I always like to come back to the vintage arcade games in the summer. The Mame system emulator for arcade games is something I got hooked on way back during the vintage gaming series – be sure to check it out, because it was a classic series that got a lot of buzz way back when.

Downloading ROMs for original arcade games is becoming less of a gray area every year and more of something almost completely legal. With each passing year, copyrights on arcade machine ROMs expire, companies that own the intellectual property rights fold up, and fewer and fewer people frankly care. Media conglomerates have enough headache making sure nobody pirates the latest film to worry about a 25-year-old arcade game that only about 100 people know how to run anyway. Go to ROM Hustler, have fun!

But there’s a lot of hazards to having a Mame machine hobby anyway, such as:

Interface screw – This is when the controls to a game just don’t map well to a keyboard because there are too many widgets. This is a very common problem. Remember that arcade machines were free to have dual joysticks, trackballs, paddles, dials, and any other wacky interface gizmos they could gin up. These games are virtually unplayable without the original case. Notable offenders: Major Havoc, Tron.

Computers don’t have gas pedals – This is a problem with driving games, which have their own interface screw problem. Gas and brake pedals, gear shifts, steering wheels, and then some, just don’t handle naturally on a keyboard and mouse. Even though it’s possible, very few games are playable this way. Notable offenders: Road Blasters, Hard Drivin’.

Diskless wonder – Laserdisk technology has gone the way of carbon paper copies, and with it the visually stunning games from this brief period in the ’80s. This is a damn dirty shame, because those games were sweet. Notable offenders: Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace.

My finger is falling off. – Some of the easiest games to translate to the desktop computer experience are shooters. The vertical scrolling shooter, starting with Xevious on forward, involved nothing more than firing and dodging. The trouble with some of these, is that they require continuous fire, and on an arcade cabinet there was just the one button you could slap with your whole hand, but on the keyboard you’re pretty much limited to rapidly hitting Control with your left ring finger until it turns purple. Note that this did not happen with those that allowed autofire. Notable offenders: Lethal Thunder, Scramble.

Sushi Fugi Yamaguchi – Games that kept their Japanese name and never got an American translation – and even if you know a little Japanese, they’re still impenetrable. After all, the very concept of video games was practically born in Japan and most of the video game companies continue to be Japanese, so what do you expect? But this hampers you if you’re going through ROM archives looking for something to play and you have no idea what this game is about. It’s also frustrating when you’re trying to find some game you used to play but you can’t remember the name, only that it was Japanese. Notable offenders: Shisenshou Joshiryou-Hen, Keroro-Gunsou Pekopon Shinryaku Shirei … de Arimasu.

99 words for Breakout – Bounce the ball off a paddle, beat up bricks at the top of the screen. There are thousands and thousands of these, they’re all exactly the same, and they all came out with clever names to make you think they were something else until you download them and have a play. Notable offenders: Bal Cube, Bomb Bee.

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