Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and now the tech aren't you. It's time for a text stuff Ted bits and uh. I was listening to a recent episode of the Besties. That's a podcast that's about video games, which has no connection to my show or the I Heart network. I just enjoy listening to it, And in this particular episode, one of the hosts, Russ frush Dick, was chiding another one of the hosts, Chris Plant, after Plant had talked about the coin operated arcade days, and the reason that Russ was giving his buddy a bit of a hard time was that both Russ and Chris are a little too young to have spent a ton of time in arcades up. So essentially, Russ was saying, as if you are old enough to remember those days, well, friends, I am not as young as Russ and Chris are, and I spent a lot of time in video game arcades as a kid. And that actually got me to thinking about maime cabinets, because I've I've actually thought about making one myself. But I've kind of I've been holding back on it, largely because there's some philosophical challenges that I face that I have not yet reconciled. Anyway, I thought, why not do a text of tidbits on MAME. I've talked about MAME in the past, but I thought it might be good to kind of run down this because folks who are my age, they might have a nostalgic love of certain classic arcade games, but anyone who has even casually looked into the the hobby of collecting arcade games, nos, it could be really hard to find some of those classic titles. Some of them are prohibitively expensive. And then on top of that, you have to think about things like maintenance and repair, because these are systems that you know, they have physical moving parts, and those things do break down over time. So we're gonna take a quick look at all of that in today's episode. Well, first, let's talk about what old arcade machines had inside them, what made them special. The brains of your typical arcade machine was a circuit board, kind of like a mother board in a PC, and various logic circuits would be incorporated into these boards and these would be specific to whatever title you were talking about. So you can think of it in a way as the games are being hard coded onto circuit boards to work a specific way, and that's why Pacman is different from Donkey Kong, which is different from Galagha and so on and so forth. Now, these circuit boards were coupled with a primitive version of BIOS, that's basic input output system. So BIOS meant that there was a means for the circuit board to interoperate with the input systems of the game, so the controls the game. This involves everything from a joystick, maybe a button or more than one button. Typically you would also talk about a coin slot so that the machine detects when someone has inserted a coin, that kind of stuff. So all of those are inputs and the BIOS would be handling those signals and sending them on to the the circuit board to have the correct output. Right. The game's output was mostly shown to the player through a monitor. That's that was typically a CRT or cathode ray tube monitor. These are those really big monitors, big heavy monitors, you know CRT televisions. Maybe you still have one, or maybe you used to own one. Um, these are those big, heavy things that have a tube inside of them. By the way, those televisions and the CRT monitors that were in arcade machines, they're also equipped with powerful capacitors. Okay, these capacitors can hold on to a really strong electric charge. When I say really strong, I mean one that's strong enough to kill you. And I say this because it is always good to remember that even an arcade machine or an old CRT television that's been sitting in storage for years could still potentially have plenty of juice stored in those capacitors. And if you accidentally cause those capacitors to discharge, then you could be in serious danger. So I say that because I mean I was a kid once. I remember, like you'd come across a bunch of old, abandoned stuff, and as a kid, my number one inclination was let's break it right because it's just sitting there. Um. But when it comes to things like televisions and monitors and stuff, that comes with a real danger to it. So I just wanted to point that out. Anyway, Over time, arcade machine companies got a little more sophisticated, and they created a standardized control boards at least for their own output, right. It wasn't like it was standardized across the industry, but like neo, GEO created its own kind of circuit board design so that it wasn't making a new kind for every single title. And into these you could plug a wrong chip ROM or r O M that stands for read only memory, and as that name suggests, it's a type of computer memory that allows a device like a computer, to a pulled data from the chip, but it doesn't allow the device to write new data to the chip. You can essentially consult the chip, but you can't change anything on it. And we usually put stuff on ROM chips that's necessary for basic computer functionality, like running through the basic startup steps. You don't want that to get changed, so you end up hard coding it into ROM, and then it's effectively set in metaphorical stone. Now, in the case of arcade machines, the game itself would be stored on the ROM chip. So the important thing for the purposes of our discussion about MAIM is that the games we're on these physical chips, So we're not talking about software in the traditional sense. We're talking about hardware, hard coded chips. You can't just plug and play. So the big downside to the industry using hard coded ROMs is that there was no easy way to port the experience of playing these arcade games onto some sort of home system. Right. You couldn't just unless you went out and purchased an arcade cabinet. And some people did. I mean they had the money for it. I didn't, so I never did this. But they would go out and they buy a copy of the arcade machine and then they could play the arcade game at home. That was really the only way to do the actual arcade game, because you could not just buy a wrong chip and then plug it into a computer and play. So instead you had to rely on a port of an arcade game. Porting essentially just meant that the person in charge of the port had to build effects simile of the arcade game that could be played on some home system, whether it was a computer or a video game console. More often than not, they would actually pay someone else to do it, right, They would pay someone else to go through and and essentially recreate the game. So programmers of ports are often trying to reinvent the wheel to an extent. They're aiming to create the same game playing experience, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna follow follow the exact same path as the original game designers did. When they're making a port, they're saying, all right, well, what makes this game what it is? What? How can we create that same output? Uh? And it might mean that the port is actually, from a program level drastically different from the original code. This also meant that your experience when playing those ports could vary drastically. You might luck out. It might be that the port feels more or less the same as you remembered from the arcade. I mean, obviously it'll feel a little different if you're playing it on you know, a video game console or your PC and you're using a game pad. Game pads feel different from arcade controls. But otherwise it might feel like it's pretty accurate it or you might not be so lucky, and it might be that the port is practically unrecognizable when compared to the original title. So one early port that became infamous in the classic video game console days was the pac Man Port for the Atari twenty