The Emulation Debate

To MAME or not to MAME, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of legal persecution or to take arms against a sea of pirates, and by opposing end my arcade gaming, to die having never played Go Go Mr Yamaguchi.  Erm... anyway, emulators have been around for ages and for some, it's only way they've experienced certain classics.  But what is emulation all about and is it legal? Let's dig a little deeper and find out.

Emulators: Software in disguise

Emulators are not just programs that play old arcade or console games; their code mimics the functions of a piece of hardware, such as the motherboard from an arcade machine, so that programs written for the emulated hardware can be run on totally different hardware. Generally speaking, in order for an emulator to work well, the hardware it's running on has to be significantly more powerful than the original hardware. This is because it takes time (specifically memory load times and CPU clock cycles) to load and run each command in the emulator. In order to translate the functions of the original hardware to the new hardware, the faster the processor and memory, the quicker this translation can take place and the more smoothly the game will play. Emulating one processor on another is one thing, but the processor running the emulator also has to emulate the graphics chips, sound chips and I/O (input/output) board of the emulated hardware. So, the more complicated the hardware, the longer the translation takes. As such, the quality of the emulation varies. Generally speaking, 8 and 16-bit machines based on Intel 8080 and 8088 processors, the Zilog Z80 processor or Motorola 6500 or 6800 processors can be emulated pretty well. The difficulty comes with 32 and 64-bit machines based on the Motorola 68000 series or MIPS Rx000 series processors from the mid-90s onwards. The result is slow frame-rates, which no amount of power can overcome.

The most celebrated arcade emulator around is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or MAME for short. As the name suggests, MAME can emulate dozens of different arcade machines, but it's not the only one out there.  There are a number of others that emulate just one or two arcade boards, often resulting in better emulation for those machines. Such emulators include KAWAKS, which emulates Capcom CPS1, CPS2 boards and the SNK Neo Geo and ZiNc, which emulates Sony ZN-1 and ZN-2, Namco System 11/12, and Konami GV/GQ arcade hardware.

 

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Playing from memory

In order to play games on an emulator, you also need need the data that was stored on the arcade machine's ROM chips.  This information has to be "dumped" into one or more files, usually in a binary format. These collections of binary files are then collectively known as a ROM image. There can be dozens of files required for a single, simple game, all of which need to be correctly named and kept together so that the emulator can load all of the data successfully. Thankfully, modern emulators can often play ROMs as compressed Zip files, so you don't have to worry about losing track of individual binaries.

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What good is power without control?

Whether or not the graphics and sound can be emulated effectively, games with bespoke control schemes do not translate very well. While games that only used a joystick and buttons work fine, especially if you have something like a Hori EX2 Fighting Stick, and even racing games tend to fair quite well, games with specialised controls, such as rotating joysticks (a la Xybots or Search and Rescue) or games with paddles can be almost unplayable. One such example is the legendary Tron. While the light cycles levels play fine, a typical dual-analogue controller does a terrible job of emulating the paddle needed to aim the turret on the tank battles and Tron's arm in the I/O tower or MCP Cone levels.

While it is easy to think pinball tables, with their two buttons and a plunger, would be easy to emulate, few pinball emulators do a good job of emulating the pinball table's crucial third control mechanism: nudging the table. There are degrees of both subtlety and force that skilled pinball players just cannot obtain by flicking an analogue stick.

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Insert piece o' eight to play

It's easy to forget that most arcade games are owned by companies that are still trading and as such they still under copyright protection.  It's also easy to justify downloading and playing games through an emulator, because in many cases there is no other way to play a lot of these games. But none of this matters in the eyes of the law. Just because someone leaves a classic car in a garage and never drives it, doesn't mean you can take it and claim it's the only way you could enjoy such a vehicle. Put simply, emulation is piracy and the recent rise of the HD port, you never know when a company is going to reprise an old franchise.

So what can an old gamer do?

The games industry as a whole has reached an exciting point in its life.  Never before have we had so much choice. In the last few years there's been a resurgence of interest in retro gaming and now there are loads of legal emulation services, most notably Microsoft's Game Room for Xbox and PC and the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Arcade, both of which offer games from as little as a couple of quid. Admittedly neither service has an exhaustive range of games, but by purchasing arcade classics  from a legitimate source, you can play safe in the knowledge you have done the right thing.

MTW