Just spotted a brilliant video tribute to 80's classic games this morning via digg. The actual video referenced by the digg entry can be found here. In the event that it's overwhelmed, though, you can find a mirror of it here for the time being.
Enjoy!
- Aaron
SpiffMAME is my MAME-cabinet, which I have spent countless hours building/rebuilding. In this article I will try to write a little about the background for building SpiffMAME, and some of the choices in the early stages of the project.
Since I was young I have been very fond of computer games. In particular the older games where graphics and sound are limited by the hardware, and where the game developers have had to be really creative to get good gameplay. But I really think the gameplay of those games is so much better than most of the games developed today on multi-million dollar budgets.
Where I grew up there was no easy access to arcade games, so I cannot say that I spent a lot of time (and money) on this in my youth. I spent a lot of time on my Commodore 64, but only played arcade games when I ocationally found a machine somewhere. Still I have always been intrigued by these machines.
I first got the idea to build my own arcade machine after reading an article in a Danish computer magazine about a guy who built his own cabinet running an early version of MAME. At this time I had been playing a lot with various emulators (mainly C64), and I quickly got hooked on the idea to have my own coin-op machine. Having a machine with a single game was not an option, both in terms of the size, and in terms of the investment (being a student with limited financial freedom), but a machine running MAME could run a wealth of games.
OK. So I finally got some time again, and decided to do something about all the things I wanted to write about here on mameblog.com. Of course, since it has been a while since my last post, and that was about upgrading the packages, there is a bunch of new packages, so I'm going through another iteration of package upgrading.
But since I am also updating my romset, I thought I would share a little information about how I maintain my romset using the advscan utility. Way back I downloaded a complete romset (I think it was for version 0.70), and ever since, I have been using differential updates (one for each MAME version) and verifying with advscan. Let me explain how I apply one romset update at a time and check for any missing ROMs. Then I will give a few hints on how to fix it if it turns out some roms are bad.
On a non-MAME related note... Spiff's project for making what he calls the "Bob Clock" (check his site for the amusing backstory on that name) was profiled today on MAKE Magazine's blog:
Congrats, Mikkel. :)
A friend of mine sent me this link yesterday about an iPod running Linux which, in turn, can now run MAME. I've run iPodLinux on an older iPod for fun, but not one with a color screen worthy of MAME. I suspect my wife would spaz if I did this to her iPod Nano.
Yesterday evening, though, I came across an even more amusing link: an iPod Nano MAME Arcade. This has to be one of the most amusing and creative things I've seen recently.
Enjoy!
- Aaron
