MAME: The Exclusive Definitive Review

Wherein I do something I should have done decades ago.

In a pique of madness, I have been using my own gaming collection to run an after-hours club at my children’s primary school (yes, I have been DBS checked). Pompously titled ‘the history of computer games’, I’m guiding fifteen kids from age 5 to 11 from Pong to PlayStation 3, giving them as broad a sweep of the culture and its paradigms as I can provide in eleven hour-long sessions. It promotes beautiful moments, particularly when you see 45-year-old hardware engaging and delighting kids who own Switches and PlayStations, who are already jaded by mobile and tablet touchscreen play. Maybe it’s the simplicity of 1970s videogaming, or the novelty of seeing visuals of such stark abstraction. Hypnotised by the Vectrex version of Scramble, they can see that the vector monitor has some unique quality they’ve never seen before, that there’s a beguiling charm in the game’s shonky execution and flickering lines, but also that this machine is tangibly real. It has its own smell and an audible buzz to go along with its singularly distinctive form. Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that it was such a favourite, and naturally I brought it back for the Spectrum vs Commodore 64 session. You see, with fifteen kids you need three machines. Partially because you can’t divide a child but also because you can represent eras very nicely with three pieces of hardware and five kids to one machine gives a reasonable amount of playtime. However the next session leaves me with a dilemma of sorts. Following the 8-bit home computers without a functional Amiga or Atari ST (no kickstart ROM and a dodgy floppy drive put paid to that) means we’re jumping to SNES and Megadrive to bridge the 16bit 80s and early 90s. I only have two portable TVs, so what should compliment them? Initially I was going to deploy my DMG-01 Gameboy (with Tetris, obviously), but this felt a bit lacking. I’m not sure it works for a group of five - would they be able to see the screen? Would they get bored of Tetris without the kind of in-depth strat training I’m not qualified to give? This insecurity led me to pick up a long-discarded project as my ultimate fall-back.

Long ago, I was able to make off with an unwanted office machine from a previous job. It’s a deliciously chunky Dell Vostro all-in-one lozenge, with a nice enough screen (not CRT, sadly) and enough HDD space to accommodate a very weighty amount of ROMs. Obviously, this had to become a MAMEstation. Really, I should have done the legwork for this before I even committed to the club. It actually didn’t take that long to cleanse, set up new accounts, copy across several gigs of arcade games and so on. But the kicker is it’s a 32bit machine running Windows Vista, so there’s no chance of dropping in the latest MAME and expecting everything to work perfectly. As chance would have it, the venerable Vostro already had MAME32 on it, but hilariously a version from 2006. This meant it was happy enough with the 2022 romset to claim 4,600 games available but with some tragic exceptions. The entire Neo Geo catalogue for one, with a refusal to play R-Type, Choplifter and a few other seminal greats adding a grimace of pain. I could go off and try to find the last working 32-bit version, but that’s not a quest I particularly fancy undertaking. Slightly trickier was hooking up a suitable controller. I have a nest of console arcade sticks and after some baffling refusals from MAME, found the best results came from an old PS2-USB adapter and a surprisingly rusty SNK vs Capcom stick (hexagonal gate, motherfuckers) that while not 100% Sanwa assured, nonetheless clicks and clacks with reasonable confidence. And so, we were off to the races!

I think that everyone should sit down and spend an hour with MAME at least once a year. A cultural ritual we should all abide by. Communal or alone, we should enter into communion with this vast codex of hallowed colossi, from which so much of the modern industry sprang. There are few things that we can point to as modern miracles, cultural wonders fit to stand alongside those of the ancient world, but MAME is absolutely one of them. A new library of Alexandria, its depth is still astonishing to me some 25 years since first downloading it. And now in its absolutely towering completeness, this single program and its exhaustive preservation of 50 years of exotic, bespoke hardware is one of the greatest achievements in all videogaming. I mean, it’s so stupidly important that any moral or legal challenge to it is utterly moot, almost infantile in the face of what it does, what it represents. It’s a truly magnificent tool and an astoundingly magical gateway of discovery. But I think the use of a joystick is vital, honestly. It pairs the physical experience with the audio-visual interactive one so nicely and sets a real difference from the gamepad monoculture that has dominated home machines for 40 years. The joystick now is the preserve of fighting game enthusiasts and Shmup players - we all too easily forget it was once universal. What’s more, to play Galaga or Pacman, or any golden-age arcade great on a gamepad or keyboard is wholly wrong, a dishonest representation. There is a real difference in playing from the wrist instead of the digit. A sense that you’re guiding with your hand instead of your thumbs. It’s just more mechanically physical, somehow more satisfying to execute. Of course, I could well be preaching to an exclusively Gen-X crowd here, as our lucky little cohort was the primary audience for the majority of MAME’s catalogue.

