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"The Guru" at the MAME dumping project would probably be very interested in your find! Dumping those kinds of ROMS would be trivial to him.

http://www.mameworld.net/gurudumps/DumpingProject/

The only game that's worse is Pac Man. I have played that game, in total, for hundreds of hours, but I never managed to reach the end.

You want to talk about unmemorable "endings"? Pac-Man has none. It just crashes after 255 levels (scroll down to the end of the page).

Then again, if that had happened to me back in the prime of Pac-Man, I'd have thought it a random crash rather than "the end", and probably blown an aneurysm. So I guess you could call that memorable, in its own way...

It was probably the same trackball as in Missile Command, but do you remember that football game where the players were x's and o's? We played that one all the time and those trackballs took some major abuse but I don't recall ever going to an arcade where one was out of service.

It was an Atari game and I found a link for it.

Maybe it is just because I'm an old fart, or it was my age when I played those games, but I haven't played a game in a long time that had such great gameplay as those 70's and 80's arcade games. Of course, if I had to do it all over again, I would take all those quarters I dumped in the arcades and invest them instead, and I'd be sitting rather pretty right now.

I do hope there are useful pointers to graphical front-ends.

I had trouble finding a frontend I liked, and actually started writing my own in wxWidgets, until I ran across 3D-Arcade. Took a while to figure out how to set it up (and I'm still figuring it out since the config is quite complex), but its nice to walk around in the virtual arcade, pretty cool stuff.

And as a side note, a working 3dArcade set can fit on a 1GB flash drive, and makes an inexpensive gift at christmas. Launches a bit slow off the flash (assuming cheap flash), but plays great once its going.

http://www.mameworld.net/maws/romset/konek (that's one of the latest ones; however, most of them were mechanical or semi-mechanical so there's no option of mame emulation).

Those are all set patterns which you can take which take into account the AI of the ghosts and should allow you to finish levels repeatably.

Some information on how the ghosts move can be found here: http://www.mameworld.net/pacman/basics.htm

And they aren't...at least not until Ms. Pacman. In the original Pac Man the Ghosts followed very predictable patterns which they never changed, and it is quite common to simply memorize these patterns and play the game with your eyes closed.

http://www.mameworld.net/pacman/patterns.html

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

MameWorld lists Slapfight as 240x280, which is barely more than half the lowest HD resolution (480p).

Or wait untill this guy
http://www.mameworld.net/vlinde/
finishes the work he is doing and makes Nintendo 64 emulation possible the way it should have been done (instead of that "HLE" crap most N64 emulators use)

Agreed, I think the article's author probably just sucks at modern games.

Click here to see old arcade center images. Seen on MAMEWorld.net.

Also think about MAME finally being able to emulate those
early Discrete logic TTL's used in Pong, etc....
see: www.mameworld.net/discrete/

PinballSim.com

Visual PinMame Guide

VPForums

Well, the best use (or at least the one I enjoy most) I've found for my iPaq is to load it up w/a couple of emulators for games :)

You definately want to grab pocketnester. Then you can play any NES game that you want :)

Also, check out MAME CE3. Unfortunately it was written w/an older version of MAME, so a lot of the ROMs I have tried didn't work :( But you can play Galaga all day to your heart's content :)

According to the MAME history file, Magic Bubble was released in 1993, a year ahead of Puzzle Bobble. However, there is no actual copyright date in the rom and no source listed for the date in the history file, so it could be inaccurate. It appears that Magic Bubble has some elements that could be ripped off from later versions of Puzzle Bobble -- but it could be the other way around also..

for what it's worth...

According to the MAME history file, Magic Bubble was released in 1993, a year ahead of Puzzle Bobble. However, there is no actual copyright date in the rom and no source listed for the date in the history file, so it could be inaccurate. It appears that Magic Bubble has some elements that could be ripped off from later versions of Puzzle Bobble -- but it could be the other way around also..

for what it's worth...

Plenty of inspiration here: (click "examples"):
http://arcadecontrols.com/

And my own pimpage here:
http://benchmark.mameworld.net/cab1/

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/

It's been in MAME for quite some time.
PolyPlay is one of the the (few) legal ROMs for MAME. From Mameworld.net:
(C) 1985 VEB Polytechnik Karl-Marx-Stadt.
Owing to the collapse of East Germany, there does not appear to be any copyright holder for this software.

