Gaming Hacks

Play Arcade Games Without the Arcade

Unless you’ve been living in a classic-gaming bereft hobbit hole for the past few years, you’ve probably heard of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Nicola Salmoria started the project in late 1996 and early 1997. It’s since expanded to an immensely popular 100-person hydra. As the official MAME FAQ (http://www.mame.net/mamefaq.html) explains:

When used in conjunction with an arcade game’s datafiles (ROMs), MAME will more or less faithfully reproduce that game on a PC. MAME can currently emulate over 2,600 unique (and over 4,600 in total) classic arcade video games from the three decades of video games—’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and some from the current millennium. The ROM images that MAME utilizes are “dumped” from arcade games’ original circuit-board ROM chips. MAME becomes the “hardware” for the games, taking the place of their original CPUs and support chips. Therefore, these games are NOT simulations, but the actual, original games that appeared in arcades.

MAME’s advantages over the original hardware are obvious: you don’t have to deal with bulky boards that may or may not work with your extremely bulky arcade machine and won’t fit into your PC or portable PC-like devices. Even recent home conversions (or TV game versions; see [Hack #9] ) of classic titles aren’t necessarily perfect versions of the original, due to controller constraints if adapting to consoles or, in the case of TV games, adapted, not emulated, conversions.

MAME Basics ...