Arcade - Space Paranoids
The small town where I grew up was blessed with a single arcade. It was in the basement of a building next to a book store and one of the many ubiquitous t-shirt shops mountain tourist towns were so well known for. In the back of the t-shirt shop was the arcade. It featured an occasionally rotated collection of new and classic games and a few pinball machines. Some favorites that swallowed many of my quarters included Gauntlet (that was later replaced with Gauntlet II), Spy Hunter, Super Sprint, Rastan, UN Squadron, Forgotten Worlds, Street Fighter II (which was replaced with Championship Edition when that was released) and a Neo Geo 4-way featuring most notably Samurai Showdown. In retrospect it was actually a pretty darn good collection for a small town and I was pretty much a permanent fixture there after school, on weekends and all Summer long.
I remember the first time I played around with MAME. It was sometime in the late nineties fairly early in the development of the project. I loaded it up on my Mac at the time and tried some of my favorite games listed above. The experience was both awesome and underwhelming. Most of the games played with varying degrees of inaccuracies from poor framerates to slow or missing sound. However these myriad issues weren't the source of my disappointment. It was the interface that was the problem. Using a keyboard is just a pathetic substitute for the feel of those old push buttons and a fine joystick. I played around with it for a few days and never really looked at it again.
The idea of emulation came back into my head while walking through Costco a year or so ago. They were selling some sort of "multicade" type of thing that played sixty or so arcade games. I was drawn to the idea because it was like my old foray into MAME but done with a proper control set-up. It wasn't the most attractive cabinet, the graphics were a bit of a mish-mash of various logos that didn't blend well together and I thought the price was quite steep. But the seed was now planted.
I started very casually browsing around the web looking at what all would be involved in doing something like this myself. I very quickly determined that the fundamental workings would actually be pretty straight-forward. A computer, a display and a keyboard controller wired to the buttons and a cabinet to house the whole thing was about all it took. That is certainly understatement, of course there is a lot more to it. All the essential little details that help make the experience real like the cabinet itself, the theme of the graphic design and the software interface. There were many, many questions to be answered.
Next - The Cabinet »
