MAME goes fully FOSS Retro-gamers rejoice! Cautiously. The multi arcade machine emulator (MAME) is now open source. MAME makes it possible to emulate the hardware found in early arcade game cabinets. If one can also find ROMs of the games that ran on those cabinets, one can play classic arcade games. Last week, the MAME team announced that after …
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, and other open source efforts have had their names trademarked by unscrupulous asshats who then use UDRP to get hold of their domains and then push poisonous adware / malware infested versions of their hard work. It's a sensible precaution, is all.
Never mind clearing space in your calendar, clear a disk too, a full spread with all the HD only games is easily a couple of hundred GB in size!
I remember downloading MAME when it only support about 8 games, now it's up to several thousand....not that I'd know anything about collecting such things of course...
On an aside, I still find it amazing (and often inspirational) how, despite the appalling graphics, so many of these games were fantastic fun to play. Somewhere along the line the mainstream game industry has forgotten this and is churning out multi-million($/£) production titles that look great, in screen shots, but genuinely suck every flavour of balls compared to some of these original games.
Not that all of the "original" or "older" games were good (many were genuinely appalling), just that the good ones didn't cost more than an average Hollywood film to produce.
One of the truly educational aspects of MAME was discovering just how much crap never surfaced in my local "spacies" parlours [*], the surge of bootlegs and half-arsed clones mixed in with the downright dull and pathologically unplayable. In fact the ratio of good to bad seems not that different to today, but with rather more expensive hardware attached (although MAME also makes clear how many games were based on common platforms, just with new decals and the controls relocated)
[*] in case a 1980s Aucklander with a better memory stumbles across this: SpaceWorld under the Regent cinema, Fun City 1 further up the same block, then Fun City 2, but what was the name of the one further up Queen St with a genuine "Space War" and "Missile Command", also a quick-drawing paper-mache cowboy? Or down on Commerce St, had the only Xevious in town - Luna World?
- and a photo of SpaceWorld Damn, MAME is such a nostalgia tarpit that I'm soaking up time just THINKING about firing it up...
"On an aside, I still find it amazing (and often inspirational) how, despite the appalling graphics, so many of these games were fantastic fun to play."
Mr.Miamoto from Nintendo went down the path of "cell shaded graphics" during the life of the GameCube because he argued that having a lot of textures etc on a game distracted the user from the actual game play. This made total sense to me at the time, as I was still in secondary school when I got my GameCube and there were constant arguments about which game looked better. I think one such game was BMX XXX - but the only reason that was a good game graphically was all down to the computer generated pornography that made the game what it was.
The other thing though is that consoles and PC's these days are stupidly quick, so the programmer can do a hell of a lot more now than they could when making a game for the C64 for example. The problem with this though is that laziness creeps in. With a C64 you had to cut down your music files to something like 1k, and the resources of the systems were extremely limited. So you begged, borrowed and stole resources on the machine where you could. Whereas these days the games developer will create something that isn't really optimised for the machine it's meant to be running on. Over reliance on first day patches are the obvious symptom of this culture now. Obviously games back in the day still shipped with bugs, but these were largely small bugs, not massive game breaking issues - I know there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part it's true. These days you can't play the game until you apply the patch. I bought Wolfenstein: The New Order on the day of release and the first thing it made me do was download and install a 15GB patch for the game. 15GB?!?! How broken was that game on release?!?
Obviously games back in the day still shipped with bugs, but these were largely small bugs, not massive game breaking issues...
IIRC one or two of the classic Ultima titles shipped with bugs that made them impossible to win. (Although back then, there also wasn't as much of an idea that a game should be beatable without extreme measures and/or buying a hint book.) The early ones were written in BASIC so if you had some programming chops you could always fix them yourself. ;)
Ah, the good old days when I used to score millions in the arcades on games like Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust, etc.
I discovered MAME back in 2005 and even though I hadn't played the arcade versions of Missile Command and Joust since the early 80's, after a few days of practice I was scoring millions again (MC 'clocks over' at a million but Joust doesn't - I think I had about 2 or 3 million on Joust before I decided to end the game).
Used the mouse (for trackball) and the Z, X and C (fire) buttons for MC and the Z and C buttons for left/right and the right Ctrl button for 'flap' in Joust.
