for the roms which downloads the cover art and info... which is neat.
MAME is just an Arcade Emulator. It stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. In short, it emulates the common arcade operating hardware, like JAMMA (which was the hardware standard that ran most of the games during the "Golden Age" from the mid 1980's until the mid 1990's. There are 2 things you need to emulate the games. First you need the emulator. Then you need to get the ROMs. These are ZIP files which hold the actual game code and extras (like sounds). ROMs are the tricky part. There are a handfull which have been released into the public domain. Exidy for example has released some of it's games for public domain (Car Polo, Circus, Crash, Fax, Fire One, Hard Hat, Rip Cord, Robot Bowl, Side Trak, Spectar, Star Fire, Targ, Teeter Torture, Top Gunner and Victory). Others fall into various areas, from orphan (companies out of business with nobody holding the rights), to abandonware (companies hold the rights but have not done anything with them for years or decades), or those which are still active (Pac-Man, most Atari games, Mortal Kombat, etc). The easiest way to start is probably to go looking on torrent sites for MAME collections. Most start at around 1 GB, and run up to 20 GB. My collection is over 3,000 games, and is around 7 GB. Many of the games are either various versions by the same company, clones by licensed companies, and even bootlegs (Dig-Dug and Zig-Zag, Mr. Do and Mr. Du). The thing you have to realize is that these are the actual original game ROMs. So it plays exactly like the original arcade, not like a port (think Pac-Man in the arcade Vs. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600). You also need to learn how the keys work. You actually have to hit a key to simulate putting in the coins! Emulation is a lot of fun, especially since these are games that are long out of the arcade. However, not every old game is available. Some are not available because there are no working machines to provide the ROMs from. Others used hard wired logic systems, so are impossible to emulate (Death Race). Then others use systems that are so individual that they have been unable to emulate them. This is generally the case for some obscure games, as well as games made after 2000. And there are a lot of other emulators out there. Atari 2600, GameBoy, Vectrix, Colico, Intellivision, even DAPHNE for the old LaserDisk games like Thayer's Quest and Dragon's Lair. And as Ctrl mentioned, old computer systems like the TI 99/4A, VIC-20, Atari 400/800, C-64, TRS-80, and others. I still use some of those myself. I keep a C-64 emulator so I can play MULE on occasion, and once got a TRS-80 emulator so I could play Death Maze 5000 for the first time in 30 years.
Emulator are great, but I prefer plying on the real thing. This is why I have in my collection the following system: Atari 800xl and 130xe C-64 Apple IIe 2x Amiga 1000 Amiga 2000 Atari 2600 Collecovision Sega Master System Playstation I, 2 & 3 Xbox Xbox 360 I also use Mame via the XBMC frontend on my HTPC.
Yeah, all you have to do is click on the link 'NEW Mame32 download v103b' Hit 'run' and then when the file finishes and you see it turn into saying "7 zip self-extracting archive," Change the default location to "my documents," so you know where it is.Then hit extract. When it's done, goto "my documents" and you will see the 'Mame' folder,go in there and scroll down until you see the orange arcade machine icon and right click on it and send it to your desktop (shortcut) .. After that, all you have to do is download the ROMS (games) and they have some on that same page on the left of the page scrolling all the way down the page. Just click on them and save those Roms in the "ROMS" folder that is located in 'Mame' folder that is in "my documents." After that, just hit the Mame icon you have on your desktop and you will see the games load up. On the left, you should click on "available games" because it will only list the ones you actually have. Once you pick a game to play by clicking on it, you usually have to hit "OK" 2 times on your keyboard,and after that,the number "5" usually gives you quarters (just hit it).. Then # 1 usually starts the game. The rest you will figure out, the arrow keys are self explanatory for control, also the ctrl button and alt button are used. The space bar is an uppercut for "punch out."
These games are not easy. I am lucky to get through 3 screens of space invaders . lol I know it's old but I like it. If you find a rom of space invaders that has sound, please let me know, I looked and they are all screwed up.
