Classic Arcade Games Online

Ant writes "Midway Games and shockwave.com announced today that ten classic Midway arcade games are now available for free on the internet. " The games released include Defender, Joust, Spy Hunter and Rampage, but as you might expect, you need Shockwave in order to play them.

Comments

*Sniff*

[[Crimson]Chain]

That's the best thing that ever happened to me. I have my whole childhood back again. Now, all I have to do is fire up the TRON arcade machine right behind me and I'll have the full arcade effect...

Adam

Click Here

Um.... Mame?

[Booker]

And I would rather play these via shockwave, instead of using Mame, because....? :) Still, kinda cool that they (midway) are willing to loosen their grip on the old classics just a bit... nifty demonstration of Shockwave, too.

Does Shockwave run on Linux?

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Why bother with flash...

[Anonymous Coward]

..when you can play more than 2000 retro arcade game with the mame emulator. This run on linux, freebsd and a lot of other platforms and the all games are emulated orginals not remakes. Head over to http://x.mame.net/ and to http://www.mame.dk/ for all the roms.

Bleh

[Greyfox]

They should just release the MAME roms. MAME's standard and will run on every platform and you get the true feel of the classic game because it IS the classic game.

I wish these companies would get a clue.

They already made all the $$$ off of them possible

[Rahga]

There have been numerous repackaging for those very same games (also original edition-ified) released for the Super Nintendo, PC, and Playstation. I believe they also released a good deal of them on a ripoff "classics" arcade machine recently. They probably couldn't make any more money off of them no matter what they try now :)

At last

[froz]

At last, something that Shockwave can adequately handle: 10 year old game designs.

Mmm...

[pb]

Joust, Spy Hunter, and Rampage. (I sucked at Defender)

I could never get the hang of the controls on the arcade Spy Hunter, I did much better at the Nintendo version.

Joust, on the other hand, was awesome, as was Rampage with three players.

So are these games really free now? Can we finally use them on MAME without fear of retribution? ('cause it does say "exclusively on shockwave.com...)

I don't think that's very fair. Especially since their page was broken enough to give me a Javascript error instead of taking me to the Shockwave download page, and *then* they said it was "downloading", with nary a mention of those other "platforms" that people might be using, yea, even on the web.

When I did try to get it, it redirected me to "Flash 4 for Linux", which I already have. I guess Shockwave does stuff that Flash doesn't? Oh well, I at least know that their Javascript looks pretty broken on my version of netscape. Otherwise, it'd redirect me to the proper page.

Anyone know the absolute address of this one?

And who would write an emulator in that stuff anyhow? Weird...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Never mind....

[pb]

I got it.

If you're having problems with the site, (you have, say, Flash 4 for Linux installed, but the JavaScript is giving you trouble) try going here.

Of course, once I tried to *play* a game, it said...

"Mac users! We
haven't forgotten
about ya. All these
great games will be
ready for you soon so
hurry back."

Grr. Someone doesn't get it. Time to play some games on XMAME...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

And why should anybody care since MAME exists?

[Gridle]

The point being, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is available for many platforms (such as *nix - get XMAME) unlike Shockcrap, and the Shockcrap-recreations aren't true emulation like in MAME. I admit that they are very well crafted, but the feel just isn't correct and for example the sound is far from original. Actually, MAME emulates these particular games perfectly!

It would have been much more useful for them to release the ROMs to free redistribution, so that all MAME users could use them in good conscience. Now they'll just have to download the roms illegally or simply not play those games.

There are even two free games available for use with MAME. In fact, another one of them was previously owned by Midway, being Robby Roto. However its coder had quite a good contract - it said that when the sales of the game dropped below a certain level, the copyright would revert back to him. Being a good guy, he then released the game for free redistribution. The other free romset is Poly-Play, the only arcade game ever made in ex-GDR (East Germany), and thus there does not seem to exist a copyright holder for that piece of software anymore.

Other choice to get legal games for MAME is to buy the Hot Rod Joystick control panel which comes with a compilation of 14 good old Capcom arcade classics (such as 1941, Block Block, Commando, Exed Exes, Ghouls'n Ghosts, Magic Sword, Mercs, Section Z, Side Arms, Son Son, Street Fighter 2 HF, Strider, U. N. Squadron and Varth), which not recreations but actual ROM files that you can use with MAME. I'd love to see more people buy this pack - it would show the copyright holders that there actually still is a market for stuff like this.

Why not MAME? Because MAME is evil, in their eyes

[Mercenary]

Appreciate that Midway are still out to make money, no matter how old these games are! Not to mention that some of them are absolute classics. :)

So I suspect some sort of financial deal has gone on between shockwave.com and Midway.

As for why Midway don't just release the ROMs for MAME officially.... do you seriously think they want the average user to know about MAME?

I can just see it... In big writing on midway.com: "Download our games, and play them using MAME on your own PC! Oh, and you can get loads of other games illegally off the internet as well! Make us bankrupt please!"

Mac mice and keyboards

[yerricde]

most macs have a scarcity of mouse buttons

Only if you use the pack-in mouse. But even with the pack-in mouse, you get right click by holding Ctrl and left clicking.

often lack full keyboards, too.

Every Macintosh computer with a PowerPC CPU (even the iMac and G? computers) comes with a full keyboard, even though Mac OS maps F1-F4 to "undo, kill, copy, yank" instead of "help, save, open, scroll-to-point" like in DOS and doesn't (last time I checked) have keyboard access to pull-down menus.

