When I think of arcade games, I think of Pacman, Asteroids, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, and Q Bert!. When I was dating my wife, we would go out and play video games. I don't have the attention span or the coordination to play many newer games. Many of them are simply too complex to understand and graphically confusing.
Many years ago, I considered buying an Arcade Cabinet and putting it in my rec room. When I checked into this, I found that the cost was simply too high. This article will describe how you can play these old games exactly as you remember them – not imitations that are sold for computers and game consoles. It is even possible to build your own Arcade Cabinet that will play a variety of games.
MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. MAME emulates the hardware of the original machines. Most of these machines had ancient 8 bit processors such as the 6502 or the Z80. These older processors and graphic chips are easily emulated in modern 32 bit computers.
Once the basic hardware is emulated, all that is required are copies of the original ROMs that were in the arcade machines. There are several ways to get copies of these ROMs. You can purchase boards out of the original game machines and use a EPROM reader to copy the data out of the EPROM. There are websites that make ROM available. There are collections of older games that come with MAME or other emulators. I can not advise anyone how to directly obtain these ROM or give advice on the legality of the various distribution methods. The people who are behind MAME do not believe they are pirating. They believe they are preserving a part of history that would otherwise vanish. Some of the original game machines are now over 20 years old. The people behind the MAME project want to preserve these games and make them available for future generations to enjoy.
MAME now emulates over 2500 arcade games. Some of these are variations or hacks of original games. The total number of original games supported by MAME is 1500. MAME is currently available for almost every operating system you can imagine. There are versions of MAME that run on DOS, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS, and Windows 32. There is even a version that runs on Pocket PC so that you can run classic games on your IPAQ. There is even a version of MAME that can run on some digital cameras. You can take a look at various versions of MAME. The version of MAME for Microsoft Windows is MAME32.
DOS would be a very good choice for a dedicated arcade machine. You could store everything on a CF memory module or boot and run from a CDROM. What if you don't have DOS? A free version of DOS is available to download.
It is possible to create a CDROM that boots into a dedicated Arcade Machine. The smallest of these CD distributions is AdvanceMame. The CDROM comes with some public domain ROM. You can add your own ROMs to this collection. This allows you to play arcade games without installing any software. AdvanceMame CD is based on a small Linux distribution.
There are many different ways to find ROM. One is to do a search on one of the peer-to-peer networks for ROM. Several companies will have their downloads where they will try to sell you 32 or so classic games. They will download a demo player that will have some limitations until you pay for their package. I do not know if these companies have licensed the games they are distributing. My guess is they haven't. You can copy the ROM files out of their directory into your MAME ROM directory.
There is a website that allows you to download ROM. This website had stopped ROM downloads because they were not getting enough donations. You might want to check the website and see if they are allowing downloads or not. If you use their service, you might want to send them a donation.
Another source of ROM are low priced game packs that you can find for sale. These are sold a Game Classics, Emulator King and many other titles. Most of these packages are simply variations of MAME. Once again, you can copy the ROM into your own ROM directory.
If you want to create your own dedicated Arcade machine, there are several projects and examples on the Internet. Here are a few links:
http://geocities.com/nieders2k/MAME/finished.html
http://www.angelfire.com/in/emulation/main.html
http://netbox.home.mindspring.com/arcade/
There is even an easier way to enjoy Classic Arcade Games. You can play them on line at this website.
As of this writing, there is not a MAME emulator for the new OS 5.0 based Palms. There is a commercial program called XCADE that is available for $9.95 that will run some classic games. You will need to provide your own ROM sources.
Have Fun.