Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and now the tech aren't you. It's time for a
Speaker 1: text stuff Ted bits and uh. I was listening to
Speaker 1: a recent episode of the Besties. That's a podcast that's
Speaker 1: about video games, which has no connection to my show
Speaker 1: or the I Heart network. I just enjoy listening to it,
Speaker 1: And in this particular episode, one of the hosts, Russ
Speaker 1: frush Dick, was chiding another one of the hosts, Chris Plant,
Speaker 1: after Plant had talked about the coin operated arcade days,
Speaker 1: and the reason that Russ was giving his buddy a
Speaker 1: bit of a hard time was that both Russ and
Speaker 1: Chris are a little too young to have spent a
Speaker 1: ton of time in arcades up. So essentially, Russ was saying,
Speaker 1: as if you are old enough to remember those days, well, friends,
Speaker 1: I am not as young as Russ and Chris are,
Speaker 1: and I spent a lot of time in video game
Speaker 1: arcades as a kid. And that actually got me to
Speaker 1: thinking about maime cabinets, because I've I've actually thought about
Speaker 1: making one myself. But I've kind of I've been holding
Speaker 1: back on it, largely because there's some philosophical challenges that
Speaker 1: I face that I have not yet reconciled. Anyway, I thought,
Speaker 1: why not do a text of tidbits on MAME. I've
Speaker 1: talked about MAME in the past, but I thought it
Speaker 1: might be good to kind of run down this because
Speaker 1: folks who are my age, they might have a nostalgic
Speaker 1: love of certain classic arcade games, but anyone who has
Speaker 1: even casually looked into the the hobby of collecting arcade games, nos,
Speaker 1: it could be really hard to find some of those
Speaker 1: classic titles. Some of them are prohibitively expensive. And then
Speaker 1: on top of that, you have to think about things
Speaker 1: like maintenance and repair, because these are systems that you know,
Speaker 1: they have physical moving parts, and those things do break
Speaker 1: down over time. So we're gonna take a quick look
Speaker 1: at all of that in today's episode. Well, first, let's
Speaker 1: talk about what old arcade machines had inside them, what
Speaker 1: made them special. The brains of your typical arcade machine
Speaker 1: was a circuit board, kind of like a mother board
Speaker 1: in a PC, and various logic circuits would be incorporated
Speaker 1: into these boards and these would be specific to whatever
Speaker 1: title you were talking about. So you can think of
Speaker 1: it in a way as the games are being hard
Speaker 1: coded onto circuit boards to work a specific way, and
Speaker 1: that's why Pacman is different from Donkey Kong, which is
Speaker 1: different from Galagha and so on and so forth. Now,
Speaker 1: these circuit boards were coupled with a primitive version of BIOS,
Speaker 1: that's basic input output system. So BIOS meant that there
Speaker 1: was a means for the circuit board to interoperate with
Speaker 1: the input systems of the game, so the controls the game.
Speaker 1: This involves everything from a joystick, maybe a button or
Speaker 1: more than one button. Typically you would also talk about
Speaker 1: a coin slot so that the machine detects when someone
Speaker 1: has inserted a coin, that kind of stuff. So all
Speaker 1: of those are inputs and the BIOS would be handling
Speaker 1: those signals and sending them on to the the circuit
Speaker 1: board to have the correct output. Right. The game's output
Speaker 1: was mostly shown to the player through a monitor. That's
Speaker 1: that was typically a CRT or cathode ray tube monitor.
Speaker 1: These are those really big monitors, big heavy monitors, you
Speaker 1: know CRT televisions. Maybe you still have one, or maybe
Speaker 1: you used to own one. Um, these are those big,
Speaker 1: heavy things that have a tube inside of them. By
Speaker 1: the way, those televisions and the CRT monitors that were
Speaker 1: in arcade machines, they're also equipped with powerful capacitors. Okay,
Speaker 1: these capacitors can hold on to a really strong electric charge.
Speaker 1: When I say really strong, I mean one that's strong
Speaker 1: enough to kill you. And I say this because it
Speaker 1: is always good to remember that even an arcade machine
Speaker 1: or an old CRT television that's been sitting in storage
Speaker 1: for years could still potentially have plenty of juice stored
Speaker 1: in those capacitors. And if you accidentally cause those capacitors
Speaker 1: to discharge, then you could be in serious danger. So
Speaker 1: I say that because I mean I was a kid once.
