MAME - The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 02:34:35PM -0400, ted leslie wrote:
> what size is that crt? and is there mag. and mirror or something that makes it look bigger in the
> cabinet? 
> 
> The button issue? isn't it just as easy as mapping the joystick port buttons (assuming you have that on the
> mobo, to the buttons on the game?), yeah having it go to mouse/kb really would make it sux.
> 
> I would love to do this too. I have a 21" view sonic crt here doing nothing, and it may make a good
> crt to put in one of these? As well i have mobo's of needed power just laying around collecting dust.
> 
> Colin, I didn't see to many games in your links. Is it the case do to legality, that you really have to 
> dig for them? Was nice to see some games even of recent vintage (i.e. 2000) posted.

Certainly the legality is a big problem.  The general opinion seems to
be that if you own the real arcade system, you should be allowed to play
with a rom copy of that system, and otherwise you probably should not.
Of course lots of people don't care and have copies of lots of games
anyhow.  Of course to some extent the fact that you probably can not
buy these games from anyone anywhere makes the illegal copies the only
way to get those games.  Occationally some old games do become available
for purchase (dragon's lair and similar games in that series can be
bought on DVD and for PC now for example).

The one site I know of that provides access to lots of old video game code
uses the policy that if it can be purchased, they will not be distributing
it but will instead point to where you can legally purchase it.  They of
course use bittorrent to distribute the files.  The site is
http://www.pleasuredome.org.uk.

For example they used to have the laser disk dumps of dragon's lair
and such.  When the rights where bought up and the game released for
purchase, they immediately deleted them from the site and put links to
the place you can now buy the games.

So what they do is probably not legal, while on the otherhand to a large
extent the stuff they do distribute is abbandoned and the owners are in
many cases not in existance anymore.  Whenever it isn't abbandoned and
is available again, they stop providing it.  It seems like a decent
compromise, even if it is technically illegal in some places.

> Definitely a cool project for the rec-room, to re-live the arcade days of my youth, without actually
> having 20 physical units (in the rec-room).
> 
> Now of course there is all the chatter of the 3d games (and crt/tv) just being released now.
> Maybe some one will mod these games (and MAME) to put out 3D versions of some of them, would be quite wild,
> not sure how easy it is to get in an modify MAME game code .. if its all roms, of essentially machine code ..
> I want to re-live the arcade playing of my youth (in my rec-room), but not the assembly language programming
> (of my youth), that I DO NOT miss! :)

It's all roms.  MAME emulates the original hardware as accurately as
possible.  The original rom code runs on the emulated hardware.
Some games have multiple roms, some with sprite data or character data
or sound effects.  Some games had harddisks instead, for which MAME uses
.chd (compressed hard disk) files.  I believe the laser disk games are
also stored as .chd files as are some CDROM based games.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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