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Games Entertainment

Classic Arcade Games Online 64

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-ya-gotta-play-shockwave dept.
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.
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Classic Arcade Games Online More

Classic Arcade Games Online

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  • That's the best thing that ever happened to me. I have my whole childhood back again. Now, all I have to do is fire up the TRON arcade machine right behind me and I'll have the full arcade effect...

    Adam

    Click Here [crimsonnet.net]

  • And I would rather play these via shockwave, instead of using Mame, because....? :) Still, kinda cool that they (midway) are willing to loosen their grip on the old classics just a bit... nifty demonstration of Shockwave, too.

    Does Shockwave run on Linux?

    ---
  • They're promising these will be playable on the Mac soon. WTF ? Shockwave runs on the Mac, does anybody know what in Shockwave isn't cross-platform ?
  • Dang, that brings back memories! Eat oil slick, spy guys!
  • This says it all....

    "Mac users, we haven't forgotten about you, check back soon!"
  • The thing I like best isn't playing the games, but the idea that these things aren't just dropping off the face of the earth when their medium/platform becomes outdated. I hope this is a trend.

    And nice of Midway to let it happen. Now if we can just bring the music industry into the 21st century. Three cheers for embracing new technology.

    Jon Sullivan
  • What a joke... I'm on Windows2000 (hey if you need to run Windows, 2000 is pretty decent), so I just went to shockwave.com to play some Defender and after showing me all kinds of Shockwave stuff it tells me that to actually play the game, I need to have Shockwave 8 installed... Which I don't have (apparantly), so I get a link to autoinstall it. It starts downloading for a couple of minutes, shows me a movie with the text below "If you see the movie playing, the installation is complete" but I notice that the movie says I have Shockwave 7...

    And indeed, the same message pops up: "Sorry, you need Shockwave 8 to play this game" AAAARRRGGGHHHH

    Even when I go straight to the download-menu and select I want to download Shockwave 8, it tells me I already have it!

    Anybody proficient in Macromedia website-navigation (Tarzan?) care to help me out?

  • Why bother with flash... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ..when you can play more than 2000 retro arcade game with the mame emulator. This run on linux, freebsd and a lot of other platforms and the all games are emulated orginals not remakes. Head over to http://x.mame.net/ [mame.net] and to http://www.mame.dk/ [www.mame.dk] for all the roms.
  • When I go to the shockwave site, using Linux and Netscape 4.72 with java and javascript turned on, I get a javascript error.

    When I go there with java and javascript turned off, I get nothing. Just a blank, grey page.

    Linux
    -----
  • Actually, Shockwave for Linux has been out for at least several months. That doesn't matter, though, because shockwave.com's JavaScript evidently won't run at all in Netscape (4.7). woo!

  • Bleh (Score:2)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 )
    They should just release the MAME roms. MAME's standard and will run on every platform and you get the true feel of the classic game because it IS the classic game.

    I wish these companies would get a clue.

  • There have been numerous repackaging for those very same games (also original edition-ified) released for the Super Nintendo, PC, and Playstation. I believe they also released a good deal of them on a ripoff "classics" arcade machine recently. They probably couldn't make any more money off of them no matter what they try now :)

  • Re:Gee golly wiz! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Shockwave has never been released. If you mean Flash player then yes. See the this page [macromedia.com] for more info.
  • I got it to work, and it is exactly like I remember. On Defender, it even draws the shitty little Williams logo at the beginning.
    Breif thrill, I miss the arcaded controls though.

  • At last (Score:3)

    by froz ( 69551 ) on Saturday May 06, 2000 @08:26AM (#1088184)
    At last, something that Shockwave can adequately handle: 10 year old game designs.

  • And playing it until my vision clouded from lack of moisture on my eyes.

    then sitting there with my eyes closed for ten minutes, and doing it all over again. (sigh). Those were the days :)

  • Mmm... (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Joust, Spy Hunter, and Rampage. (I sucked at Defender)

    I could never get the hang of the controls on the arcade Spy Hunter, I did much better at the Nintendo version.

    Joust, on the other hand, was awesome, as was Rampage with three players.