Speaker 1: I remember, like you'd come across a bunch of old,
Speaker 1: abandoned stuff, and as a kid, my number one inclination
Speaker 1: was let's break it right because it's just sitting there. Um.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to things like televisions and monitors
Speaker 1: and stuff, that comes with a real danger to it.
Speaker 1: So I just wanted to point that out. Anyway, Over time,
Speaker 1: arcade machine companies got a little more sophisticated, and they
Speaker 1: created a standardized control boards at least for their own output, right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like it was standardized across the industry, but
Speaker 1: like neo, GEO created its own kind of circuit board
Speaker 1: design so that it wasn't making a new kind for
Speaker 1: every single title. And into these you could plug a
Speaker 1: wrong chip ROM or r O M that stands for
Speaker 1: read only memory, and as that name suggests, it's a
Speaker 1: type of computer memory that allows a device like a computer,
Speaker 1: to a pulled data from the chip, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: allow the device to write new data to the chip.
Speaker 1: You can essentially consult the chip, but you can't change
Speaker 1: anything on it. And we usually put stuff on ROM
Speaker 1: chips that's necessary for basic computer functionality, like running through
Speaker 1: the basic startup steps. You don't want that to get changed,
Speaker 1: so you end up hard coding it into ROM, and
Speaker 1: then it's effectively set in metaphorical stone. Now, in the
Speaker 1: case of arcade machines, the game itself would be stored
Speaker 1: on the ROM chip. So the important thing for the
Speaker 1: purposes of our discussion about MAIM is that the games
Speaker 1: we're on these physical chips, So we're not talking about
Speaker 1: software in the traditional sense. We're talking about hardware, hard
Speaker 1: coded chips. You can't just plug and play. So the
Speaker 1: big downside to the industry using hard coded ROMs is
Speaker 1: that there was no easy way to port the experience
Speaker 1: of playing these arcade games onto some sort of home system. Right.
Speaker 1: You couldn't just unless you went out and purchased an
Speaker 1: arcade cabinet. And some people did. I mean they had
Speaker 1: the money for it. I didn't, so I never did this.
Speaker 1: But they would go out and they buy a copy
Speaker 1: of the arcade machine and then they could play the
Speaker 1: arcade game at home. That was really the only way
Speaker 1: to do the actual arcade game, because you could not
Speaker 1: just buy a wrong chip and then plug it into
Speaker 1: a computer and play. So instead you had to rely
Speaker 1: on a port of an arcade game. Porting essentially just
Speaker 1: meant that the person in charge of the port had
Speaker 1: to build effects simile of the arcade game that could
Speaker 1: be played on some home system, whether it was a
Speaker 1: computer or a video game console. More often than not,
Speaker 1: they would actually pay someone else to do it, right,
Speaker 1: They would pay someone else to go through and and
Speaker 1: essentially recreate the game. So programmers of ports are often
Speaker 1: trying to reinvent the wheel to an extent. They're aiming
Speaker 1: to create the same game playing experience, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean they're gonna follow follow the exact same path
Speaker 1: as the original game designers did. When they're making a port,
Speaker 1: they're saying, all right, well, what makes this game what
Speaker 1: it is? What? How can we create that same output? Uh?
Speaker 1: And it might mean that the port is actually, from
Speaker 1: a program level drastically different from the original code. This
Speaker 1: also meant that your experience when playing those ports could
Speaker 1: vary drastically. You might luck out. It might be that
Speaker 1: the port feels more or less the same as you
Speaker 1: remembered from the arcade. I mean, obviously it'll feel a
Speaker 1: little different if you're playing it on you know, a
Speaker 1: video game console or your PC and you're using a
Speaker 1: game pad. Game pads feel different from arcade controls. But
Speaker 1: otherwise it might feel like it's pretty accurate it or
Speaker 1: you might not be so lucky, and it might be
Speaker 1: that the port is practically unrecognizable when compared to the
Speaker 1: original title. So one early port that became infamous in
Speaker 1: the classic video game console days was the pac Man
Speaker 1: Port for the Atari twenty so Atari owners like myself
Speaker 1: were eager to have the opportunity to play the simple
Speaker 1: and yet compelling game of pac Man at home now
Speaker 1: in the arcade, pac Man's graphics, while not like super sophisticated,
Speaker 1: look nice like the ghosts look nice, the maze look nice.
