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The only reason I can think of for having an open-source camera OS is so someone could port MAME to it.

Well I know (at least MAME) has the base ROM, then all of the alternatives listed, so you can play all of the variants, including the "pirate" variants.

Nephilium

can I hack it to run MAME?

This is simply not true. If you take a look at Kaillera it is in a questionable battle with MAME developers. MAME (open source - but no GPL) requires that derivative works open their source as well. But the Kaillera (two of the main Nullsoft guys) developers have not only refused to comply with MAME's license they've also perma-banned the MAME developers from Kaillera's forums.

This is not a group of people that like open source. Sure they liked fighting AOL, but they also like fighting open source.

Joseph Elwell.

This is simply not true. If you take a look at Kaillera it is in a questionable battle with MAME developers. MAME (open source - but no GPL) requires that derivative works open their source as well. But the Kaillera (two of the main Nullsoft guys) developers have not only refused to comply with MAME's license they've also perma-banned the MAME developers from Kaillera's forums.

This is not a group of people that like open source. Sure they liked fighting AOL, but they also like fighting open source.

Joseph Elwell.

And example of releasing multiple builds would be the MAME group.

MAME already runs on Mac/Linux/UNIX/BSD/Win32 anyway. Who needs crappy 3D remakes of old classic games when the originals are 100 times better, and can run emulated on 1/10 the hardware requirements? :)

http://www.mame.net/
http://www.mameworld.net/

and a lot of 10000in1 illegal (but very illegal) games from amule: search: ".nes" extension: nes

It would be pretty awesome if it could stream video off a network and into your TV in real time. Or even just to use as a monitor for your recording. (Though it would need some decent storage space.) Looks decent, even if a bit bulky it's acceptable camera size for me. I wonder if it's programmable, just get MAME on it like those DIgita OS cameras could do and you'd have a pretty geeked out hybrid going on. Hell, throw in an mp3 player too for good measure.

How about donkey kong instead

You can wire up a joystick and a few buttons to be used to interface an old keyboard into a MAME Machine's arcade control panel.

It would be great if new Japanese sit-at-style cabinets will be born of this effort (a starter jamma cabinet google search). If MAME could run on this cabinet, you could get the both the *newest* arcade-quality games and your old favorites from MAME.

Very interesting.

Get youself a copy of XMame

Rus

Wow, bullets that emulate old videogames?
http://www.mame.net/

Sweet, get me some that will emulate Space Invaders, so when I fire them they turn into giant white pixels.

(Yes, yes, sarcastic and pedantic. The mental picture amused me though. And I think the word you want is maim.)
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Diction ary&va=maim&x=0&y=0

QIX, I think I wasted most of my youth sitting in front of my C64 cussing at the damn squiggly thing. Simple, yet confounding. You know if there are any ports/clones of this floating around?

Why waste your time with a port or a clone? Play the C64 version on a Linux, Mac or Windows machine, or play the real thing on the same.

And of course MULE, the other game that kept me chained to the C64,

Yup, you definitely need this.

Some people are building MAME consoles, basically a PC and a TV in a cabinet, loaded with the MAME emulator software and arcade ROMs. Add the emulators for Nintendo etc. and it would be an awesome experience.

This game Poly-Play is fairly well known within the MAME community, as it is one of only three (of the thousands MAME supports) ROM games that are freely available! So, it is often one of the first games tried by a new MAME user.

Poly-Play is judged to no longer have a copyright at all, because it was state-developed and the old Soviet state no longer exists.

Another game is Robby Roto, a game whose programmer was ingenious enough to get a clause in his contract in which copyright control reverted to him after the game stopped selling! When this happened (unfortunately sooner than later, as the game was a flop), he got full copyright control of his ROM, and generously donated it for free non-commercial use.

The third game is Gridlee, a fun little game that is a favorite at California Extreme. I'm not sure of the story behind this one, but this ROM was also freed by the original developers of the game.

This game Poly-Play is fairly well known within the MAME community, as it is one of only three (of the thousands MAME supports) ROM games that are freely available! So, it is often one of the first games tried by a new MAME user.

Poly-Play is judged to no longer have a copyright at all, because it was state-developed and the old Soviet state no longer exists.

Another game is Robby Roto, a game whose programmer was ingenious enough to get a clause in his contract in which copyright control reverted to him after the game stopped selling! When this happened (unfortunately sooner than later, as the game was a flop), he got full copyright control of his ROM, and generously donated it for free non-commercial use.

The third game is Gridlee, a fun little game that is a favorite at California Extreme. I'm not sure of the story behind this one, but this ROM was also freed by the original developers of the game.

This game Poly-Play is fairly well known within the MAME community, as it is one of only three (of the thousands MAME supports) ROM games that are freely available! So, it is often one of the first games tried by a new MAME user.

