Retro Games

Although the art of running the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) on Macintosh [Hack #21] and Linux [Hack #22] is discussed later in this chapter, this hack deals solely with the ubiquitous Windows operating systems. MAME was originally writte...

Yeah, you've heard it all before. "But Jimmy, you can't play videogames on your computer. You have a Mac." You can hear the venom in their voice as they say it like you've caught some foreign disease. However, this blanket statement and your friends ...

Home gaming consoles might be fine for some people, but if you are reading this hack, you are probably one of those old-school arcade wizards that we used to congregate around in smoky pizza joints, hoping for the honor of holding your tokens, as you...

Microsoft's Xbox is both the most powerful and the most flexible game console on the market. In addition to playing off-the-shelf Xbox games, it can serve as a jukebox, a region-free DVD player, a media center, and an arcade machine. That last bit of...

I'll level with you here: this ain't gonna be the longest hack in the book. There's not much in the way of homebrew MAME development, and for good reasonstrictly speaking, there is no such platform as "MAME." Since the program is by definition a coll...

Let's face itas fun as Gridlee [Hack #24] may be, what you really want to do with MAME is play the arcade games you remember from your misspent youth (or, depending on your age, satisfy your curiosity about what us geezers used to think was high-tech...

If you prick your ROMs, do they not bleed? Well, no. But ROMs are still precious things, and you must take good care of them. Now that you've set up MAME and have started to piece together a game collection, you'll want to know how to download, store...

Tired of playing classic arcade games under MAME using only your keyboard or a tiny game pad? Want a controller that mimics the original arcade experiencebut don't want to shell out the cash and living-room space required for a six-foot-tall arcade c...

One day not too long ago, you were thinking of Q*bert. You closed your eyes and suddenly you were back in front of the machine that used to stand in the lobby of your local pizza parlor. You put in a quarter, slammed the machine to get it to drop in,...

So you've decked out your MAME setup with original arcade game sounds [Hack #28] and even got hooked up with a classic arcade-style controller [Hack #27]. But something's still telling you that your MAME experience isn't quite complete. Something's s...

More and more accurate as every new iteration of MAME is, the popular arcade machine emulator will always have one insurmountable design flaw: no matter how perfectly it emulates arcade machines, it does so on something that isn't an arcade machine. ...

Playing your favorite arcade games using MAME at home is a lot of fun, but what happens when you're forced to leave the house? (Hey, it happens.) If your friends and relatives are tired of you reconfiguring their computers and installing MAME every t...

If you've ever seen a professional laser light show, you know what a thrill it is to watch such vivid, colorful light patters projected onto enormous screens (or the sides of buildings, or any flat surface). And it's a safe bet that somewhere in the ...