Speaker 1: Pac Man looked nice. Everything was The sprites were good,
Speaker 1: things moved on a good clip. You had fun sound
Speaker 1: effects and music too. It really was the combination of
Speaker 1: all of these different elements that made pac Man such
Speaker 1: a fun game to play in the arcade. But the
Speaker 1: Atari twenty port was, by contrast, ugly playing. The game
Speaker 1: was unwieldy, it didn't sound good at all. The ghosts
Speaker 1: flickered in the Atari port because the Atari wasn't able
Speaker 1: to handle a a solid pac Man and four solid
Speaker 1: ghosts moving around simultaneously. In fact, the ghosts collectively had
Speaker 1: to share a single sprite, a sprite being a graphical
Speaker 1: element that can actually move uh compared to the play
Speaker 1: field of a game. And so the way the game
Speaker 1: compensated for the fact that it couldn't support four simultaneous
Speaker 1: ghosts on screening, it would only display one at a time,
Speaker 1: and that would alternate between the four of them, so
Speaker 1: like you would see a ghost for a frame and
Speaker 1: then the next frame you would see Ghost number two,
Speaker 1: and in the next frame you'd see Ghost number three,
Speaker 1: and in the next frame you see Ghost number four,
Speaker 1: and then the next one it would go back to
Speaker 1: ghost number one. So you're getting twenty four frames a second,
Speaker 1: you know, essentially really more like thirty frames a second.
Speaker 1: So they were flickering pretty fast, so you could see them,
Speaker 1: but they had that flicker and it was distracting. It
Speaker 1: didn't look at all like the original arcade machine. The
Speaker 1: only way you could have avoided that is if you
Speaker 1: had only had one ghost, you would have one solid
Speaker 1: pac Man and one solid Ghost, because the ghost wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to share that sprite with you know, it's fellow ghosts. Now,
Speaker 1: this gets more complicated, but we're not here to talk
Speaker 1: about the Atari's limitations really, but the point being that
Speaker 1: while pac Man for the Atari wasn't very good, in fact,
Speaker 1: I would say it was pretty bad, Atari sold more
Speaker 1: than seven million copies of it. Now, unfortunately, Atari manufactured
Speaker 1: twelve million copies, so while they sold seven million, that
Speaker 1: meant five million were sitting around unsold. Uh So, even
Speaker 1: though pac Man was the best selling Atari cartridge in
Speaker 1: the company's history, it didn't perform to what the company
Speaker 1: was expecting, and ultimately would become one of many massive
Speaker 1: mistakes that would lead to the Great Video game Crash
Speaker 1: of anyway, that's an example of a really bad part.
Speaker 1: But even a good part of a game often doesn't
Speaker 1: feel quite the same as the original arcade cabinet, and
Speaker 1: a lot of different factors can contribute to that, including
Speaker 1: the brightness and color contrast of the display, the responsiveness
Speaker 1: of the controllers, even the style of controllers can really
Speaker 1: make a big difference. Playing Galiga on an arcade cabinet
Speaker 1: just feels different than playing it with a game controller,
Speaker 1: even with a really faithful part of the game. I've
Speaker 1: got a version of Galagha on Xbox right. That was
Speaker 1: one of the games that I I purchased, and from
Speaker 1: a gameplay perspective, everything except the controls is perfect. Like
Speaker 1: it looks and sounds and behaves exactly the way the
Speaker 1: arcade machine behaved. But because I'm playing on a game
Speaker 1: pad like a game controller as opposed to the classic
Speaker 1: joystick and button combo of the arcade, it's still not
Speaker 1: the same. Now, arcades had a fairly brief time in
Speaker 1: the spotlight here in the United States. It was a
Speaker 1: little different. In other places in the world, like Japan,
Speaker 1: the arcade culture was healthier for much longer and still
Speaker 1: exists over there. But here in the United States, Uh,
Speaker 1: the the heyday of the arcade is long in the past,
Speaker 1: and a lot of different factors led to most arcades
Speaker 1: closing down. When we come back, we'll talk a bit
