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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.
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.