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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steven Bowen who wrote (1219)	12/16/1998 3:27:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 110653

Does anybody have experience downloading classic arcade games? I was just looking into the availability of Donkey Kong on PC, and found this is a controversial area. getwild.com Crackdown on Classic Arcade-Game Lovers - By Howard Wen l For fans of the Net's emulation (or "emu") scene, where old video games are resurrected for fun on today's computers, it's been a rough -- and ominous -- few weeks. The Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), the trade organization for the video and computer games industry, recently stepped up its policing of Web sites that freely distribute the source code to old arcade video games (in the form of "ROM images" -- data from ROM chips dumped into software form). Threatened with legal action over copyright violation, popular emu sites, such as Dave's Video Game Classics, either quit providing ROMs or were shut down entirely by their Internet service providers. Emulation programs re-create, in software form, the hardware of arcade machines, console video-game units or other video-game platforms. With a given emu program, you can run and play classic arcade games, like the original Ms. Pac-Man, on your computer. The most popular of the emu programs is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME), which, at current count, can emulate more than 1,000 arcade games. Programmers of these pieces of "virtual hardware" toil on their emulators with various motivations -- including the technical challenge and a love for old games -- and most give away their creations for free on the Web. But emulators alone don't do anything -- to play a game using an emulator, you also need a ROM image of the game itself. The copyright owners of the emulated arcade games have not targeted the emulators, per se, but the free -- and brazen -- distribution of ROM images of their games via the Web. Many online fans of the emu scene have argued that emulation programming is not about piracy but about preserving the history of video games and old computer hardware formats. Without the scene, the majority of classic arcade video games, most of which are not available for purchase in any computer or video-game console format, would have disappeared into oblivion. Under this logic, some emu Web sites gave the impression that making available ROM images of old arcade games was, at the very least, not as bad as distributing pirated versions of current software. Not surprisingly, this argument never swayed the game companies. Responding to e-mails it received regarding the shutdowns of Web sites illegally distributing ROM images, the IDSA states on its own Web site, "Just because a particular title is not currently for sale does not mean that it will never be for sale. Tolerating the unauthorized distribution of ROMs makes a product less valuable if and when the copyright owner wants to re-release it or profit in some other way." But the emu scene has moved beyond its origins of mere historic preservation. Current emulators (including MAME) can run the ROM images of more recent titles like Mortal Kombat -- games still found in video arcades. This is just an indication of the growing sophistication of emu programmers' talents. Programs fully emulating the Sony PlayStation console are on the horizon (currently, they can successfully run about 60 percent of the game titles available for this format). And, in perhaps a more telling example of where the emu scene is headed, an emulator for Nintendo's new GameBoy Color was distributed on the Web weeks before the actual gadget was available for sale. Such advances are likely to bring more scrutiny to the emu scene from the video-game companies. As for "retrogamers" who would like to play emulated versions of arcade classics on their computer while adhering to copyright law, current options don't look promising: Microsoft's recently released Revenge of the Arcade, which emulates Ms. Pac-Man along with four other classics, has been widely panned for its slow emulation speed and bloated file size (it takes up 36MB of hard disk space, compared to the less than 2MB that the same five games and MAME take up together). In its review of the product, Next Generation magazine offered a sentiment most emu fans can probably relate to: "If this is what it means to buy a legal emulator, we'd rather break the law."