When Brad Oliver was growing up in the early '80s, he loved videogames so much that he created his own imaginary company, Alive-a-vision, and sketched pictures of games he would like to create. Now that he's a grown-up programmer, Oliver spends his spare time recreating those heady days by re-engineering the systems that powered the arcade games of yore.
By using emulators such as Oliver's MacMAME to run reformatted code known as ROMs (the old software was all built onto chips), fans can again play classic games such as Frogger, Galaga, and Kangaroo on their modern home computers. It's difficult to overestimate the appeal this holds for certain people who spent their formative years in darkened arcades, slipping quarters into colorful, noisy video boxes.
"At that age, I could honestly think of nothing closer to heaven than to be in an arcade with a cupful of quarters," says Oliver.
"Many people think the [older] games are more playable than today's games," says Moose O'Malley, an Australian who runs a site dedicated to saving this playability for posterity.
Jeff Matthews, a 24-year-old programmer who runs an online discussion board about emulators, says the sense of community that arises from working together to hack videogames is a breath of fresh air. "I've always been peeved by ... programmers who hide their knowledge," says Matthews, who thinks that many engineers are worried that sharing techniques will throw away their advantage in the job market. "But in the emulation programming scene, I have never seen so many programmers freely exchange complicated techniques."
The legality of what they're doing doesn't seem to worry emulator fanatics, who think of themselves as such small targets that they won't appear on the screen of most game companies. The fact that they're not making any money, they feel, should keep big companies from suing them.
They're probably right. Activision's recently released Action Packs, a series of old games from Atari's 2600 machine, like Pitfall and Kaboom, sold well, though a release of Commodore games did less well, and Activision executive VP Howard Marks says there is not enough demand to rerelease most old games. Game companies nonetheless grumble. "It's basically a big pirate market," says Marks. "They're allowed to build emulators but they're not allowed to copy games, but that's what happens.... Why else would you build an emulator?"
But actually getting to play the games is only a small part of what drives emulation enthusiasts, Matthews says. The crossword-puzzle-like pleasure of writing a piece of software that will work like an old machine is the real attraction.
O'Malley agrees, and even advocates a sort of legal high-mindedness: His site includes a page targeting people who try to make money from pirating CD-ROMs.
Meanwhile, most emulator fans seem content to just labor away as quasi-legal archivists and hackers. As O'Malley says, "Emulation is all that stands between the great arcade games and oblivion."