I expect millennials won’t share the same foundational love for the arcade that I do, nor would they necessarily feel the same phantasmal pangs of lost desire. MAME reminds me of a time when you would get 60 seconds of intense play with the most spectacular graphics you’ve ever seen, then having to return home to machines that’ll never be capable of recreating the precise experience. That arcade-vs-8bit class struggle was a mere sliver of time in gaming’s history, but I think it powered so much aspiration in a particular population of game creators that it helped fuel the progressive push of game design (for progression’s sake) well into the 21st century. It’s a shame that modern gaming doesn’t have some rarefied, inaccessible tier of experiences that the consumer grade platforms can aspire to. It’s also equally telling that when home hardware reached full parity with the arcade, home gaming’s aspirations shifted towards prior media, seeking affiliation and accreditation with cinema or television instead of chasing the standards of videogaming’s own best-in-breed. Noticeable too was the arcade’s swing toward the bespoke cabinet, to the gimmick interface. The other unexpectedly fun thing was the sense of multiplexed nostalgia. There’s the primary rush from the games themselves, but a secondary flood of emotions and memories of the emulator’s Cambrian explosion of the late 1990s, when MAME and its contemporaries first emerged. Memories zing around of Snes9X and Genecyst, of Final Burn and Magic Engine. All playable on a reasonably average PC, with entire system catalogues turning up on a couple of CDRs apiece. I remember the revelation that the PC was going to become the ura-computer, that a real, tangible possibility had been realised; eventually, all machines will be simulated, all videogames could be playable, forever. That as each system and each generation fell into senescence, the PC would sweep them up and add to its ever-growing preservation catalogue. 

The deeper delight that emerged from finally setting up a dedicated MAME machine was having my children gawp at some of the more intense offerings of the JAMMA era. In a stupendously quixotic turn, I’d already introduced my two to Shmup exotica via the Android version of Raiden Fighters Jet, through DotEmu’s Raiden Legacy. It was a simple issue of handing toddlers something to entertain them that had a) military hardware shooting things and b) lots of explosions. Little did I know that they’d actually play it properly, sort of. Imagine their jaws then, when I showed them DoDonPachi for the first time. The latter Raiden titles seem tame in comparison, and DoDonPachi’s gorgeous pixel art, which is so unashamedly pixelly, shone with a visual finesse that matched the game’s genre-defining intensity. The first stage’s magnificent launch mothership, its various futuristic tanks and sleek mid-boss still carry a wonderful charisma. My eldest was gripped, and I felt a remarkable sense of satisfaction. DoDonPachi is my Moby Dick, a great white whale I’ll be forever hunting, but I love its uncompromised declaration of sheer challenge, dressed in exquisite audio-visual design that seems to mark the highest of zeniths for the pure, non-scaling 2D bitmap mode. Its provision of obscene power provides an elemental glee from the destruction you can wreak, but those dazzling blossoms of enemy shots, their attenuated geometries, staccato polyrhythms, their bullet curtains of pure barrage never seemed any more sublime in later games, either from Cave or its contemporaries. Despite their provenance, Batsugun and DonPachi seem vestigial in comparison. DoDonPachi is the locus around which the modern Shmup is defined and now I’m absolutely thrilled that my kids really want to play it, even though they have access to the most modern of games if they wish. Such is DoDonPachi’s singular presence and charisma. 

I’ve always been quite ambient in my approach to introducing my children to videogaming. Proscribed education seems too patrician, too rigid. I want them to have the luxury of personal exploration that I had. My task is to simply show them possibilities, to inspire their hearts to build their own passions. My eldest now knows that MAME exists. I’ve now got to strip out all the fucking adult mahjong shit, as I can’t trust a 7-year-old to stick to a ‘favourites’ folder. As for the after-school club, I’m not going to subject them to DoDonPachi just yet. I’ll await my eldest’s flawless 1CC so he can suitably showboat. Instead, I’ll umm and ahh between the golden age (Pacman, just because), or something contemporary to the SNES and Megadrive. Those machines will be playing out the feud between Mario and Sonic, so perhaps the MAMEstation can offer respite by hosting Capcom’s glorious CPS-1, with Final Fight or Mercs. Given the singleplayer slant, I might well settle on Strider. Anything that works with this ancient version of Mame32 will do, really. Or maybe, seeing as the subject is 16-bit home consoles and the educational justification, should I have bought a Neo Geo AES? After all, the kids would absolutely love it.

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