Your reactions to MAME & emulators in the early days?

[Kombalar]

I remember when I got MAME and Neil Bradley's EMU. It was 1994 I guess when MAME came out. I was in my early 20's.

 

My little brother (who was about 15 back then) called me and told me that "Hey, there is an emulator that allows you to play Gravitar and Space Duel". 

 

I was like: "You mean someone has recreated those games?"

 

He said: "No, the real things. It's called emulation".

 

I went literally BERZERK (no pun intended). I drove to my parent's house immediately (he was still living at home).

 

Back in those days MAME did not emulate vector games. EMU was for those. Then there was a Xevious standalone emulator.

 

We had a discussion forum on Usenet for these classic emulators. Even Jeff Minter was there, being a legendary Tempest fan that he is.

 

I don't remember what 486 machine me and brother had back in those days but they only ran them at 80% speed or so. I immediately went to buy a new one just to play EMU.  That SAME DAY.

 

It's impossible to describe the feeling when I first had a chance to play Space Duel, Gravitar, Tempest and Xevious again. Remember, they were only 10+ years old games back then. I thought when they disappeared from the arcades they were gone forever.

 

Of course I owned the commercial Williams pack (that had Robotron, Defender, Stargate and Bubbles). I love them all (esp. Stargate) but they weren't "special" to me like the ones mentioned above because they weren't in my local arcade when I was a kid.

 

Then came Track & Field, Hyper Sports, Bomb Jack, Mr. Do's Castle. I couldn't believe it. It was too good to be true. Even my school suffered because I was literally playing these games endlessly.

PinMAME and Visual Pinball was another amazing revolution. 

 

It was "magic" to see Gauntlet and Marble Madness eventually on your computer screen. Those games were so "larger than life", even "mythical" when you saw them in the arcades a kid. They were light years ahead of the conversions we had in our home video systems (I had Vectrex, A2600 and C64). Oh, and I'Robot. That was really jaw dropping game back in 1983... those graphics were revolutionary.

 

I've been playing MAME since 1994. There are weeks that I don't play but sometimes I spend hours with it... 26 years later. Yesterday I played Raiden Fighters and its sequels. It has SO many great games.

MAME, for me, is the most important thing that has ever been released on home computers. And if I ever met guys who were involved the beers would be on me.

 

Tell me how you felt when you first got into emulation. Cheers!
 

Edited January 4, 2020 by Kombalar

[Flojomojo]

^^^same! Emulation is magic!!!

[VectorGamer]

I remember the first time I heard about it was the late 90s at some get together my wife and I went to. There was some friend of a friend that was all excited and telling me about MAME and ROMs. At the time I had no interest in video gaming whatsoever but I thought it would be cool to play Galaga. So probably that night I went searching for an emulator pretty sure it was MAMEUI32 and then after trial and error figured out how all this stuff is supposed to work.

 

It didn't get me back into retrogaming though to be honest as from the early to mid 2000s I was more into computers and networking and I was spending time with kids and what not. It wasn't until December of 2008 when I saw the movie Chasing Ghosts by chance one night on Showtime that I found out that retrogaming was a thing.

 

Then in the summer of 2009 I built my first MAME cabinet. I didn't want to sodomize that cabinet with a trackball so I built another MAME cabinet out of a gutted Centipede to play trackball games. Then I built a Pole Position II cabinet. And I had yet another MAME cabinet plus I added dedicated games like Monaco GP, Mr. Do!, Missile Command, Cosmic Alien and a few others.

 

I sold all that stuff by last summer and populated my small game room with pinball machines instead. I bought a Raspberry Pi and now I play MAME and other emulated consoles with RetroPie while I sit my fat ass in the recliner with a Xbox 360 controller off the big screen. Much more pleasant gaming experience than standing at an arcade cabinet. And as a result has renewed my interest in video gaming as I've been spending a lot of time the last 4 years playing pinball.

[NE146]

3 hours ago, Kombalar said:

Tell me how you felt when you first got into emulation. Cheers!

