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by Doug Thews.
Original Post: 80's Video Games
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MY wife & I went to an all you can play for $9 video arcade a few weeks ago that advertised they had all of the old 80's style arcade games. Well, I was pretty good at Defender (toward my peek I could play 3-4 hours on one quarter) and I was looking forward to playing it again. Problem was, they didn't have it - and, as luck would have it, that particular Williams machine was very high maintenance, so nobody really has them anymore (except for hobbyists).
I was pretty down, but then I found the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) intiative. It's basically an emulator (multiple platform support) that emulates the various gaming circuit boards out there. You then load a ROM file, which are the exact op-code bytes pulled from the EEPROMS from these video games, and the emulator runs it. It's really pretty cool.
ANyway, I'm playing Defender now on my PC. I'll post a little more on the details of MAME and some add-ons you can get for your PC to make it look and feel like a real 80's style arcade cabinet.
In the meantime, you can check out the MAME initiative over at http://www.mame.net.
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