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In case you haven't noticed, the number of in-home video game consoles totally swamps the number of video game arcade machines. Stop living in the past. Your mode of thinking is obsolete, same as you.

This is slashdot - anyone wanting to play arcade games would be more likely to fire up mame for their dose of nostalgia.

As for high blood pressure, take some estrogen. Contrary to previous findings, it's now known to be beneficial to both the circulatory system and the brain, by making the blood vessels more flexible and reducing the risk of stroke. It's also a powerful antidepressant. Oh wait - you can't/won't do that. I can (and do) which means I'm likely to live far longer than you. Sux 2 B U.

In fact, MAME already seems to allow HLSL processing of games you are playing: http://docs.mamedev.org/advanc... The idea is simple - figure out the visual phenomena commonly seen on a CRT screen. Write a pixel shader in HLSL/GLSL that mimics those visual phenomena using realtime image processing operations. This might be a combination of visible scanlines, blurryness around pixels, some bloom, warping of the image and so forth. Even an old Nvidia 500 series GPU can comfortably do these effects in realtime at 30 FPS or more.

The Nintendo NES Classic is quite an amazing console.

No, it's not. It's a glorified emulator with a limited game library and vendor-lock-in. It's a gimmick - a toy meant to appeal to nostalgia and will be just as quickly relegated to the back of the cupboard.

True, it is not as powerful as modern game systems like Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but it comes pre-loaded with many classic NES titles.

6 which you'll probably actually play.

Unfortunately, its strength is also its weakness -- those pre-loaded titles are the only games you can play. You cannot load other games, so you are stuck with what you got.

Until someone hacks it to play anything.

As an alternative, some folks use software emulation and ROMs...

'software emulation and ROMs' is literally what the NES Classic is, the only difference being it's been released by Nintendo.

...on their computers to play countless video game titles.

You're also completely ignoring mobile phones, tablets, OTHER CONSOLES (See PSOne Classics on PSN).

Of course, there are moral concerns here, as you are often downloading the games illegally -- unless you own the physical copy, that is.

Even if you own the physical copy, it's still illegal to download a copy. The only legal precedent you have is to take the ROM dumps/backups yourself (and then not distribute them).

Even then, it is a gray area.

It really isn't, unless you live in a country where ripping and sharing software is legal.

Today, a company called Doyodo launched a new Linux-powered emulation console on Indiegogo.

So, like the RetroN?

The device not only plays NES games, but Atari, Game Boy, PlayStation 1, Genesis, and more.

So, like MAME?

You play using USB controllers.

So, like every emulator that supports controllers in some fashion (Original, USB, Bluetooth)?

In addition, it can serve as a media player (with Kodi) or a full-fledged Linux desktop.

So... it's a PC?

Seriously this sort of thing is nothing new, why is it news?

From http://mamedev.org/?p=422:

...project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+)...

From the /. story pointer:

The project as a whole is available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0)...

Yes, one supported configuration for building MAME is using Clang on Linux. It links against distro-provided, GCC-built libstdc++ and Qt4. It definitely works using Clang 3.4 or later on Fedora 20 or later. I've also successfully built applications with Clang against distro-provided, GCC-built libstdc++, xerces-c and Clang on CentOS 6 and later, and Fedora 20 and later.

There are some issues with experimental C++14 mode in Clang that cause it to choke on some of the libstdc++ headers, but these are real known bugs in Clang to be fixed, and C++14 mode is still considered experimental. Also, at present libc++ is still considered experimental and it's recommended that you use GNU libstdc++ when building with Clang on Linux unless you want to report and deal with bugs.

I fairly sure it's their entire library, was getting updates from the Usenet but god was that ever slow going.

MAME_0.149_CHDs_A-B
MAME_0.149_CHDs_C
MAME_0.149_CHDs_D-G
MAME_0.149_CHDs_H-N
MAME_0.149_CHDs_P-S
MAME_0.149_CHDs_U-Z
MAME_0.149_EXTRAs
MAME_0.149_ROMs
These are game disk images http://fileinfo.com/extension/...

