Game Emulation
For you gamers out there this post is for you. Many may have never heard of emulators or emulation. This is where this post comes in. A Game Emulator is a program that uses ROMS to emulate the real game that we've all come to know and love either Arcade Games, Console Games you name it. These emulators give you the REAL game, not say Pac Man from the Arcade to what Atari did to it on the home console, eeek what a nightmare.
This post will be about the best of them, and that is MAME and it's front ends, there are so many emulators to speak of, ones for the Intellivision, Atari, Apple II, NES, SNES, XBOX, PS2 and anything you like - start googling (Game Emulation).
The most famous of these Emulators is what is known as MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulation). For you Windows people this comes in the flavor called MAME32 and MAME32 Plus which are just different (Front Ends) to the emulator, you can pick and choose what front end you prefer - I prefer MAME32. There are plenty of others.
You may be asking what is a Front End? This is the graphical user interface created by someone, to accomplish in the easiest form, the use of emulation - makes it easy on the user, as Windows did for DOS, catch my drift? If not you can google all these terms from my blog with my google search bar.
The Front End MAME32
With picture above you can see a screen of how the actual game looks on right - (It's the REAL DEAL).
ROMS are what make the emulator emulate the actual game and these ROMS are usually the exact same code that was placed on chips within the actual arcade machine. This information is somehow taken from these chips and put into a readable form by the emulator. Most ROMS are simply zip files that contain the information or binary of what was on those chips, video, sound, button presses, coin slots, dip switches etc. You simply take these zip files and place them within the ROMS folder in your MAME32 folder without unzipping them and the emulator will read the zip file and it's contents by its name. The front end does everything for you it's just a matter of knowing how this all ties together. You can learn anything and everything about MAME from these two links.
http://www.mame.net/
http://www.classicgaming.com/mame32qa/
For those that are my age. Remember all those quarters spent in the arcade back in the early to mid 80's and for those still doing it today? With the onset of home console systems (XBOX, PS2) rivaling what can be done in arcades, this has since changed and most of these games have vanished and so has the arcades.
MAME currently has approximately (5000) ROMS and these are exactly how you saw them when they were in the arcade. Of course getting these ROMS is another process in itself because of legal ramifications and copy rights. Some sites outside the US host them for a fee you can download them with a paypal account. Some people host them themselves by ftp or web sites. My way of getting anything and everything is by the use of Newsgroups and I'll be creating a post on this great little secret later. Now back to emulation.
Once you download the emulator and extract to your favorite place on your hard drive it consists of several subfolders and depending on the front end used allows you to spiff up the front end with screenshots, icons, marquees, flyers and the like. Always leaving everything in zipped form you just place in it's proper folder.
You can click on Front End picture above and see a larger picture of it and see what all the bells and whistles added to it can accomplish.
Those taking the information from chips to file form were unable to extract some sound for some of the games this is where Samples come in and these have the exact same name as the ROM but must be placed within the Samples folder instead to give certain games their sound. Most games have been emulated exactly and these are not needed except for a few. Out of the (5000) games in ROM form not all are working or replicated exactly due to encryption and other factors. Most of the most famous of games are out there and if you name it, I'm sure I'd say yes it's out there.
This hobby has a tendency to take you away from doing your work and what is great is that it can be run in a smaller window which can easily be minimized. Who the heck wants to play Solitaire when you can play Pac Man, Asteroids, Galaga and so on. This post won't be as long as others only because with the links included and Google you can learn about emulation until your hearts content.
These ROMS are free as is the Emulator, its just a matter of finding and downloading everything you want. You will never find the ROMS with the emulator because of legal ramifications so by having both on your hard drive and the fact that you should own the actual game to have legal rights to it - is entirely up to you and solely falls on your lap - this all can be read usually within the Readme.txt or Help file in the Front End.
Not all of my posts will be completely informative because with Google and Links included within my posts more can be learned by the true experts, these are just my take on some of the things I'll be posting on. I'll be posting more and more on the things of interest to myself and I hope you agree are worth the read and want them to keep coming. My next post will be about Newsgroups (Who needs P2P (peer to peer))... I think I'm becoming addicted to Blogging. lol.