I got into the emulation scene really early on. I still remember Mame was a new standalone Pac-Man emulator which eventually got renamed (to "Mame") after it kept adding more games. 

 

The site I used to frequent all the time was Dave's Video Game Classics which I actually saved a version of the site from 1996 (after it left it's .edu roots) and have it attached it here daves video game classic.zip. ?

 

In the early-mid 90's if you were interested in classic gaming, unless you collected real cabs, PC/DOS remakes of arcade classics were the main things around. So the progression that people were creating emulators which could make your pc simulate actual console and arcade games was huge news. If I recall the first system I played via emulation was the Colecovision. I thought that was super exciting, even when it didn't work. I still remember getting jazzed with the news that the Atari 2600 could actually be played on a computer, then trying it out and only getting a single dot to show up on the screen (it didn't work), and I STILL thought it was great.  Fun times! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kombalar]

Haha now that I took a look, I now remember Dave's Video Game Classic. 

 

You apparently catched MAME right away. I think my first version was a few months later. It already had Donkey Kong and maybe Qix, Frogger and Ms. Pacman too. 

[VectorGamer]

34 minutes ago, NE146 said:

PC/DOS remakes of arcade classics were the main things around

Champ Games. I had all his games.

 

That would've been in the mid 90s when I was playing a lot of DOS games on my 486. At the time I was playing a lot of puzzle games along with the Champ games.

 

The dial-up days.

 

[NE146]

1 hour ago, VectorGamer said:

Champ Games. I had all his games.

Yep.. all here in 2600 land 100% know who he is. He only still makes amazing 2600 arcade ports today   I'm amazed though he still has all his pc ports online http://www.champ-em.com/. But then again so does jrok: http://www.jrok.com/games_orig.html   

 

Also I dug Kurt Dekker's stuff even though his were more rough "remakes", and he'd also put up little paywalls around his games. I still had fun with them though. Some are available at Archive.org like his version of Defender https://archive.org/details/DEFEND_201706 

[Keatah]

I got into MAME the first few versions it was out. Prior to or around that time it was DaveSpicer’s Arcade, Activision ActionPacks, Microsoft Arcade, Jeff Vavasour’s Digital Eclipse stuff, Mike Cuddy’s Gyruss sound emulator, Marcel de Kogel’s stuff and Marat Fayzullin’s material. John Dullea’s PCAE. And so much more.

 

At first it was all very nebulous. Emulation as we know it today was just a novel way to play arcade and old console games on the PC back then. But everything started snowballing from there. And today we have full preservation “societies” that are scraping and archiving everything!

 

Prior to emulation I had seriously thought I would never ever play my arcade favs again. It was a depressing thing watching the establishments close, game by game disappearing to the depths of time. A gnawing void that kept expanding. Engulfing me. Pulling me down.

A double-whammy too because I had just dumped tons of consoles and some cabs. Some that I had since the 70’s. For various reasons.

 

So, as this thing called emulation started coming online I could feel the the undercurrent of collecting and playing all over again. 

Each new emulated game (emulators were NOT perfected yet) was a big deal. A blast of warmth, of electronic life, of coziness. A reminder of the good safe times of being a kid. Of discovery and adventure. Of futurism. Of wonderment. 
 

Each new game (that got emu’d) was as valuable as the previous one or the one to come after it.

 

Getting started in emulation was almost as good as mom’n’pops or gramma and gramps pulling out new cartridges from the closet on snow days when we were off from school. Making pot pie and frozen dinners. All buried up in our blanket forts with blizzards raging outside. Studying electronics and astronomy. The best!

 

Today emulation brings back those good times, through different and arguably superior hardware. Like SFFPC. 

 

[Loafer]

Yeah Dave's Video game classics was a great site. I also used to love reading up JoseQ's emuviews, a fun site to catch up on emulation related news.  Zophar's Domain dates back to a while and was still sort of active when I last checked on it a few years ago.