    So are these games really free now? Can we finally use them on MAME without fear of retribution? ('cause it does say "exclusively on shockwave.com...)

    I don't think that's very fair. Especially since their page was broken enough to give me a Javascript error instead of taking me to the Shockwave download page, and *then* they said it was "downloading", with nary a mention of those other "platforms" that people might be using, yea, even on the web.

    When I did try to get it, it redirected me to "Flash 4 for Linux", which I already have. I guess Shockwave does stuff that Flash doesn't? Oh well, I at least know that their Javascript looks pretty broken on my version of netscape. Otherwise, it'd redirect me to the proper page.

    Anyone know the absolute address of this one?

    And who would write an emulator in that stuff anyhow? Weird...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Get it here [macromedia.com]
  • I got it.

    If you're having problems with the site, (you have, say, Flash 4 for Linux installed, but the JavaScript is giving you trouble) try going here [shockwave.com].

    Of course, once I tried to *play* a game, it said...

    "Mac users! We
    haven't forgotten
    about ya. All these
    great games will be
    ready for you soon so
    hurry back.    "

    Grr. Someone doesn't get it. Time to play some games on XMAME...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Yes, MAME is neat, and yes, it's far better to play this games emulated on your computer than on some website using one of the tools of the Devil. (shockwave)

    But still, is there anyone out there who has never dreamed the impossible dream? To have the global high score on their favorite arcade game?


    --

  • And why should anybody care since MAME exists? (Score:5)

    by Gridle ( 17502 ) on Saturday May 06, 2000 @08:40AM (#1088190)
    The point being, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator [mame.net] is available for many platforms (such as *nix - get XMAME [mame.net]) 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 [www.mame.dk] or simply not play those games.

    There are even two free games [mame.net] 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 [hanaho.com] 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.
  • I get the same....
  • Now this is just plain cool. Never thought I could play Defender in a browser window.
  • MAME has one problem in the vision of major publishers, I imagine: It would hold theappearance of condoning software piracy by releasing the MAME images - remember, in the eyes of publishers... MAME is good for one thing only........

    But of course Shockwave is perfectly secure... (scrsm...)

  • Appreciate that Midway are still out to make money, no matter how old these games are! Not to mention that some of them are absolute classics. :)

    So I suspect some sort of financial deal has gone on between shockwave.com and Midway.

    As for why Midway don't just release the ROMs for MAME officially.... do you seriously think they want the average user to know about MAME?

    I can just see it... In big writing on midway.com: "Download our games, and play them using MAME on your own PC! Oh, and you can get loads of other games illegally off the internet as well! Make us bankrupt please!"

  • most macs have a scarcity of mouse buttons

    Only if you use the pack-in mouse. But even with the pack-in mouse, you get right click by holding Ctrl and left clicking.

    often lack full keyboards, too.

    Every Macintosh computer with a PowerPC CPU (even the iMac and G? computers) comes with a full keyboard, even though Mac OS maps F1-F4 to "undo, kill, copy, yank" instead of "help, save, open, scroll-to-point" like in DOS and doesn't (last time I checked) have keyboard access to pull-down menus.

    But doesn't Mac have XSprocket (which seemed to inspire DirectX) for game controller input?

  • Legal Implications (Score:3)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Saturday May 06, 2000 @09:04AM (#1088196)
    I see that many people are mentioning running a MAME ROM as opposed to the shockwave version. However, the site states "that ten classic Midway arcade games are now available for play exclusively at..". Notice how it only mentions 10 games, and that they're for exclusive use from that locality. I'm guessing that they are probably doing this for financial reasons - banner ads? Or possibly merely for association with Macromedia of some sort. I don't think Midway is too pleased with the ROM market.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • This would seem to be better than MAME. With MAME, it is a challenge to get roms, and then a challenge to get WORKING roms, and then a challenge to get MAME to NOT lock up when you try out a game or two.