so Atari owners like myself were eager to have the opportunity to play the simple and yet compelling game of pac Man at home now in the arcade, pac Man's graphics, while not like super sophisticated, look nice like the ghosts look nice, the maze look nice. Pac Man looked nice. Everything was The sprites were good, things moved on a good clip. You had fun sound effects and music too. It really was the combination of all of these different elements that made pac Man such a fun game to play in the arcade. But the Atari twenty port was, by contrast, ugly playing. The game was unwieldy, it didn't sound good at all. The ghosts flickered in the Atari port because the Atari wasn't able to handle a a solid pac Man and four solid ghosts moving around simultaneously. In fact, the ghosts collectively had to share a single sprite, a sprite being a graphical element that can actually move uh compared to the play field of a game. And so the way the game compensated for the fact that it couldn't support four simultaneous ghosts on screening, it would only display one at a time, and that would alternate between the four of them, so like you would see a ghost for a frame and then the next frame you would see Ghost number two, and in the next frame you'd see Ghost number three, and in the next frame you see Ghost number four, and then the next one it would go back to ghost number one. So you're getting twenty four frames a second, you know, essentially really more like thirty frames a second. So they were flickering pretty fast, so you could see them, but they had that flicker and it was distracting. It didn't look at all like the original arcade machine. The only way you could have avoided that is if you had only had one ghost, you would have one solid pac Man and one solid Ghost, because the ghost wouldn't have to share that sprite with you know, it's fellow ghosts. Now, this gets more complicated, but we're not here to talk about the Atari's limitations really, but the point being that while pac Man for the Atari wasn't very good, in fact, I would say it was pretty bad, Atari sold more than seven million copies of it. Now, unfortunately, Atari manufactured twelve million copies, so while they sold seven million, that meant five million were sitting around unsold. Uh So, even though pac Man was the best selling Atari cartridge in the company's history, it didn't perform to what the company was expecting, and ultimately would become one of many massive mistakes that would lead to the Great Video game Crash of anyway, that's an example of a really bad part. But even a good part of a game often doesn't feel quite the same as the original arcade cabinet, and a lot of different factors can contribute to that, including the brightness and color contrast of the display, the responsiveness of the controllers, even the style of controllers can really make a big difference. Playing Galiga on an arcade cabinet just feels different than playing it with a game controller, even with a really faithful part of the game. I've got a version of Galagha on Xbox right. That was one of the games that I I purchased, and from a gameplay perspective, everything except the controls is perfect. Like it looks and sounds and behaves exactly the way the arcade machine behaved. But because I'm playing on a game pad like a game controller as opposed to the classic joystick and button combo of the arcade, it's still not the same. Now, arcades had a fairly brief time in the spotlight here in the United States. It was a little different. In other places in the world, like Japan, the arcade culture was healthier for much longer and still exists over there. But here in the United States, Uh, the the heyday of the arcade is long in the past, and a lot of different factors led to most arcades closing down. When we come back, we'll talk a bit about those factors. Okay, just before the break, I talked about how arcades started to close down in the United States. Well, there were a lot of different reasons for that. One of the reasons was the rise of the home video game system. Now, that did have a big blip in ten three with the collapse of the industry, that also affected the arcade industry as well. It wasn't just the home video game market. But then you know, the system Nintendo Entertainment System came in really turned things around here in the United States, and uh, the home video game market recovered and then flourished on a level that it hadn't even approached back in the first age of home video game systems. But that was just one factor that led to arcades losing relevance. Another was that in order to keep an arcade interesting, owners had to add new games fairly regularly, right, people would get tired of playing the same games, But buying a new game to feature in your arcade was expensive. So as arcade attendance was on the decline, keeping things going would eat into revenues more and more. Right, if you didn't add new games, you would lose even more players over time. If you were buying new games, you were spending a good amount of your revenue just to try and hold on to the customers you already have. You weren't really seeing a lot of places get new customers, so it was it was essentially treading water, and ultimately it would lead to a situation where it just became impossible to be profitable and run an arcade, and most of them shut down. There are still arcades out there. I don't mean to suggest that they're all gone, but they aren't nearly as popular or as numerous as they were back in the glory days of the eighties and even into the nineties, because there was like an arcade renaissance in the nineties, largely helped by the emergence of a little game known as Street Fighter too. Anyway, this also meant that those classic arcade games were in danger of being lost to time. We had the various ports, right, Like a lot of these game teams had ports on different home consoles, but the original versions of the games were still sitting on these ron chips inside arcade cabinets, and the world was moving on. That also included other technologies as well, like the CRT For example, it became far more common for companies that were in the business of making monitors and displays to switch to manufacturing displays that use LED technology, for example, and one by one the companies that were making CRT s shut down those manufacturing lines. So today, if you hunt down a classic arcade machine, you can still find them and you can still purchase them. But when you do it, you also know that if your monitor breaks, if that CRT set goes bad, it could be really tricky to find a way to repair or replace it. It's just it's getting harder and harder to find parts or replacement monitors. So there we have the stage set. Right, We've got a technology that is in danger of going entirely obsolete, and if it does, it takes with it hundreds thousands of games, some of which are real classics that lots of people love, but now let's talk about Nicola Salmoria. He is a programmer from Italy and Nicola became interested in this idea of using software to mimic or emulate the hardware of arcade machines. That's what an emulator does. An emulator is able to mimic something else so that you can get a particular output. It doesn't have to be video games. A lot of people just equate emulator with the world of video games. An emulator really is just a way to use software two replicate what hardware would do when you no longer have access to the hardware. So the the way that this worked, I mean you couldn't just plug a RAM chip into a circuit board and then you're able to play the game. Right, even if you went out and you bought a RAM chip of a classic arcade game, you don't really have an easy way of playing it