Chapter 3. Playing Arcade Games on Your Computer

Unless you're a competitive Dance Dance Revolution player, the importance of the video arcade in the modern-day gaming diet has dwindled to nearly nothing in recent years . This would come as a shock to someone who was cryogenically frozen in 1982 and reawakened just last week.*

For a long time, arcade games were retro gaming. Sure, you could technically play a version of Pac-Man on the Atari 2600, but that's not how the yellow dot-muncher found world fame. Arcades were packed full of bodies because they offered the definitive gaming experience in every category from graphics to play control.

But now that most of the arcades have closed down, how can you get your retro arcade fix? I suppose you could start buying up old arcade machines, but your basement would get filled up pretty fast. Here's an idea: MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

An emulator is a software program that, in layman's terms, tricks one piece of hardware (your computer) into acting like another piece of hardware (an Asteroids machine). In this chapter, you'll learn the ins and outs of MAME: installing the software, finding the ROM files that contain the games you want to play, and tweaking everything until it runs just the way you want it to.