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This is hardcore This isn't what I meant to write.
I had two pieces vying for my attention. One was a straightforward run through of ten games* that I would never have played were it not for the advent of arcade emulation. Nothing wrong with that, but in all honesty, you should just go ahead, download the roms and play them yourself. It'll mean more than anything I could write. The second was a rather forced and bleak moan on how emulation gives us a mere facsimile of once great games. How without the context, the wood, plastic and metal of those cabinets, consoles, cassettes and cartridges all your left with is a bunch of archived zeroes and ones. Emulation is no longer the gaming hot potato it was some ten years ago. All the great games were emulated long ago and each MAME release offers returns diminished to microscopic levels. Emulation is essentially dead, beyond the novelty of running old games on the latest mobile must-have device. Emulation was once a major part of my life. From making MAME cabs to being closely involved in the earliest Visual Pinball and PinMAME creations, it has been the driving force behind much of my online existence. A couple of particularly difficult and protracted MAME cab projects effectively killed any love I had left for emulation. I've not played a single game in MAME since. So this week the Rodentia Games Challenge (a contest I've consciously ignored up until now) has thrown up Tac/Scan. It's a game I know very well from my teenage years. There was a Tac/Scan machine in the Electrocoin arcade in Tottenham Court Road. It was part of my regular London arcade crawl. It was the only Sega vector game that I really got to grips with and it was always one of my golden age favourites. The only MAME setup I have at home is the one in my VectorMAME cab. It's essentially a converted Gravitar, with an over-complicated bundle of wiring inside to handle a full set of Space Duel controls, a spinner and the intricacies of driving a proper arcade vector monitor. Outside of successfully maintaining the notoriously unreliable 25 year-old Sega vector hardware (keep a fire extinguisher handy) it really is the closest you can get to playing Tac/Scan as the programmers intended. All my jaded misgivings about MAME and emulation in general are easily put to one side as soon as I press start and the game roars into life. It's a revelation in that it is still so honest and true to the game that swallowed my ten pence pieces. The same rush of nostalgia and excitable near-disbelief that I felt when I saw my first emulated game (Stargate on an old Pentium PC) buzzes through me again. It's still something of a miracle that I can have this intimate connection to a part of my past that would and should be irretrievably lost to me. At times like this, grumbling about emulation seems as churlish as complaining that, after a long grey winter, the bright spring sky isn't quite your favourite shade of blue. Admittedly, my gaming rig is near custom-built to play Tac/Scan. The spinner, buttons and monitor all mimic the original arcade hardware, and it's a luxury that very few gamers have access to. Emulation almost always fall short when it comes to translating whatever bespoke controls the game, be it console or arcade, was originally designed around. Every single arcade emulation on XBLA has been compromised to some degree by the translation to a control pad understandably built around modern console gaming. Even a game as simple as Galaga is subtly altered by something as minor as firing with a thumb action rather than forefinger, and it's a problem that no amount of accuracy in emulation or programming expertise can work around. But today, basking in the bright vector glow, emulation is delivering everything it promised. If I can forget the heartache of collecting, building and maintaining the hardware to complement and complete the MAME programmer's work, then these games still deliver as much joy, challenge and sense of achievement as they did to my pre-cynicism childhood self. It's emulation that makes that connection possible, and sometimes I need reminding of that. March 2008 * In case you were wondering, those ten games were Quantum, Black Widow, Reactor, Do Don-Pachi, Major Havoc, Insector, Blaster, Zektor, Libble Rabble and I-Robot. Go play them now!
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