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Why not build your own cab and slap MAME on it. It's what I'm doing. It's very easy to do.
Arcade Controls Everything you need to know about creating your own Arcade Game.
MAME
Lucid's Arcade Cabinet DesinGet your cabinet plans here.

The classics will stay alive, as long as there are people out there who care about them.

This is evidenced in the dozens of emulators out there. Here's a small sample:

Stella (Atari)

FCE Ultra (Nintendo)

Freeze SMS (Sega Master System)

Gens(Genesis)

and, of course:

MAME (Every arcade game we know and love)

On the PC side, we have some very interesting projects:

AGI/SCI Remember all those old Sierra games? Well a few people were able to reverse engineer the interpreter language. The result is that you can now make your own Sierra games, and even take apart existing ones, look at the code, screens, etc, and even modify them if you want. Truly and old schooler's paradise.

SCUMM VM So times have changed, and you can't play your LucasArts games on whatever OS you happen to be running now? ScummVM will fix that. Compatibility is not 100% but give them time.

The people behind these projects are very dedicated to saving the classics. With these kinds of people around, we should have no worries about the games we loved so much fading into obscurity.

There is always MAME.

Kodak used to sell a GPS receiver/adapter for the DC260/265/290 series of cameras, several years ago. I don't know how the location data was stored, perhaps in the EXIF information. I never had one, but the DC260/265/290 series sounded like some funky cameras. DigitOS and enough CPU/memory to run MAME. Apart from that, the ability to write scripts for a camera sure sounds cool.

I'm not trolling by saying this, but MAME has all the games I'd ever want to play :)

Be forewarned though, playing those games will shatter your fond memories. You really are much better getting MAME and playing the arcade versions which hold up a little better.

NVIDIA works closely with developers to optimize games for GeForceFX. These optimizations (including shader optimizations) are the result of the co-development process.

I'm sure Nvidia's engineers are falling all over themselves to assist the folks who work on open source games too.

I'm waiting for their call asking "How can we help optimize Mame"...

Oddly enough, I'm better with a keyboard than a gamepad/arcade stick... Though I think I can blame marathon sessions of One Must Fall for setting the precedent there. MAME and SNES9x just honed the ability ^^;

Want logic games?

Try some of the games in Mame (also available for Linux/Unix) such as: Boxy Boy, Chicken Shift, Logic Pro, Logic Pro 2, Phozon, Pushman, and Wise Guy.

Some of these can are real real brain-busters.

Want logic games?

Try some of the games in Mame (also available for Linux/Unix) such as: Boxy Boy, Chicken Shift, Logic Pro, Logic Pro 2, Phozon, Pushman, and Wise Guy.

Some of these can are real real brain-busters.

These pages shows the use of 'off the shelf' components to construct an integrated in-car multimedia and entertainment system. The back end of the system is powered by a Microsoft Xbox which is running a mod-chip and a version of Linux developed by the Xbox-Linux developent team. This is a variant of Debian/GNU Linux but heavily stripped down by myself so that the system boots and loads the interface in a respectable time (<40 seconds from power on). With a 40gb replacement drive, I have multiple albums of music, several films, a few video game emulators (Arcade, NeoGeo and Super Nintendo) and music videos to play along with the music.

The interface used is the excellent Freevo system. All control is via wireless Logitech Wingman game pad; this navigates menus, launches media and also plays the games. No bulky keyboard or mouse required! The Xbox is powered by a 300w 12v-240v invertor which is connected directly to the battery through a 30A fused switch, a remote wire has been attached to the Xbox power on button so that when Trinity dies in Matrix 2 it can be switched on and off from the passenger or driver position.

The car side of things is taken care of by a Pioneer AVH-P6400 Multimedia head unit (CD control, DAB, 4x50w, remote control, RDS/EON/PTY, Equaliser, SLA, Hivolt pre-outs etc etc...) running a pair of Infinity Reference component speakers up front through a 2x150wrms amplifier and directly driving a pair of Pioneer 8" 2-way speakers mounted behind the headrestsof the rear seats. CD changing is care of a Pioneer CDX-P630S, controlled by the on-screen menu of the head unit.

Enjoy!

Other links: Car details, Main site here, Full sized images here and compressed images here.

Actually you CAN run Different programs on a Kodak camera than what was intended, like MAME for cameras - since the Kodak Camera has the same chip as an older Mac (a PPC) it actually runs quite well.

"Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 Hits Mirrors" ...a handful of people rejoice! :-)

Give the playable demo a try and see for yourself. Though most of my Linux gaming involves xmame or zsnes, when I'm not doing actual work.

Awesome. Hey, I hear a Defender port is upcoming...

We've had that covered for years. Heck, even Quake 1 and 2 have been available for a long time. But 3D Realms is slow, as always.

"What the hell is this crap?" Comparing a videogame system to a digital camera?