 

 

Colem was the first emulator I think I really messed around with a lot.  I think ines came out first (but first version didn't work) but Colem really got me hooked.  Later when Mame came out in '97, it was pretty cool and it was evident the future was bright because of its approach (documentation and many contributors).  After a while Neil Bradley's Retrocade (I think?  It has been a while) came out and I preferred it because the majority of games supported were more playable here than in Mame and it was just easier to use.  Better PC's eventually fixed that issue LOL

 

[Kombalar]

3 hours ago, Loafer said:

Yeah Dave's Video game classics was a great site. I also used to love reading up JoseQ's emuviews, a fun site to catch up on emulation related news.  Zophar's Domain dates back to a while and was still sort of active when I last checked on it a few years ago.

 

 

Colem was the first emulator I think I really messed around with a lot.  I think ines came out first (but first version didn't work) but Colem really got me hooked.  Later when Mame came out in '97, it was pretty cool and it was evident the future was bright because of its approach (documentation and many contributors).  After a while Neil Bradley's Retrocade (I think?  It has been a while) came out and I preferred it because the majority of games supported were more playable here than in Mame and it was just easier to use.  Better PC's eventually fixed that issue LOL

 

Yes Neil Bradley made Retrocade but EMU was his first one. Retrocade was a newer one which emulated a lot more games. EMU was only the vector games.

 

He was a true pioneer. I believe MAME still uses his emulation in those Atari vector classics.

 

[+Spriggy]

For most of us older lads, arcades were a huge part of our lives in the 70's-80's-early 90's.  I stumbled on Mame in 1999.  I remember because I ordered a full set of 0.36 roms, and all related files, from the old online Lazarus/Tombstone rom-burner worldwide network, which I still have in a little cd holder.  Freakishly found a burner 30 minutes from where I lived at the time.

Now we move to 2002-2003..  An old Australian LAI (Leisure and Allied) generic arcade cabinet falls into my lap.  I stumbled on info online about some people starting to put PCs in empty arcade cabs running Mame.   Me!?  Own my own arcade machine with shitloads of actual arcade games?  No brainer.  Well ... I jumped right in with both feet.   I picked up the latest romset from Lazarus/Tombstone again.  ie 0.71, again which I still have, and built my first upright Mame machine.  I then dabbled for many years with mame with many projects.  I still have my Mame Bartop I made from scratch in 2005.  Was just a new thing around then. Still played and enjoyed, however was updated a few years ago with a better motherboard and LCD as the 15" CRT died.  The cabinet cut down to narrow the depth to suit.   Although the LCD died about a month ago.

 

The original BYOAC forum thread for my Bartop still exists HERE! ... for anyone who gives a shit. ?

 

Bartop now...

 

 

Hence, my sentiment on Mame is obvious! ??

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JBerel]

I remember first playing Galaxian and PAC Man on separate dedicated DOS emulators before Mame was a thing. That was awesome, and made it clear the all the other neat stuff would follow. I was impressed how quickly Mame progressed from there, and it was damn good timing as a ton of original arcade machines were being trashed at the time. I bough a couple for between 200 and 400 bucks when the arcades shut down. If the good folks hadn't snatched those roms when they did, we'd have to endure a lot more snobs squatting on the only remaining original version of a lot of stuff today.

[Kombalar]

Yeah Galaga, Galaxian and Space Invaders were in the early MAME versions. Zaxxon and Congo Bongo came pretty soon too. And Bomb Jack.

 

Every day was like a potential Christmas back in those days. Haha.

 

[Keatah]

It was, wasn't it..? Most of my most nostalgic and happy "MAME times" occurred around Christmas/Winter here in the northern hemisphere. Time off school and work and stuff helped set the stage for distraction-free fun.

 

Quiet snow-filled days filled with anticipation and expectation. Safely buried in my cozy & toasty bedroom bunker. What game is coming next? Will it be my one of my childhood favs? Will my current CPU handle it? And so much more. Not unlike getting cartridges under the tree or in the grocery bag. Same atmosphere and aura, just the product is of a different nature.