This post will be about the best of them, and that is MAME and it's front ends, there are so many emulators to speak of, ones for the Intellivision, Atari, Apple II, NES, SNES, XBOX, PS2 and anything you like - start googling (Game Emulation).
The most famous of these Emulators is what is known as MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulation). For you Windows people this comes in the flavor called MAME32 and MAME32 Plus which are just different (Front Ends) to the emulator, you can pick and choose what front end you prefer - I prefer MAME32. There are plenty of others.
You may be asking what is a Front End? This is the graphical user interface created by someone, to accomplish in the easiest form, the use of emulation - makes it easy on the user, as Windows did for DOS, catch my drift? If not you can google all these terms from my blog with my google search bar.
The Front End MAME32
With picture above you can see a screen of how the actual game looks on right - (It's the REAL DEAL).
ROMS are what make the emulator emulate the actual game and these ROMS are usually the exact same code that was placed on chips within the actual arcade machine. This information is somehow taken from these chips and put into a readable form by the emulator. Most ROMS are simply zip files that contain the information or binary of what was on those chips, video, sound, button presses, coin slots, dip switches etc. You simply take these zip files and place them within the ROMS folder in your MAME32 folder without unzipping them and the emulator will read the zip file and it's contents by its name. The front end does everything for you it's just a matter of knowing how this all ties together. You can learn anything and everything about MAME from these two links.
http://www.mame.net/
http://www.classicgaming.com/mame32qa/
For those that are my age. Remember all those quarters spent in the arcade back in the early to mid 80's and for those still doing it today? With the onset of home console systems (XBOX, PS2) rivaling what can be done in arcades, this has since changed and most of these games have vanished and so has the arcades.
MAME currently has approximately (5000) ROMS and these are exactly how you saw them when they were in the arcade. Of course getting these ROMS is another process in itself because of legal ramifications and copy rights. Some sites outside the US host them for a fee you can download them with a paypal account. Some people host them themselves by ftp or web sites. My way of getting anything and everything is by the use of Newsgroups and I'll be creating a post on this great little secret later. Now back to emulation.
Once you download the emulator and extract to your favorite place on your hard drive it consists of several subfolders and depending on the front end used allows you to spiff up the front end with screenshots, icons, marquees, flyers and the like. Always leaving everything in zipped form you just place in it's proper folder.
You can click on Front End picture above and see a larger picture of it and see what all the bells and whistles added to it can accomplish.
Those taking the information from chips to file form were unable to extract some sound for some of the games this is where Samples come in and these have the exact same name as the ROM but must be placed within the Samples folder instead to give certain games their sound. Most games have been emulated exactly and these are not needed except for a few. Out of the (5000) games in ROM form not all are working or replicated exactly due to encryption and other factors. Most of the most famous of games are out there and if you name it, I'm sure I'd say yes it's out there.
This hobby has a tendency to take you away from doing your work and what is great is that it can be run in a smaller window which can easily be minimized. Who the heck wants to play Solitaire when you can play Pac Man, Asteroids, Galaga and so on. This post won't be as long as others only because with the links included and Google you can learn about emulation until your hearts content.
These ROMS are free as is the Emulator, its just a matter of finding and downloading everything you want. You will never find the ROMS with the emulator because of legal ramifications so by having both on your hard drive and the fact that you should own the actual game to have legal rights to it - is entirely up to you and solely falls on your lap - this all can be read usually within the Readme.txt or Help file in the Front End.
Not all of my posts will be completely informative because with Google and Links included within my posts more can be learned by the true experts, these are just my take on some of the things I'll be posting on. I'll be posting more and more on the things of interest to myself and I hope you agree are worth the read and want them to keep coming. My next post will be about Newsgroups (Who needs P2P (peer to peer))... I think I'm becoming addicted to Blogging. lol.
posted by Cellar Dweller at 3:30 PM
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