The reviewer apparently forgot the MAMED digital camera port of the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator. If the G3 is like Canon's other cameras, it runs a version of dos on an x86 compatible chipset.

With the potential for mame, and that high-res display, the G3 could be the better gaming machine than the gameboy advanced sp for only ummm... 5x the money.

Can't play games on a camera?

You just have the wrong camera.

Why don't get a camera that you can take pictures and play more than 3000 games like a Kodak DC265 Digita ?

However, did you know that MAME has been ported to several digital cameras?

So you could play your games and take pictures too! But waitaminute...there's also the Game boy Camera!

This 'digital convergence' stuff gives me fits! I'm off to duct tape a bunch of live grasshoppers to my back, masturbate, and proclaim myself the Messiah!

Windows XP running a hidden *virtual* Windows XP session. Vistual session crashes, it won't bring the machine down. How to solve the performance hit? Just wait, 3.06Ghz will soon be entry level.

Seriously, the nice part about it being integrated into the OS would be for compatibility purposes with their own older OS's. Like for instance (God forbid) Win 3.11 for Workgroups, or Win 95, or Dos 4 (lol).

Even BETTER, maybe it will include ALL of the emulation out on the net today... Like MAME and Atari800WinOh, the possibilities! GLAVEN!

Perhaps its like those Asian pirate carts you can get a million games but they're all randomly generated hacks of Contra.

I'd guess this is the total number of pc games released, or some other weird figure that already exists.

"...all sorts of video games (if you know where to look).

That sounds cool. Where might I find information?

"...all sorts of video games (if you know where to look).

That sounds cool. Where might I find information?

Ok to follow the theme. Pedaling to the oldies:

Joust would lend itself quite well to the pedal-for-your-life concept.

Now, if somebody would just brew up an easy interface for MAME, we'd be set!

There are also quite a few arcade roms that have been put into the public domain over the years.

No arcade rom that I'm aware of is "public domain", with the possible exception of PolyPlay, which was written in East Germany and the copyright holder has now vanished completely.

The only other games that are freely distributable by anyone are Gridlee and Robby Roto, both licensed by their respective copyright holders for free distribtuion for non-commercial use only. Which is a long way from public domain. See here for download information and the relevant licenses.

version .63 of MAME just came out today. Downloadable, of course, from http://www.mame.net.

However, it's a bit ridiculous that a $200 XBOX can't even run Angband or MAME.

Actually.. it can, check out:
MAME-X.

Whether Microsoft is allowing it to, is a completely different story.

The Domesday Project is now officially abandonware...

Rumor has it that MAME 0.7 will support it.

Look at the mailing list that this is on: Linuxbios. The /. story acts like this is some sort of big announcement or press release, but it's really just the mailing list version of a standard WIP page. They're not being pretentious about it or patting themselves on the back, but the person that submitted this story certainly is.

if apple can do it

The Classic application environment is more of a virtualized native environment than it is emulation of hardware.

Carbon vs Cocoa, on the other hand, is like Winelib vs Qt, just a different toolkit to access the same underlying graphics system (Quartz or X11).

the onus isnt on the user to recompile

But if your proprietary software publisher refuses to recompile its application for your hardware platform, tough shit. One more reason for free software.

4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code
The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code.
The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

But, I see the problem. Part "VII" of the MAME license was written to protect MAME programmers from copyright law suits. The specific clause says,

There are some specific modifications to the source code which go against
the spirit of the project. They are NOT considered a derivative work, and
distribution of executables containing them is strictly forbidden. Such
modifications include, but are not limited to:
- enabling games that are disabled
- changing the ROM verification commands so that they report missing games
- removing the startup information screens

I'm glad I never submitted any patches to MAME. I agree my anonymous post titled, "Open source vs Free software" is wrong, which makes me question my the third paragraph.

My final thought. I'd like to see a "+1 Good Question." The three "+1 I.*s" are pretty much the same. And "+1 funny" is used to make fun of posts as often as it's use for post that are intendend to be funny.

Step 1. GPL MAME

Step 2. ?

Step 3. Profit!

The legal uses of MAME (together with legal ROMs) have been explicitly allowed previously (see the Capcom Classics CD), and it has been made clear that MAME itself isn't for sale, rather just a license for the game ROMs and a free copy of MAME on top.

Of course, we've had a fair share of problems because nobody is willing to try to enforce our current license on the most visible license violators, who currently do not redistribute the full source code changes: MAME32K (Kaillera) and the other MAME32 (not to be confused with the "right" MAME32). GPL would probably help here to force the source changes open, or to end the development of these particular derivative works. GPL would also allow us to re-use some non-critical code from other GPL'd projects, but personally I don't see this as a big advantage. Everything can be rewritten anyway.