because you don't have the rest of the circuitry that that RAM chip interacts with in order for the game to work. However, if you were able to create software that could mimic how that particular arcade machine worked, and then if you were able to make a copy of the code that was stored on the RAM. This is called creating an image. If you were to create an image of the data that was stored on that RAM, you might then be able to create what amounts to a virtual arcade machine. The software is handling everything that the hardware would have handled, and as far as the code on the RAM is concerned, it's in a an official, you know, legitimate arcade machine and it will create the output that you need. You also have to build all the the systems that will allow that output to have a meaningful expression, right because I'll put has to go to something like a display and speakers. So there's a there are a lot of steps here. It's not just to make the the WROM work. It's so that the modern technology we're using to access the code that's on the ROM can interoperate with it. So this is really complicated. It's not just oh, I found a way to create code that makes this ROM chip think that it's in a Donkey Kong machine. No, it has to involve the support for the various controls you're using, Like are you using a game pad versus a classic joystick and button combo? These are really tricky things and that's kind of what Nicola was really tackling in those early days. This is, by the way, is around nine six UH. So the software would serve as sort of an abstract layer representing all the circuitry of an arcade machine. And Nicola first focused on pac Man games, a bunch of games that were in the pac Man family of games, and in fact, he originally called the name of his project multi Pack. But he saw that there was a need to create a means to preserve arcade games in general, not just pac Man games, but all arcade games. They all had a risk of going obsolete and just being lost to time. So he started to develop his software so that it could essentially trick the ROM code of different types of games into thinking it was in a physical arcade machine, and uh began to expand well beyond the pac Man games, and in that stage he this project was only working for the ms DOS platform, So in other words, the software, the emulator software he was designing, was only compatible with MS DOS machines, so we're not even talking about Windows at this particular stage, though that would follow, and as he was adding more and more support for early arcade titles, he decided multipack just isn't an accurate descriptor anymore, and he gave it a new name. This name was the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or MAINE. These days we just call it MAIN. We don't even suggest that you should break it out as if it were an acronym. And that's because it it now encompasses way more than just arcade machines. But I'll get to that now. So Maria didn't tackle all of this on his own. He actually made his project an open source project. Now that means that other people were free to look at what he was doing, to look at his code, and to contribute to the project, to build onto it. That meant that with more people you could focus on adding emulation support for more titles. Uh. And in fact, that's one way you can look at the progress of MAME, and it's to see how many number, how many supported titles rather would be involved from version to version, because like lots of software, you look at MAME as generations of software and and different You know, what's the latest version of MAME um And that's one way you can look at the history of MAME. But there are lots of other ones too. And again, it wasn't just title support that was important. It was also important to add to the support from various control systems that required a lot of work from the main community as well, and then support for the various operating systems, because obviously it didn't just stick to MS. DOSS is compatible with lots of operating systems out there now. So when you really boil it down, the goal of MAINE is to create as many ways for modern systems to recreate the experience of playing specific games from the past as possible. And that includes folks who want to build their own main arcade cabinets, which might include classic style joysticks and buttons, or it could include someone who just wants to be able to play classic games on their PC using a game pad as their controller, or one of a hundred other systems. Now we're gonna take another quick break, but when we come back, I'll talk a bit about the complications of MAINE, because it it does get complicated. We're not talking about the technology side, but the business side. I'll explain more when we come back. Okay, let's talk about business a bit here. First of all, Main itself is free software, and there are a lot of different flavors of MAIN if you're familiar with Linux, you know that there are all these different distributions or distros of Linux where all the distros are using Lenox as the foundation, but they have different user interfaces. Well, the same thing is true with Maine. You can really just think of Name as the underlying guts of emulation UM and it's not really user friendly. It's not really easy to navigate. And just like pure MAIN, so the versions you typically find out there in the wild have different user interface systems built into them to make it easier to navigate Name. And here's the other important bit maime itself. The emulator doesn't include games. It is supportive of thousands of games, but it doesn't act actually include the games themselves. It's kind of like if you were to go out and just by a video game console and there are no games included on the console. Well, you've got a device that can play games, but you don't have any games to run on it. You have to go out and then get games for it. The same is true for Main, So to get games you have to get hold of ROM images, and technically the only legal way to do that is to either you know, get official permission from whatever entity holds the intellectual property of that specific ROM, or you have to purchase a copy of the ROM so you can do this. For example, let's say, yeah, you went out and you bought an arcade machine of Donkey Kong. You found a classic Donkey Kong arcade machine. Maybe it's being sold for a song, like like fifty bucks, and it's because the person selling it knows that the game is not playable in its cur and state. So the arcade machine still has the original RAM in it, like that's in the arcade cabinet, but it is unplayable for whatever reason. Maybe the monitors busted, maybe the circuit board is damaged. Whatever it is, You do have the wrong it's in there, but you can't play it. Well, then you could presumably download a RAM image of that game and use an emulator and play Donkey Kong with no penalty. Uh, because you own a copy of it and you are allowed to make backup copies of your legally purchased media. That's well established, at least here in the United States. It is that if you purchase a copy of something, you can make a backup copy for your own personal use, and that's fine. That is an exemption to copyright law. It's one of the few, but you can do it. However, let's say you don't own a copy of Donkey Kong. You didn't go out and find a version of the Arcade Machine with the RAM in there, and let's say that there's nowhere you can go to buy a license to use the ROM. Well, technically, if you then go on and download a RAM image of Donkey Kong, you're violating copyright. So while you could download the main software for free and Maime is total legit and totally legal, downloading the ROMs that you will need in order to actually make use