    And don't get me started on why my Sidewinder game pad won't go up. The program gets real weird when trying to redefine the damn controls. Up is UP, okay?
  • The unfortunate thing about this story (espeically combined with other recent developments like the Ultracade and the Hasbro lawsuits) is that it weakens one argument used by defenders of MAME et al (among whom I'd count myself). I speak of the "well you're not doing anything with these properties, and there's no other way to play them so they're slowly disappearing" position. Clearly at least some companies do plan on marketing older games in new packages, licenced to hardware manufacturers like Ultracade and Hanaho, or in this case as a vehicle for web hits and banner views.

    It's not really a new idea - I bought the Digital Eclipse 68k-emulated versions of three Williams game years ago - but there does seem to be a new trend toward it. The funny thing is, of course, that the renewed market for these probably wouldn't exist if the MAME project and all those ROM sites hadn't helped bring it back, and they'll now make use of all that free work and publicity to reassert exlusive control.

    It's really just another of the problems with proprietary software and copyrights that last too damn long. Should these companies be able to retain exclusive control over this code for so long? Especially when in many cases they had nothing to do with the original work, and just bought the "rights"? And even if you buy the argument that they still deserve to exercise the commercial rights to Joust right now, what about in 2050?

  • "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."
    No! NO! We'll never get them to give it away if they actually think there is still a market. The only way to get them to open it up is to convince them that there is no market- no way to make money off of them.
    ~luge(exams are done... firing up xmame as we speak)
  • Actually I find it's PC keyboards that aren't "full" - they're short one metakey (this is why Microsoft does stupid things like using ASCII control characters for cut & paste). Macs have both an option and command key, which is useful in all kinds of ways both under the Mac OS and PPC Linux. And it's no better for PCs now that M$ has added the useless Windows and Menu keys to the mix (a thinly veiled ploy to get their logo on every PC keyboard), because you can't remap them in a sane manner under Windows. You can do a reasonable job within the limitations of XFree86, though, which makes xmame and Maelstrom easier. ;)

    No argument about the mouse, but it's easily replaced, and there are real justifications for a one-button mouse among the less computer-fixated crowd.

  • Had the same problem with NT, except it asked me to reboot during the installation. After I did, I went back to the page and started the download again, and this time I got all the way through the download and install. Hope that helps.
  • 2 window 98 boxes, identical to each other (and I mean identical, same ghost images) one dl and worked fine, the other still complains about needing version 8.

  • 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.

    Do you really think that a company is going to give away their trademarked property so that people that they regard as pirates will be able to sleep easier?

    But I do agree that this is too little too late, especially when the flood of ROMs is going to go on, legal or not. I think this is mostly meant as a novelty for people when they are idly surfing. (A lot of my coworkers didn't have anything better to do when I worked tech support then play Java Script games).

  • Especially since their page was broken enough to give me a Javascript error instead of taking me to the Shockwave download page

    I noticed this too, so I decided that I would send them a polite email. If you have problems you might consider that too:

    ------------------------------------------
    To : webmaster@shockwave.com
    Cc :
    Attchmnt:
    Subject : Javascript error
    ----- Message Text -----
    Dear Sirs,

    Your web site "http://www.shockwave.com" appears to be broken. When I visit that URL, I get automatically redirected to a "http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp" URL, only to get a "Javascript Error". The page remains blank.

    I use the latest release of one of the major web browsers (Netscape 4.72 with the Macromedia Flash 4 plugin installed), so my choice of browser should normally not be a problem. Anyway, I was unable to find information on your site regarding the minimum software requirements to visit your site, as I could not access the web site in the first place.

    I hope this error will be taken care of, and I look forward on being able to visit the shockwave.com web site. Thanks in advance!

    Best Regards,
    [your name]
    ------------------------------------------

    Who knows, maybe it helps.

  • OK...that Hot Rod Joystick Control Panel is the f**kin S*IT!!! Damn....I am so glad you slapped that link up, I highly doubt I'd have ever found that..thanks, and on further...its cool Midway and Macromedia popped those games out on Shockwave, I'm a big fan of the stuff myself having taken tons of classes on Lingo and whatnot (money is good), but I can't really say its worth it...if yer that paranoid with breaking the law by d/lin a ROM which is almost certainly not being traced by anyone and which would land you nothing in regards to fines etc etc....then enjoy shockwave..otherwise get MAME or Retrocade or any of the other fine emu's out there and play for fun. If yer that worried about breaking the law then theres most likely a deeper problem with ya (Freudian anal fetish?)


