Nostalgia Gaming
Joust - Donkey Kong - Pac Man
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Centipede - Galaga - Bad Dudes - Street Figher. These were the games that defined our youth, played endlessly in arcades and pizza shops while we waited for the adults to do whatever it was they did, on our Colecovisions and our Atari twenty-six and fifty-two hundreds.
I've grown out of videogames. In all honestly, I haven't sat down and played an entire game by myself since beating the crap out of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night over 6 years ago. Sure, I've had little affairs with games since, but they're always been too fast and un-centered, for lack of a better word, for me to enjoy. Games with a 3D camera make me alternately frustrated and dizzy, and it's near to impossible to find a game without one anymore. I don't really care how realistic the lighting or the bump-mapping looks, beyond a geeky curiosity, and I don't need a Hollywood budget or plot. To me, the best games are the ones that, in the words of my "Othello" box, take a minute to learn, and a lifetime to master.
To find the games that I really enjoyed playing for any amount of time, it was time to stop waiting for the next great first person shooter, and start looking backward.
Enter Mame - the little
emulator
that could. The [M]ulti [A]rcade [M]achine [E]mulator team is bringing back the old, forgotten games of our youth, one by one, and emulating the hardware that powered them. Because lots of games shared near-identical hardware, the number of games the emulator supports is staggering.
Due to the fact that MAME is a lower-level emulation project focused on resurrecting these old arcade boards, it lacks the polished UI of a great emulator like nesticle. There's also the problem of dealing with a possible library of thousands of games at once in a sane manner.
MythTV has a little-documented plug-in called Mythgame which is a frontend for a bevy of emulators, and can easily act as a nifty M.A.M.E. GUI.I've been anxious to try it out for ages, but really haven't had the time, and I'm not a big fan of playing games on the keyboard, so I was going to need to invest in some joysticks as well. To be honest, I really only like to play games with at least 1 other person, so I needed 2 USB joysticks that worked with Windows and Linux.
I semi-randomly stumbled upon a HUGE collection of Mame roms(bittorrent) on the popular tracker sitesuprnova.org (notice the missing e in supr), and decided to download the 9 gig collection so I could finally get around to checking it out. The ridiculously complete package includes all the emulated games, samples (some games like beatmania have large sound samples which are not extracted with the rom and have to be downloaded separately, but are included in this archive), screenshots, cabinet (actual video game machine) pictures, and icons.
For getting the actual emulator installed, I turned to Mameworld.net. I was able to download the windows version of mame with a GUI and some other speed updates, mame32fx, fire it up, and start playing. Once I'd told it where to find my roms, it was pretty flawless.
Getting set up to play on Linux was roughly the same. I downloaded the current version of xmame with a simple apt-get
I fired up a game or two, but there were a few glitches. First, the screen was too small, filling only about 2/3 of my monitor. Second, the joysticks weren't doing a thing.
Stay away from the similar usb joystick offering from Logitech, the Playstation lookalike "Logitech Dual Action GamePad" as they're plagued with calibration issues. You should be able to find the awesome Saitek P880 at any GameStop or computer store.
Now I needed to get MythTV's MythGame GUI to invoke xmame with these options. Adding the flags for fullscreen and joysticks to the "MAME binary location:" line didn't do it because MythTV couldn't interpret the path correctly with spaces, so I had to find another way.
Luckily, Mame looks for a simple RC file (.xmame/mamerc in your home directory - you'll have to create this file) where you can put the options you want.
jt 7
fullscreen 1
hs 2
ws 2
As soon as I selected a
game and started it up, we were playing, and I
spent the weekend locked in epic joust battles with Jon and Jenn at my side. The package that is floating around the bittorrent circles is a true library, including prototypes that never hit the arcades, bootlegs, and some real japanese gems unreleased in the US. Next time you're hankering for a late night gaming fix, give Mame a shot. I'm a big fan of emulators in general, but there's something different about this one. Unlike Nintendo games which we played so hard they wore out and you had to blow on them, these are the games that we never got to play because we didn't have enough quarters or tokens in our pocket, and mom said it was time to go. Mame, when set up right, is like having an endless supply of quarters in the library of congress arcade (which should, but as of yet doesn't, exist).
