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You want X-Arcade sticks.

Actual arcade hardware. USB connector, or the option to stick in modular controllers for PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox360... you name it. Lifetime warranty and EASY user servicing, too. Shoot them an email if any component fails, they'll mail you the replacement part, you stick it in yourself, easy as can be.

I bought a pair years ago, been upgrading them (very cheaply) as new systems came out. Love them and highly recommend them.

I for one love my X-Arcade joystick (link warning: some video game sounds present). Nothing makes for a better MAME experience short of building an entire MAME cabinet.

Wii Virtual Console + An Actual Arcade Stick (with GC adapter). There's no WVC game you won't be able to play, and play well.

"I am an older man (44)..."

Quite whinning. I'm a young 40 year old.

If you are suffering from unfitness related degenerative diseases then get your fat ass down the gym and start drinking milk.

As for games: Try arcade classics like Robotron and Tempest. To play them use an emulator like MAME http://www.mame.net/ and go buy some addons from http://www.x-arcade.com/mame.shtml/

The artritis will obviously limit your ability to do 'twitch' gaming, but maybe you should try using a large controller which will not require a lot of hand movements, like the X-Arcade controller.

Actually, I was thinking of buying a Domo-kun from them (see URL link). But now we are outside the realm of games unless you mean PC games. In which case we may as well mention X-Arcade.

This is all academic anyway, as I'm in debt up to my eyeballs for the next 5 years at least....

First of all, while I have confidence in Nintendo they do have more moving parts and thus complexity in thier system.

There are no moving parts, it's build off of solid state MEMS accelerometers

http://www.x-arcade.com/newsletter/Wii%20Dupe.shtm l

What it really comes down to is that Nintendo is offering a complete motion sensing/pointing device that is of a reasonably mature design; and Sony has added a minor feature of limited use in extending functionality to games. Basically, Nintendo's system allows the creation of game types that have never been though of before and Sony's device allows developers to add (mostly pointless) motion sensing controls to their games.

It is hard to say because I had some of the stuff already like the pc. Without the pc I spent about $1000. $600 of that was the controls. The tv was about $200. If you already have a decent pc and monitor, and you don't really need the best controls , you can come in well under what I spent. Check out the X-Arcade controller (They even make a cabinet!) for about $100. http://www.x-arcade.com/ This even works on consoles! Good Luck!

and the eight-direction human-sized joystick

If you're fairly serious about this, and especially if you're into MAME or other arcade emulation, you should seriously consider an X-Arcade joystick. I say you have to be pretty serious 'cuz it's a lot of cash to drop for a joystick, but I've found mine to be worth every penny.. it's an absolute dream to use.

On this matter btw, YTF does every PC joypad ever made suck so badly? I've tried most of them at some point - the D-Pad is usually the critical failing. Only good D-Pad I ever found on a PC joypad was an old Saitek one they don't make any more.... and yes, I know about the Playstation 2 to USB adapters - got one. The PS2 joypad is wonderful.. the adapter isn't (made by VenomUK, don't buy that one, it sucks)

This?

First of all, it really makes you feel like an old fart, especially if you have kids. And, trust me on this, these games are dorky and far from exciting to anyone who plays them for the game, and not for the memories and geek bragging rights. Plus, it just is not new, sexy technology any more. In the old days, we didn't mind typing up pages and pages of BASIC code - that was an integral part of the fun. Try doing that nowadays. Chances are you'll just feel it's pointless. Times do change.

There's some cool stuff going on in the do-it-yourself scene though. Over at the Xbox-Scene forums there's lots of discussion about creating custom controllers and even full-blown old-school arcades. And since the Xbox is pretty hackable, with MAME readily available (Sourceforge link), it's just a natural choice.

Hmm.. You mean like this type of stuff?

Sorry, it's being done, and has been for years. Next idea.

You really should get an XArcade controller for MAME. You can even get an XBox adapter to use it with your Xbox. (I use mine with my PC) It isn't *quite* the same as the arcade games, but about as close as you'll get without having the original game.

As part of my Ghosts of Slashdot project, I grabbed a copy of this article before it went "live". There was a Slashdot outage at about that time, so I don't know if CmdrTaco & co. decided to change the text, or if it was lost and had to be re-created.

Same submitter, same "dept."... just the title and story text has changed.