  • Maybe Midway picked up the rights to these at some point, but Defender, Joust, Robotron 2084, "Defender II" (which was actually called Stargate in the arcade, but changed later), Sinistar, Bubbles, and Satan's Hollow are all Williams games. Out of the games listed, only Spy Hunter, Rampage, and Tapper are Midway games.

    Note that Williams still exists. They haven't made video arcade games for a while, but they started as a pinball machine maker, and are still producing new pinball machines. Their web page is here [wms.com]

  • Yeah, I got that "Mac users" message too, on my Solaris 2.6 system. Idiots.


  • And it's no better for PCs now that M$ has added the useless Windows and Menu keys to the mix (a thinly veiled ploy to get their logo on every PC keyboard), because you can't remap them in a sane manner under Windows.


    Actually, The Windoze & Menu Keys are easily remappable with the Windoze PowerToys package.
    Well, not *Easily* - you can only remap them to other meta keys, really. But it is a rather sick ploy on M$'s part - In retaliation, I think that the Happy Hacker Keyboards should replace one of their metakeys' icon's with a little Ewing Penguin.

    (/me prays to the Karma Faeries)
    Kagenin
  • ShockWave (and Director) can be traced back to Bally/Midway, where Marc Canter, Marc Pierce (now a VP at Atari Games), and myself worked in the arcade industry in the early 1980s. We all were laid-off after the "great crash" and started our own company to develop this.

    Since it was created by game designers as a way of making game/multimedia design accessible, it is not surprising that it is easy to code games in it. It just took 15 years for the computational bandwidth of computers to rise to level needed to have an interpreter evaluate game logic and do sprite animation as well as dedicated hardware did in the early 1980s.

    I am a MAME fan. Many "normals" find it difficult to set up, and find it hard to locate games to play beyond the few that are legal to trade or easy to buy.
  • Quick downloads, arcade-perfect realism, extensive options to modify controls and screen positioning: I'd rather play this on shockwave.com then in MAME. Also, the biggest factor: I can play it wherever I want, as long as I have an internet connection. No need to download some emulator (which often crashes), and with Shockwave on Linux, there is loads of great content on the web I can peruse. I'm off to shockwave.com.
  • Hot Rod is for wussies! :)

    Check this bad boy [arcadeware.com] out. If youve got a few grand to throw around.. its the ultimate. Heres a bit from the features.

    The Arcadium is the revolutionary new Arcade Machine Gaming System for both the Home and Commercial Markets. It incorporates the classic-style Arcade cabinet design with modern-day computer technology to deliver the most entertaining gaming system available today. Engineered by a team of hard-core computer gamers, the Arcadium System offers the most ergonomic design of player controls, optimum Intel PC-based computer components that deliver the highest levels of gaming performance, and all of the other features of a real Arcade Machine to bring back the look and feel of the Classic Arcade Machines. But it doesn't end there... With it's PC computer engine, the Arcadium system also allows for a broad range of other gaming capabilities -- it supports virtually any PC game that utilizes the PC keyboard and/or mouse - as well as providing room for expansion for future games.

    but dont forget this

    Price: $5999.00 US*

    Yikes. But its the best.

  • Hellooooo....! They DO have a clue. They wouldn't make any money by releasing the MAME roms, but they can get tons of hits on their site by letting people play them with shockwave.

  • Grrrr!! And they don't post this limitation anywhere else, so there's no way to find out that their Shockwave games are Windows-only until you actually try to play one of them. I hate seeing a cross-platform standard misused and made dependent on a specific operating system.

    I guess Macromedia is admitting that their Shockwave engine isn't truly cross-platform, and that additional development work is needed to port Shockwave apps from Windows to Mac.

  • You probably have both installed, I do. Go to windows/system/macromed and see if you find 'shockwave' and 'shockwave 8' folders. Both have the 'swinit.exe'. One dated 10/17/99 and the other 4/13/00 (in my case, at least.) Naturally, my shortcuts and probably the registery point to the old version. Looks like the 7 version should have been deleted prior to the install or the setup program has a bug. Either way, I'd check the website FAQ's. If that doesn't work, uninstall both and try again.
  • Having roms for MAME is illegal unless you own the original.

