> With all those single machine emulators and the year's time between, I don't think > the WAC pack had any bearing on the situation. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest > that Multi-Pac was inspired by the other single-machine emulators of the era. He > started with Pac-Man, discovered the other Pac sets ran on nearly identical hardware, > and then Aaron Giles popped up with the necessary slight modifications to make Mappy > work. At that point, it wasn't just Pac-Man anymore, so they had to change the name. > The addition of other CPU cores only further sent MAME down a different path.
That isn't quite right; MAME had multiple CPUs (and was called MAME) for several months prior to Aaron showing up. Aaron's own history page has a pretty good treatment of that.
I do agree otherwise that MAME/MultiPac were an organic result of where things were going at that time.
> The right people at the right times, with the right obsessions in games. That's how > MAME came to be.
Yup. It was magic, and you can't recapture it.
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