Real Vs. MAME

Greg Kennedy asks: “I have a question about your MAME cabinet: how much do you play it vs. the other real-deal machines you own? I wonder sometimes if the diversity offered by MAME is a match for dedicated hardware or not […] I asked because I just got my MAME cab working and was wondering how others’ experience pans out over time.”

Greg, I’m so glad you asked!

The debate between MAME Cabinets and Arcade Cabinets (aka: “dedicated arcade machines” or “real machines”) has raged, I’m guessing, since the day the first MAME cabinet was built and will continue to rage for as long both MAME Cabinets and Arcade Cabinets co-exist. Some people love MAME Cabs and don’t see the point in dedicated machines, while others cling to dedicated machines and detest MAME and emulation. Like most technical discussions, rather than taking a definitive “right” or “wrong” stance, I tend to evaluate the positive and negative points of each and then apply the appropriate solution to an individual’s needs — in other words, I rarely subscribe to “one size fits all” solutions. Questions like “How many megapixels should my next camera have?” and “how big of a hard drive do I need?” can not honestly be answered without finding out additional information, and finding a solution that meets that specific person’s needs. Likewise, MAME vs. Real is a complicated matter and a personal choice that is different for every single person.

There are many reasons why I enjoy, own and collect arcade games. I grew up in the 80s playing real arcade games in real arcades. Just seeing an arcade cabinet up close, even one that’s turned off, brings back memories of those times. For me, the actual videogame itself is such a small part of the enjoyment. I mean, I love my Ms. Pac-Man cabinet; I love the artwork, I love the shape, I love colors and the sounds … but to be honest, I don’t like playing it all that much. I’m no good at it, really. I’m sure there are small children who could beat me at the game, if it were somehow able to keep their attention long enough.

The machines I play the most are my favorites. If you’ve read Invading Spaces you already know most of the stories. I own RoadBlasters because I used to play it at the bowling alley. I own Shinobi because I used to play it up at the neighborhood convenient store. I own Gauntlet because Jeff, Andy and I used to play spent all day playing it. I own Karate Champ because my friend and I used to play it against one another, head-to-head. In fact, I own the actual machine my friend and I used to play on. Ain’t that somethin’.

But more than any one specific machine I like the video and audio chaos created by twenty or thirty machines flashing and bleeping at the same time, all vying for your quarters. That’s something you don’t get from a MAME machine. It’s something you get by owning twenty or thirty machines and turning them on all at the same time. Is that a weird reason to buy twenty or thirty arcade machines? Probably. Maybe even definitely. And maybe I like owning them because I know my kids will never experience arcades the way I experienced them, and I’d like for them to — although, as time goes on, I’m already finding that those were my memories, not theirs. (That’s a topic for another day.)

I have gone on the record as stating that collecting arcade games has got to be one of the dumbest hobbies of all time. Machines are big and heavy; there are logistics involved in moving and storing them. They break down, more than you would think. As a kid I thought these flashing monoliths were indestructible and maybe back then they were; the older I get, the more fragile they appear. They are expensive to buy, to run, and to maintain. They can be financial pitfalls.

MAME, on the other hand, is relatively cheap. Broken arcade games can be picked up for almost nothing. For the price of cheap PC, monitor, some wire and some elbow grease, you can turn that cabinet into a MAME Cabinet. It looks like an arcade cabinet and plays arcade games, but its “guts” are a PC, and the games are emulated. There are technical differences between MAME machines and vintage arcade machines, the most common of which are differences in monitors. Classic arcade monitors work more like television sets than computer monitors (and are completely different than LCD monitors). While “arcade experts” can tell the difference in a second, the average person off the street probably wouldn’t notice and, more than likely, won’t care. I can’t say if it would bother you or not.

The problem (well, one of) with MAME machines is that they play everything. With a joystick and a couple of buttons you can emulate literally thousands of games. Add a trackball and a spinner and a steering wheel and eventually you’ll be able to play essentially everything — of course by that point in time it won’t look much like a real arcade game, and truth told that may be one of the things that vintage collectors have against MAME cabinets. They don’t “look” right, or at least most of them don’t. (Mine is virtually indistinguishable from a real cabinet; in fact, it’s in an unmolested cabinet and I often leave it running a game when people come over just to see if they’ll notice that it’s running MAME).

Pong is, especially when compared to most videogames released over the past twenty-five years, a fairly boring game. The game’s instructions printed on the machine were ridiculously simple (“Avoid missing ball for high score.”). It is something my three-year-old can play and my seven-year-old would quickly tire of, and yet people lined up to play it. I spent hours playing Pong with friends, because that was all we had. I, and maybe you too, have spent hours playing a game that in retrospect wasn’t very good because we only had a few games. Sky Diver for the Atari 2600 seemed pretty fun back in the day when I only had a few games.

There’s a weird psychological thing that happens to me (and maybe everybody, I don’t know) whenever I get a bunch of stuff all at once. I’ll check out the best of the best and the rest never gets touched, or at least not for a long time. Back in physical-land, this wasn’t such a problem. I’d buy three albums and only listen to two of them. I’d buy five a dozen books and only read a couple of them. We weren’t dealing with the astronomical numbers we have in today’s digital world. Suddenly things like Napster and p2p file sharing and all kinds of wonderful (I mean terrible) things came along. All of a sudden I wasn’t getting three albums; I was getting three hundred. I wasn’t getting five books; I was getting five-thousand. While the number of things I was getting increased exponentially, the amount of things I consumed did not. After downloading 300 albums, I didn’t listen to two-hundred of them — I listened to a dozen or so before the next albums started coming in. This isn’t a new phenomenon. I can remember trading Commodore games with kids at school, bringing home ten disks of games, and only playing a handful of them more than once. And, to be sure, it’s not limited to digital files. If you’ve ever picked up a stack of cheap videogames at a garage sale and found yourself only playing the best of the crop, you know what I’m talking about.