I added up the files (torrents) and I've got 308 Gigs worth of games, most of which I'll pry never load let alone play.

If your not aware the program MAME will load the ROMs of the old arcade games, so you can play your old favs. MAME has been ported to most tablets and cell phones, not that they all work that well. "Moon Patrol" is a great cell phone game for me as there are only 4 keys that you use, fairly fun to play and it's great bathroom throne material.

"MAME can currently emulate several thousand different classic arcade video games from the late 1970s through the modern era."
http://mamedev.org/

Javascript?!?!?!

No thanks. I'd rather emulate an emulator using javascript whilst emulating windows, just to be on your level.
I love the youth of today for taking priceless optimized stuff and waving your "i'am a lazy fuck, who pisses on hard work" in its face. Nice job.

I just use Mame, http://mamedev.org/ I see it's up to .152 :} the torrent (.151) is outdated already.

$ pacman -Si sdlmame
Repository : community
Name : sdlmame
Version : 0.152.u0-1
Description : A port of the popular Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator using SDL with OpenGL support.
Architecture : x86_64
URL : http://mamedev.org/
Licenses : custom:MAME
License Groups : None
Provides : None
Depends On : sdl>=1.2.11 libxinerama sdl_ttf alsa-lib qt4
Optional Deps : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Download Size : 15445.54 KiB
Installed Size : 79016.00 KiB
Packager : Sergej Pupykin
Build Date : Fri 27 Dec 2013 10:29:04 AM EST
Validated By : MD5 Sum SHA256 Sum Signature

Or is yesterday not modern enough?

Here are all the free games: http://mamedev.org/roms/

I can plug in a FightStick Tournament Edition and use it for Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition

True, Super Street Fighter IV works, but as of 2012, Mortal Kombat 2011 does not. How should we convince WB to follow Capcom's lead?

or fire up MAME

There are copyright problems with marketing a PC as ideal for running classic video games in emulation. MAME comes with only twenty games as of today, and I haven't counted how many of those allow for two players at the same time. Most end users are unwilling to buy arcade PCBs and solder together the tools needed to dump them, and advertising a product for use with illegally downloaded ROMs is likely to be viewed as "inducement" under MGM v. Grokster.

etc.

The assertion of some of these other Slashdot users is that the "etc.", the collection of worthwhile games compatible with more than one gamepad on one PC, is as of 2012 large enough to make building or buying a gaming HTPC worthwhile to home users.

There is no reason why BlazBlue, Mario Kart, and other currently console only titles couldn't be released on PC.

Sure there is. They aren't released on PC because there is no track record of demand for other games in the same genre on the PC over the past several years, which in turn is because they historically haven't been released on PC.

You don't have to be limited to mice and keyboards or only certain game types but for the status quo, enforced by a handful of entities, that dictates "These kind of games are for consoles, not for PC". Break that, and everything is available.

So if a company does decide to release a "console-style" game as a PC exclusive, how will it find enough customers willing to buy the game to make it profitable? If you want, I can link posts from other Slashdot users claiming that these customers do not exist in large numbers. For example, at one point, Wii consoles were claimed to outnumber home theater PCs by a factor of over 100 to 1.

Take for instance how Breath of Death VIII and Cthulhu Saves the World made more in one launch weekend (or was it week) on Steam than for months on XBLA.

Are those single-player or multiplayer? I understand a single-player indie game doing well on PC. But multiplayer is different because as of 2012, too few people already have a PC hooked up to a large enough monitor to fit multiple adult bodies around it.

This is a catch 22. People only put a PC in the living room if they want to do "PC stuff" on it. If all the "console" content was available on the PC, people would buy PCs

Other than legislatively banning consoles, how do you recommend breaking this catch-22?

there is no reason that an actual PC could not fulfill that niche if the games were not limited to certain console platforms

One reason is the perception that PCs need far more maintenance. Unlike consoles, PCs get viruses and fake antiviruses. Unlike Wii disc games and Xbox 360 disc games, PC disc games typically need to be "installed".

