Over 1,100 New Arcade Games Added To the Internet Archive (archive.org)

Jason Scott, writing for Internet Archive blog: The Internet Arcade, our collection of working arcade machines that run in the browser, has gotten a new upgrade in its 4th year. Advancements by both the MAME emulator team and the Emscripten conversion process allowed our team to go through many more potential arcade machines and add them to the site. The majority of these newly-available games date to the 1990s and early 2000s, as arcade machines both became significantly more complicated and graphically rich, while also suffering from the ever-present and home-based video game consoles that would come to dominate gaming to the present day. Even fervent gamers might have missed some of these arcade machines when they were in the physical world, due to lower distribution numbers and shorter times on the floor.

Comments

The Internet Archive is a treasure

[bobstreo]

and should be fully funded as part of the Smithsonian or Library of Congress.

Re:Why are they allowed to do this?

[tlhIngan]

It's all a LOT of legwork and they're doing a lot more than posting ROM dumps

Not to mention, they're not technically making the ROMs available. You can play it in your browser, but you'll note there's no link to download the ROM itself - it's only available that way.

Of course, anyone with a modicum of knowledge of how to use "Developer mode" in their browser can easily get at the real ROM files. It's not hard and left as an exercise to the reader. Presumably there are controls in place to keep users from writing scripts to mass download the ROMs.