Poly-Play is judged to no longer have a copyright at all, because it was state-developed and the old Soviet state no longer exists.

Another game is Robby Roto, a game whose programmer was ingenious enough to get a clause in his contract in which copyright control reverted to him after the game stopped selling! When this happened (unfortunately sooner than later, as the game was a flop), he got full copyright control of his ROM, and generously donated it for free non-commercial use.

The third game is Gridlee, a fun little game that is a favorite at California Extreme. I'm not sure of the story behind this one, but this ROM was also freed by the original developers of the game.

I was wondering about that, too, here's what I found:

A MAME status report from April 2000 states that "Martin Buchholz sent in a Poly-Play driver (the only arcade machine ever produced in GDR, the former East Germany) with thanks to Jürgen Oppermann, Volker Hann and the Videogame Museum in Berlin (especially to Jan-Ole Christian) - without them, the driver would not have been reality."

This German article elaborates on that a little bit. Basically, they analyzed existing hardware and built a MAME driver for it. That's what they do for other games, too - usually, however, implementing a platform will give you more than one box to emulate...
(The museum people were quite happy to have the MAME emulation, of course, because one of these days, the hardware is going to fail, and now they'll at least still have the games in working order.)

The second article also talks about four missing games: Their names are in the software and people in the comments section remember playing them, but none of the surviving machines seems to have the games.

Their names are:
"Der Gaertner" (The gardener)
"Im Gewaechshaus" (In the greenhouse)
"Hagelnde Wolken" (Hail clouds - apparently some kind of Space Invaders clone)
"Der Taucher" (The diver)

Jens

Why is it that you can walk up to any book store and pick up titles that were written centuries ago, or purchase movies that date as far back as 1912.. and yet you can't even play a game anymore that came out 5-7 years ago?

One might argue that it's due to technical reasons, but that's no excuse is it?

Why do we find ourselves donating our precious time hacking away at emulators and virtual machines when it should be the people who made the games in the first place that should be supporting them? Does the game industry hold their own products in so little regard that it has already decided that future generations can't enjoy them?

Sure, there's the odd overpriced nostalgia pack put out every now and then, but that's just a drop in the ocean.

I'm glad that some companies have figured this out! I love the latest and greatest games as much as anyone, but my heart still belongs to good old 2-D action games. Ah the memories of dimly lit arcades where you could go and bask in the warm glow of electronic sex, erm I mean video monitors...

Emulators like MAME and ZSNES are a blast when you just need a quick game to let off some steam or kill some time. When on the go the old Gameboy Advance really has you covered with tons of classic games available as well.

You buy games now that you can't play unless you pay your monthly subscription to the server.

Speak for yourself. I don't own any such games, and would never buy one. I don't know anyone that would even care about such a thing. Maybe some teenagers and 20-somethings are willing to buy that crap, but a lot of people aren't: many (most?) console games are not networkable, and many people have just given up on modern games altogether. Of course, it's hard to measure how many people are playing MAME games instead of the latest 1st-person shooter since MAME isn't sold and doesn't have retail sales figures, much like it's nearly impossible to know how many people have abandoned MS and are using Linux that they downloaded or got a free CD of.

If you enjoyed Every Extend, you might also enjoy Kenta Cho's Tumiki Fighters, A7Xpg, or my personal favorite, Parsec 47. Tumiki Fighters is a stylish shooter, where pieces of your battered enemies glom onto your ship; eventually, you become a behemoth that can't help but stumble into incoming fire. I love Parsec 47, because it brings me back to arcades during the early '80s. MAME does this in a nostalgic manner, but Parsec does a great job of overwhelming the player with bright, flashy, fun graphics. It's what I remember arcade games to be.

Cho's games are why I'll contend that smaller developers can still wow audiences with style -- Parsec's not art-centric-beautiful, the way Doom III is; it's just damned pretty.

I couldn't _believe_ that arcade games are running Windows these days!

Quite likely it's a sleazy arcade operator running MAME on a Windows box so he doesn't have to spring for an actual arcade machine.

Even more impressive (to me) is MAME for some digital cameras. That one took my by surprise. Still is pretty technically amazing to a peon like me.

Typical /. user:
"Let's see what platform I can port [Dope Wars|Linux|MAME] to..."

I can see some fun being had

That fun has been had, at your local arcade.

You can still enjoy it, as a matter of fact.

Yes, still using it running OS9 Level II under emulation, using xmame/xmess on a Linux system. I understand they also have a port to Windows too.

Robby Roto is the only PD rom.

Robby Roto is NOT a public domain rom. Its owner has made it available for non-commercial use. That is substantially different than public domain.

Gridlee has also been released by its owner under similar conditions. So that's number two. And as the copyright owner for East Germany's Polyplay seems to have disappeared completely, it is for all practical purposes public domain, as well.

Robby Roto is the only PD rom.

