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."

This is important

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.

cabinets are the really tricky part now

I've been watching and using MAME for a while now, and it's wicked, so great. The trick will be when some company creates a kit to easily make a cabinet to play these from that almost anyone with a bandsaw can put together.

Imagine if someone sold complete plans and hardware (joysticks, etc, but not counting the computer itself) that you could buy, and then all you'd have to do would be buy the wood, bandsaw it to size and insert a standard PC into, and boom, a full-sized arcade machine of your own with almost every game invented. Mmmmm, that gets me excited just thinking about it :)

And as sick as it is, yes I'd like an option to stick quarters in to play:)

been playing for years ..

With old MacMAME on my mac. Now MAME32 for Win32.. I love it. Despite lots of new games I have, I play the old MAME one's more, like Elevator Action and hypercross and Track and Field and Spy Hunter, the list goes on. Note: you can get just about every ROM from www.mame.dk [www.mame.dk]
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now all i need

is a quarter slot inserted into an open 5.25" bay so i can invite my friends over for some gaming!

Remember

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.

Saving our heritage... HARDWARE...

I am one of those people who is "Saving our Video Game Heritage"... by saving the actual hardware. Although I am a hardware purist, I must applaud MAME. It has helped many an arcade collector determine what a game is, and what it should act like (as I used to discover a flaw in my GORF).

But the last paragraph is true... MAME really doesn't compare well to the actual hardware. (Especially the phosphor glow of vector [non-raster] games.... MAME can't do it.) And the presence of having a Gauntlet II arcade game in your living room far exceeds that of having Gauntlet II on your PC. People will run up to your arcade game and want to play it. They don't really do that with your PC.

BTW... excellent article and good focus on some of the hardware.

Those games need to be saved!

The feeling of nostalgia and the memories those games bring back make them worth saving even if nothing else does. But the fact remains that most of those games are as engaging and playable as they were when they first came out. They represent the golden age of coin-op game creativity. Of course in those days the current software patent idiocy wasn't so much of a problem and you didn't have to worry about someone suing your ass out from under you because you violated their patent on, say, the extra life.

Of course, assorted evil companies are trying to control these games and it is their right to do so. The moral implications are somewhat more dubious, though. They may never do anything with the copyrights, and those games are the heritage of a generation.

While I'm generally pro-copyright and would, in fact, be willing to pay a reasonable price for the MAME ROM images of the games in question, I'm fully behind the sites that keep the ROMs and hope that they remain free for download for personal use. No one should be forced to install Windows to play those games, and a company's idea of what's a marketable game may be different than mine. Some of the cheesiest games of that era bring back the most potent memories.

Seems like a company could make a reasonable sum of money just selling hardware to support some of those games. Spy Hunter just isn't right without the steering wheel with 4 buttons, the gear shifter and the gas pedal, for instance. Discs of Tron is another one that could benefit from real controls. I'd definitely spring for a 720 degrees spinny joystick. A whole retro industry could spring up around that stuff. Perhaps we might even start seeing truly creative games again...

I love MAME and Retrocade...

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.

Cabinets ARE available!

See ArcadePC [hanaho.com] , 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 [hanaho.com] , 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).

Recreating the classics, badly

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.

Re:And Everything Old is New Again

Not only does this mean my kids will get to play all the great games I grew up on, but it also looks like this is the first step towards Vernor Vinge's idea of a massive database of source code which could be used and modified in the future to really do anything we wanted. (He explains this a bit better in his novel 'A Deepness in the Sky').

Actually, when I read A Deepness In the Sky (nominated for a Hugo this year, BTW) I thought of open source. In almost the same thought, I remembered Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust [acm.org]. I hope someone (RMS maybe) has copies of gcc and login that have never been compiled with uninspected patches.

THE classic video game

SPACE WAR can be played right now right here [mit.edu] (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 [enteract.com]

(Thanks JL)

Copyright is not a right, it is a privelege

Of course, assorted evil companies are trying to control these games and it is their right to do so.

It disburbs me to see how effective pro-intellectual property propoganda has been -- they have convinced most of us to think in their terms, without our even realizing it.

Copyright is a misnomer. It isn't a right, it is a privelege which our government has granted various authors, publishing houses, software enterprises, etc. A privelege which they look upon as a right, and have convinced most of the rest of us is their "right." It is a privelege which has been sorely abused in the last century and will be abused even more in the years to come.

Losing our digital heritage is just one cost this privelege is exacting from our society.

Movies are decaying, by the time they enter the public domain many of them are unrecoverable, lost forever.

The same is often true of other media as well -- recordings which go out of print and are never released (or recordings which were never made, of concerts for example, except by fans doing so illegally).

Restricted copy priveleges are costing our culture our digital, cinematic, and musical heritage, all to protect the revinue streams of Disney, Time-Warner, and their ilk.

Still think we have a government "by the people, for the people?"