Chasing the high scores.

[Rabbit 2600]

I'm a high score junkie. I adore my Atari 2600 and my Mame cabinet. I'm in the mood to expand upon my Mame's game selection and was wondering which of the other older systems would cater too my high score chasing needs? Preferably those with an initial entering feature so you can see who got what score =)

[+Gemintronic]

Glad to see you back! With your skills you should MAKE the game and get the high score

 

[Reaperman]

Vectrex, A8 and Neo Geo are my personal faves to chase scores on.

 

• The vectrex tends not to do initials, but provides an experience very different than its contemporaries, and some ways is still unmatched today. If you record, vectrex tends to be a tricky one, however.
• Neo Geo may just be doubles of what mame does for you, but you may want to compare the real thing to mame on a few games and see if you can feel a difference. It's about the easiest path to lots of arcade games.
• A8's are a pretty good platform for high scores too. They tend to have better versions of almost all the 2600 games, but a significantly larger and more varied library on top of that. On the down side, PAL vs NTSC makes a big difference on A8, where the other two aren't really impacted.

 

Sadly none of the solutions above especially inexpensive or easy to acquire. Because of that the competition pool may be smaller than more common systems like NES or C64. I'd assume those two have score interest, anyway.

Edited August 4, 2014 by Reaperman

[Cynicaster]

I'm a high score junkie. I adore my Atari 2600 and my Mame cabinet. I'm in the mood to expand upon my Mame's game selection and was wondering which of the other older systems would cater too my high score chasing needs? Preferably those with an initial entering feature so you can see who got what score =)

In saying that you want to "expand upon Mame's game selection", do you mean you want to run other emulators on your MAME cabinet, or find physical consoles to play new games? I'd assume you meant emulators, because most classic console games with highscore tables will not save the scores after the console is powered down, so they're pretty much useless for tracking anything. In emulation, you can use save states to preserve high scores.

 

I run a whole bunch of emulators on my cabinet from MAME (duh) to GBA to 7800 to C64. Lots of the games are no fun because they are tough to play with arcade controls (especially platform games like SMB, or games on consoles that used keypads like CV and Inty). Games on systems like NES, SNES, and Genesis that are arcade ports play nicely, but usually, I'd just rather play the arcade versions. Generally speaking, shooters and beat 'em ups seem to play really well with arcade controls, and in fact, aside from Atari 2600, emulation on my cabinet is the only way I can play console games for any length of time any more because the controllers on non-modern systems cramp my aging hands in no time flat.