Play Those Classic Video Games Virtually Anywhere
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the emulating-the-classics dept.
Iphtashu Fitz writes "If you're like me your introduction to video games decades ago was something like the Atari 2600, and you also pumped untold hundreds of quarters into arcade games like Space Invaders, Defender, and Asteroids. Well according to a Wired News article you can now play these and many more of those classic games in their original format on your PC, Mac, Playstation, XBox, or Gamecube. X-Arcade has an emulator & arcade-style interface that they claim will let you play over 4000 of the classic games on any of these modern gaming systems. Or if you'd prefer to play the actual arcade games from the 1980's then it might be time for you to take a trip to New York where the American Museum of the Moving Image is holding an exhibition where you can play these classics. Game emulators can be found linked from the museums website as well as through Retrogames." Much easier than building your own Cabinet.

I got my undergrad from UCF in Digital Media, just down the street from FullSail - heard some questionable things as well about the place. They do have kickin' facilities, though.

I'm a grad student now at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The program has people going into many industries, but the majority are into video games. We have graduates at Rockstar, EA, Maxis, Angel Studios, and a number of other companies. One guy was back from his co-op at Maxis and had to excuse himself from a party because Will Wright had called him on his cell. We took a trip to EA (among other companies like Pixar, Disney, etc) last month, where the Vice President and CTO each gave presentations to our group of 30 or so.

Unlike many vocational programs, we don't actually have any courses on video game programming directly, though we do offer official courses in Maya, Building Virtual Worlds, and Game Design. The game design course mainly focuses on board, dice, and card games.

Retro gaming is a popular side hobby, with one student teaching a course in Game Development for the 8-bit NES and the X-Arcade company at residence in our building. (We've got two MAME Arcade setups in the hall)

It's not uncommon to see students parked in front of the gaming setups we have on each floor (with all the major consoles) doing "research", only to go back and discuss what they learned for a few hours with their project team.

The program is pretty demanding and tough to get in, but it's a fun place. Gaming is not an easy industry, there's a lot of late hours, especially in "crunch" mode before a game ships, but it's pretty rewarding.

For the extremely lazy, the X-Arcade folks are taking preorders on their trackball unit, which I believe includes a 3" trackball. They have not traditionally used happ buttons and joysticks in the past, so it's doubtful this ball will have the same feel as the happ balls on most golden tee machines.

If you do want the "real deal" you can get a 3" trackball from Happ Controls and to interface it you can buy an OptiPAC from Ultimarc, a usb interface from happ (a bit more expensive, though it supports 3 buttons unlike the OptiPAC) or you can even hack apart an old ball mouse and interface through that. Personally, I am using the Ultimarc OptiPAC with a Happ 3" ball on my own cabinet.

Incredible Technologies (makers of Golden Tee Golf arcade machines) used to publish a version of Golden Tee for the PC, though they themselves do not sell it anymore. You can get a copy from ebay for about 3-5 bucks, and there are some addon courses for sale also. The courses are from the arcade games Golden Tee 3D Golf and (the addons) Golden Tee Golf '97. The game supports network, modem, and internet play.

Though it's dated and the graphics are not as good as some of the newer titles, the price is right, and the experience is as close as you can get to the arcade if you want to practice your Golden Tee at home. I bought golden tee pc from ebay last week and have been having a lot of fun with it on the cabinet.

I personally use a X-Arcade joystick.

I couldn't be happier with it. It is incredibly sturdy , and just feels right (especially for my capcom fighting games or bizarre japanese puzzle games ie. puyo puyo)

If the left buttoned nature is so important to you (and you are using mame.. ) , you could just rebind the movement to the right joystick and use the left's buttons.

I personally find left joysticked better to use.

For what it's worth. Sammy Studios was responsible for one of the best 2d^H^H fighters in the last few years (beyond the latest capcom rehashes) , in the form of the Guilty Gear series of games. Pristinely animated , infinitely enjoyable , old style arcade fighters.

Guilty Gear has much more 'depth' in a fighting game than capcom has ever mustered, and it keeps my arcade stick occupied for much of it's time.

You can use a regular mouse or a trackball as the input device. For instance I use a mouse for Arkanoid which works great and is surprisingly better than the original controller.

for the best experince, you can get the X arcade controler for all the regular stick/button games

"The interesting detail about the arcade stick is that it works with all three consoles - no extra assembly required. All gamers need do is plug the appropriate end into the console of their choice and they'll be up and running."

The X-Arcade Fighting stick does the same thing...so I'm not sure why it's such an interesting detail. It's probably only interesting since Nuby paid IGN to say it was.

USB

Playstation 1 & 2

Xbox

Gamecube

Dreamcast

...and your PS2, and your GameCube...