Speaker 1: about those factors. Okay, just before the break, I talked
Speaker 1: about how arcades started to close down in the United States. Well,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of different reasons for that. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons was the rise of the home video
Speaker 1: game system. Now, that did have a big blip in
Speaker 1: ten three with the collapse of the industry, that also
Speaker 1: affected the arcade industry as well. It wasn't just the
Speaker 1: home video game market. But then you know, the system
Speaker 1: Nintendo Entertainment System came in really turned things around here
Speaker 1: in the United States, and uh, the home video game
Speaker 1: market recovered and then flourished on a level that it
Speaker 1: hadn't even approached back in the first age of home
Speaker 1: video game systems. But that was just one factor that
Speaker 1: led to arcades losing relevance. Another was that in order
Speaker 1: to keep an arcade interesting, owners had to add new
Speaker 1: games fairly regularly, right, people would get tired of playing
Speaker 1: the same games, But buying a new game to feature
Speaker 1: in your arcade was expensive. So as arcade attendance was
Speaker 1: on the decline, keeping things going would eat into revenues
Speaker 1: more and more. Right, if you didn't add new games,
Speaker 1: you would lose even more players over time. If you
Speaker 1: were buying new games, you were spending a good amount
Speaker 1: of your revenue just to try and hold on to
Speaker 1: the customers you already have. You weren't really seeing a
Speaker 1: lot of places get new customers, so it was it
Speaker 1: was essentially treading water, and ultimately it would lead to
Speaker 1: a situation where it just became impossible to be profitable
Speaker 1: and run an arcade, and most of them shut down.
Speaker 1: There are still arcades out there. I don't mean to
Speaker 1: suggest that they're all gone, but they aren't nearly as
Speaker 1: popular or as numerous as they were back in the
Speaker 1: glory days of the eighties and even into the nineties,
Speaker 1: because there was like an arcade renaissance in the nineties,
Speaker 1: largely helped by the emergence of a little game known
Speaker 1: as Street Fighter too. Anyway, this also meant that those
Speaker 1: classic arcade games were in danger of being lost to time.
Speaker 1: We had the various ports, right, Like a lot of
Speaker 1: these game teams had ports on different home consoles, but
Speaker 1: the original versions of the games were still sitting on
Speaker 1: these ron chips inside arcade cabinets, and the world was
Speaker 1: moving on. That also included other technologies as well, like
Speaker 1: the CRT For example, it became far more common for
Speaker 1: companies that were in the business of making monitors and
Speaker 1: displays to switch to manufacturing displays that use LED technology,
Speaker 1: for example, and one by one the companies that were
Speaker 1: making CRT s shut down those manufacturing lines. So today,
Speaker 1: if you hunt down a classic arcade machine, you can
Speaker 1: still find them and you can still purchase them. But
Speaker 1: when you do it, you also know that if your
Speaker 1: monitor breaks, if that CRT set goes bad, it could
Speaker 1: be really tricky to find a way to repair or
Speaker 1: replace it. It's just it's getting harder and harder to
Speaker 1: find parts or replacement monitors. So there we have the
Speaker 1: stage set. Right, We've got a technology that is in
Speaker 1: danger of going entirely obsolete, and if it does, it
Speaker 1: takes with it hundreds thousands of games, some of which
Speaker 1: are real classics that lots of people love, but now
Speaker 1: let's talk about Nicola Salmoria. He is a programmer from
Speaker 1: Italy and Nicola became interested in this idea of using
Speaker 1: software to mimic or emulate the hardware of arcade machines.
Speaker 1: That's what an emulator does. An emulator is able to
Speaker 1: mimic something else so that you can get a particular output.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be video games. A lot of
Speaker 1: people just equate emulator with the world of video games.