There's a link there to download the game. So go grab your favorite version of MAME and play the game! Interactive news! It's the future!

DrMrLordX, please see these links:

1. http://www.pinballsim.com/
2. http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/pinmameguide.htm
3. http://www.vpforums.com/

Remember, this a virtual pinball machine customized by people to match the real thing. At least, you don't have to repair these emulations. ;)

Also, you need Windows for them. I'd love to see MacOS X and Linux ports.

... but I'm beginning to wonder how closely they're following their own mission.
They've released 11 games, 3 of which are sequels of prior games. I *know* there's more than 8 categories of game listed at http://www.mameworld.net/maws/
I think they're falling into the trap of 'game improvement' instead of 'game development'. Please excuse me while I go play Mario Party 5 now.

I looked it up.. probably others would, too (Ninth Key and other patterns).

(posted with no bonus on purpose -- not whoring)

S

Emulated types if you have Windows. Basically, people make models and graphics based off the real machines. I have to admit this is well done! See these links for details:

1. PinballSim.com
2. Visual PinMame Guide
3. VPForum - Complete Pinball Discussion

Now, someone please port this to MacOS X and Linux!

This is an excellent idea. If I had any shred of skill in this area, I would be doing something similar myself.

One thing you might want to consider is having a button box instead of leaving them in one place. I remember a lot of games had buttons on both sides of the joystick, so people could play left- or right-handed. I use my right had for the joystick, which makes pretty much every arcade control pad I've seen worthless to me.

You also might want to check out MameWorld, if you haven't already. They have several discussion forums dedicated to Mame cabs and arcade hardware.

Rally-X theme (.SAM format)

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

all they have to show for it is a standard Street Fighter engine with a predictable character roster"?

The idea that a capcom-level fighting engine could be running on SNK hardware is pretty amazing. No offence to Mark of the Wolves fans out there, but the Neo Geo has never been known for a high physics framerate. The new iteration of Street Fighter vs. Capcom is running on a 12 mhz 68000, with a Z-80 coprocessor! That's equivalent to the old CPS 1 board that "powered" the original Street Fighter 2 through Turbo. This was hot stuff when it was released in 1990. But eeking out an experience comparable to Capcom Vs. SNK 2 (on a 128 bit SH-4 with PowerVR)? If your graphics coprocessor used to be used on the Sega Master System, you have to do a lot of work to keep up. It's a testament to the programmers that people can consider it a standard Street Fighter engine.

Furthermore, convincing Capcom to re-do their artwork must have been a Herculean task. After being burned by rediculous art resources in Street Fighter 3, Capcom has seemed afraid to commit to any major overhaul of their character's designs. The gorgeous Capcom vs. SNK 2 suffered from 16-color flat cell artwork from Darkstalkers and 10-year-old versions of Street Fighter characters (has Dhalism ever been updated?), while SNK's characters looked characteristically beautiful. Convincing this art-risk averse company to redo everything must have been a monumental task, dwarfed only by the task of actually re-doing their ten-year-old characters.

And, of course, playbalancing fighters is incredibly difficult. Unlike computergames which can be patched after launch if an exploit is discovered, and home games where competition in your house remains friendly, Arcade games have to be uncheatable out of the door. If you don't playtest them mercilessly, horrible imbalances can emerge. Why do Blizzard games take 4 years to make? Balance. Why do AAA fighters take 4 years to make? Balance.

In short, a 3 year development cycle for a competition-level arcade game is not surprising. If what they come out with is solid and plays well, they will have succeeded.

No. That's like saying that WINE's not an emulator because it runs real software. Here's the parallels you have to see to compare MAME to VMware to WINE:

ROM from game cartridge = software program

console BIOS (internal to machine, not the games) = OS

Console = computer

So, at what level does MAME emulate, and at what level does it actually replicate? You don't compare the software programs, as what is run is irrelevant. You compare the OS's - ie, if what you're running is the ORIGINAL OS, then it's NOT an emulator. MAME did NOT have the original OS - it had to reverse engineer it. See here to see how MAME works - they wrote the console BIOS from scratch, allowing it to *emulate* the console API. This is also how WINE works.

This is *not* how vmware works. VMware,again, runs an ACTUAL COPY of windows (the OS). VMware instead creates a "virtual machine" (hence the "VM") that a real OS is allowed to use.