Check It

Yep. I had the Intellivision, Atari 2600, NES, and SNES (which I still have). No plans to buy another console. I am not a big gamer, but I do still play Quake online occasionally. (created a bootable Quake server too, based on Knoppix. - knoppixquake .)

But I also got into collecting arcade cabinets, and although my collection has dwindled over the years, my collection of ROMs has grown. I just purchased an X-Arcade joystick. Add MAME to your gaming PC, and one of these, and you should have a few thousand more games to keep you interested.

LEGAL NOTE: you should only acquire ROMs for games that you actually own. ;-)

X-Arcade

mame.dk, never heard of them.

However I have heard of the MAME burners, The Tombstone Project, and Rom-Mania!.

Not only can you obtain MAME ROMS, but you can get all the ROMS for all your old systems. I was able to ressurect my Intellivision, Commodore 64, Amiga 1000, MS-PacMan Machine, and Nintendo 64 on my PC.

I thought about putting together a project to contact all the ROM license holders and see how much they would want for the copyrights. We (the collective we) would then all contribute to a fund that would be used to buy the licenses and place them into the Public Domain. I personally contacted a few license holders and the response was quite negative.

It seems that the large corporations which own the licenses and copyrights don't want us emulating old games, but instead want us to go buy NEW game systems. They aren't the most nostalgic bunch and I am glad that all these old treasures have been preserved through emulators.

Fast Forwarding, you can play MAME on XBOX now :) Imagine every arcade console game ever made burned onto a single DVD. This would be the killer XBOX app! Bill has got the money to make it happen. It could be his gift to the world, but we will never see it.

Uh huh...

Here's some random video game trivia I picked up for the incredible book The Ultimate History of Video Games to celebrate this good news!

- The PacMan character shape was derived from the game designer looking at a pizza he ordered after eating one slice of it.

- Pac Man was originally called "Puck Man" in Japan, but worried that american adolescents would deface the cabinets, replacing the 'P' with an 'F' to spell "Fuck Man", they changed the name.

- Both Steve Jobs and The Woz used to work at Atari in its early years. Atari founder Nolan Buschnell (also the founder of Chuck E Cheese) was hesitant about hiring Steve Jobs because he literally smelled bad and looked like a "20 year old ho chi minh". It turned out that almost everything Jobs took credit for at Atari was stuff that Woz actually did, which leads me to ...

- Atari gave Jobs the task of changing the design of one of their games (I forget which) to use less chips. Jobs then handed this task over to Woz. Jobs was promised a substantial bonus for every chip removed from the design, and he promised Woz half of this bonus. Woz's design was brilliant and removed something like 75 chips, which led to a bonus of something like 50 grand. Jobs gave Woz 500 bucks and told him that was half the total bonus. By fucking over his best friend, Jobs now had some capital to go and start Apple.

-The name "Donkey Kong" came from the Japanese designer (Miyamoto? I forget) trying to translate "Stubborn Gorrilla". He looked up "Stubborn" and saw "Donkey" as part of the translation and went with it.

-Magnavox designed the first video game console, the "Odyssey".

-"Atari" means "check" in the context of the japanese game Go.

-The company Namco got its big start by the illegal bootlegging of Atari arcade machines for the Japanese market.

-Space Invaders was such a hit in Japan that it caused a national coin shortage.

-The company name "COLECO" stands for "Colorado Leather Company". They also invented Cabbage Patch Kids.

Now, it is possible there's some factual errors above (don't have the book on me right now so I'm working on memory), so feel free to correct me!

(RANT)All that said, people, please go and support your local arcades. The arcade industry is DYING and it seems that nothing is being done because home video games are being so damn successful. I truly miss the days when arcade developers had significant R&D budgets and were capable of releasing arcade games that looked and played far better than anything you could play at home. I miss the days when I'd think how great it would be to be able to play those games at home. It just saddens me that 2d arcade style games are dying as a genre, and people keep unfairly comparing them to their 3d counterparts. and I don't care what you say, games like Metal Slug, Street Fighter 3, and Last Blade 2 have _FAR_ better graphics than any 3d first person shooter!!!!(/RANT)

And one more thing ... MAME on a fast PC with an X-Arcade = the best video game console out there!

I have a hotrod, and it is without question the best purchase I have ever made. I got it on a special discount price of $100. Also... check out this site. It isn't ready yet, but they claim it will be compatible with all systems via an adapter. Seems like it would be pretty sexy.

Captain_Frisk