 

---

 

I would arguably say that the uniqueness and novelty showcased by MAME ranks right up there with..

 

Discovering cartridges or an entirely new console like Intellivision or Colecovision.

Discovering new toys as a kid.

Doing a remote control car for the first time.

Learning about astronomy and black holes (how extraordinary those are)

Figuring out how airplanes operate.

Playing Doom for the first time.

 

I mention Doom because I wasn't ever expecting a rather mundane but still fast 486 computer to do 3D graphics beyond a few cad/cam lines and stuff. I mean this computer had no custom sound chips aside from what was on the ubiquitous SoundBlaster. And even then it didn't use any funky features or anything. Same with the graphics. Most all PCs of the era had dumb VGA framebuffers. No special instructions or accelerated features. Not yet. Those would start with 3D gaming chips a few years later.

 

And that's also what's neat about MAME it emus so many custom chips as it is. All in the CPU and RAM.

Edited January 6, 2020 by Keatah

[zzip]

When I made the jump from Atari to the PC world in 1995-ish,  emulation was one of the first areas I got interested in.   Probably because it made the transition from my ST easier,  I could still use some of my old stuff, even if the emulators were primitive compared to what we have now.

 

I remember when Dave Spicer released his arcade emulator with a few games,  I was blown away!  Then someone else started releasing arcade machine emulators which eventually turned into the Mame project and kept getting bigger and bigger.

 

Also suddenly around 96 there was an explosion of new emulators for every system imaginable, and the gaming magazines took notice of the growing emulation scene and wondered why people wanted to play old games when there was all this new stuff.   I had journalists contact me for quotes on emulation stories they were working on.

 

The other thing that amazed me was most of these emulator authors were doing it for free.   Prior to the mid-90s, any emulator that was even partially useful cost money.  So this was new.

[JBerel]

That's because emulating old gaming rigs was a challenge to be overcome. It was a competition to see who could do it first or better. There were some computer system emulators that were specifically written for corporate clients that represented a lot of commercial development, so you'd see those for sale beyond the original enterprise customer. I don't remember much in the game emulation world that was commercially successful or even warranted except Bleem and a brief competitor. Those didn't have commercial viability for long because other wrote freeware emulators to replace them. You mostly see just mobile platform emus for sale today to take advantage of the impulse buy app store behaviors. There's still always free options available. 

[Kombalar]

Who had the commercial Williams arcade games pack (that had Defender, Bubbles, Stargate and Sinistar)? That came before MAME.

 

Were those are emulated or recreations (programmed from scratch)?

 

Also, I can't help but wonder why ATARI didn't release these classic arcade games for computers in the early 90's themselves? Most likely they would have been very successful (considering how popular arcade emulation was - and still is). 

 

They released something in the late 90's but we already had these games in MAME years ago.

 

Edited January 6, 2020 by Kombalar

[NE146]

5 minutes ago, Kombalar said:

Who had the commercial Williams arcade games pack (that had Defender, Bubbles, Stargate and Sinistar)? That came before MAME.

I had it.. for the Macintosh even. That had to be in the early 90's some time.. 1993?  It was full blown emulation and I remember it had Defender and Joust, but I don't remember it having Bubbles.

 

I also later bought Activison Atari 2600 Classics for the PC which came out not a huge amount of time later.. maybe 1995/96

[Kombalar]

Just now, NE146 said:

I had it.. for the Macintosh even. That had to be in the early 90's some time.. 1993?  It was full blown emulation and I remember it had Defender and Joust, but I don't remember it having Bubbles.

 

I also later bought Activison Atari 2600 Classics for the PC which came out not a huge amount of time later.. maybe 1995/96

Oh yeah... it was Joust, not Bubbles. Thanks.

 

[zzip]

27 minutes ago, Kombalar said:

Who had the commercial Williams arcade games pack (that had Defender, Bubbles, Stargate and Sinistar)? That came before MAME.

