MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: about MAME (thanks)

> 1980? and I thought I was old! Just funnin' with ya Greg.

As my late brother-in-law Sam would say…”it’s all good”
He was a Cincinnati, Ohio native and with me liking Pittsburgh sports teams, there was always a rivalry with him and his favorite Cincinnati teams versus Pittsburgh teams.

As for time frame reference, I had discovered Gremlin’s Frogs coinop game at the cafe lodge at Mountain High ski resort in (Wrightwood, CA) in November 1978 when I was 13 going skiing there for the day. To me, the game was unique for its time and I was addicted to the coinop game. I never saw the game in person again until a cab was at a Time Out arcade in Westminster, CA mall in 1980 and that was when I was 15. I never saw another cab in person since then. When I was 35 in 2000, and was just discovering non commercial emulation and venturing to JoseQ’s Emuviews web site for grabbing MAME and a couple roms and finally figure out how to run MAME with playing Frogs. It was unbelievable to me at the time in 2000 just seeing and playing Frogs once again when I thought I would never be able to play the coinop game again which makes Nicola’s idea back in 1997 all the more amazing even though it has transitioned into something else to some degree. Granted Frogs still required many updates over the years to where it runs similar to looking like actual coinop cab gameplay, it was amazing that the game was preserved which I had guessed way back then would never happen.

> The funny thing is that you and I are probably older than 90% of the people that post here.

When I was 10 and Nintendo film reel version of WG was starting to appear at places in 1975, Orclord had mentioned he was already in college at the time when he was playing the game in UK region in Europe. Knowing that, I don’t feel as old whenever Orc drops by here on occasion.

When Gridle was running old MAME.net web site, there was another poster on the forum who knew his stuff and was likely an arcade tech during the1960s and 1970s. He posted a few times in 2000, but nothing in 2001 or after. I would have liked to ask the poster some questions then, but I was guessing he would drop by later which was not the case. I am guessing he probably wasn’t one of the past contributors, but had to be someone in their 60s age range that knew the coinop games of 1960s and 1970s and likely repaired those from that era.

> Age does have its rewards though because you and I have seen the evolution of arcades from quarter
> machines to ticket machines and everything in between.

My first somewhat foggy recollection of going to an arcade was in 1968 at the North Long Beach Shadey Acres miniature golf course and watching older kids playing gun rifle shooting games made by Midway, Chicago Coins etc. Mid to late 1960s would be the start of the electromechanical coinop era with Allied Leisure with some of their first generation of electromechanical coinop games that made use of a pcb for auto racing games and airplane games such as Rapid Fire while Chicago Coin countered with Flying Tiger and Midway with their products as well.

Seeing Nutting Associates Computer Space in late 1971 did not impress me then when I was a finicky 7 year old then when I was trying to figure out how to play Computer Space. Like several other arcade attendees of that year, I didn’t understand the gameplay and with TV set being used as a monitor Computer Space wasn’t impressive back then. As an unimpressed kid back then, I went back to EM hardware coinop games.

* for younger generation part *
Back then in early 1970s era, a lot of folks in general probably didn’t understand that there were technical limitations with chip memory, expensive costs of chips back then especially CPUs and specific game designed video monitors wasn’t a thing until there was a coinop market demand that made it possible to make a profit in that area. All the more credits to Nolan Bushnell and others from that era to still keep on going with continuing to make videogames coinop market an eventual reality.

It was probably by summer or fall of 1973 before seeing Atari Pong or Midway Winner or other pong clones and then following year more video / tv style games such as Space Race and Rebound until Atari Tank appeared in my area by late 1974. By that time it was half video and half non-video coinop games and by 1980 maybe only a couple non-video games while rest was video along with pinball, skeeball games. It was a gradual transitional change of the technology, but it was probably noticeable by years of 1976 and 1977. It was interesting getting a chance to see the evolution in person back then.

One of the few places of seeing what the 1970s arcade experience felt like was visiting one of Manitou Springs, CO Arcade Amusements game rooms that had a blend of 1960s, 1970s, 1980s coinop games in one room back in years 2000 to 2004 As former MAMEdev Dave Widel described the game room when he visited there was
a ‘time warp back to 1970s arcade experience.’

By my next visit there in 2007, it changed and didn’t have the feel compared to visiting there in years 2000 and 2001.

> MAME is a beautiful thing. Every time I want to take a trip down memory lane and relive my local mall and
> arcade days, I just fire up MAME and away I go.

I enjoy the fact that it supports more than the coinop hardware because I like the Mattel handheld led games support and Casio RZ1 drum machine support. I can envision a state of the art desktop computer running 3 sets of MAME at same time with one running Frogs, the other running Mattel Football, and the MAME running Casio RZ1 drum machine all at the same time. It would be interesting if such a desktop can handle all 3 items at same time.