Slashdot Mirror
Saving Our Video Game Heritage
felis_panthera writes: "SecurityFocus has a great article on the preservation of the old arcade games like Arkanoid and Pac Man through the MAME program. MAME, which stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is an emulator for the old, stand up arcade games. This story has SecurityFocus's Kevin Poulsen chatting with a few people involved in the project."
Game design is an art form. Currently, it's all to common for new-release games to sport the latest whiz-bang 3D graphics and sound, while the game itself is absolute crap. Obviously none of the games from the 80s would win any awards today for technical excellence, but what made the classics great in their time was solid design and attention to gameplay. Game designers of today ought to study the history of games as well as the latest version of DirectX. That's why we need to keep these old games around.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
The benefit of MAME doesn't lie just in preserving the playing experience. It's also in providing an incentive for people to preserve the roms themselves. Bit rot is consuming old arcade machines like there's no tomorrow, and the problem is only going to get worse as the iron gets older.
This exposes a real problem with the way copyright is currently enforced. Yes, after a century, the roms will be in the public domain (unless Rep Sonny Bono comes back from the grave and hands another century to Disney). But if you're not allowed to copy the rom in the meantime, then the rom won't still be around. And don't just say that individuals have a fair-use right to make backups, since I'm talking about the harm to society as a whole by lost works in the public domain, not the harm to individuals.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It's great that so many old arcade games are being preserved in ROM images and played by programs like MAME and Retrocade. I'm especially glad that the companies who own these old games haven't come down hard on the ROM sites, at least not yet. Even though the games are effectively no longer marketable, the companies involved could still throw a fit and destroy the top ROM sites, because unlike the warez scene the emulation scene tends to try to stay open and above-board; they just want to be able to freely use old games which are more useful to nostalgics like us than to the game companies themselves.
This is one of the big reasons that copyright law needs to be changed back to something like its original shorter terms, instead of this bullshit corporate agenda of "life of the creator plus 100 years." This is especially true in the information age, when things get out of date very quickly and the media we use doesn't last very long. Books can exist for a thousand years if stored in a dry place, but the boards used by old arcade machines are more likely to last 10-20 years unless they're stored extremely well and even then there can be damage from the board just getting burned out--that's why it was so important for the emulation scene to get these ROMs into a digital, downloadable format and distribute them to as many sources as possible. But to do that, they had to break copyright law, over something which isn't very marketable anyway. Arcade collections for the PC put out by authorized companies only contain three or four games which were unusually popular in their day, but if it weren't for the emulation scene 99% of the arcade games, part of our history, would probably have ended up disappearing forever.
There are currently several sites which are all very big and carry tens of thousands of ROMs, but with a few cease and desist orders they could disappear. I'd name my favorite one, but I don't want to lead the corporate lawyers who doubtless read Slashdot to their door, especially since Microsoft of all companies has a couple of arcade-derived collections. The corporate, abusive extension of copyright terms has to stop, or else we may lose other digital artifacts, not just video games.
And as a final note, MAME plays far more games, but Retrocade plays over 100 games with the slickest UI you could ever slap onto an emulator, it's just unfuckingbelieveably cool. Check it out.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
See ArcadePC , a Cabinet/PC/control system, all packaged and ready to purchase. Small & large versions available. I think they're working on a cocktail-type platform, too. Kinda pricey, though. The standard ArcadePC with a 19" monitor & a mini-cabinet is around $800, and the one with a 27" monitor & a full-size cabinet is around $2000.
If you just want the control panel, they're using the Hot Rod , available in 2 versions, that you can use with your current computer. The 'classic' is around $180, and the SE (with more buttons, same layout as many modern coin-op control panels), is around $200. They connect via a PS/2 port, but mention on their site that USB support is in the works (that's what I'm waiting for).
I'v played with MAME a little, and I've become convinced tht preserving the classics in their original form is more worthwhile than some of the recent attempts to "modernize" and recreate the classics. (I really don't understand the fascination with rehashing games every decade or so, it fits right in with making a 90's movie of "Leave It To Beaver")
For example, I recently bought Centipede for the playstation in a fit of nostolgia. And it's ok, the original mode is there, but the "new" version has been slaughtered with 3D graphics and awkward controls. But at least it really does have the "real" classic interface.
Much worse yet, not so long ago, I saw an arcade machine featuring 4 "classic" games (ala NeoGeo). I played a round of Pac-Man and was disgusted! Everything had 3D shading, the pellets bounced in place, pac-man was green!!! Absolutely stomach turning.
Give me the originals, and I mean originals any day, they were carefully crafted masterpieces that bring back memories like these recreations never can. And when tools like MAME can play nearly anything you can remember, you truly have a wonderful preservation that surpasses any "recreation" I've seen come out in the last few years.
SPACE WAR can be played right now right here (if you have Java) - it runs the original PDP-1 code in a Java emulator. Story of it's development in early 60's here
(Thanks JL)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }