Vintage games - anyone into MAME?

[HopeHoops]

[FSogol]

1. I am. I have have an x-arcade tankstick to play Mame on my pc. n/t

[HopeHoops]

2. 98SE is the best platform for MAME. It's kind of quirky (at best) on Vista.

Some of the ROMs will only run on 95. I've got everything back to 3.11 on one machine or another.

[FSogol]

7. I keep my rom set current and don't have any problems on XP. n/t

[HopeHoops]

9. Do NOT post it in a public forum, but just where the hell do you get the ROMs now?

PM would be nice. They're sort of "contraband". I have a lot of them.

[FSogol]

16. They are not contraband. They have been widely avaiable for the last 15+ years. n/t

[HopeHoops]

17. I know. Most of mine are older than that. But I have updated some since. The sites keep getting..

... shut down as if they were kiddie porn or something. Even the MAME site won't link to them. If you have current links, please PM me.

[FSogol]

19. Sites that sell them are shutdown. The developers of Mame

help shut them down. Use the sites in my message below (#14).

[Ohio Joe]

3. I got it for Romance of the Three Kingdoms

I have several of them and just love em.

[HopeHoops]

4. I'm more the Space Invaders and Berzerk sort. Frenzy is my favorite, but it won't run on anything.

It keeps saying I'm missing ROMs and I think I have them all.

[FSogol]

10. My favorites are: Robotron, Frenzy, Besersk, Vanguard, Tempest, Defender, Bosconian,

Tapper, and Galaga. My absolute favorite is Taito's Ice Cold Beer, an electro-mechanical game unlikely to be working anytime soon.

[HopeHoops]

13. Tempest is worthless without a dial. You need a joystick for the others.

[FSogol]

15. I have an x-arcade tankstick. It has the double joysticks for Robotron and a trackball

which functions great in lieu of a spinner.

[FSogol]

11. Your files are probably from different versions than the emulator.

If you post the version of the emulator, I may be able to get the working files to you.

[HopeHoops]

12. Most of them are ten years old or more. They have been difficult to locate.

Copyright shit. Games that will never see the light of a bar again held hostage by copyrights.

I've got at least ten versions of MAME. Some things work on all of them (Like SMASH TV), and others only work on specific versions on specific operating systems. Vista is the worst.

[FSogol]

14. See below

There is a freeware rom manager program to rebuild rom sets called ClrMamePro (http://mamedev.emulab.it/clrmamepro/) It can create a list of the files that are missing. Many roms are dependent on the roms in other files.
There is a torrent site called Pleasuredome (http://www.pleasuredome.org.uk/) where you can download torrents of roms. (Beware a full set contains over 10,000 games and is over 100 gb.)
The binary usenet group alt.biniaries.games.mame will also fill requests if you are missing roms. (Post a list of what you want -hopefully a fixdat file from clrmamepro) and it gets posted within hours.

Almost no company is doing anything with copyrights on these old games with a few exceptions.
You can also get any questions answered on alt.games.mame

[HopeHoops]

18. That's 1/10th of one of my external drives (of which I have many).

Thanks for the links. I'll check them out later.

[Systematic Chaos]

26. Frenzy really is an awesome game.

I suck at it personally -- can't get much more than 7 or 8 thousand points.

But back in the day there was someone I used to watch play my local Frenzy machine who could consistently score well into 5 digits. It was a sight to behold.

[HopeHoops]

27. When it was in the arcade, I regularly got up into the white bouncy walls (can't shoot through those

like you can the orange/red ones). After a while, ALL of the walls are bouncy so there's shit flying in all directions. The real trick is to trick the robots into shooting themselves. They shoot when you move into range, so you dodge the shot and then on its way back move up behind it. The robot follows your moves and thereby puts itself into the path of its own shot. There are also a lot of Evil Otto's instead of just one. In the lower stages, you can get away with killing Otto twice before the screaming fast one comes out. In the upper levels, don't even try. I'd play that so long on one quarter that I don't even remember how many levels I made it through - a lot.

That and Centipede where the two games I ALWAYS had all of the top scores on. I was naughty - for the 3 letter "high score" name, I'd alternate between "TIT" and "ASS".

[Systematic Chaos]

28. I never got much beyond 150k at Centipede. LOVED Millipede also.

The one video game I mastered was Tron. My high score at it is 1,000,187 points. I was trying to get as close to 999,999 as possible to put it at the top of the high score list. I was on the spider stage and I accidentally shot one too many times. My score hit a million and rolled over, and then I immediately lost my last life. The game then informed me that my score of 187 was "not in the top 100 scores." I was so pissed off I didn't play the game again for years.