of Maime is a different story. Now, this does not mean that the Internet isn't positively teeming with ROM images out there. There are tons of them. There are groups of of enthusiasts who have collected thousands of games and made an image where all those games are on that image and when paired with Maime software are It means you can actually play all of those games. And making these images is not easy. It requires a lot of work. A lot of ROMs have copy protection on them, which usually requires someone to find a way around that protection. You're also usually talking about physically taking a ROM chip apart so that you can actually make an image of the code that's hard coded on the chip. So it's really tricky stuff. Um. Also, by the way, if you have to get around copy protection, that creates a new problem as well, because while it is totally legal for you to make backup copies of stuff for your own purposes, it's actually illegal here in the US to try and defeat copy protection mechanisms. That puts you into real paradox, right because you're like, well, I'm allowed to make a backup copy of something I own, of media I own. That's fine. If I bought a copy of you know, this game, then I can make a backup. That's my legal right. However, if there is copy protection on the game itself, I am not legally allowed to bypass that copy protection. So while I while I can legally make a copy, it would be illegal for me to do it because I would have to get around the copy protection first. Fun times, it's like saying, Uh, you can't come into the building unless you fill out a form. Well, where's the form, Oh, it's inside the building. It's It's one of those situations. Anyway. There's also the matter that a lot of the older arcade games are kind of just sort of fading away, and so ROM images really are a means of preserving those games. Like, if you do not make those images, eventually that hardware is going to deteriorate to the point where it might be irretrievable and we just lose it. So in some cases, uh, you know, this is this is really about preservation. However, you still aren't supposed to distribute it or you know, play it or whatever unless you've got the permission first. And in a lot of cases, even determining who the heck owns the copyright for a specific game can be difficult or sometimes even impossible, meaning that even the most well intentioned person isn't necessarily going to be able to find a strictly legal means of preserving the game. Now, there are a lot of companies out there that are in the business of building out main arcade cabinets, or they design main kits. Sometimes they just put together a main ROM image file containing tens of thousands of games on it. There are tons of them out there. If you were to do a search, many of them would pop up. And that even gets more complex because MESS, the multi emulator supersystem merged with MAME about seven years ago now, I think so MESS is an emulator that focuses on video game consoles and older computer systems. It is similar to MAME, but instead of arcade machines, you're talking about more than nine hundred different video game systems and older computer systems, and so it's designed so that you can run games that were built for those systems as well. That means that MAIM now supports even more games, not just classic arcade games, but classic console and computer games. So for the companies that are offering raw images or built out systems that include these games in them, they're kind of operating outside the law. Not kind of, they are operating outside the law. Now, whether the big companies that own a lot of the I P s are going to come after these various vendors and merchants, that's that's really the question. Uh. If they do, then you can bet that that particular vendor is gonna get shut down. I don't think it will ever go away entirely, but that is a possibility. So when you see these ads for a main machine that has seventy games on it or whatever, you have to remember that the people selling that probably don't have the right too in include those games on that machine. In fact, most of the time, uh in my experience, when I was looking through these, it was impossible to find a list of the games that were supported. And I think that's largely so that the vendors can try and quietly skirt any imperial entanglements. As obi Wan might say, uh so, if you go out and buy a main cabinet stacked with games, you're technically engaging in IP theft, unless, of course, the company that made the cabinet actually does have licenses for all of the games that are included on that machine. I suspect that that's not the case, because getting those licenses would be incredibly complicated and expensive. My guess is that if you had an arcade machine that legit had all seventy thousand games covered in licenses, it would be prohibitively expensive. You would not be able to afford it. Um that won't stop people from doing it. And like I said, like I've thought about making a main machine. I really would love to have like an arcade machine just for nostalgia's sake, but settling on just one title would be really hard for me because I've got a lot of arcade titles that I truly loved playing, and I worried that if I got a single arcade machine, I would grow so tired of it so quickly that I would then be looking at every time I looked at I just think, like, I spent so much money on something that's just taking up space. So part of my brain is saying, well, if you're gonna do that, then you want to have as many different titles at your disposal as possible. However, doing that is knowing that you're skirting I p law and uh, and that actually does bug me, not because I'm afraid of getting caught, but rather I really do feel that the folks responsible for making these these titles deserve not just credit, but compensation for it. It's just that in most cases, there's no clear means of providing that. There's no clear means of actually buying these things legitimately. There are some the Arcade one up replicas are licensed replicas, so that's different, but that's still just a tiny fraction of all the games that were out there, so it is a bit of a complicated topic. Anyway, That's a rundown on the topic of mame without getting too technical in it. Uh, and yeah, it really is fascinating. I've played around with it once in the past where I even downloaded a few ROMs temporarily. I did not keep them. I didn't even keep them for a full day and tried it out. But um, when I did it, the emulation of the games I was specifically playing was somewhat lacking, so the performance was terrible, which was weird, or I thought it was weird because the computer system I was running it on was far more powerful than those old arcade machines, but the emulation of those titles was the issue, right, That's why the performance wasn't as good as the original arcade version was. Uh, and that can still be the case, Like really, That's the other thing about emulators is in some cases you might have an emulator for a specific title that just isn't as good as other emulators are, and that gets really complicated. But maybe I'll do another episode about maims in the future and go into more detail. I just thought it'd be fun to do a little tidbits episode about them today. If you have suggestions for topics, I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff. Maybe topics like what it's like when the lawn people show up in the justice you're trying to close on episode, or maybe the tech that you use in order to calm down when your dog is barking in the background. Uh, let me know. You can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yea, yeah, I love my dog. