Shouldn’t you be spending more time with the classics?

Today’s games brim with high-polygon-count beasties, but we’re still floored by what the creators of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Battle Zone were able to squeeze out of eight measly bits of processing power. Despite severe limitations, they produced compelling and addictive games that ate a generation of children’s quarters and birthed a billion-dollar industry.

Now your home computer has more processing power in its on-off switch than the machines of yesteryear had in their wildest electric dreams, and with a few quick downloads you can play the classics for free. To do that you need an emulator, a downloadable program that creates a virtual version of those old arcade machines inside your computer’s memory. Find the code for an old game online, plug it into the emulator and you’re on your way to a showdown with Wizard of Wor, only this time with endless free plays.

MAME (mame.net, macmame.org) plays thousands of old games, with the RAINE (rainemu.com) emulator supports late-1980s titles such as Ninja Gaiden, along with more than 100 others (including many sleeper hits). Capcom ruled the arcades of the 1990s, and Callus (bloodlust.zophar.net) is dedicated solely to its games – just having all the Street Fighter versions is worth the (free) price of admission.

The catch? Well, there is one pesky legal issue. Emulators themselves are legal, but the game files (while readily available) are usually not. We can say this, however: Google is a singularly impressive search engine (nudge, nudge).

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2005 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Journalism, Playboy Magazine, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.