I ended up here in Las Vegas in 1982, when I was 13. I just about lived in the arcades of the Strip hotels and elsewhere through my teen years. I was also one hell of a pinball player by then.

Some of my other all-time favorite games include:

Super Pac-Man
Jr. Pac-Man
Baby Pac-Man (with the pinball table attached)
Gaplus (Galaga 3)
Zoo Keeper
Tapper
Time Pilot
Thief and N.A.T.O Defense
Ponpoko
Bosconian
Anteater
Amidar
Reactor
Peggle (NOT the modern one by PopCap, something completely different)
Block Out
Arkanoid

and I know there are dozens more, but these are just off the top of my head.

[HopeHoops]

29. Is Super Pac-Man the one with the Lego block maze on the second level?

I've got all of them on MAME, but various ROM sets only play on specific versions of MAME (of which I have several). The one the girls like the best is "Elevator Action", but it really only plays well on a Win 98SE box (have a few, no problem there).

Tapper is fun. There's even a Budweiser version of it. I also love Gorf, but the MAME colors are sort of fucked up. And then there's SMASH TV - NO MORE POPPING QUARTERS!!!!! Mutoid Man is fun to kill, the cobras are a bitch, the sun skeleton boss is a bitch, but the REALLY fun one is the revised Mutoid Man with the game show host's head on it (last screen of the game).

[Systematic Chaos]

30. The Lego maze one is PacMania, which I forgot to list.

And by the way, I don't know why you're having so many problems with MAME. I've been running it since 2000 and I just try to keep my version up to date, and load the newest ROM set (not the HD images though because those eat up way too much space) every year or so. I've used it in Windows 98, XP, Vista and now Windows 7 with few problems with games.

[HopeHoops]

31. I've got the newest version. My ROM sets are out of date.

For a long time, you had to really hunt for the ROMs. As I understand it they are more widely available now. I've got the disk space, no problem there. I just haven't tried to hunt down new ROMs in a long time. They were contraband when I first started using MAME (pre-2000).

[HopeHoops]

5. Funny story from an old game - King Authur type thing.

It was on the Amiga (way more advanced than PC games) and one of the requirement for winning was to be of strong character and just, and all that shit.

Anyway, my wife were playing it together and I said "fuck horse" - it responded "Those are not the thoughts of a pure man". My wife threatened to kill me if it made us lose the game.

[Ohio Joe]

6. heh, One of my favorites

A long time ago, someone put out a kings Quest type of adventure game for The Hobbit. My buddy Bill got it and we were playing it (on the old TRS-80) and drinking... So right at the start as all the dwarves gather at Bilbo's, I start putting in "Kill Thorin", over and over.. heh, at first, Thorin just gets annoyed but after about 15 times, he gets mad and tries to kill you but Gandalf steps in and kills Thorin... bwahahahaha, we still make jokes about that

[HopeHoops]

8. You can't be a D&D fan without thinking about shit like that.

When I was in 10th grade (78), I was taking a computer class at the local community college. My buddy and I would get stoned all to Jesus and go over there to program shit in Fortran - mainly a character generator (six capabilities, 3-18). We could have done it on his Apple II, but it was fun to go fuck with the mini computer.

[Hayabusa]

24. Same here

And it really doesn't matter which one I play, that series just never gets old. I remember buying a new Nobunaga's Ambition (sister series) for the Genesis during the time that there were no US releases in over a decade.

[SidDithers]

20. I still play Angband once in a while...

that's kinda vintage, isn't it?

Sid

[Rex]

21. I must admit, sadly that I have become a visual junkie

and can no longer play a game without full DX11 support.

[Occulus]

22. Skyrim renews my faith in the place beautiful visuals have in games

When used well, great graphics work.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

23. Big time. Does anyone know the best control setup for Defender?

Aside from having the actual control panel from an original Defender?

I haven't been able to get a reasonable setup yet.

Asteroids and Missile Command work great with the keyboard and mouse.

[RexDart]

25. I've been out of it for a while.

I think the last full set I had was .136, but life has been hectic, and I haven't had time to do anything with it. I do have my mother in law's old tv when she went to a flat screen. I'm hoping to build a full cab someday.