A PC emulator such as Connectix’s VirtualPC or FWB’s SoftWindows is a handy app to have on the shelf, just as a balanced part of this nutritious breakfast, but emulators can be disappointing for spinning PC games. Still, there are a lot of Wintel-only titles, and some of them are tempting. I’m hopeful that a Second Age of Mac Gaming is upon us. The first question is, of course, “Does it work?” and the answer has been upgraded from a qualified and fidgety yes to a somewhat more confident one. The second question people ask about it is “How can it possibly be legal to sell a product that emulates the Sony PlayStation?” Well, it is, and Connectix has the court findings to prove it. But for God’s sake don’t ask that aloud when Mom’s in the room, because she’ll tell you that right is right and ROM isĬonnectix’s Virtual Game Station can be run guilt-free. In the case of a game that hasn’t been produced for 15 years and was available only in coin-op form from a company that went out of business during the Reagan administration, the question “Well, what difference does it make?” comes readily to mind. Nintendo goes after Web sites that offer ROM images of Nintendo games for downloading. These games are still copyrighted by someone, after all. At some point an owner of a Track & Field machine must have copied the contents of said ROMs into a file and posted them somewhere, begging the question (he said, looking over his shoulder first and then whispering)
Normally the code would be burned onto a cartridge or onto some ROM chips on the arcade’s motherboard.
See, obviously none of these emulators can play Track & Field without the game software itself. That means there’s a unified demand for the original game software, and therefore there are easily found, openly operated central sources for locating them. And as a free, open-source project, MAME runs on almost every computing platform you can name. A Mac version of Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, it rolls emulators for every significant piece of coin-op arcade hardware into one piece of software.
But the primary problem I have with them is, I mean, if you want to play the Atari 2600 version of Frogger, you can find a console and a shopping bag full of tapes for next to nothing at a garage sale, on eBay, or at the curb on trash day. The quality of emulation is pretty spotty, and it’s hard to locate a solid range of compatible games to play on ’em. These emulators are little more than curiosities, though. There are emulators for Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super NES, Atari, ColecoVision, Intellivision – honest, you read the list and you can almost hear a Pat Benatar tape playing somewhere. The site is so exhaustive, I can assume only that he’s an alien sent to collect all this stuff so it’ll survive when Earth is consumed in the upcoming invasion and Armageddon. John Stiles’s love letter to Mac emulation. He got kind of mad about that and sputtered out something about how much he’d paid for the thing on eBay, and I’m sorry to say that I did little to cool him down by grabbing him by the collar, dividing the dollar figure by 1.77, and spelling out to him how many starving children Sally Struthers could have fed with the money he’d wasted. A pal of mine excitedly thrust his recently acquired mint-in-mint-packageįashion doll into my hands, and before I had a chance to smile and say, “Hey, that’s neat,” I had thrown it to the floor and started jumping up and down on it, yelling,Īs I did so.