"suck every flavour of balls"
+1 for that alone, however, one wonders, how many flavours of balls there are?
I saw a bag of corn snacks named "beefy balls" in Tesco the other day. I know there are cheesy balls and marmite balls, anyone care to expand on their favourite ball flavour!
Mine are bollock broth flavour after sitting at the steering wheel for 5 hours straight.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike...
Oh happy days.of text.
But yes, Manic Miner and The Hobbit (amongst others) kept me entertained within the constraints of 64K.
Engagement is what you need.
At some point in the past a post here on El Reg put me in touch with World of Goo, I am eternally grateful.
That was more in nature to protect their interests since many of the companies that made those games still exist in some form (Capcom and Konami, for example, while Square Enix acquired the Taito properties). As the article notes, many individual pieces of the code are available in a 3-clause BSD license which is more liberal than the GPLv2+ license that envelops the entire project.
There HAVE been instances of bootleg cabinet makers using MAME in them, and the license as it was enabled them to either sue the cabinet maker or at the least keep the lawyers away.
"There HAVE been instances of bootleg cabinet makers using MAME in them, and the license as it was enabled them to either sue the cabinet maker or at the least keep the lawyers away."
Ironically MAME can emulate the common 60 in 1 games PCBS that can be found on the web which run a custom
build of MAME for XScale architecture with hacked roms.
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers/39in1.cpp
Now all someone needs to do is peruse that code to recover the elegant simplicity of some of the gems of old.
Playing a boring "game" that looks gorgeous but does little else is not entertaining.
I abandoned Battlefield at #3. I never was interested in Call of Duty.
I now play Diablo III or Minecraft. One for the mouse-twitching action and loot, the other for the simple beauty of deciding on something to do and going about getting it done the way I want. Yes, Diablo III looks gorgeous, but it is much more than that. Minecraft looks . . . well nobody plays Minecraft for its looks.
"Now all someone needs to do is peruse that code to recover the elegant simplicity of some of the gems of old."
I think you may have misunderstood what has been done. The games have not been open sourced, merely the emulation of the hardware, ie MAME itself.
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Perhaps it was a combination of its unique appeal, changing time, and the thought that trying to pull it off with higher-poly models actually makes the drawing of the "tiles" more complicated, especially once you get to things like concave surfaces. Besides, I think Namco's already found a way to satisfy people with that kind of fetish. Given the popularity of Tecmo's Dead or Alive, last I checked, they've been incorporating similar elements into the Tekken series, which you'll note has its own fair share of well-developed female fighters with fan followings.
I do play modern games - with GTA V and Battlefield 3/4 being favourites in recent years but I do love playing the old games and MAME really does the job.
Outside the simple fun of gaming, it is important activity they are enabling - the preservation of a rich heritage that the games industry itself clearly did not care about one bit.
It's also an enabler to the companies that still exist. MAME in and of itself has never really been an issue with them. It's that basic requirement of using the actual copyrighted code. Which is not an issue if they're using their own code. They've already been taking good looks at retro cabinets (my local Dave & Buster's has a Namco one used for fundraising and had a Nintendo one until recently), and the ability to use the now-very-robust MAME codebase (they can craft custom UIs in front of the untouched codebase to stay legal) will only encourage this going forward.
PS. It's not talked about in the article, but some time back, MESS was merged into MAME, meaning this is a potential boon for retro computer emulation, too.
Back when I had hair on my head rather than in my ears, we (gearheads in the U.S.) made a distinction between "quick" (acceleration, e.g. dragster) and "fast" (top speed, e.g. Campbell's Bluebirds). I have generally correlated those to the computer/communications terms "latency" and "bandwidth" (Oh, lord, imagining now the world record for 1/4-mile and salt-flats records for 18-wheelers full of magtapes).
Anyway, back in the day game developers would be sheepish about latencies over about the 50mS range, while today it seems that large fractions of a second are shrugged off.
I second the comments about "modern" crap games that look awesome vs fun games that were barely-recognizable collections of pixels and more addictive than heroin.
I would like to add current movies to that category. Flashy effects and CG graphics are being used to dress up films with frankly lame screenplays. In comparison, home-brewed videos posted online can get millions of views and approving comments. Both industries seem to throw money at window dressing instead of doing the hard work of making an engaging product.
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