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

At last

[froz]

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

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.

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

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 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 :)