Robby Roto is NOT a public domain rom. Its owner has made it available for non-commercial use. That is substantially different than public domain.

Gridlee has also been released by its owner under similar conditions. So that's number two. And as the copyright owner for East Germany's Polyplay seems to have disappeared completely, it is for all practical purposes public domain, as well.

I guess it's not quite hacking, but there are a few digital cameras that run the Digita OS which allows you to write programs and scripts. OK other people do the hacking and I reap the benefits and I run MAME!

The MAME license specifies that MAME cannot be used for profit. There is a product thats intended for commercial use in JAMMA cabinets that has multiple games in it called Ultracade.

Lately I've pretty much felt the same way, but not just with games. Every year we've pretty much been seeing the same things coming out of both Hollywood, the music industry and the games industry.

I have a slightly older friend who has always gone to see the latest subtitled film, listened to Belgian house, and was into retro gaming before the concept had even been invented. I always used to take the P*** out of him!

The past year I've been buying a lot of oriental films in a big way, in particular I'm getting heavily into Korean cinema and when I haven't been trying to get Mame games working on a shuttle mini pc that's sat under my tv, I've been really into the indie games scene. Gametunnel and games from moonpod, pompom and sigma team have kept my gaming urges alive this year. They might not offer anything new, but at least they are games offering gameplay, rather than chasing the need of the masses to immerse themselves in a movie. I suppose once you've seen so much media of any time, you begine to crave somehting new.

It's not old age, just boredom. Thankfully, I haven't felt the need to get into Belgian trance music yet...

WITH MAME! And it works on Linux to boot!

If you don't have an arcade and still want to play the the 'original' ones you can easily emulate it with Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

For Unices there is the XMAME port, which do a great job.

If you don't have an arcade and still want to play the the 'original' ones you can easily emulate it with Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

For Unices there is the XMAME port, which do a great job.

Read the article. It comes with slimmed-down XP and can play PC games straight off the Best Buy shelf: "Obviously, you can play DVD movies, audio and video CDs, and PC games on the box." This means you get at least the entire Intellivision, NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, Sega Genesis, Super NES, N64, PS1, and GBA libraries in emulation, along with hundreds of emulated arcade games.

For those who want to play the original versions, all the KOF games are perfectly emulated in MAME and several other emulators such as Nebula or Kawaks.

Really sad that these games will be censored. Especially about Mai Shiranui's bouncing!

It's most likely just a front end that uses MAME for the most part, and NES, SNES, ATARI and SEGA emulators. For MAME alone there is over 3000 roms available. This store most likely was only selling the machine and emulator since it's illegal to sell 99.5% of ROMs. Usually the companies that created the company don't mind if you download them on your own (still not very legal), but selling them is out of the question. Unless of course he has licenses for every 7200 games, which I *really really* doubt.

I am not sure if this is a troll, but will respond anyway.

There is MAME for Win-32. Requires DOS commands to run the ROMs, but there are also plenty of MAME frontends for windows that are very GUI and let you adjust all your settings and organize your ROMs and point and click to run a game.

Go here to get it, and look for the FAQ on finding frontends. I have used a few, and they vary. Forgot which I liked best.

Of course the targets of these remakes are the old school player, don't think the palyer of the newest generations will lose they sleep for Space Harrier or Golden Axe... well the point is that any player who ever had a nostalgic crisis already got and installed Mame or just another emulator out of the zillions available on the net...

of course there's the rom's IP issue... but well, I can't really figure out how many people would erase the rom of Golden Axe and buy the "slap in the face" PS2 remake.

(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

IANAL, but it surely seems they have just legalized MAME and its many emulative friends.

Take a look at gxmame for a really cool and very pretty Linux frontend for xmame.

And with xmame, the Linux/Unix Mame version, you can use

-[no]skip_disclaimerSkip displaying the disclaimer screen

-[no]skip_gameinfo Skip displaying the game info screen

on the commandline, or specify these options in your xmamerc file.

PDA functionality is usefull and will be used virtually in all personal devices. And some of those devices will be far away from being called "a cell phone": watches, MP3 players, cameras.

Watches? Yes and yes. MP3 players? Not quite yet, but I'd expect it soon. Cameras? Close enough.

Also, I am sure PDA functionality will expand from wearable devices to... drivable one?

Once again, yes, yes, and yes. Granted, most of the items I've listed aren't exactly PDAs, but they all have some PDA-type behaviors or at the very least the capability or promise of PDA features.

