Vintage Video Gaming

Crunchity

Crunchity

Well-known member
Found a perfect hobby to fill in my non guitar playing down time. I recently was at a local PC hardware store looking to upgrade my sound card and saw a stack of these arcade controllers for Windows/PC (it's USB plug and play) and decided to grab one...well now I can't get enough lol. It's heavy duty (feels like the same hardware used on old, real arcade units) easy to setup and definitely adds to the old school vibe for caveman era games (if you're older like me).

Anyone else here still living it the dark ages and playing ancient video games?

Joust.jpg


Burger-Time.jpg
 
Awesome, man! :cheers2:

Looks like you're rockin' M.A.M.E. Been a huge M.A.M.E. fan for 20 years.

The only computer games I've ever played besides my beloved Gran Turismo are '80s arcade ones, so there's that. :LOL:
 
Other than getting married, having kids, and landing a decent job,
drinking and playing video games was the highlight of the 80s for me.

Remember Imagic? They were the best imo.

AT2600-Star-Voyager-large-image.jpg
 
I wonder if that was Star Raiders as it was known here in Oz, Donnie.

I had an ATARI 400 computer and the BASIC and Star Raiders ROM cartridges were mandatory.
 
I installed MAME and Killer Instinct on my MacBook Pro last year for shits and giggles. I loved that game almost as much as Street Fighter II back in the day.
 
Monkey Man said:
Awesome, man! :cheers2:

Looks like you're rockin' M.A.M.E. Been a huge M.A.M.E. fan for 20 years.

The only computer games I've ever played besides my beloved Gran Turismo are '80s arcade ones, so there's that. :LOL:
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Thanks. Yep, using MAME (one of the latest versions 2.xx) - it has those "HLSL" settings that help make your modern PC monitor look like a CRT. It's so funny, I built this beefy PC for music recording, video editing, modern gaming, porn, etc...yet more times than not, in my down time I'm playing these old, pixely, sprite games lol...Commando, Donkey Kong Jr, Street Fighter's, Metal Slug, Joust, Ring King, Karate Champ, etc. Such a blast!

I got the controller at "MicroCenter". They have two versions, one that comes with Rasbery Pi, which is basically a simple program loaded with a ton of old Atari games (arcade + all their console exclusive stuff) and one that is just the controller. I got the controller only unit as I already have a couple hundred games running great and tweaked to my tastes with MAME.
 
Yup!

Scanlines is the most-important visual filter IMHO. Essential for the classic '80s games. :rock:

Huge fan of Asteroids, Galaga, Galaxian, Scramble, Joust, Defender, Pleiads, Phoenix and so on. Space shooters mainly.

If you can get the complete MAME ROM set you'll have all the ATARI console games in there as well as Nintendo and whatnot. Back in the day the console games were only available on a separate platform (NeoGeo / GeoMAME?), but now they're all included in the main ROM set and the clients / apps / shells or whatever you want to call them are able to handle them now too.
 
All this MAME talk is making it really hard not spend $150 on something my wife will be pissed about!

Original Pac-Man might still be my all-time favorite.
One thing cool about being there from the very beginning you'd get all of the pioneer games of the
various genres - space/racing/1 on 1 gaming/maze/shoots and ladders style (donkey kong) - before
the dozens of imitations/variations immediately followed.

To this day I still think the original PONG is the best and most fun 1 on 1 style game.

And +1 on scanlines.
 
Agreed on everything, brother. :cheers2:

Oh, except our faves differ - Pac-Man was great, but Asteroids was my first experience after Space Invaders in the late '70s and it still holds a special place in my heart. I remember back in the day I used to try to explain to people that it was the "freest" of the games that were around back then 'cause you had 360º movement and no two games were the same pattern-wise once you'd blasted a few rocks to smithereens.

My theory at the ime was that peeps didn't appreciate what it had to offer 'cause it was black-and-white and didn't have a soundtrack.
 
Donnie B. said:
All this MAME talk is making it really hard not spend $150 on something my wife will be pissed about!

Original Pac-Man might still be my all-time favorite.
One thing cool about being there from the very beginning you'd get all of the pioneer games of the
various genres - space/racing/1 on 1 gaming/maze/shoots and ladders style (donkey kong) - before
the dozens of imitations/variations immediately followed.

To this day I still think the original PONG is the best and most fun 1 on 1 style game.

