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 There
are many ways to experience Pac-Man. The most authentic is to
play the actual arcade game. Most of us don't have that luxury
though. A fantastic alternative is arcade emulation. Emulation
is the process of simulating the hardware of one machine on
another machine, so that the second machine is able to run software
designed for the first machine. In simple terms, arcade emulation
allows you to play old arcade games on your home computer!
To run a classic arcade game on your computer, you need two
things. First, you need to get an emulator. For arcade games,
the best emulator out there is MAME. MAME stands for Multiple
Arcade Machine Emulator. MAME can currently emulate over 2600
unique (and over 4600 in total) classic arcade video games from
the three decades of video games - '70s, '80s and '90s, and
some from the current millennium.
In addition to an emulator, you will also need the actual games
(which will be emulated). Games in emulation are known
as ROMs (Read Only Memory), because of the ROM chips they are
stored on inside the cartridges. Legally, you need to pull the
roms from the actual arcade circuit boards. The illegal option
is to search the net with Google, Altavista, Yahoo, Webcrawler
or other search engines, for the ROM files. You can also try
other methods such as IRC, newsgroups, P2P software etc. Before
you consider doing this, see if the particular arcade games'
copyright-owner has the ROMs available (as with Capcom and Atari).
That way you will support the companies that support emulation.
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