• CygWin. The Linux-like environment for Windows.
  Mozilla. Use this for mail, news, and browsing if you like.
  Firebird. for FAST browsing.
  WS FTP Light. A FREE, FTP client that works great.
  Filezilla. which is TRULY free and does sftp as well.
  PuTTY. a free SSH client for Windows.
  TTSSH. is a much less clunky ssh client than PuTTY.
  iXplorer. freeware secure FTP client
  VNC hello!? remote controll software.
  Tight VNClike the original, only FAST.
  GNU-EMacs for Windows. just trust me ;).
  Dev-C++a free C++ compiler for those who can't afford VS.
  NetHack. as someone here said, you MUST have NetHack installed on everything...
  Free-AV.free Anti-Virus software for Windows, (mandatory these days). or
  AVG Free edition. another free Anti-Virus software for Windows.
  Zonealarm. my favorite Personal Firewall,, really!. or
  Kerio. another firewall that some seem to like. or
  Sygate. yet another firewall. whatever floats your boat.
  Boingo. to see where the closest hotspot is, hehe.
  OpenOffice 1.1 the Microsoft Office KILLER :) {really!}
  Winamp 2.x for audio/video usage in Windows, stay away from the new one :).
  Mark's Adding Machine is much better than the Windows calculator.
  SpyBot Search & Destroy The best Ad-ware / Spyware removal tool we've found, "IE is unusable without".
  Ad-Aware another spy-ware app "alas poor Windoze."
  Trillian a favorite IM, since we're all chatters @ heart. or
  GAIM since trillian hogs resources, "bad piggy!".
  Gimp image creation/editing. Who needs Photoshop anyway?
  EnZip freeware Zip Utility, Stop nagging you WinZip!!
  Iview is a great little image viewer. or
  Irfanviewone of the best image viewer out there for Windows.
  Audacity is a great little sound editor.
  Virtual Dub. a great video editor.
  cDex gotta rip those cd's for the RIAA!
  MAME for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. and finally
  XPantiSPY since XP is E-V-I-L.

And FINALLY, don't trust me! Trust the experts;

Go to the Pricelessware site maintained by the alt.comp.freeware Usenet group.
The

I can only give you my top 10 and hope it ties in with other peoples:

Anti Virus - AVG - Updated regularly and free for non commercial use - FREE
Browser - Mozilla - A stable and standards compliant browser, and not tied in with the OS unlike IE! - FREE
Compression - PowerArchiver - Freeware ZIP/RAR/CAB/LHA/TAR/etc/etc! - FREE
Security - ZoneAlarm - For piece of mind when connected - FREE
Email - MailWasher - Eliminate spam without downloading to your computer - FREE
Registry - RegCleaner - An invaluable registry tool - FREE
MP3 - WinAmp - Still my fav MP3 player after all these years - FREE
MPEG - VLC - A very comprehensive media player - FREE
CD - Daemon Tools - A CD emulator, once a gamer has used this they never uninstall it! - FREE
Games - MAME - An arcade emulator... essential for people over the age of 25! - FREE
FTP & Download - LeechFTP - Unintrusive, easy to use, hard to crash (unlike BPFTP) - FREE


Well thats my two penneth anyway :o)

As far as desktop apps go, I can only discuss Windows apps, since I don't use X at all. Linux = command line as far as I'm concerned.

• Windows Only
• AVG - Antivirus, free if you don't live in Europe.
• Spybot - Antispyware, freeware.
• Winamp - Nice for playing those mp3 collections.
• Kazaa Lite - Nice for getting those mp3 collections. For the legal-minded, substitute a good cd ripping program (I don't know of a good free one, I use a pay app).
• MAME - Bring back the memories.
• Trillian - Save them from the AIM/MSN/ICQ mix and match hell.

• Cross Platform
• Tight VNC - Install it so you can remote-admin their computer easily when they screw it up.
• Mozilla - Either Moz itself or one of it's 'light' siblings Firebird and Thunderbird for email and web browsing.

• Shareware Worth Trying

• Audiograbber: It's free to try, easy to rip with, and only $20 to register.
• GetRight - Assists in downloading all those patches and apps.

Irfanview - hands down the best image viewer out there for Windows. Free. Windows only (but will run under Wine if you want)

Gimp - if you want to edit images. Free. Linux and Windows.

MAME - for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. Windows and Linux. (Xmame)

CDex - for CD ripping in Windows. Free. Windows only, but several good ripping programs are available for Linux. (search freshmeat)

GNUWin - a collection of free apps for Windows. Worth the download.

Audacity - if you want to create/edit sound files. Free. Linux and Windows.

Winamp - for listening to audio files. Free. Windows only. I like XMMS for Linux over Freeamp.

Opera - web browsing, email. Free. Windows and Linux. I prefer it over Mozilla, but not by much.

Knightfall writes "Well, it seems remembering those games may soon be all that is left. As companies are dropping support, but not property rights to our old favorites, many are in danger of vanishing forever. [stuff deleted] What can we do to prevent them from no longer being available?"

"oh! the sky is falling! the sky is falling!" blah, blah, blah, blah...
Mame, MAme, MAMe, MAME!

'nuff said