But doesn't Mac have XSprocket (which seemed to inspire DirectX) for game controller input?

Legal Implications

[CAIMLAS]

I see that many people are mentioning running a MAME ROM as opposed to the shockwave version. However, the site states "that ten classic Midway arcade games are now available for play exclusively at..". Notice how it only mentions 10 games, and that they're for exclusive use from that locality. I'm guessing that they are probably doing this for financial reasons - banner ads? Or possibly merely for association with Macromedia of some sort. I don't think Midway is too pleased with the ROM market.

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CAIMLAS

Ammo for anti-MAME suits (both kinds)

[toh]

The unfortunate thing about this story (espeically combined with other recent developments like the Ultracade and the Hasbro lawsuits) is that it weakens one argument used by defenders of MAME et al (among whom I'd count myself). I speak of the "well you're not doing anything with these properties, and there's no other way to play them so they're slowly disappearing" position. Clearly at least some companies do plan on marketing older games in new packages, licenced to hardware manufacturers like Ultracade and Hanaho, or in this case as a vehicle for web hits and banner views.

It's not really a new idea - I bought the Digital Eclipse 68k-emulated versions of three Williams game years ago - but there does seem to be a new trend toward it. The funny thing is, of course, that the renewed market for these probably wouldn't exist if the MAME project and all those ROM sites hadn't helped bring it back, and they'll now make use of all that free work and publicity to reassert exlusive control.

It's really just another of the problems with proprietary software and copyrights that last too damn long. Should these companies be able to retain exclusive control over this code for so long? Especially when in many cases they had nothing to do with the original work, and just bought the "rights"? And even if you buy the argument that they still deserve to exercise the commercial rights to Joust right now, what about in 2050?

Re:No Mac Versions Yet - Linux probably too

[toh]

Actually I find it's PC keyboards that aren't "full" - they're short one metakey (this is why Microsoft does stupid things like using ASCII control characters for cut & paste). Macs have both an option and command key, which is useful in all kinds of ways both under the Mac OS and PPC Linux. And it's no better for PCs now that M$ has added the useless Windows and Menu keys to the mix (a thinly veiled ploy to get their logo on every PC keyboard), because you can't remap them in a sane manner under Windows. You can do a reasonable job within the limitations of XFree86, though, which makes xmame and Maelstrom easier. ;)

No argument about the mouse, but it's easily replaced, and there are real justifications for a one-button mouse among the less computer-fixated crowd.

Most of these were Williams games, not Midway

[Joe Rumsey]

Maybe Midway picked up the rights to these at some point, but Defender, Joust, Robotron 2084, "Defender II" (which was actually called Stargate in the arcade, but changed later), Sinistar, Bubbles, and Satan's Hollow are all Williams games. Out of the games listed, only Spy Hunter, Rampage, and Tapper are Midway games.

Note that Williams still exists. They haven't made video arcade games for a while, but they started as a pinball machine maker, and are still producing new pinball machines. Their web page is here

Re:Most of these were Williams games, not Midway

[grahamwest]

I used to work for Williams and now I work for Midway.

Williams no longer makes pinball - that operation was terminated last October 25th (and was the reason for my job change).

Midway owns all the rights to the games. When Midway and Williams were a single entity they were transferred to Midway.

If I understand things correctly (this isn't something I personally worked on) you're actually playing the real game code on an emulator made as a Shockwave plugin. Digital Eclipse's logo is there and they are the people who did all the emulators for the arcade classics compilations Midway sells for PC and Playstation and Nintendo 64.

Bear in mind that there is a thing called subsidiary rights, which means that the original people who worked on these awesome arcade games (not I, being only 26 :-) ) still get paid if you buy the games.

MAME and ShockWave

[jamiefaye]

ShockWave (and Director) can be traced back to Bally/Midway, where Marc Canter, Marc Pierce (now a VP at Atari Games), and myself worked in the arcade industry in the early 1980s. We all were laid-off after the "great crash" and started our own company to develop this.

Since it was created by game designers as a way of making game/multimedia design accessible, it is not surprising that it is easy to code games in it. It just took 15 years for the computational bandwidth of computers to rise to level needed to have an interpreter evaluate game logic and do sprite animation as well as dedicated hardware did in the early 1980s.

I am a MAME fan. Many "normals" find it difficult to set up, and find it hard to locate games to play beyond the few that are legal to trade or easy to buy.

MAME ROMs

[bbibber]

the MAME people did a good job preserving all those classics but maybe MAME should be splitted up in two versions: one which tries to emulate ONLY classic games older then 15 years or so (eg. Galaxians, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, defender, Elevator Action...) and the current MAME (this also emulates neo*geo roms and more recent games). I think this would persuade companies to give up rights on ROMS.
I don't feel well about playing games illegaly on MAME but..

• I cannot play them anywhere else!!
  
• I already paid for them big time in the arcades years ago :)
  
• in the 80ties I bought some crappy arcade conversions of the games for the c64/Atari ST on which Sega/Konami etc have also had a percentage via licensing. Anyone remembering the crappy job Ocean did with Outrun/Afterburner? Only a few of them were good (rainbow islands, bubble bobble)
  
• IF you could buy rom sets for a reasonable price I would certainly buy my favorites !!
  

I rest my case ;-)

ps. interested people should really check out http://www.retrogames.com, you'll be amazed how much can be emulated these days :)