Speaker 1: An emulator really is just a way to use software
Speaker 1: two replicate what hardware would do when you no longer
Speaker 1: have access to the hardware. So the the way that
Speaker 1: this worked, I mean you couldn't just plug a RAM
Speaker 1: chip into a circuit board and then you're able to
Speaker 1: play the game. Right, even if you went out and
Speaker 1: you bought a RAM chip of a classic arcade game,
Speaker 1: you don't really have an easy way of playing it
Speaker 1: because you don't have the rest of the circuitry that
Speaker 1: that RAM chip interacts with in order for the game
Speaker 1: to work. However, if you were able to create software
Speaker 1: that could mimic how that particular arcade machine worked, and
Speaker 1: then if you were able to make a copy of
Speaker 1: the code that was stored on the RAM. This is
Speaker 1: called creating an image. If you were to create an
Speaker 1: image of the data that was stored on that RAM,
Speaker 1: you might then be able to create what amounts to
Speaker 1: a virtual arcade machine. The software is handling everything that
Speaker 1: the hardware would have handled, and as far as the
Speaker 1: code on the RAM is concerned, it's in a an official,
Speaker 1: you know, legitimate arcade machine and it will create the
Speaker 1: output that you need. You also have to build all
Speaker 1: the the systems that will allow that output to have
Speaker 1: a meaningful expression, right because I'll put has to go
Speaker 1: to something like a display and speakers. So there's a
Speaker 1: there are a lot of steps here. It's not just
Speaker 1: to make the the WROM work. It's so that the
Speaker 1: modern technology we're using to access the code that's on
Speaker 1: the ROM can interoperate with it. So this is really complicated.
Speaker 1: It's not just oh, I found a way to create
Speaker 1: code that makes this ROM chip think that it's in
Speaker 1: a Donkey Kong machine. No, it has to involve the
Speaker 1: support for the various controls you're using, Like are you
Speaker 1: using a game pad versus a classic joystick and button combo?
Speaker 1: These are really tricky things and that's kind of what
Speaker 1: Nicola was really tackling in those early days. This is,
Speaker 1: by the way, is around nine six UH. So the
Speaker 1: software would serve as sort of an abstract layer representing
Speaker 1: all the circuitry of an arcade machine. And Nicola first
Speaker 1: focused on pac Man games, a bunch of games that
Speaker 1: were in the pac Man family of games, and in fact,
Speaker 1: he originally called the name of his project multi Pack.
Speaker 1: But he saw that there was a need to create
Speaker 1: a means to preserve arcade games in general, not just
Speaker 1: pac Man games, but all arcade games. They all had
Speaker 1: a risk of going obsolete and just being lost to time.
Speaker 1: So he started to develop his software so that it
Speaker 1: could essentially trick the ROM code of different types of
Speaker 1: games into thinking it was in a physical arcade machine,
Speaker 1: and uh began to expand well beyond the pac Man games,
Speaker 1: and in that stage he this project was only working
Speaker 1: for the ms DOS platform, So in other words, the software,
Speaker 1: the emulator software he was designing, was only compatible with
Speaker 1: MS DOS machines, so we're not even talking about Windows
Speaker 1: at this particular stage, though that would follow, and as
Speaker 1: he was adding more and more support for early arcade titles,
Speaker 1: he decided multipack just isn't an accurate descriptor anymore, and
Speaker 1: he gave it a new name. This name was the
Speaker 1: Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or MAINE. These days we just
Speaker 1: call it MAIN. We don't even suggest that you should
Speaker 1: break it out as if it were an acronym. And
Speaker 1: that's because it it now encompasses way more than just
Speaker 1: arcade machines. But I'll get to that now. So Maria
Speaker 1: didn't tackle all of this on his own. He actually
Speaker 1: made his project an open source project. Now that means
Speaker 1: that other people were free to look at what he
Speaker 1: was doing, to look at his code, and to contribute
Speaker 1: to the project, to build onto it. That meant that
Speaker 1: with more people you could focus on adding emulation support
Speaker 1: for more titles. Uh. And in fact, that's one way
Speaker 1: you can look at the progress of MAME, and it's
Speaker 1: to see how many number, how many supported titles rather
Speaker 1: would be involved from version to version, because like lots
Speaker 1: of software, you look at MAME as generations of software
Speaker 1: and and different You know, what's the latest version of
Speaker 1: MAME um And that's one way you can look at
Speaker 1: the history of MAME. But there are lots of other
Speaker 1: ones too. And again, it wasn't just title support that
Speaker 1: was important. It was also important to add to the
Speaker 1: support from various control systems that required a lot of
Speaker 1: work from the main community as well, and then support
Speaker 1: for the various operating systems, because obviously it didn't just
Speaker 1: stick to MS. DOSS is compatible with lots of operating
Speaker 1: systems out there now. So when you really boil it down,
Speaker 1: the goal of MAINE is to create as many ways
Speaker 1: for modern systems to recreate the experience of playing specific
Speaker 1: games from the past as possible. And that includes folks
Speaker 1: who want to build their own main arcade cabinets, which
Speaker 1: might include classic style joysticks and buttons, or it could
Speaker 1: include someone who just wants to be able to play
Speaker 1: classic games on their PC using a game pad as
Speaker 1: their controller, or one of a hundred other systems. Now
Speaker 1: we're gonna take another quick break, but when we come back,
Speaker 1: I'll talk a bit about the complications of MAINE, because
Speaker 1: it it does get complicated. We're not talking about the
Speaker 1: technology side, but the business side. I'll explain more when
Speaker 1: we come back. Okay, let's talk about business a bit here.
