Hippy Grant and myself met thru a mate who liked Magnum and Motorhead and as we both shared the passion for computer games a friendship revolving around video gaming was soon nutured. We never competed as such with hardware but as soon as one of us upgraded the other was sure to follow. I led with the purchase of an ST and later an Amiga but HG was the first to embrace PC gaming. A backwards step I thought comparing the visuals of my A1200 to his VGA garish coloured games. All that was to change when Doom arrived. My eyeballs virtually fell out their sockets when I first saw this thing run, I was blown away.

At that point I realised I had to have a PC. The only problem being the lack of 1000 quid that one of those cost. If I was making the step it had to be cutting edge, and cutting edge it was ; a monster Pentium 60, 540mb hard drive, SoundBlaster and a whopping 8mb ram. Within weeks I’d built up a library of pc titles, most being FPSs or flight sims.

Summer of 97 arrived and with it a phone call that would change my gaming for ever. Sitting playing ‘Actua Soccer’ on the Playstation one afternoon the phone rang, it was Hippy Grant. He proceeded to enlighten me he’d just acquired a disk for the pc that would quite literally make me come in my pants. He asked how I’d like to be able to play the ‘real’ Space Invaders, Galaxian etc all on my pc. My brain was turning summersaults on hearing this. ‘How was this possible’ I enquired. Apparently there was a program you installed on the pc and it allowed you to run every arcade game. He told me he never actually had the disk to hand but his mate Gary had it and he’d get a copy the next time he saw him.

For the next week or so I couldn’t quite get my head around the concept of playing real arcade titles on the pc. Given I lived slap bang in the middle of Scotland, seaside resorts and more specifically arcade cabs were something I only ever got to experience whilst stopping for a piss on the motorway services on our annual camping holiday. Most of my arcade exposure amount to little more than reading the ‘Arcade’ section in C&VG and the realisation that I might ‘own’ the fuckin real games was too much to comprehend, it really was that big a thing for me.

The phone call arrived and I eagerly made my way to Hendo’s. Small talk was exchanged but as was the norm with him and I, it was kept to a minimum. We both realised our friendship was a hollow one and based purely on what one could gain from the other. Today was no different. Disks were handed over and I set off back to Mid Calder.

Before long DOS Mame was installed and after a quick scan of the ‘read me’ entered ‘MAME INVADERS’. The screen blanked and suddenly she sprang into life. There it was, the little invader entering from the side to correct the upturned letter. Sound was lacking in this one as it did in a few others but that didn’t matter.

There was collectively about 50 or so games all mainly the earliest titles Frogger, Scramble, Galaxian etc. I was in heaven, I’d probably had a collective 10 goes of Galaxian in my entire life and here was THE real deal glowing away on the 14" monitor.

Shortly afterwards the Internet superhighway (as we called it then) arrived at work. Dabbling at lunchtime with search engines I soon unearthed a vast underground following of this Mame thing. Turns out ‘Mame’ was coded by a bird called Nicola and someone else. Found out later Nicola was a bloke but that never dampened my admiration for them. Digging further unearthed ‘websites’ that allowed you to ‘download’ further games. Jesus, not only had I a collection of 50 games but now had a unlimited source to add to them. Christmases all arrived at once.

Being in charge of petty cash allowed me to order a plentiful supply of blank floppy disks, no-one ever questioned why I went thru so many. As soon as the works pc was fired up in the morning I was straight into ‘Dave's Videogame Classics’ (eventually shortening itself to ‘Dave’s Classics’) to set 3 consecutive downloads going. Once downloaded these were dragged over onto floppies and stuck in my jacket pocket. The luxury of having my own office meant my little production line never went noticed. On a handful of occasions someone would come in and I’d intentionally make as much noise as possible to try and mask the rattling of the drive as it wrote the next track on the floppy.

Downloading was easy, there was a single page with around several hundred images and simply clicking on the link launched the ‘download’ windows box. The first few disks would hold ten games or so at once but soon they started creeping up in size with the Capcom titles not even fitting on a disk. At that point, the work downloading ended as I had no way of transferring the games to my home pc.

Grant (non Hippy one) soon embraced the internet, 2p for 1 minute and a whopping 2.5kps download speed. The first thing we did was attempt to download our 2 favourites ‘Rolling Thunder’ and ‘Yie Ar Kung-Fu’. After a little searching we managed to grab then, however despite all attempts to get them to load we gave up unsuccessfully. Later investigation revealed Mame would only run games which had been ‘added’ with games that could run listed in an enclosed ‘read me’ file.

I soon figured the larger ‘ROMs’ could be unzipped and zipped into smaller files. This allowed the work production line to kick in and I soon had amassed virtually the entire "Dave’s" site archive.

Time passed and I was soon online at home, the collection grew as did the anticipation of every Mame release. Back then it was awaited with a fevering excitement in akin to the latest Harry Potter film, replacing the kids with geeks.

The big one for me was version 0.34. This release was huge and ran ‘Yie Ar’ which I’d dreamt about for a long time.

Every Mame release saw me faithfully download every additional supported game ensuring it was 100% up to date. As subsequent versions were released an annoying thing happened. Some ROMs that had previously worked no longer did and a more up to date one had to be gotten. I struggled along with this determined to keep it current but the more releases of Mame that came out, the more ROMs wouldn’t work and the less inclined I was to try and keep it current. New Mames came and went and were no longer widely anticipated.

Although my using of Mame never waned, the constant updating did. Broadband arrived as did the newsgroups which allowed to me to download the entire collection of ROMs per each release of Mame. Something had changed, the fun just wasn’t there and my Mame updating ceased.

It’s March 2008, nearly ten years since I discovered Mame, and I now own a dedicated cocktail Mame cab which has a version of Mame which is 3 years old and probably won't be updated any time soon.

I’ve no hankering to play a 3 year old polygon ski simulator or the latest ‘shooter’ title as long as I can fire up 1942 and blast to my hearts content and cage the animals in ‘Zoo Keeper’ then I’m a happy man.

March 2008

Comments