 

Were those are emulated or recreations (programmed from scratch)?

 

Also, I can't help but wonder why ATARI didn't release these classic arcade games for computers in the early 90's themselves? Most likely they would have been very successful (considering how popular arcade emulation was - and still is). 

 

They released something in the late 90's but we already had these games in MAME years ago.

 

 

I have the Williams pack,  yes it came before Mame.  I believe they were emulated, not recreations..

 

Atari had a complex history in that time period.  In the mid-90s, the consumer Division was failing and merged with Hard-drive maker JTS.   Nothing was heard from them for the next few years until Hasbro got the rights to the IPs.

 

The Arcade division was undergoing changes too, first becoming "Time Warner Interactive", and then being sold to Williams.    I know I got a CD with Gauntlet and Marble Madness on it,  I'm thinking it might have been on a Midway disk?

[JBerel]

Quote

1995

Description of Williams Arcade Classics

"Warning: This oldies collection is intended for those with nostalgic memories of early 1980 arcades/game consoles. If you don't remember these games from your local pizza shop or were not born when they came out, you may be in for a big disappointment."

Nostalgic Fever Grips Gaming Community

First came Microsoft Arcade followed by the Activision Collections. Now Williams Electronics the pinball and arcade giant is getting in on the act of porting classic video games from the early 80's to the PC platform. William's Arcade Classics ports the arcade classics (and some not so classics) Defender, Defender II, Joust, Bubbles, Robotron, and Sini Star from the cabinet to the PC in a new CD-ROM collection for Windows (the games run in MS-DOS mode).

Now, mind you, these are not updated versions of classic games like the recently released Pitfall Harry or Lode Runner, these are the original games -- 16 colors or less, blocky graphics, limited sound. After spending God knows how much on CPUs, RAM, sound cards, speakers, video cards, joysticks etc so that your machine will run the latest games, why would you want to play outdated video games? Good question.

Why Ask Why?

The recent trend to bring 80's arcade games to the PC scares me. These games were great when that's all we had but after experiencing games like NASCAR and Mechwarrior II are we going to be satisfied moving little blocks of color around the screen? Not likely, but yet...

Its mind boggling to think that the original programmers sometimes had only had up to 64K in which to cram their games. Even in this PC version all six games only take about 4MBs when installed to the hard drive. So why the CD-ROM? Ah, that is the brilliance of this CD-ROM and the reason it has great value to game historians/collectors. The rest of the CD-ROM stores about 232 MBs of video interviews with original designers of the games, original sketches, sales sheets, information and photos of the cabinets.

Video Game Trivia

For its time, Defender's 16 colors were considered cutting edge? Sini Star's original name was Dark Star? Hours before Defender was unveiled to thousands of arcade owners and operators at a major coin-op trade show, the programers were still burning ROMs back at the company? The buzz at the show was that Defender and Pac Man would bomb? The average game time during the first week of Sini Star's release was 33 seconds? The bulk of programming for Robotron took four days? An Atari 2600 version of Defender II was released in 1988? There is a bug in Sini Star which makes it possible to receive over 250 lives?

Is This CD-ROM For Me?

Williams Arcade Classics is a hard CD-ROM to review. On one hand it has a great nostalgic value but on the other hand, compared to today's polygon, texture mapped graphics, 32 bit programming and stereo sound effects, 10 plus year old games can't hope to compete. Is it for you? Take the following little test:

Get it if...

• you consider yourself a game collector
• you hang around the "rec.games.video.arcade.collecting" newsgroup
• you fondly remember wasting sunny days in a dark arcade pumping quarters into Robotron.
• you are a game programmer who has forgotten how to put game play above glitz.
• you feel today's games don't give that true non-stop arcade action.
• your wife nixed the idea of buying an old arcade game for the basement.