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and now the tech aren't you. It's time for a text stuff Ted bits and uh. I was listening to a recent episode of the Besties. That's a podcast that's about video games, which has no connection to my show or the I Heart network. I just enjoy listening to it, And in this particular episode, one of the hosts, Russ frush Dick, was chiding another one of the hosts, Chris Plant, after Plant had talked about the coin operated arcade days, and the reason that Russ was giving his buddy a bit of a hard time was that both Russ and Chris are a little too young to have spent a ton of time in arcades up. So essentially, Russ was saying, as if you are old enough to remember those days, well, friends, I am not as young as Russ and Chris are, and I spent a lot of time in video game arcades as a kid. And that actually got me to thinking about maime cabinets, because I've I've actually thought about making one myself. But I've kind of I've been holding back on it, largely because there's some philosophical challenges that I face that I have not yet reconciled. Anyway, I thought, why not do a text of tidbits on MAME. I've talked about MAME in the past, but I thought it might be good to kind of run down this because folks who are my age, they might have a nostalgic love of certain classic arcade games, but anyone who has even casually looked into the the hobby of collecting arcade games, nos, it could be really hard to find some of those classic titles. Some of them are prohibitively expensive. And then on top of that, you have to think about things like maintenance and repair, because these are systems that you know, they have physical moving parts, and those things do break down over time. So we're gonna take a quick look at all of that in today's episode. Well, first, let's talk about what old arcade machines had inside them, what made them special. The brains of your typical arcade machine was a circuit board, kind of like a mother board in a PC, and various logic circuits would be incorporated into these boards and these would be specific to whatever title you were talking about. So you can think of it in a way as the games are being hard coded onto circuit boards to work a specific way, and that's why Pacman is different from Donkey Kong, which is different from Galagha and so on and so forth. Now, these circuit boards were coupled with a primitive version of BIOS, that's basic input output system. So BIOS meant that there was a means for the circuit board to interoperate with the input systems of the game, so the controls the game. This involves everything from a joystick, maybe a button or more than one button. Typically you would also talk about a coin slot so that the machine detects when someone has inserted a coin, that kind of stuff. So all of those are inputs and the BIOS would be handling those signals and sending them on to the the circuit board to have the correct output. Right. The game's output was mostly shown to the player through a monitor. That's that was typically a CRT or cathode ray tube monitor. These are those really big monitors, big heavy monitors, you know CRT televisions. Maybe you still have one, or maybe you used to own one. Um, these are those big, heavy things that have a tube inside of them. By the way, those televisions and the CRT monitors that were in arcade machines, they're also equipped with powerful capacitors. Okay, these capacitors can hold on to a really strong electric charge. When I say really strong, I mean one that's strong enough to kill you. And I say this because it is always good to remember that even an arcade machine or an old CRT television that's been sitting in storage for years could still potentially have plenty of juice stored in those capacitors. And if you accidentally cause those capacitors to discharge, then you could be in serious danger. So I say that because I mean I was a kid once. I remember, like you'd come across a bunch of old, abandoned stuff, and as a kid, my number one inclination was let's break it right because it's just sitting there. Um. But when it comes to things like televisions and monitors and stuff, that comes with a real danger to it. So I just wanted to point that out. Anyway, Over time, arcade machine companies got a little more sophisticated, and they created a standardized control boards at least for their own output, right. It wasn't like it was standardized across the industry, but like neo, GEO created its own kind of circuit board design so that it wasn't making a new kind for every single title. And into these you could plug a wrong chip ROM or r O M that stands for read only memory, and as that name suggests, it's a type of computer memory that allows a device like a computer, to a pulled data from the chip, but it doesn't allow the device to write new data to the chip. You can essentially consult the chip, but you can't change anything on it. And we usually put stuff on ROM chips that's necessary for basic computer functionality, like running through the basic startup steps. You don't want that to get changed, so you end up hard coding it into ROM, and then it's effectively set in metaphorical stone. Now, in the case of arcade machines, the game itself would be stored on the ROM chip. So the important thing for the purposes of our discussion about MAIM is that the games we're on these physical chips, So we're not talking about software in the traditional sense. We're talking about hardware, hard coded chips. You can't just plug and play. So the big downside to the industry using hard coded ROMs is that there was no easy way to port the experience of playing these arcade games onto some sort of home system. Right. You couldn't just unless you went out and purchased an arcade cabinet. And some people did. I mean they had the money for it. I didn't, so I never did this. But they would go out and they buy a copy of the arcade machine and then they could play the arcade game at home. That was really the only way to do the actual arcade game, because you could not just buy a wrong chip and then plug it into a computer and play. So instead you had to rely on a port of an arcade game. Porting essentially just meant that the person in charge of the port had to build effects simile of the arcade game that could be played on some home system, whether it was a computer or a video game console. More often than not, they would actually pay someone else to do it, right, They would pay someone else to go through and and essentially recreate the game. So programmers of ports are often trying to reinvent the wheel to an extent. They're aiming to create the same game playing experience, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna follow follow the exact same path as the original game designers did. When they're making a port, they're saying, all right, well, what makes this game what it is? What? How can we create that same output? Uh? And it might mean that the port is actually, from a program level drastically different from the original code. This also meant that your experience when playing those ports could vary drastically. You might luck out. It might be that the port feels more or less the same as you remembered from the arcade. I mean, obviously it'll feel a little different if you're playing it on you know, a video game console or your PC and you're using a game pad. Game pads feel different from arcade controls. But otherwise it might feel like it's pretty accurate it or you might not be so lucky, and it might be that the port is practically unrecognizable when compared to the original title. So one early port that became infamous in the classic video game console days was the pac Man Port for the Atari twenty so Atari owners like myself were eager to have the