If a game was designed with a single-screen gameplay option in mind, it would support multiple inputs.

The problem here is that publishers either remove the single-screen gameplay option (as explained in the Cracked article that I linked) or simply decline to port single-screen multiplayer titles to the PC. Instead, they're more likely port titles in genres associated with multiple screens, such as FPS and RTS. Again, the catch-22 needs broken by someone with enough capital to break it.

It depends on the price of the controller; If the bloody thing actually comes close to or eclipses $100, there's no re

Are you fucking stupid? How hard is it to check the website of the largest and most complete arcade emulation project for the past 15 years.

Somewhat along the same lines of an earlier post claiming that piracy will solve this issue.

I agree that if someone wants to play the game in 18 years. They will play the game. Emulators rule. I love that MAME exists and give me strolls down memory lane without sucking quarters out of my pocket in that stuffy, over-heated, converted room behind the Mini-Golf rental shack.
http://mamedev.org/legal.html

Read their "Legal" section if you think that "piracy" is the only solution.

Uh, MAME isn't 15 years old yet according to http://mamedev.org/history.html ... On 2/5/2012, it will be. Or did I miss something? :(

I love MAME and have been using it (on and off) since the very early MS-DOS days. The problem with MAME is that most of the needed ROM dumps are still copyrighted, and will remain under copyright for a very, very, very long time and it remains to be seen when they will enter the Public Domain, if at all.

The MAME community should be on the forefront of the Copyright Term Reduction struggle; freeing up ROMs should be a major goal. Some ROMs, with Exidy being the Shiny Example, have been made available to us, but everything that is not listed here should be treated as suspious if not downloaded from a trusted source.

Take something you like and/or use. Or something like what you do if possible. Load it in a debugger, trace in to main or the language equivalent, and see where the calls go. You'll see quickly how the files are organized (if they are organized).

The more familiar you are with the app, the more sense the code will make.

Choose several - I've found every project has its own style, organization, or other peculiarities.

As someone said above, the real world is not all open source. Most of what I've seen in open source has nothing to do with what is done at large companies. The closest you might come is Red Hat, their distro-specific additions to Linux. But that's still open-source style.

When you feel comfortable, go to something that will blow your mind. The creative use of the preprocessor in MAME/MESS, and the ploymorphic implementation in C, makes this a wonder to behold. And not a great example unless your intent is to make an emulator.

http://mamedev.org/

The point is to learn more than one way of doing things, and find what you are comfortable with. Not how other people do it. Because there is no one way. If you want the one way, read a book instead.

Get MAME, get the original ROM, have the exact experience of the original (because it really is the original).

As per TFA, the Voodoo emulator is basically lifted from MAME. Granted, integrating it into DOSBox is important work and all, but I would judge the original code to be worth more than 90% of the effort. Yet Aaron gets no credit in the summary.

Isn't this the exact same thing the MAME project is trying to achieve? http://mamedev.org/about.html

In the context of archiving games, accurate software emulation the whole HW underlying each game is the only solution.
Obviously it should be done in a open, portable, multiplatform way to ensure that it is a long term solution.

Mame and Mess ( mamedev.org ) has already shown that this approach is viable and practical.

I often think that those people who try put some kind of rationale behind everything are the same people who miss the point entirely.

Why do they feel the ***NEED*** to give some kind of justification for stuff that's just there to entertain?

Last night I played Fallout 3 for a couple of hours, the night before I fired up the MAME emulator and played Mr. Do, Pacman and Space Invaders for an hour or so. In both cases, when I ended my playing, did I ask myself is one was a more "immersive experience" than the other? Nope, because I couldn't actually give a toss... in both cases, I thought "That was a lot of fun" and then went and found something else fun to go and do.