Don't get it if:

• you were born after 1975.
• your eye to hand co-ordination is shot.
• you are expecting games which will hold you attention over a long period of time.
• and parents, think twice about buying this disk to impress your kids with the great games you played instead of studying for your biology final. Unless, you want your kids laughing at you. "Dad, are you telling me you spent all of your lunch money and spare time playing this? Ha, Ha, Ha".

Review By GamesDomain

 

[Kombalar]

Funny review.

 

Ironically the favorite game of my 9-year old son is "Growtopia", which looks exactly like a 80'S game.

 

At some point people eventually realized that the graphics don't mean squat. It's the playability that matters.

 

It's even more ironic that he loves many MAME games, like Skull & Crossbones and Metal Slug.

 

[Keatah]

I had Williams' Arcade Classics - a product that was a spinoff/aggregation of the Digital Arcade series. I also had/have the stand-alone versions that were sold in mini-arcade boxes. These were emulated, even the sound, they were the forerunners of the cd collection. They worked fine on a 486-33 (or DX2/50 with power to spare).

 

They were made in 1994/1995, with executables on my copy dated August of 1995. The first version of mame didn't come till Feb 1997.

http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/www.vavasour.ca/jeff/games.html

https://www.mamedev.org/oldrel.html

Edited January 6, 2020 by Keatah

[JBerel]

5 hours ago, Kombalar said:

 

Also, I can't help but wonder why ATARI didn't release these classic arcade games for computers in the early 90's themselves? Most likely they would have been very successful (considering how popular arcade emulation was - and still is). 

 

They released something in the late 90's but we already had these games in MAME years ago.

 

Atari licensed 5 arcade games in 93 for the first Microsoft Arcade release on Windows 3.1. That was one of, if not the first classic arcade collection to get the retro thing moving on PC. I remember reading other people saying what I was; why would they rewrite those games so close to the originals when they could probably just run the original code with less effort? Within a year, several people had done just that with several original arcade games.

 

Microsoft ArcadeEdit

The first compilation was released in 1993 on a single 1.44MB floppy for both Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the Apple Macintosh. It contained versions of the following arcade games by Atari:

• Tempest
• Battlezone
• Asteroids
• Centipede
• Missile Command

[dj_convoy]

I remember downloading... I dunno, maybe Genecyst? maybe a bespoke Master System emulator like Meka? in the college computer lab in 1997 or 1998 and playing a couple of Master System games. I was blown away that it was even a possibility. And save states? Forget about it. I breezed thru Phantasy Star in half the time I normally could have on cart. I think it even worked on my awful 486 SX computer at home, albeit probably not that well. I don't remember how accessible roms were, then; I'm sure it was nothing like the giant rom sites that were prevalent until the big guys started cracking down. Bless whomever was out there ripping and dumping roms in those early days. 

 

A few years later, out in the workforce, I had a conversation about 2600 games with my boss and installed what must have been a pretty early STELLA for them on their crummy hardware and grabbed a few games that were easily playable with the keyboard only for them. I thought emulators were magic, back in those days, and remember playing with NESticle and Magic Engine way before I started collections for either of those consoles. MAME was a revelation. Patching english into japanese PS1 games was amazing, even if they ran badly. I had a buddy with Bleem! in college always trying to run PS1 games on his laptop, and I thought it wasn't worth it until I saw utility in language patching. Great for stuff like Super Robot Wars that didn't really need to be running at 60 fps and full speed. I was also heavily into PinMAME and the other one (Virtual Pinball? Does that sound right?) for awhile, scoring hundreds of millions on the Doctor Who table that I had only ever played once in real life for awhile. 

 

I don't know when I soured on the whole thing. Maybe when consoles started having large, emulated collections of their own? I don't think I ever touched PinMAME after Pinball Arcade came out. Endlessly updating MAME probably contributed to it... but at some point, curating the ROMs for ease of use elsewhere became much more important to me than trying to tune emulator "A" to computer "B." I still think the emulators that have been around forever and are essentially perfected are neat, but it's rare that I fire them up in this age of FPGA consoles and Everdrives.