opportunity to play the simple and yet compelling game of pac Man at home now in the arcade, pac Man's graphics, while not like super sophisticated, look nice like the ghosts look nice, the maze look nice. Pac Man looked nice. Everything was The sprites were good, things moved on a good clip. You had fun sound effects and music too. It really was the combination of all of these different elements that made pac Man such a fun game to play in the arcade. But the Atari twenty port was, by contrast, ugly playing. The game was unwieldy, it didn't sound good at all. The ghosts flickered in the Atari port because the Atari wasn't able to handle a a solid pac Man and four solid ghosts moving around simultaneously. In fact, the ghosts collectively had to share a single sprite, a sprite being a graphical element that can actually move uh compared to the play field of a game. And so the way the game compensated for the fact that it couldn't support four simultaneous ghosts on screening, it would only display one at a time, and that would alternate between the four of them, so like you would see a ghost for a frame and then the next frame you would see Ghost number two, and in the next frame you'd see Ghost number three, and in the next frame you see Ghost number four, and then the next one it would go back to ghost number one. So you're getting twenty four frames a second, you know, essentially really more like thirty frames a second. So they were flickering pretty fast, so you could see them, but they had that flicker and it was distracting. It didn't look at all like the original arcade machine. The only way you could have avoided that is if you had only had one ghost, you would have one solid pac Man and one solid Ghost, because the ghost wouldn't have to share that sprite with you know, it's fellow ghosts. Now, this gets more complicated, but we're not here to talk about the Atari's limitations really, but the point being that while pac Man for the Atari wasn't very good, in fact, I would say it was pretty bad, Atari sold more than seven million copies of it. Now, unfortunately, Atari manufactured twelve million copies, so while they sold seven million, that meant five million were sitting around unsold. Uh So, even though pac Man was the best selling Atari cartridge in the company's history, it didn't perform to what the company was expecting, and ultimately would become one of many massive mistakes that would lead to the Great Video game Crash of anyway, that's an example of a really bad part. But even a good part of a game often doesn't feel quite the same as the original arcade cabinet, and a lot of different factors can contribute to that, including the brightness and color contrast of the display, the responsiveness of the controllers, even the style of controllers can really make a big difference. Playing Galiga on an arcade cabinet just feels different than playing it with a game controller, even with a really faithful part of the game. I've got a version of Galagha on Xbox right. That was one of the games that I I purchased, and from a gameplay perspective, everything except the controls is perfect. Like it looks and sounds and behaves exactly the way the arcade machine behaved. But because I'm playing on a game pad like a game controller as opposed to the classic joystick and button combo of the arcade, it's still not the same. Now, arcades had a fairly brief time in the spotlight here in the United States. It was a little different. In other places in the world, like Japan, the arcade culture was healthier for much longer and still exists over there. But here in the United States, Uh, the the heyday of the arcade is long in the past, and a lot of different factors led to most arcades closing down. When we come back, we'll talk a bit about those factors. Okay, just before the break, I talked about how arcades started to close down in the United States. Well, there were a lot of different reasons for that. One of the reasons was the rise of the home video game system. Now, that did have a big blip in ten three with the collapse of the industry, that also affected the arcade industry as well. It wasn't just the home video game market. But then you know, the system Nintendo Entertainment System came in really turned things around here in the United States, and uh, the home video game market recovered and then flourished on a level that it hadn't even approached back in the first age of home video game systems. But that was just one factor that led to arcades losing relevance. Another was that in order to keep an arcade interesting, owners had to add new games fairly regularly, right, people would get tired of playing the same games, But buying a new game to feature in your arcade was expensive. So as arcade attendance was on the decline, keeping things going would eat into revenues more and more. Right, if you didn't add new games, you would lose even more players over time. If you were buying new games, you were spending a good amount of your revenue just to try and hold on to the customers you already have. You weren't really seeing a lot of places get new customers, so it was it was essentially treading water, and ultimately it would lead to a situation where it just became impossible to be profitable and run an arcade, and most of them shut down. There are still arcades out there. I don't mean to suggest that they're all gone, but they aren't nearly as popular or as numerous as they were back in the glory days of the eighties and even into the nineties, because there was like an arcade renaissance in the nineties, largely helped by the emergence of a little game known as Street Fighter too. Anyway, this also meant that those classic arcade games were in danger of being lost to time. We had the various ports, right, Like a lot of these game teams had ports on different home consoles, but the original versions of the games were still sitting on these ron chips inside arcade cabinets, and the world was moving on. That also included other technologies as well, like the CRT For example, it became far more common for companies that were in the business of making monitors and displays to switch to manufacturing displays that use LED technology, for example, and one by one the companies that were making CRT s shut down those manufacturing lines. So today, if you hunt down a classic arcade machine, you can still find them and you can still purchase them. But when you do it, you also know that if your monitor breaks, if that CRT set goes bad, it could be really tricky to find a way to repair or replace it. It's just it's getting harder and harder to find parts or replacement monitors. So there we have the stage set. Right, We've got a technology that is in danger of going entirely obsolete, and if it does, it takes with it hundreds thousands of games, some of which are real classics that lots of people love, but now let's talk about Nicola Salmoria. He is a programmer from Italy and Nicola became interested in this idea of using software to mimic or emulate the hardware of arcade machines. That's what an emulator does. An emulator is able to mimic something else so that you can get a particular output. It doesn't have to be video games. A lot of people just equate emulator with the world of video games. An emulator really is just a way to use software two replicate what hardware would do when you no longer have access to the hardware. So the the way that this worked, I mean you couldn't just plug a RAM chip into a circuit board and then you're able to play the game. Right, even if you went out and you bought a RAM chip of a classic arcade game, you don't really have an easy way of playing it because you don't have the rest of the circuitry that