Speaker 1: First of all, Main itself is free software, and there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different flavors of MAIN if you're
Speaker 1: familiar with Linux, you know that there are all these
Speaker 1: different distributions or distros of Linux where all the distros
Speaker 1: are using Lenox as the foundation, but they have different
Speaker 1: user interfaces. Well, the same thing is true with Maine.
Speaker 1: You can really just think of Name as the underlying
Speaker 1: guts of emulation UM and it's not really user friendly.
Speaker 1: It's not really easy to navigate. And just like pure MAIN,
Speaker 1: so the versions you typically find out there in the
Speaker 1: wild have different user interface systems built into them to
Speaker 1: make it easier to navigate Name. And here's the other
Speaker 1: important bit maime itself. The emulator doesn't include games. It
Speaker 1: is supportive of thousands of games, but it doesn't act
Speaker 1: actually include the games themselves. It's kind of like if
Speaker 1: you were to go out and just by a video
Speaker 1: game console and there are no games included on the console. Well,
Speaker 1: you've got a device that can play games, but you
Speaker 1: don't have any games to run on it. You have
Speaker 1: to go out and then get games for it. The
Speaker 1: same is true for Main, So to get games you
Speaker 1: have to get hold of ROM images, and technically the
Speaker 1: only legal way to do that is to either you know,
Speaker 1: get official permission from whatever entity holds the intellectual property
Speaker 1: of that specific ROM, or you have to purchase a
Speaker 1: copy of the ROM so you can do this. For example,
Speaker 1: let's say, yeah, you went out and you bought an
Speaker 1: arcade machine of Donkey Kong. You found a classic Donkey
Speaker 1: Kong arcade machine. Maybe it's being sold for a song,
Speaker 1: like like fifty bucks, and it's because the person selling
Speaker 1: it knows that the game is not playable in its
Speaker 1: cur and state. So the arcade machine still has the
Speaker 1: original RAM in it, like that's in the arcade cabinet,
Speaker 1: but it is unplayable for whatever reason. Maybe the monitors busted,
Speaker 1: maybe the circuit board is damaged. Whatever it is, You
Speaker 1: do have the wrong it's in there, but you can't
Speaker 1: play it. Well, then you could presumably download a RAM
Speaker 1: image of that game and use an emulator and play
Speaker 1: Donkey Kong with no penalty. Uh, because you own a
Speaker 1: copy of it and you are allowed to make backup
Speaker 1: copies of your legally purchased media. That's well established, at
Speaker 1: least here in the United States. It is that if
Speaker 1: you purchase a copy of something, you can make a
Speaker 1: backup copy for your own personal use, and that's fine.
Speaker 1: That is an exemption to copyright law. It's one of
Speaker 1: the few, but you can do it. However, let's say
Speaker 1: you don't own a copy of Donkey Kong. You didn't
Speaker 1: go out and find a version of the Arcade Machine
Speaker 1: with the RAM in there, and let's say that there's
Speaker 1: nowhere you can go to buy a license to use
Speaker 1: the ROM. Well, technically, if you then go on and
Speaker 1: download a RAM image of Donkey Kong, you're violating copyright.