Wine, on the other hand, does not - like MAME, it attempts to reverse-engineer the Windows API. Thus, the difference between something being an emulator (as it is classically defined) or not lies with the OS. It doesn't lie with the hardware. Obviously, console emulators perform both jobs - they create a sort-of virtual machine and then run an emulator on it. That's like they're running some software in WINE on top of VMware, so they have to perform the parallel functions of both.

But bottom line is VMware creates virtual machines. It doesn't emulate an OS as it dosn't have to.

I sold my SL-5500 a few months ago and honestly can't remember how quickly Konq and Opera loaded. But I know I'd remember if it were really slow because it would have annoyed the heck out of me. :-)

The Zaurus is an amazing machine but I found that I spent most of my time giving it care and feeding, instead of using it to be more productive. It was also my first PDA. After a while I realized I'd be a lot happier (and more productive) just using a laptop, which is what I did.

Speaking of productivity, you arcade fans will be happy to discover that MAME has been ported to the Zaurus. Works great!

Gosh, I'm really getting nostalgic! Anybody know of any _good_ up-to-date non-3D Shoot'em Ups? I'm so sick of 3D-this and 3D-that games.
One of the main reason I bought a GBA was to be able to play Gradius and the likes. Of course, there's always M.A.M.E., but I would love to see some modern graphics, high resolutions etc.

I love Linux, but I don't think it's right for this project. The only reason to run Linux on this thing is that you like Linux and you haven't thought of the alternatives.

What MAME needs is an OS that doesn't get in the way. There's no need for any processes other than MAME to be running, so no multitasking. We want fast, direct access to graphics and sound hardware. We want DOS. It's no coincidence that the core MAME source is written for DOS.

If a free OS is required, I'm given to understand that MAME runs fine under FreeDOS.

DOS MAME aleady contains code to underclock certain video cards to TV scanrates. ArcadeOS is one MAME frontend that can also run at these scanrates.

Personally, I can imagine Will Smith wearing a brightly colored cardboard box and making beeping noises, while painting the landscape strange colors and shooting at things...

The voices in my head do say I have far too good an imagination, tho...

I initially bought this for three reasons:

1) It's the only portable OGG player right now :-)

2) It's a reasonably full functional, and powerful PDA

3) It runs linux, thus has endless potential -- far more than any proprietary PDA

Already there is a completely opensource replacement OS for the Zaurus.

But... there is no "killer app" yet. A few possibilities though:

1) Real, usable, opensource GPS software using one of the many CF GPS cards out there.

2) Wireless portable OpenH323 terminal

For now, zaurus xmms and zmame are enough to keep me busy for a long time :-)

Archon was released by Electronic Arts and I loved playing it on the Commodore 64.

Here's a site with a review and screen shots.

Remember the Pac-Man move where you could hide indefinately and the ghosts couldn't get you

Yes, yes I do.

I wonder how long it will be before an unscrupulous arcade operator puts a JAMMA connector on a chipped X-BOX and runs it in his arcade

How would this differ from an unscrupulous arcade operator putting a computer into a cabinet and running regular MAME on it?

I've never seen one personally but I have seen many reports of the word "MAME" showing up on supposedly-genuine arcade machines in various bars and so on.

Many people use MAME in a stand-up arcade box for their own personal amusement (check here and here for information on how to build them and many examples of completed and in-progress projects. It's when folks put them into their businesses to collect quarters that things become a bit dodgy, in my opinion, but that has been going on long before the xbox was even thought of.

Like I said earlier, would MAME do? http://www.mameworld.net/zmame/

There maybe snes emus out there for the z, I haven't checked.

dude, why would you want gameboy when you can install zmame?

http://www.mameworld.net/zmame/.

That's the same guy who did the POSE port btw. Man has respect in my book :)

You definately want to go with a zaurus then.

tcpdump, rdesktop, ssh, ftp,... have all been ported to the zaurus. Also important, linux on the zaurus flies!. You can start a command line and run multiple apps, saving a lot of valuable memory which would be used by a gui. Try http://www.debian.org/ports/arm
, http://ipkgfind.handhelds.org, http://zaurusoft.com,... for a lot of those ports.

You can do stuff yourself if you develop in linux or java, the zaurus is simply a 2.4 kernel running on a ARM chip.

Other cool stuff on the zaurus. zMame.