that RAM chip interacts with in order for the game to work. However, if you were able to create software that could mimic how that particular arcade machine worked, and then if you were able to make a copy of the code that was stored on the RAM. This is called creating an image. If you were to create an image of the data that was stored on that RAM, you might then be able to create what amounts to a virtual arcade machine. The software is handling everything that the hardware would have handled, and as far as the code on the RAM is concerned, it's in a an official, you know, legitimate arcade machine and it will create the output that you need. You also have to build all the the systems that will allow that output to have a meaningful expression, right because I'll put has to go to something like a display and speakers. So there's a there are a lot of steps here. It's not just to make the the WROM work. It's so that the modern technology we're using to access the code that's on the ROM can interoperate with it. So this is really complicated. It's not just oh, I found a way to create code that makes this ROM chip think that it's in a Donkey Kong machine. No, it has to involve the support for the various controls you're using, Like are you using a game pad versus a classic joystick and button combo? These are really tricky things and that's kind of what Nicola was really tackling in those early days. This is, by the way, is around nine six UH. So the software would serve as sort of an abstract layer representing all the circuitry of an arcade machine. And Nicola first focused on pac Man games, a bunch of games that were in the pac Man family of games, and in fact, he originally called the name of his project multi Pack. But he saw that there was a need to create a means to preserve arcade games in general, not just pac Man games, but all arcade games. They all had a risk of going obsolete and just being lost to time. So he started to develop his software so that it could essentially trick the ROM code of different types of games into thinking it was in a physical arcade machine, and uh began to expand well beyond the pac Man games, and in that stage he this project was only working for the ms DOS platform, So in other words, the software, the emulator software he was designing, was only compatible with MS DOS machines, so we're not even talking about Windows at this particular stage, though that would follow, and as he was adding more and more support for early arcade titles, he decided multipack just isn't an accurate descriptor anymore, and he gave it a new name. This name was the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or MAINE. These days we just call it MAIN. We don't even suggest that you should break it out as if it were an acronym. And that's because it it now encompasses way more than just arcade machines. But I'll get to that now. So Maria didn't tackle all of this on his own. He actually made his project an open source project. Now that means that other people were free to look at what he was doing, to look at his code, and to contribute to the project, to build onto it. That meant that with more people you could focus on adding emulation support for more titles. Uh. And in fact, that's one way you can look at the progress of MAME, and it's to see how many number, how many supported titles rather would be involved from version to version, because like lots of software, you look at MAME as generations of software and and different You know, what's the latest version of MAME um And that's one way you can look at the history of MAME. But there are lots of other ones too. And again, it wasn't just title support that was important. It was also important to add to the support from various control systems that required a lot of work from the main community as well, and then support for the various operating systems, because obviously it didn't just stick to MS. DOSS is compatible with lots of operating systems out there now. So when you really boil it down, the goal of MAINE is to create as many ways for modern systems to recreate the experience of playing specific games from the past as possible. And that includes folks who want to build their own main arcade cabinets, which might include classic style joysticks and buttons, or it could include someone who just wants to be able to play classic games on their PC using a game pad as their controller, or one of a hundred other systems. Now we're gonna take another quick break, but when we come back, I'll talk a bit about the complications of MAINE, because it it does get complicated. We're not talking about the technology side, but the business side. I'll explain more when we come back. Okay, let's talk about business a bit here. First of all, Main itself is free software, and there are a lot of different flavors of MAIN if you're familiar with Linux, you know that there are all these different distributions or distros of Linux where all the distros are using Lenox as the foundation, but they have different user interfaces. Well, the same thing is true with Maine. You can really just think of Name as the underlying guts of emulation UM and it's not really user friendly. It's not really easy to navigate. And just like pure MAIN, so the versions you typically find out there in the wild have different user interface systems built into them to make it easier to navigate Name. And here's the other important bit maime itself. The emulator doesn't include games. It is supportive of thousands of games, but it doesn't act actually include the games themselves. It's kind of like if you were to go out and just by a video game console and there are no games included on the console. Well, you've got a device that can play games, but you don't have any games to run on it. You have to go out and then get games for it. The same is true for Main, So to get games you have to get hold of ROM images, and technically the only legal way to do that is to either you know, get official permission from whatever entity holds the intellectual property of that specific ROM, or you have to purchase a copy of the ROM so you can do this. For example, let's say, yeah, you went out and you bought an arcade machine of Donkey Kong. You found a classic Donkey Kong arcade machine. Maybe it's being sold for a song, like like fifty bucks, and it's because the person selling it knows that the game is not playable in its cur and state. So the arcade machine still has the original RAM in it, like that's in the arcade cabinet, but it is unplayable for whatever reason. Maybe the monitors busted, maybe the circuit board is damaged. Whatever it is, You do have the wrong it's in there, but you can't play it. Well, then you could presumably download a RAM image of that game and use an emulator and play Donkey Kong with no penalty. Uh, because you own a copy of it and you are allowed to make backup copies of your legally purchased media. That's well established, at least here in the United States. It is that if you purchase a copy of something, you can make a backup copy for your own personal use, and that's fine. That is an exemption to copyright law. It's one of the few, but you can do it. However, let's say you don't own a copy of Donkey Kong. You didn't go out and find a version of the Arcade Machine with the RAM in there, and let's say that there's nowhere you can go to buy a license to use the ROM. Well, technically, if you then go on and download a RAM image of Donkey Kong, you're violating copyright. So while you could download the main software for free and Maime is total legit and totally legal, downloading the ROMs that you will need in order to actually make use of Maime is a different story. Now, this does not