Arcade Games

The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME), has been ported to the Acorn by Gareth S. Long, original version by Nicola Salmoria (and the rest of the MAME development team). This emulator has been ported to almost every system in common usage today. I believe you can even play Sega Master System Games through this emulator, though you should really try the other sega emulators!

Before you read on, I really must first say that this emulator will blow your mind! With this emulator you can play hundreds of arcade games on your Acorn, ranging from the golden oldies of the late 70s to hits of the 90s like Strider and Final Fight to name but two. The gameplay is second to none, since the games were designed to keep you coming back for more, and the only games emulated are the ones that the programmers remember as classics - thus you are almost guaranteed quality.

The emulator is only really usable on a StrongArm Risc PC, though Arm700 users shouldn't find too much difficulty either. The author is trying to optimise it for the lower end machines. One of the major strengths of MAME, is its portability, permitted by the fact that it is written in 100% C which unfortunately keeps it a little slower than an ARM coded emulator. Developments are taking place fairly regularly every few months adding many games with each new version, and we have Gareth S. Long to thank for continually porting the program to the Acorn, so give him some encouragement!

MAME is designed to run original arcade coin-op ROM images, from several different motherboards, and is very versatile. As a result of this, it has built up a *large* following world wide, and undergoes constant development from a large team. Since MAME is still under development, it is supplied as a single executable file rather than a fully RISC OSified program. You really need a front end to use this easily, and there are several available written by 3rd parties (see below) though Player1 is probably the most popular. The screenshots of MAME on this page are from Final Fight, Return of the Jedi and Strider in order from the top of the page.

Speed Rating: is irrelevent, some games will play too slow, some too fast since the complexity of games varies from 20Kb ROMs upto 2Mb+ ROMs. To put it bluntly you need a RISC PC, an ARM610 will be quite slow, likewise an ARM 710, to get the best you need a StrongARM, but then, don't you always!

Since the emulator runs too slow on many acorns, as there is no handcrafted assembly in it, there is a turbo module, called 'TurboMAME' (surprisingly) being developed to try and speed the emulator up, without damaging its development time, by reducing portability. Gatch recently mentioned this in a discussion in comp.sys.acorn.games, it appears that he is being aided in this by Michael Borcherds, and they are trying to produce a module written in pure assembly to emulate the 6502 and Z80 processors, so that it will work faster on a lot of systems, particularly those slower than a StrongARM! This will be called from the ported code, and therefore not reduce portability and slow down development time.

Latest changes: Version 0.31.0 has much better sound emulation, another 134 or so games added, so that now over 400 games are supported on emulators for 7 CPUs. This version is temporarily downloaded from a different page to normal, since there was a need to keep its location secret while Gareth Long was a way, before the official release.

There are also emulators for the games Pleiads and Phoenix, written in Java.

Emulators:
MAME 0.31.0 ZIP file (26th April 1998)
This version's download page (see above)
ARM MAME homepage
List of games supported by v0.31
The Official MAME page
The Official MAME work in progress page
The unofficial MAME homepage

FrontEnds:
Richard Cassidy (X-man's) Player1 MAME front end
Chas's MAME emulator front end (ZIP 29Kb)
Richard Sharpe's simple front end
Chas's page

ROMs:
AROM MAME roms
General ROM list from MAME homepage
Brian Peek's ROM
Loadsa MAME ROMs
Lord 13's MAME page
ftp://ftp.tant.com
Dave's Arcade Classics
Katson's MAME page

Recommended software:
1943, Silkworm, Starwars, Return of the Jedi, Strider, Wonderboy, Final Fight, Robocop.... hell, try all of them :o)