Speaker 1: So while you could download the main software for free
Speaker 1: and Maime is total legit and totally legal, downloading the
Speaker 1: ROMs that you will need in order to actually make
Speaker 1: use of Maime is a different story. Now, this does
Speaker 1: not mean that the Internet isn't positively teeming with ROM
Speaker 1: images out there. There are tons of them. There are
Speaker 1: groups of of enthusiasts who have collected thousands of games
Speaker 1: and made an image where all those games are on
Speaker 1: that image and when paired with Maime software are It
Speaker 1: means you can actually play all of those games. And
Speaker 1: making these images is not easy. It requires a lot
Speaker 1: of work. A lot of ROMs have copy protection on them,
Speaker 1: which usually requires someone to find a way around that protection.
Speaker 1: You're also usually talking about physically taking a ROM chip
Speaker 1: apart so that you can actually make an image of
Speaker 1: the code that's hard coded on the chip. So it's
Speaker 1: really tricky stuff. Um. Also, by the way, if you
Speaker 1: have to get around copy protection, that creates a new
Speaker 1: problem as well, because while it is totally legal for
Speaker 1: you to make backup copies of stuff for your own purposes,
Speaker 1: it's actually illegal here in the US to try and
Speaker 1: defeat copy protection mechanisms. That puts you into real paradox,
Speaker 1: right because you're like, well, I'm allowed to make a
Speaker 1: backup copy of something I own, of media I own.
Speaker 1: That's fine. If I bought a copy of you know,
Speaker 1: this game, then I can make a backup. That's my
Speaker 1: legal right. However, if there is copy protection on the
Speaker 1: game itself, I am not legally allowed to bypass that
Speaker 1: copy protection. So while I while I can legally make
Speaker 1: a copy, it would be illegal for me to do
Speaker 1: it because I would have to get around the copy
Speaker 1: protection first. Fun times, it's like saying, Uh, you can't
Speaker 1: come into the building unless you fill out a form. Well,
Speaker 1: where's the form, Oh, it's inside the building. It's It's
Speaker 1: one of those situations. Anyway. There's also the matter that
Speaker 1: a lot of the older arcade games are kind of
Speaker 1: just sort of fading away, and so ROM images really
Speaker 1: are a means of preserving those games. Like, if you
Speaker 1: do not make those images, eventually that hardware is going
Speaker 1: to deteriorate to the point where it might be irretrievable
Speaker 1: and we just lose it. So in some cases, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, this is this is really about preservation. However,
Speaker 1: you still aren't supposed to distribute it or you know,
Speaker 1: play it or whatever unless you've got the permission first.
Speaker 1: And in a lot of cases, even determining who the
Speaker 1: heck owns the copyright for a specific game can be
Speaker 1: difficult or sometimes even impossible, meaning that even the most
Speaker 1: well intentioned person isn't necessarily going to be able to
Speaker 1: find a strictly legal means of preserving the game. Now,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of companies out there that are
Speaker 1: in the business of building out main arcade cabinets, or
Speaker 1: they design main kits. Sometimes they just put together a
Speaker 1: main ROM image file containing tens of thousands of games
Speaker 1: on it. There are tons of them out there. If
Speaker 1: you were to do a search, many of them would
Speaker 1: pop up. And that even gets more complex because MESS,
Speaker 1: the multi emulator supersystem merged with MAME about seven years
Speaker 1: ago now, I think so MESS is an emulator that
Speaker 1: focuses on video game consoles and older computer systems. It
Speaker 1: is similar to MAME, but instead of arcade machines, you're
Speaker 1: talking about more than nine hundred different video game systems
Speaker 1: and older computer systems, and so it's designed so that
Speaker 1: you can run games that were built for those systems
Speaker 1: as well. That means that MAIM now supports even more games,
Speaker 1: not just classic arcade games, but classic console and computer games.
Speaker 1: So for the companies that are offering raw images or
Speaker 1: built out systems that include these games in them, they're
Speaker 1: kind of operating outside the law. Not kind of, they
Speaker 1: are operating outside the law. Now, whether the big companies
Speaker 1: that own a lot of the I P s are
Speaker 1: going to come after these various vendors and merchants, that's
Speaker 1: that's really the question. Uh. If they do, then you
Speaker 1: can bet that that particular vendor is gonna get shut down.
