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Retro: Play retro games on your PC

Posted on 23 May 2012 at 15:40

From coin-up classics to modern console favourites, Stuart Andrews reveals how to emulate the games of yesteryear on your PC.

Ah, the sweet buzz of nostalgia - those halcyon days in the arcade playing Galaxians; the day you moved up from Competent to Dangerous; that first encounter with Sonic the Hedgehog. Reliving those gaming memories no longer means dragging a box from the attic, dusting off the discs and plugging in strange cables and arcane controllers. Thanks to code-crazed enthusiasts and the wonders of emulation, you can get your fix on your PC.

Whether you had a Spectrum or Commodore 64, an Atari ST or Amiga, a Mega Drive or a SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System for the non Nintendoists), it isn't hard to find an emulator that will play pretty much any game ever made. Meanwhile, emulators exist that also bring arcade classics home or enable you to play lost gems. Best of all, you're not playing a poor conversion, but the original code in all its ragged glory. Getting hold of the games themselves can be tricky; in some cases, old discs will still work, while in others you'll need the web and a little know-how. However, it's worth the effort - trips down memory lane are rarely this riveting.

Arcade emulation

Computer games originally hit the big time in the arcades, so it's fitting that the biggest name in emulation is dedicated to keeping coin-up classics alive on the PC. MAME - the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator - is available across several operating systems and devices, but the PC version is the best known and most functional, enabling you to sample more than 3,000 arcade hits, although not all are fully functional. These range from the originals - Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids - to such fondly remembered classics as Outrun and Operation Wolf, plus comparatively recent games such as Sega Rally and Tekken 2. The application itself is quite strict in the way it emulates arcade hardware, emulating every aspect of the system using CPU power alone. While this means that later 3D games can't make use of your PC's dedicated 3D hardware, a few slow-running games are a small price to pay for authentic arcade gaming.

Downloading MAME (http://mame32.classicgaming.gamespy.com) is easy, free and entirely legal. Getting hold of games to run on it, however, involves walking into a legal grey area. Like most emulators, MAME needs the original game code, as dumped from the ROM chips found in the arcade machine and written to a format the PC can access. This means that unless you have the original machine, the necessary equipment and expertise to make your own dumps, you'll need to download ROM images from the web.

Fire up R-Type - the classiest sideways-scrolling blaster - for retro shoot-em-up action.

There are various websites that carry these images, and a quick search will pick them up, but in the majority of cases this code is still under copyright, meaning you're breaking the law by downloading and using a ROM unless you already own the original. And because many ROM download sites exist in this legal backwater, a number are infested with more spyware, malware and general nastiness than you probably want your PC to handle. Proceed with caution.

Even without legal and safety issues, getting hold of MAME ROMs requires a little nous. In many cases, arcade games came as an initial basic version that would be tweaked for updates or international versions. This means you need to distinguish between core ROMs and updates (termed Clones), which will only work if you've already downloaded and installed the core ROM. As not all ROM dumps are complete or fully functional, and some need additional sound sample libraries or data files to work, getting ROMs to work within MAME can be tricky.