There's a linux distro for the PDA called, http://opie.handhelds.org. It runs on the z and ipaq. Should check that out.

I have a zaurus, and I plan to use it for this exact purpose, when I get my NIC compact flash card.

There are other
Linux PDAs out there as well, if you're on a budget.

There are three types of problems in this chart. In many places the authors put "N/A" because they were simply too lazy to find out the correct specifications. Uninformed readers might get the impression this means the console lacked any features in that category. Secondly, some of the numbers are just wrong. Finally, many of these numbers are comparing apples to oranges. Since the errors seem to be concentrated on the Gamecube, and that's the console I know the most about, I'll just stick to correcting their mistakes on that column in the table.

Graphics Processing Unit_____162.5 MHz, not 200
Memory Bandwidth_____________2.6 GB/s, not 3.2
Simultaneous Texture Fills___8
Compressed Textures__________6:1 (S3TC)
Storage______________________Standard .5 meg and up cards, an +____________________________adapter will allow the use of flash +____________________________cards up to 64 megs in size
Maximum Resolution___________1920x1080

Many of these categories aren't directly comparable. Even the RAM comparison is misleading, because Nintendo decided to use several different types of RAM. There are 24 MBs of so-called "1T-SRAM," which is actually a new type of DRAM offering improved and more consistent access times and transfer rates. There are also 16 megs of 83 MHz SDRAM, for sound and (speculatively) "other" unspecified purposes. Flipper has 3MB of embedded memory in the form of 2MB frame buffer and a 1MB texture cache. This totals 43 megs. On the other hand, the Xbox is a UMA machine with 64 MB of 200 MHz DDR-Dram. It has more memory and memory bandwidth, but actual performance is further from the peak numbers listed, in comparison to the Gamecube, and UMA designs are less bandwidth efficient. Therefore the memory bandwidth numbers aren't comparable either. The Gamecube is really the most bandwidth efficient of all 3 consoles, for a handful of reasons.

The polygon performance numbers given are meaningless, and clearly whoever posted those numbers has no idea what they mean. "6-12M/s" is Nintendo's conservative estimate of what developers would achieve in game. The PS2 and Xbox numbers are probably for flat-shaded triangle meshes - a number which is nearly useless in revealing what the hardware can do in a real game. Unless, of course, I, Robot becomes popular again.

Pardon my shitty chart, but the <pre> tag isn't allowed anymore, and the lameness filter was driving me nuts.

I wonder if it would be possible to build/hack a JAMMA adapter for Sega's new board...??

Or if you're a Palm owning Gameboy fan then try Liberty or PalmBoy (free).

There is also a GBA emulator for the PocketPC apparantly. Although I've not tested it and there was a rumour of one of the GBA emulators being a hoax.

Biggest problems are that:

• Battery life in a pocketpc is low enough as it is without having a game hammer it even more
• You can't press two buttons at the same time with an iPAQ, possibly others too

--

While you would have to use winbloze there is a great page here with directions on how to do all of wireing to use the orignal JAMMA systems with your PC. They have even written a program they call ArcadeOS which does what your GTK Perl menu system does. The instructions are quite detailed although you have to sacrifice a keyboard to work the joysticks. A little knowledge of basic circitry will be usefull too.

However, Paulo Sergio Coelho has a web site for his DOS and Windows based VGA to TV (similar refresh as low res arcade monitors) drivers that work with a variety of video cards with claims of superior quality as compared to standard tv-out cards I think. I believe source code can be gotten if someone wanted to look at some sort of port or at least a good starting point. Other links of interest:

Tomi Engdahl has several must-visit links - VGA to TV information center, VGA to RGB + composite sync -converter, and connecting Matrox MGA to TV among others that are probably worth visiting, and the Fixed Frequency Video FAQ is probably on the list as well. I would also definitely visit the TV and Monitor CRT (Picture Tube) Information by Samuel Goldwasser. This is getting kind of wordy, for more links hit the "Tech & tips" link on my web site and then the "monitors" link, and/or the "finishing" link and then again the "monitors" link. OH! Also you might contact Brian of PC2Jamma and who is also the author of ArcadeOS to see if some sort of port would be possible.

Hope that was of some use :)

using mame on an arcade monitor

If you want to convert a jamma arcade cabinet to use with an emulator but don't have the cash to buy one of those Arcade2000 dealies, try this.