I remember the first time I downloaded and tried an Atari 2600 emulator for my PC. The zip file, which was around 3mb in size, included both an emulator and every single known Atari 2600 game. I don’t remember the actual number, but there were five or six-hundred different games included. Did I play them all? No. Did I play half of them? No. I played about fifteen or twenty of them, and many of those were for less than a minute. As a kid I can remember spending entire rainy days playing Pinball and Asteroids on the 2600; this time around, I only played them for five, ten minutes, tops. The vast majority of the ROMs never got played.

I would be lying if I said part of the reason was because they weren’t the real thing. I love boxes, manuals and artwork. I like to touch the games, feel them in my hands. Is that to day I am anti-emulation? Absolutely not. I think they both have their place. Emulation will never completely replace the feeling of playing a real game on real hardware, but the ease of which ROMs are obtained and played (as compared to buying and maintaining old hardware and software) is, quite frankly, simpler and less expensive. I appreciate both methods of game playing.

Which, somehow, brings us back full circle to MAME cabinets — and specifically, my MAME cabinet.

The biggest mistake I made when building my cabinet was copying every single ROM MAME would play on to my cabinet. I think that’s something around 5,000 ROMs — 5,000 arcade games, sitting in one upright cabinet, waiting to be played. Many of them will be waiting forever. Even as someone who grew up hanging around arcades, there are hundreds — no, thousands — of games I have never heard of in MAME. Some of them are obscure. Some of them are Japanese. Some of them are just plain bad. None of them will ever be played by me, or anyone ever playing my cabinet.

Which begs the question, why are they even on there? For two reasons, mainly. One is for when people say, “Have you ever played game X? You should try it, it’s really fun!” Instead of trying to track down the game, I simply walk to my MAME cabinet and lo and behold the game is waiting there for me. Isn’t that an odd thought? Twenty years ago, someone wrote a game. Ten years ago, someone wrote a program to play that game. Five years ago, I downloaded that game and built a cabinet to play it. Last night, I played it for the first time. What a long, lengthy journey for that little piece of code! The other reason I leave all those games on my MAME machine is because whenever people come over to visit my arcade (not as often as you would think), immediately after seeing my collection of games they say, “Oh my gosh do you have GAME X?” or “I remember playing GAME Y back in the day!” When it’s a game I don’t own, it’s fun to walk over to the MAME machine, punch a few buttons and bring up a slice of their own childhood. Those people do not care about the differences between emulation and dedicated games. They do not care that the resolution is higher on a computer monitor than an arcade monitor. They do not wish to hear that they only think they are playing a classic game when, in reality, they are playing a nearly indistinguishable computer-emulated version said game on a computer piled inside an arcade cabinet. They only care that at that moment, they are playing Joust. They have been swept away to the past, like I am every day, to a simpler time. They smile, and that makes me smile.

When I first began collecting arcade games almost fifteen years ago, I made a mental list of games I wanted to own someday. The list is fluid; it changed a lot in the early days and changes less often today. My initial list was made without any technical knowledge of arcade games or prices. For example, at one point in time I wanted to own a Pole Position cabinet. Everyone Pole Position owner I have ever met falls into one of two categories; those who continually fix theirs, and those who own broken machines. I also wanted to own a Dragon’s Lair cabinet at one time, without knowing that the laserdiscs and laserdisc players that play them are expensive to replace and dying due to old age. The more I learned, the more that list rearranged itself. Over time the real “must own” list formed itself: 720, Gauntlet, Centipede, Commando, Karate Champ, Mortal Kombat, Rampart, Shinobi, Speed Buggy, Super Offroad, Zaxxon, and so on. If that list sounds familiar, it’s because I own them all.

That’s not to say I own every game I ever wanted to own. Some of them, like Elevator Action and Mat Mania, were sold. Others like Star Wars and Scramble, broke and I could never get working. And then there are the ones I haven’t found yet, at least not at a price I’m willing to pay — stuff like Double Dragon, a game I think is worth a hundred bucks and the current market thinks is worth more (I’ll wait ’em out). Those games, I play in MAME, on my cabinet, and I don’t mind it a bit. No, it is not better than the real thing. Yes, it is better than nothing.

Several years ago, some evil genius created the 48-in-1 JAMMA PCB. Like the name implies, the board plays 48 different games, and fits in one cabinet. The board includes games like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Frogger, and, well, 45 others. And boy, did my wish list of games ever change the day I bought one of those. For around a hundred bucks, I could now play almost fifty classic games in the space of one cabinet!

But something funny happened after buying that 48-in-1. A few months later I bought a Centipede cabinet. Centipede is one of the 48 games included on the board. Since then I’ve picked up Ms. Pac-Man and Zaxxon, two other games included on the 48-in-1 too. What does it all mean? I’m not sure. I can tell you this … all three of those games have classic artwork or vintage styling, something you just don’t get from a generic 48-in-1 cabinet.

So how often do I play my MAME cabinet? Not that much, I guess. At this point there are around ten games I play on it from time to time: Jungle Hunt, Double Dragon, Excitebike, Zoo Keeper … a few others. Chances are before I’m all done with this hobby, I’ll own those too. For the average person, I would say a MAME Cabinet is a pretty sane way to get into the hobby without letting it take over your life. Then again, worrying about what sane people do has never been a big concern of mine.