Emulation is cool. Today's processors make it possible to "fool" software into thinking it's running on the actual hardware of yesteryear. Equipped with the original ROMs, your Mac can become the old Asteroids arcade machine you played as a kid. This ain't a port... it's the actual game running on top of a hardware translator. It doesn't get any more authentic than this, unless you've got one of the old arcade game towers standing in your living room.

Tracking all the emulators out there, for all platforms, would require an entire web site of its own... in fact there is one excellent site for the emulators on the Mac where you'll find just about every conceivable hack in the book. Check out Emulation.net for its exhaustive resources. For gamers, be sure to look for two emulators in particular: MacMAME and Stella. The MAME in MacMAME stands for "multi-arcade machine emulator." Obviously an engineer's creativity was maxed out in naming this otherwise extremely well-built, flexible emulator. To date it emulates the various hardware necessary to run hundreds of games from the arcade golden days of the eighties.

There are hundreds of ROMs available including the classic you see above. The copyrights to the ROMs are still held by the original game publishers -- some of whom are still around and employ plenty of lawyers -- so be sure not to distribute ROMs with the emulators in question. Sorta like selling someone a bong as "decoration", but that's where the line gets drawn. You may legally only download a ROM image if you own the original respective game. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Tracking down ROMs can be a bit of a trick at times. There are a number of sites online with collections of ROMs, but they can occasionally fall prey to neglect, lawyers, etc. Here are some of the best places I've found for MAME ROMs: Bradman's MacMAME Unofficial MacMame Emulation.net has more links than Yahoo (well, almost) so be sure to check there first when you're hunting for that old Pac Man ROM you've always wanted. One last note about MAME: it's available for a wide variety of platforms -- PC, UNIX, even Be. If you're one of those weirdoes out there who disdain the Macintosh, you can get your MAME fix from the MAME source.

Then there's Stella. My first love was my Atari 2600. Stella emulates the console that began the video game phenomenon decades ago. Stella has been around for a few years, but until recently required an odd combination of ROMs and Mac specific configuration files (called VCS files). Finding these VCS files and ROMs used to be a bit of a trick for Mac users, but now with version 0.7 of Stella, the ROMs themselves work perfectly. One bit of information will help get you started: the ROMs from the PC world need to be modified to have a creator code of "StLa" and a type ID of ".VCS". If you have no idea what I'm talking about, there's a small drag-and-drop utility included with Stella, but it only does one ROM at a time. Use a different utility (I used File Buddy) to do a batch conversion.

Once you're up and running, you'll be swimming in a sea of the old classics... and appalled at what used to pass as state-of-the-art. These are the games from the days when one person was the creative team... you'll even find the game that heralded the end of the golden days of console games and stank up the market so much that thousands of the cartridges ended up in a New Mexico land fill. That's right, the all-time stinker, E.T. This was the game that triggered the games crash of the early Eighties. (Then, in 1984, Nintendo showed up and has never looked back since.)

For Stella, go to its home page. For ROMs, try this great archive. And to wallow in the past on an overall well presented site, look to Atari Nostalgia. There are certainly more sites out there... though www.atari.com returns a depressing "no such DNS" error message. R.I.P. Let's hope Apple fares better.

There are far more emulators in existence than these two... these simply represent my favorites. There's a NES emulator which I intend to investigate and for awhile a SNES emulator was floating around until Nintendo caught wind of it. You can still find some beta copies of it on Emulation.net. I still have my old Nintendo Entertainment System, but obviously never bought all the games. Emulation beckons...

-- Scott
November 6, 1997.

"Scott's Addictions" are postings about the games I play as I play them. When a game captures my interest and becomes a front-burner favorite, I'll post a tidbit or two here for you fellow gamers to enjoy. I'll only post the best games of my crop. No ratings, just ravings. And I'm semi-agnostic: I love the Mac, tolerate my PC, and split time on the PlayStation and Nintendo 64.

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