In any case, even if MAME were to move to GPL, I don't think the development model would change much. Due to the dubious nature of ROMs, the developer mailing list and archive simply can not be public. A public CVS server would also be quite unlikely due to the support and maintainance nightmare. There haven't been any significant forks (unlike somebody mentioned here - changing one or two lines to remove the OK screen isn't forking) nor are we currently forbidding them - and I don't think GPL would change this situation.

Oh, and if you're wondering, mame.net is handling the Slashdot effect just fine. In fact, we've served even bigger audiences successfully. Moderators should frown any attempts of gaining karma through cut'n'pasting text from mame.net ;-)

Step 1. GPL MAME

Step 2. ?

Step 3. Profit!

The legal uses of MAME (together with legal ROMs) have been explicitly allowed previously (see the Capcom Classics CD), and it has been made clear that MAME itself isn't for sale, rather just a license for the game ROMs and a free copy of MAME on top.

Of course, we've had a fair share of problems because nobody is willing to try to enforce our current license on the most visible license violators, who currently do not redistribute the full source code changes: MAME32K (Kaillera) and the other MAME32 (not to be confused with the "right" MAME32). GPL would probably help here to force the source changes open, or to end the development of these particular derivative works. GPL would also allow us to re-use some non-critical code from other GPL'd projects, but personally I don't see this as a big advantage. Everything can be rewritten anyway.

In any case, even if MAME were to move to GPL, I don't think the development model would change much. Due to the dubious nature of ROMs, the developer mailing list and archive simply can not be public. A public CVS server would also be quite unlikely due to the support and maintainance nightmare. There haven't been any significant forks (unlike somebody mentioned here - changing one or two lines to remove the OK screen isn't forking) nor are we currently forbidding them - and I don't think GPL would change this situation.

Oh, and if you're wondering, mame.net is handling the Slashdot effect just fine. In fact, we've served even bigger audiences successfully. Moderators should frown any attempts of gaining karma through cut'n'pasting text from mame.net ;-)

http://x.mame.net/
http://www.classicgaming.com/vault/

All the games you could possibly want. Why limit yourself to 10?

Check out MAME. I'm up to about 2400 games now, highly addictive.

Yeah, books are nice, but there's nothing like the real thing. Ever desired to own almost every video game ever made? Yeah, everyone knows about MAME, but perhaps you don't know about Tombstones, which is network of volunteers who will send you CD-ROMS of all of the MAME roms -- for about $7. 3,486 roms (about 1900 unique games, I think).

It's unbelievable how much game you can put in about 4K of ROM space.

Now, what I want to know is when is SOMEONE going to make a hardware emulator of Death Race. The schematics are available on the web. [it didn't you use a microprocessor... all electronic! ]

Well, you could ...

Heh heh ;)

As a matter of fact, there are three roms that you can download legally. Just look on the official MAME homepage.

Why not smack on a few IF interpreters for playing some of the excellent (and free) text adventures out there? I particuarly recommend (Win)Frotz.

Also, MAME and ZSNES are excellent arcade and SNES emulators.

For eye candy, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Xaos. Mmm. Fractal zooming. So pretty. Plus, a good introduction to the mathematics of fractals.

MS:

Mingw/cygwin exists but not supported well (MSDN support bitterly hates both). And icc and many of the free tools you mention for Linux are also available on Windows.

Maybe true, but MinGW works quite well. MAME is compiled with MinGW. And it works just as well as GCC does on Linux.

DEBUGGERS/DIAGNOSTICS:

MS: Um...ntinternals put out regmon and filemon. Apparently MS puts out WinDBG for free, though I haven't used it and apparently it isn't too popular. No free high level debuggers. Few diagnostic programs for already compiled code

Ummm... ever hear about Purfy and BoundsChecker? Also GDB works on Windows just fine?

MS: Many, many Visual Basic coders. MS dug its own grave with Visual Basic. Very low barrier to entry, very difficult to scale above a certain height

Very true, but how else are you going to get someone with a philosophy degree to program? The same fool would be out of his element on Linux.

Linux: Some UNIX cruft. Usually, APIs are pretty clean. Emphasis is on keeping things clean for the many developers -- if something is unclear in gtk1, fix it in gtk2.

No guarantee of binary compatibility between versions of GTK?

I could go on, but the point is that any MS claims of being ahead on making life good for developers are absolutely ludicrous. The *worst* thing about Windows, easily, is doing development for it.

I care about Linux's reputation as well, but only to the extent that it deserves it. If there isn't a market for ports of new Linux games, then there isn't a market for ports of new Linux games. If there were, Tribes 2 would have likely sold a lot better for Loki, and quite possibly Q3 (although I think 3d acceleration was severely lacking at the time of Q3's release). Let's face it, Loki's plan sucked and that's why they didn't do well. They sold ports of year old games at year old prices. No one except die hard Linux fans will buy that, and quite frankly given Linux's actual cost that number is few and far between.