And +1 on scanlines.
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Don't piss off the wife lol! I'm lucky, my gf is a fan of some vintage games, Mario Bros, Ms Pac Man, Galaga, etc. She's cute tho, she'll send me a pic of where she's knocked my initials off a high score with hers lol. Of course I usually return the favor (except Frogger, she owns Frogger, can't beat her). You gotta get your wife interested in that type of quality time haha - then you can purchase the legit controller!

Pong was probably the first vid game for many, me too, but eventually it got upgraded to games like Breakout and Arkanoid (I LOVE that one), which is one reason I needed this controller, to properly play those paddle and trackball games too! Crystal Castles, Centipede, Marble Madness, Pole Position, Tempest, Missle Command, Golden Tee, etc, all so much more fun with this new toy now.

The MAME scanlines feature, I love it. It may not be 100% crt like the good old days, but it's mighty close and blows away the blotchy, zero lines crap you see dudes posting on YT, etc...not sure how anyone can play these old games looking like that.

Here's a couple more pics for fun (not sure if the scanline effect shows in the pics)...

Mat-Mania.jpg


SFIII.jpg[img]
 
Crunchity said:
The MAME scanlines feature, I love it. It may not be 100% crt like the good old days, but it's mighty close and blows away the blotchy, zero lines crap you see dudes posting on YT, etc...not sure how anyone can play these old games looking like that.
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Absorootly! :yes:
 
Pardon my denseness but how does this work?
Is MAME a standalone app or part of the controller unit?
You mentioned PC so does that infer the need for some sort of
processing (pc/tablet/phone) outside of the monitor/controller
to play a game - or is it just for any ROM upgrades in the controller??

Thanks.
 
Donnie B. said:
Pardon my denseness but how does this work?
Is MAME a standalone app or part of the controller unit?
You mentioned PC so does that infer the need for some sort of
processing (pc/tablet/phone) outside of the monitor/controller
to play a game - or is it just for any ROM upgrades in the controller??

Thanks.
Click to expand...
There are quite a few ways you can do this. I have built "boxes" which consists of a Raspberry PI using various emulators (RetroPie is one a lot of people use). I use all of my emulators through my computer at home. You then just load the Roms and off you go. Controllers...you have obviously your choice of thousands, I usually go for a quality 6 button USB controller...that covers anything through the 32 bit era for the most part.
 
To expand a little on what Japetus said, Donnie, MAME is the collection of digital copies of hardware ROM sets that's grown to several hundred gigabytes (at least) over the last few decades.

IIRC it started out with tiny (a few kilobytes each) ROM copies made by enthusiasts of "ancient" arcade-machine chips. Those units employed hardware ROM chips to store the game data (no disk drives back them, although some used cassette tape and took a few minutes to boot up). Games like Galaxian, for example, ran on roughly 2kHz CPU's (not MHz like today!) and the entire programs being run were only a few kb in size.

Fast forward and the reason the collection has such a large footprint now is 'cause games' sizes increased exponentially over time and the collection has grown to become an historic archive. As Japetus suggested, you can run these ROMs on many different platforms - Mac, PC, dedicated arcade-style cabinets housing mini PC's or Raspberry Pis or what have you.

In essence, you run an app that's capable of emulating the various CPU's and graphics hardware of the original machines and this allows you to load and run the original ROMs (copies, of course), recreating the games 100% accurately.
 
Thanks gents.

So then these are PC games and the controller is just that - the controls?

Most controller units I've seen in the past were self contained with games and just plugged into your TV/Monitor.
Haven't been paying much attention the last 20 years though.
 
Monkey and Japetus explained it far better than I could have (more accurately) as it's a bit above my pay grade. I always looked at MAME more simply as a tool where some dudes way smarter than me figured out how to "rip the original game code" off those old boards and chipsets, then dump it onto a computer and spit it back out using your PC's hardware and a simple GUI in 100% original form. The reason I say it's the authentic game is because of the cheats, glitches and oddities present in the arcade, they're still there when you run the game in MAME. Pretty amazing feat actually IMO.

Yep, the big old arcade controller I posted is a simple USB > PC controller, works no different than using an XBOX 360 controller with your PC games. You're right, Donnie B, you could download MAME to your PC, grab a bunch of the roms and drop them into MAME, plug in any USB type controller and you're set. There's even some handy YT clips on how to get MAME up and running for first timers.
 
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