mean that the Internet isn't positively teeming with ROM images out there. There are tons of them. There are groups of of enthusiasts who have collected thousands of games and made an image where all those games are on that image and when paired with Maime software are It means you can actually play all of those games. And making these images is not easy. It requires a lot of work. A lot of ROMs have copy protection on them, which usually requires someone to find a way around that protection. You're also usually talking about physically taking a ROM chip apart so that you can actually make an image of the code that's hard coded on the chip. So it's really tricky stuff. Um. Also, by the way, if you have to get around copy protection, that creates a new problem as well, because while it is totally legal for you to make backup copies of stuff for your own purposes, it's actually illegal here in the US to try and defeat copy protection mechanisms. That puts you into real paradox, right because you're like, well, I'm allowed to make a backup copy of something I own, of media I own. That's fine. If I bought a copy of you know, this game, then I can make a backup. That's my legal right. However, if there is copy protection on the game itself, I am not legally allowed to bypass that copy protection. So while I while I can legally make a copy, it would be illegal for me to do it because I would have to get around the copy protection first. Fun times, it's like saying, Uh, you can't come into the building unless you fill out a form. Well, where's the form, Oh, it's inside the building. It's It's one of those situations. Anyway. There's also the matter that a lot of the older arcade games are kind of just sort of fading away, and so ROM images really are a means of preserving those games. Like, if you do not make those images, eventually that hardware is going to deteriorate to the point where it might be irretrievable and we just lose it. So in some cases, uh, you know, this is this is really about preservation. However, you still aren't supposed to distribute it or you know, play it or whatever unless you've got the permission first. And in a lot of cases, even determining who the heck owns the copyright for a specific game can be difficult or sometimes even impossible, meaning that even the most well intentioned person isn't necessarily going to be able to find a strictly legal means of preserving the game. Now, there are a lot of companies out there that are in the business of building out main arcade cabinets, or they design main kits. Sometimes they just put together a main ROM image file containing tens of thousands of games on it. There are tons of them out there. If you were to do a search, many of them would pop up. And that even gets more complex because MESS, the multi emulator supersystem merged with MAME about seven years ago now, I think so MESS is an emulator that focuses on video game consoles and older computer systems. It is similar to MAME, but instead of arcade machines, you're talking about more than nine hundred different video game systems and older computer systems, and so it's designed so that you can run games that were built for those systems as well. That means that MAIM now supports even more games, not just classic arcade games, but classic console and computer games. So for the companies that are offering raw images or built out systems that include these games in them, they're kind of operating outside the law. Not kind of, they are operating outside the law. Now, whether the big companies that own a lot of the I P s are going to come after these various vendors and merchants, that's that's really the question. Uh. If they do, then you can bet that that particular vendor is gonna get shut down. I don't think it will ever go away entirely, but that is a possibility. So when you see these ads for a main machine that has seventy games on it or whatever, you have to remember that the people selling that probably don't have the right too in include those games on that machine. In fact, most of the time, uh in my experience, when I was looking through these, it was impossible to find a list of the games that were supported. And I think that's largely so that the vendors can try and quietly skirt any imperial entanglements. As obi Wan might say, uh so, if you go out and buy a main cabinet stacked with games, you're technically engaging in IP theft, unless, of course, the company that made the cabinet actually does have licenses for all of the games that are included on that machine. I suspect that that's not the case, because getting those licenses would be incredibly complicated and expensive. My guess is that if you had an arcade machine that legit had all seventy thousand games covered in licenses, it would be prohibitively expensive. You would not be able to afford it. Um that won't stop people from doing it. And like I said, like I've thought about making a main machine. I really would love to have like an arcade machine just for nostalgia's sake, but settling on just one title would be really hard for me because I've got a lot of arcade titles that I truly loved playing, and I worried that if I got a single arcade machine, I would grow so tired of it so quickly that I would then be looking at every time I looked at I just think, like, I spent so much money on something that's just taking up space. So part of my brain is saying, well, if you're gonna do that, then you want to have as many different titles at your disposal as possible. However, doing that is knowing that you're skirting I p law and uh, and that actually does bug me, not because I'm afraid of getting caught, but rather I really do feel that the folks responsible for making these these titles deserve not just credit, but compensation for it. It's just that in most cases, there's no clear means of providing that. There's no clear means of actually buying these things legitimately. There are some the Arcade one up replicas are licensed replicas, so that's different, but that's still just a tiny fraction of all the games that were out there, so it is a bit of a complicated topic. Anyway, That's a rundown on the topic of mame without getting too technical in it. Uh, and yeah, it really is fascinating. I've played around with it once in the past where I even downloaded a few ROMs temporarily. I did not keep them. I didn't even keep them for a full day and tried it out. But um, when I did it, the emulation of the games I was specifically playing was somewhat lacking, so the performance was terrible, which was weird, or I thought it was weird because the computer system I was running it on was far more powerful than those old arcade machines, but the emulation of those titles was the issue, right, That's why the performance wasn't as good as the original arcade version was. Uh, and that can still be the case, Like really, That's the other thing about emulators is in some cases you might have an emulator for a specific title that just isn't as good as other emulators are, and that gets really complicated. But maybe I'll do another episode about maims in the future and go into more detail. I just thought it'd be fun to do a little tidbits episode about them today. If you have suggestions for topics, I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff. Maybe topics like what it's like when the lawn people show up in the justice you're trying to close on episode, or maybe the tech that you use in order to calm down when your dog is barking in the background. Uh, let me know. You can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yea, yeah, I love my dog. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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