Once again, I'll point out the likelyhood of having Linux lying around on the old computer is far greater than having it as the sole OS on a brand new home desktop system. Linux has a wonderful reputation for being a fun and practical way to resurrect old boxes, and this wasn't gained for nothing. The old cheap game port idea could leverage this quite well. And yes, the market isn't huge, but it's no smaller than the market for new games that are only made for Linux out of the box. People will buy the cheaper windows version to avoid the porting costs and the possible hassle of distro incompatibilities simply because most new desktops will have some form of windows on them, and rebooting for a gaming session isn't a big deal.

Plunking down $50 dollars for yesteryear's game isn't going to help the Linux gaming market at all if you're looking to have it taken seriously as a platform for new games. It's not going to be much of a platform for new games until it really starts showing large numbers of desktop installs.

I understand perfectly well why Myth II was priced at $50, but that's the problem with the business plan. A very small number of people are going to pay the relatively high price for an old game that won't even run on their toy Linux system (but will run great on their Windows side). Companies can be motivated to allow ports of older games though because it's old news. They'd be wringing a few extra bucks out of an old product that they thought they were all done with. The cost that the porting house would have to pay would be much lower because it is an older game, and the original developers wouldn't feel the need to charge the massive price to port their latest hit (i.e. Tribes 2). What you obviously don't understand is that porting houses pay the developers to be allowed to port their games, not vice versa. In turn, the porting house expects to make some income on the game to pay off the costs for porting it. If the fee that the company charges is high, then the retail price would be high. If Loki had decided to port Bungie's Marathon series (before the release of the engine source) it probably would have cost them very little, and thus the product itself would have been cheaper and would have run on far more Linux installs.

Of course, I could be wrong about the idea that people are interested in old games on Linux, but there's a lot of projects that back me up. ScummVM, X-MAME, SNES9x, various NES emulators, FreeSCI, and of course, Freeciv. I can already hear you complaining that these are all free, which is true, but they do show that there is obvious interest in old gaming on Linux. And free is cheap, is it not? It's a little bit sad that the various companies like Lucasarts and Sierra didn't see that people might want to play their older titles under Linux, or they might have gone ahead with the projects themselves. But the community just implemented what they really wanted.

The community also wanted new games, and that's why we have WineX. Gamers wanted it all, so that's why Transgaming is still around but Loki is not. Porting just isn't good enough (I know this, having been a Mac person for years). I'm just as willing to support Transgaming as Loki. If they provide a service that's useful to me, then I'll purchase their product. Anything more or less is doing the Linux community, as well as the company in question, a disservice. If the reputation of Linux is really your concern, then you shouldn't be advocating artificially buoying poor business plans. If Transgaming survives, it will be because they provided what the Linux gaming community really wanted. And what the community wants is what should actually give Linux its reputation, not some feeling of needing to support some people just becuase they made something on Linux.

Too bad we can't say the same for xBox. I would really love it if I could also use my xBox as a MAME console.

Why can't you? Although Microsoft made this guy take down the binaries, they can still be found.

Done.

Anything is possible. I mean MAME has been ported to digital cameras already. Digita Mame

Mame has already been already ported to xbox. However, it isn't supported at the MAME site any more. You can, however, obtain it in #xbins on efnet.

A lot of the games were the same, but the technology behind them was not. If you compare the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids, Pac Man, or Star Wars with the arcade version, you will see light-years of difference.

Some examples:

Asteroids on the Atari 2600 (Raster graphics)

Asteroids in the arcade (Vector graphics)

Atari 2600 Pac Man (Raster)

Arcade Pac Man Plus (Also Raster, no shots of the original, but the graphics are the same)

Atari 2600 Star Wars(Raster)

Arcade Star Wars (Vector)

A lot of the games were the same, but the technology behind them was not. If you compare the Atari 2600 version of Asteroids, Pac Man, or Star Wars with the arcade version, you will see light-years of difference.

Some examples:

Asteroids on the Atari 2600 (Raster graphics)

Asteroids in the arcade (Vector graphics)

Atari 2600 Pac Man (Raster)

Arcade Pac Man Plus (Also Raster, no shots of the original, but the graphics are the same)

Atari 2600 Star Wars(Raster)

Arcade Star Wars (Vector)

Obviously you've had little or no experience with MAME.

Yes, for the 'classics' its' quite overkill. I've got MAME .36 running on a 486, and it runs Pac Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, etc quite well.

However, when I want to bust out and kick some ass in Mortal Kombat III, the 486 just doesn't do it justice. Out comes the Athlon, and watch the body parts fly.

For more information on MAME, see news://alt.games.mame or http://www.mame.net or the alt.games.mame website at http://www.tombstones.org.uk (where you can also see my mugshot, ugly as it is)