    I do have a rather large collection of MAME roms but I still think it's nice of midway to let people play them legally for free

    What would have been really cool is if MAME released the roms.

    Another nice place for roms is www.arcadeathome.com [arcadeathome.com]
  • I used to work for Williams and now I work for Midway.

    Williams no longer makes pinball - that operation was terminated last October 25th (and was the reason for my job change).

    Midway owns all the rights to the games. When Midway and Williams were a single entity they were transferred to Midway.

    If I understand things correctly (this isn't something I personally worked on) you're actually playing the real game code on an emulator made as a Shockwave plugin. Digital Eclipse's logo is there and they are the people who did all the emulators for the arcade classics compilations Midway sells for PC and Playstation and Nintendo 64.

    Bear in mind that there is a thing called subsidiary rights, which means that the original people who worked on these awesome arcade games (not I, being only 26 :-) ) still get paid if you buy the games.
  • The site at Midway claims that the shockwave play <B>is</B> emulation from the original ROMs. So if they're distributing the ROMs, can't you just peel them out of shockwave somehow, and shouldn't that be legal? (ok, so they say "exclusively", but....)
  • The Mac version of the aforemensioned acrade machine emulator...

    It works great!

    /A
  • I'm a strong supporter of intellectual property rights - I've never even made or accepted cassette tape recordings of CDs, and I buy all the software I use. But I have a hard time working up any ire for people distributing the ROM images for old videogames to be played on MAME.

    Why? Because, with a very few exceptions, the companies that own these ROMs are making no attempt to distribute, support or even license the games anymore. For all practical purposes, this will be lost technology if it weren't for the MAME 'pirates' out there. It's not like Milton Bradley (is it Hasbro now?) protecting their Monopoly copyrights - they're still selling the game. Nobody's selling or supporting Cyberball or Marble Madness anymore. How 'lost classics' that never made it to the arcades, like Marble Madness II, or great stuff that never hit arcade gold, like Pigskin 1620? With no lost revenue, I find it hard to see the damage.

    We have a Cyberball machine here at work, and we play at least 1 four-person game on it every day. We'd gladly pay Atari or whomever a reasonable amount of money to upgrade our motherboard to Cyberball 2084, but it just isn't possible. We're considering building our own board and burning the ROMs with images we can get from MAME sites.

    Does it make sense for Atari to support Cyberball for customers like us? No. I don't see how they could cover their costs. But it's a damn shame that some of these great classics are being preserved by 'pirates'. Let Atari keep their license rights to the name & brand & such, in case they ever want to release a Cyberball Millenium or whatever, but the original ROMs are only worth money if they are going to bother to sell them. If they won't, then release them.

    As a commercial developer, I know that my product only has a certain lifetime before nobody will pay money for it anymore. I'd love to have users of my work keeping it alive ten years after its lifecycle was over.

    -BbT
  • Because I'm not "allowed" to install MAME at work. Browsers and shockwave are perfectly legit. -hj
  • nerds? "kickin' it in the Bahamas"? umm..sorry, but there's just no way that's possible. nerds are nerds after all.
  • Ah. That would explain why I couldn't get it to work. :)
  • I thought I'd try it, just out of curiousity, although my experience with Shockwave is that no matter how many times you install the damn stuff, it still tries to reinstall most of the time you try to use it. Either that or they're releasing incompatible upgrades every week.

    In any event it doesn't work for me far more often than it does (just like Real, another product I wish would just die).

    Shockwave is becoming worse and worse functionality-wise while it becomes more and more popular. I'm trying to convince the company I work for to stay away from it no matter how cute it looks. However, the marketing side is in love with it and the Web experts think it's cool.

    What's even funnier is that the site says it doesn't support my browser (IE 5.5 beta) and I couldn't even view their Web pages. Now Microsoft screws with the standards with impunity, but IE 5.5 has always worked fine for me 99.5% of the time.