Speaker 1: I don't think it will ever go away entirely, but
Speaker 1: that is a possibility. So when you see these ads
Speaker 1: for a main machine that has seventy games on it
Speaker 1: or whatever, you have to remember that the people selling
Speaker 1: that probably don't have the right too in include those
Speaker 1: games on that machine. In fact, most of the time,
Speaker 1: uh in my experience, when I was looking through these,
Speaker 1: it was impossible to find a list of the games
Speaker 1: that were supported. And I think that's largely so that
Speaker 1: the vendors can try and quietly skirt any imperial entanglements.
Speaker 1: As obi Wan might say, uh so, if you go
Speaker 1: out and buy a main cabinet stacked with games, you're
Speaker 1: technically engaging in IP theft, unless, of course, the company
Speaker 1: that made the cabinet actually does have licenses for all
Speaker 1: of the games that are included on that machine. I
Speaker 1: suspect that that's not the case, because getting those licenses
Speaker 1: would be incredibly complicated and expensive. My guess is that
Speaker 1: if you had an arcade machine that legit had all
Speaker 1: seventy thousand games covered in licenses, it would be prohibitively expensive.
Speaker 1: You would not be able to afford it. Um that
Speaker 1: won't stop people from doing it. And like I said,
Speaker 1: like I've thought about making a main machine. I really
Speaker 1: would love to have like an arcade machine just for
Speaker 1: nostalgia's sake, but settling on just one title would be
Speaker 1: really hard for me because I've got a lot of
Speaker 1: arcade titles that I truly loved playing, and I worried
Speaker 1: that if I got a single arcade machine, I would
Speaker 1: grow so tired of it so quickly that I would
Speaker 1: then be looking at every time I looked at I
Speaker 1: just think, like, I spent so much money on something
Speaker 1: that's just taking up space. So part of my brain
Speaker 1: is saying, well, if you're gonna do that, then you
Speaker 1: want to have as many different titles at your disposal
Speaker 1: as possible. However, doing that is knowing that you're skirting
Speaker 1: I p law and uh, and that actually does bug me,
Speaker 1: not because I'm afraid of getting caught, but rather I
Speaker 1: really do feel that the folks responsible for making these
Speaker 1: these titles deserve not just credit, but compensation for it.
Speaker 1: It's just that in most cases, there's no clear means
Speaker 1: of providing that. There's no clear means of actually buying
Speaker 1: these things legitimately. There are some the Arcade one up
Speaker 1: replicas are licensed replicas, so that's different, but that's still
Speaker 1: just a tiny fraction of all the games that were
Speaker 1: out there, so it is a bit of a complicated topic. Anyway,
Speaker 1: That's a rundown on the topic of mame without getting
Speaker 1: too technical in it. Uh, and yeah, it really is fascinating.
Speaker 1: I've played around with it once in the past where
Speaker 1: I even downloaded a few ROMs temporarily. I did not
Speaker 1: keep them. I didn't even keep them for a full
Speaker 1: day and tried it out. But um, when I did it,
Speaker 1: the emulation of the games I was specifically playing was
Speaker 1: somewhat lacking, so the performance was terrible, which was weird,
Speaker 1: or I thought it was weird because the computer system
Speaker 1: I was running it on was far more powerful than
Speaker 1: those old arcade machines, but the emulation of those titles
Speaker 1: was the issue, right, That's why the performance wasn't as
Speaker 1: good as the original arcade version was. Uh, and that
Speaker 1: can still be the case, Like really, That's the other
Speaker 1: thing about emulators is in some cases you might have
Speaker 1: an emulator for a specific title that just isn't as
Speaker 1: good as other emulators are, and that gets really complicated.
Speaker 1: But maybe I'll do another episode about maims in the
Speaker 1: future and go into more detail. I just thought it'd
Speaker 1: be fun to do a little tidbits episode about them today.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for topics, I should cover in
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff. Maybe topics like what it's
Speaker 1: like when the lawn people show up in the justice
Speaker 1: you're trying to close on episode, or maybe the tech
Speaker 1: that you use in order to calm down when your
Speaker 1: dog is barking in the background. Uh, let me know.
Speaker 1: You can reach out on Twitter. The handle for the
Speaker 1: show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Yea, yeah, I love my dog.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
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Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.