Arcade Classics - an introduction to retro gaming

Why?

Everyone is busy getting all 'high definition' with their 360s, why would they want to play ancient old games with pixels the size of bricks? There are good reasons - reasons based on fun.

It's a shock to some of us that there are people who have never played any of the old school arcade machines, and whose first experience of electronic gaming was with some kind of PlayStation. Despite this, the number of people who have never even seen a Space Invaders machine is growing, and will keep on growing. Is the interest in these old games confined to people who grew up with them? I don't think it is.

The old school games are more abstract, require more imagination and rarely offer any kind of story or rewards for completing them. Many cannot be completed at all and roll on and on forever.

Game publishers are always telling us that people only want 3D games with stories, missions and voice-over by Hollywood actors. They tell us that modern gamers simply can't appreciate old games. This is almost certainly nonsense. Despite myths to the contrary, gamer IQs haven't dropped since the early 80s. Nor have people lost the ability to use their imaginations or play games that aren't some kind of barely interactive movie.

You can play these games without a collection of vintage arcade machines

Ports to modern consoles

Many 'museum piece' games have been ported and re-released on new consoles. The old games are particularly good for handhelds because they don't demand too much power and can work on a low resolution screen. Best of all they are games you can pick up and play any time, and abandon just as easily. This makes them perfect for playing on the train, at the bus-stop, waiting in the cinema lobby - anywhere really. You can also run emulators on handhelds with the right setup.

Dedicated hardware

Another way you can obtain classic games is through the cheap joystick devices that plug straight into your TV. These have been released with Atari 2600, Namco, Williams, ZX Spectrum and various other kinds of games built in. The Namco and Williams versions are probably the most interesting, as an Atari 2600 without four paddle controllers and a copy of Warlords hardly seems worth having.

Emulators

The third way to play is using an emulator on a PC, or on a hacked console or handheld. Usually this is a little suspect, as the ROMs for these games are often the copyright material of some company who wants to sell you their museum re-releases. Some games are in the public domain, either because the person or company that owned them allows them to be used that way or companies went bust and nobody ended up owning the rights.

The emulator of choice these days seems to be Mame. Sure, there are many classic console games that require specialised console emulators, but the sort of genuine arcade games I'm talking about here generally proceeded the home console era.

There used to be other emulators, particularly for re-creating vector games properly, and others that were created specially just to play one game, such as Nemesis or R-Type. Most of these old emulators are now bygones themselves. For example, a search for cinemula in google doesn't come back with much useful, though Sparcade still seems to exist, though it's no longer maintained.

Mame is distributed without any copyrighted software, so it's perfectly legal to download. You can even get the source and try and compile it yourself. There is an nntp news group that deals with Mame roms and maintains a gigantic distribution of data, now including some modern 3d arcade machines.