    I made a prediction about two years ago that with the plethora of kludgy technology of dubious value and crappy implementations that the Web would get a lot worse before it ever got better. I was being cynical at the time. I wish I hadn't been right.

  • I assume you have the numbers to back up your claim that most /. readers are Windows users...right?

    I'm a windows user...about once a month, I boot it up to make sure nothing's gone wrong, run ScanDisk, then reboot. :^)

  • heh (Score:1)

    by Enahs ( 1606 )
    how much money do you think they make off of defender nowadays?
  • Take a look at this.

    JavaScript Error:
    http://www.ga-source.com/all/news/bits/04+05+200 0/11:35:39.shtml,
    line 147:

    unterminated string literal.

    document.writeln("
    ^

    JavaScript Error: http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp, line
    43:

    swVersion is not defined.
    JavaScript Error: http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp, line
    29:

    syntax error.

    ^

    JavaScript Error: http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp, line
    43:

    swVersion is not defined.
    JavaScript Error: http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp, line
    29:

    syntax error.

    ^

    JavaScript Error: http://v2.shockwave.com/bin/v2/entry.jsp, line
    43:

    swVersion is not defined.

    Is it my imagination, or are they trying to use JavaScript to create an HTML document with JavaScript, and forgot to terminate a string? :^P

    Thought that was a mistake only amateurs such as myself made. :^)
  • whups...didn't read too closely there. :^}

    new guess...checking to make sure it's a Winbloze machine running IE? :^( Ah hell; guess it's back to playing the illegal ROMs...nice try, guys, just try not to half-ass it next time.
  • Ahh...those were the days. Now, all I need is a nifty browser.
    ---
  • ok, so everyone's saying "but there's MAME, why this?", and i half agree. but they are well within their rights doing it this way, and it is infact a good thing!

    firstly, it's not the original game rewritten for shockwave, it's a shockwave written "emulator" playing the original rom image (or perhaps slightly adapted rom image), so you are getting close to the real thing, just like MAME.

    secondly, this puts them back in control of the distribution of their own games, which IS THEIR RIGHT. and leads them to be able to perhaps sell them in this manner in the future, if demand is high enough, which IS THEIR RIGHT.

    and thirdly, shockwave isn't evil because it doesn't run fully on linux. macromedia are perhaps evil because their support isn't 100%, but that's life on the fringe (and we are still fringe, kids).

    this is not the sig you're looking for, move along..
  • I use consequetive MAME32 versions for over 2 years now, and I hardly noticed ANY lockups, except in Windows NT. I just want to say that it's a stunning piece of work and it gets better every day. Because it's a work in progress, it's a problem to keep up with the rom changes in every new version.

  • MAME ROMs (Score:3)

    by bbibber ( 139000 ) on Sunday May 07, 2000 @05:37AM (#1088232) Homepage
    the MAME people did a good job preserving all those classics but maybe MAME should be splitted up in two versions: one which tries to emulate ONLY classic games older then 15 years or so (eg. Galaxians, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, defender, Elevator Action...) and the current MAME (this also emulates neo*geo roms and more recent games). I think this would persuade companies to give up rights on ROMS.
    I don't feel well about playing games illegaly on MAME but..
    • I cannot play them anywhere else!!
    • I already paid for them big time in the arcades years ago :)
    • in the 80ties I bought some crappy arcade conversions of the games for the c64/Atari ST on which Sega/Konami etc have also had a percentage via licensing. Anyone remembering the crappy job Ocean did with Outrun/Afterburner? Only a few of them were good (rainbow islands, bubble bobble)
    • IF you could buy rom sets for a reasonable price I would certainly buy my favorites !!

    I rest my case ;-)

    ps. interested people should really check out http://www.retrogames.com [retrogames.com], you'll be amazed how much can be emulated these days :)
  • Not exactly. See, the original Tapper that you remember was actually "supplanted" a few years later by "Root Beer Tapper", which was basically exactly the same game, exept with root beer instead of Bud. I don't know why, I guess having kids play a game with Budweiser ads probably pissed people off. And it's pretty funny to see some of the differences (e.g. "This one's for you!" in the bonus round). But this was not done just now by the Shockwave people. You can get both versions for MAME, and I have had them both for years now.

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