Arcade Games on your PC

After watching that Ryden vs. Ken animation I desperately wanted to play a Street Fighter game today. Unfortunately, after digging through all my PS1 games I realized that I never owned one. Sure, I rented few titles back in a day, but I never actually purchased one.

So I went and downloaded Mame. What is Mame you ask? It’s the ultimate arcade emulator. It’s a little command line app which will turn your PC into an arcade machine. All you need to do is to unzip the client somewhere, put a game rom in the roms directory and you are ready to go.

You can download roms from Rom World. Just select MAME as your platform and start downloading. For example, let’s assume you downloaded X-Men vs Street fighter (which will be xmvsf.zip). Let’s assume you have mame in C:\mame\. Unzip the xmvsf into the C:\mame\roms directory so that now you have C:\mame\roms\mxvsf.

Now just run mame with the name of the folder and it should run the game. Here is an example session:


Szaman2 @ GRENDEL : C:$>cd mame

Sorry – don’t mind my prompt. I just can’t stand the usual C:> bullshit :p

Anyways, the emulator runs in full screen mode but hitting ESC will kill it and kick you back to windows. The default key mappings are as such:

5 – insert coin
1 – player 1 start
2 – player 2 start
F2 – diagnostic menu
TAB – emulator options (here you can re-map the keys)
left CTRL – game button 1
left ALT – game button 2
SPACE – game button 3
arrows – up, down, right, etc…

The default button mappings are beyond retarded. Even in a 2 button game using CTRL and ALT is dangerous as you are hovering over the windows key. Every time you hit it, windows will send the emulator to background. This wont crash the game, but it is annoying as hell if you do this every 10 seconds it gets old fast.

Most fighting games from capcom use 6 buttons which makes the default setup unusable. I mapped the buttons to numpad keys but that’s far from perfect solution… Good news is that you can manage the key mappings on a per game basis :)

I spent the evening today getting my ass kicked on all the fighting games I downloaded. Fighting games were not meant to be played on keyboard… But it’s great to re-live these games once again. If you fondly remember all the classic arcade games, give Mame a try!