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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
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).
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); }