So there's no point in analysing why they just talked about FPSs and not strategy or adventure games because ***IT DOESN'T MATTER***. All that matters is when you pick up a book, sit down and watch a movie, listen to a piece of music, play a computer game, etc. etc. is that you ***ENJOY*** it while you do it.

Some of the videos claim that because it's 'gifting,' it's somehow legal

Reminds me of that law software pirates invented so that they could copy games.

There is already a team of highly skilled developers being very busy at this exact same task. And there's another team of highly skilled developers being very busy at making all torts of computers work on that platform.

No, I think the point here is not to just recreate MAME, but to create a legitimate system of emulation that can can be used for valid historic archive purposes

MAME is a system of emulation for valid historic archive purposes. Its whole purpose is to preserve classic video games with the greatest accuracy possible. If these guys don't leverage the MAME team's work, they have no chance of success because systems like the CPS-2 or DECO Cassette System will have degraded out of existence while they spend 10 years reinventing the wheel.

No, I think the point here is not to just recreate MAME, but to create a legitimate system of emulation that can can be used for valid historic archive purposes

MAME is a system of emulation for valid historic archive purposes. Its whole purpose is to preserve classic video games with the greatest accuracy possible. If these guys don't leverage the MAME team's work, they have no chance of success because systems like the CPS-2 or DECO Cassette System will have degraded out of existence while they spend 10 years reinventing the wheel.

So, are they trying to recreate MAME?

I ask this whenever I see a "such-and-such chip overclocked to this-and-that": WHY don't any of these groups ever use MAME, http://mamedev.org/ , as a test of CPU power? MAME is entirely reliant on your CPU's speed, and it can emulate quite a few games that bring even a decently overclocked Core 2 Duo to its knees. It is the perfect objective test of how fast a CPU is.

Just because there's no one to press charges doesn't mean it's legal or OK, and the OP obviously wants stuff that's undeniably redistributable.

Obviously if the OP is uncomfortable with any of this advice, he'll not do it. But emulators are perfectly fine by themselves. He could just as easily load the emulators on the machines and let the end user figure it out. If you look online, it's actually quite difficult to find MAME ROMs, though a few free ones are available(the major ROM sites were taken down years ago). That may be 15 or so free ROMs, but it is a viable option.

http://mamedev.org/roms/
Free ROMS. Toss a few on the machines and the kids will be happy.

As for copyright, the interesting thing about it is that it's not like patents, which are jealously guarded and bought after a company dies. In the case of abandoned software by decades dead companies, there have been no major cases about this. At worst a few nastygrams have been sent out, but always to the projects/distribution sites(which stop making those files available) and not the end users. Those that were taken down but really popular almost always have sourceforge or similar groups that have made clones as well.

99.9% of the time the places in question that have such files take them down if there's a question.

http://www.the-underdogs.info/faq.php
This site is a good place for exact info and they keep their data current. (note - TONS aren't available or are blocked) Some games are shareware, some are abandoned, and some are still available, and usually dirt cheap at that.

It's pretty easy as well to find who owns the rights as well(sites like the above are full of info on each program's status), if you really care. Many of the original authors have explicitly given their okay to use it OR they have outright gifted it to the community/made it open source/etc. There are hundreds of pieces of old abandoned software out there like this. Use those titles and he's fine.

Or just go to Ebay and buy a few copies of the original floppies. I have a box of old programs like this in storage, and I get old stuff like this at garage sales just for this reason. The last I checked, a copy of Elite for PC was nearly free. The floppy need not even work - all you need is the physical disk.

Oh, but wait - the actual sequels are available online as shareware!
http://www.eliteclub.co.uk/download/

Some things do take advantage of multiple USB gamepads - MAME for example (not really a game itself, but whatever).

MAME only has fourteen games for it.

well, nobody is going to buy $20 + 4 x $xx for the controller.

There are if more than one title can use them.

And what if they buy the wrong controller - one with too few buttons, or no analog stick, etc. So you have to write your game to not require specific controllers

I'm a fan of reduced-button gaming. I'll start by requiring two buttons: L trigger and R trigger, or D-pad Left and button 2, or whatever anybody else can manage to press with whatever appendages he has. You don't need more than two buttons for pinball (L, R: flipper), racing (L, R: turn; L+R: brake), or platforming (L, R: run, L+R: jump).

At that point, controller support is an extra or nice-to-have, so often doesn't make it.

But why don't gaming magazines report that controller support ended up cut?

$10 or $15 for the indie game, or 2-3 players, would make it cheaper. :)

Not with the extra $1,500 for three more bargain-basement PCs and three more bargain-basement monitors.

PCs are for one person to sit and and play keyboard/mouse games, consoles are for the living room.

But in practice, your statement plays out like this: "Open platforms are for one person to sit and and play keyboard/mouse games, lockout chips are for the living room." Why is it possible (and even encouraged) for an individual to shoot, edit, and burn a movie that plays on a set-top player, but not possible (without jailbreaks of dubious legality) for an individual to develop and burn a game that plays on a set-top player?

don't forget a lot of people have 15" monitors and 30" TVs.

Then why don't more PCs come with a composite SDTV output like mine did? Or why don't people actually use the VGA jack on their $600 LCD HDTV?

Something that might change indie developer access to consoles is either more web-based games accessed from the console

One major problem with a web-based game is that most users aren't willing to become paying customers; they see "web based" and think "gratis".

Mike

I agree ... Plus if you (or the wife) is handy with very simple electronics, you can build your own controller for an "arcade" like experience, especially if you use the MAME emulator. That is, if you're looking for arcade type games...

I would suggest emulators.

For arcade games, you can use MAME

http://mamedev.org/

Once you've got MAME, you need a set of current ROM files for it. You can find ROMs on BitTorrent or on any P2P application.

As MAME evolves, the ROM sets get replaced with new and better extractions, so you'll want a piece of software to manage them.

ClrMAMEPro is a tool that will use the data files from the latest version of MAME, and scan a big huge mess of old ROM files, extracting whatever is useful from them into a nice, neat set that works with the current version

http://www.clrmame.com/

To get yourself set up, download any new or old MAME ROMs you can find, then use ClrMAMEPro to make a proper and current set out of them and burn it to backup.

There are also emulators floating around out there for Playstation, Nintendo 64, NES and Super NES. I've gotten good performance out of Project 64, an emulator for Nintendo 64. MarioCart plays quite well.

When you're choosing GamePads, you should look for something wireless that has as many buttons as you can possibly find. You want to be able to map the controller you choose to every possible controller from history, so you're going to need something that is flexible.

Think she already had excluded vast majority of ways to have fun while playing on a computer. If not on an MMO and by looking for 2-players games, you are just left with console emulators.

Try http://www.mamedev.org/ or Google'ing around for maybe not-so-old console emu's.

Not trolling, but I think MAME and MESS are the best gaming platform via emulation :-)

http://mamedev.org/

http://mess.org/

Rest assured, I will only use my MAME cabinet for playing Robby Roto.

There are more than that now.

http://www.mamedev.org/roms/

One of the biggest problems with most open source projects on Sourceforge is the lack of decisive leadership. Simply starting a project does not guarantee success, you need to have a vision and see it through, sticking with it for years to come. This of course also requires that the leader has coding skills, so that he or she can make responsible decisions about the direction towards which the code base is taken.

A fine example is MAME, although it's not on Sourceforge (and we can debate until the end of the world whether it fulfills the definition of "Open Source"). It in fact today reached its 10th anniversary counting from the first release. Only with persistent leadership (though the project coordinator has changed a couple of times along the years) and a vision to preserve all storage media -based arcade games in a single program has it been able to survive this long, far longer than any other arcade game emulator. This pretty much proves that the policies undertaken by the MAME team were the right thing to do, even if they were sometimes unpopular amongst the users.