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If you were to step back in time to 1982 and walk into any mall arcade, you’d find the usual collection of now-classic arcade games. Ms. Pac-Man was a monster, as was Donkey Kong. Defender, even two years after its release, maintained its share of acne-scarred fans.

In all, you’d probably find 50 or so arcade titles mixed in with a few pinball machines, which even then were relegated to back-corner status as the machines’ popularity dwindled in the face of the new rival for kids’ quarters.

Leap ahead to the present day. Mall arcades are a scarcity. And when’s the last time you played Defender?

John Guth plays on an emulator with his daughters Sydney, left, and Samantha.
( THE BLADE/JEREMY WADSWORTH )

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But walk into the basement of John Guth’s Temperance home, and you’ll find Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Defender, and other games from decades past. And many more. Guth estimates he has an alphabet of a thousand-plus arcade titles, from Anteater to Zaxxon.

Best of all, those games take up little more than a few feet in his home.

Guth is using MAME, an abbreviation for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, a program found online that allows users to play arcade video games from as long ago as the mid-1970s up through the mid-’00s. MAME supports thousands of titles. And it’s free, simply by downloading the program, which is available in different formats for various operation systems, and even for gaming consoles like the Xbox that have been modified.

Bill Combs has many classic video games in their original packages.
( THE BLADE/ANDY MORRISON )

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That’s the easy part. The hard part is finding the games. Think of MAME as iTunes. It’s an application that can run on its own, but what good is it without music? Instead of music, the program needs ROMs — short for Read Only Memory — which are the actual programs “dumped” from the arcade games’ circuit-board chips and saved in convenient ZIP form.

To play Pac-Man, for example, you would download the game’s ROM zip and put it in a special folder in MAME. Once you run the program, it should recognize the game and after a few keyboard strokes — voila! — you’re transported back to 1980 again, playing the same Pac-Man you played as kid.

The purpose of MAME, as stated on its official Web site, is to prevent “these important ‘vintage’ games from being lost and forgotten ... the fact that the games are playable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully)?”

Combs' collection includes Mini-Arcades.
( THE BLADE/ANDY MORRISON )

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Released in 1997, the program may be the granddaddy of emulators, but it isn’t the only simulation software available. There are emulators for classic home systems like all of the Atari consoles and computers, including the same 2600 that anyone born in the ’70s is sure to remember, as well as Intellivision, ColecoVision, Odyssey 2, Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Apple computers, and even early Macs, as well as DOS-based machines.

Some of the emulators replicate only one device. Others emulate a host of computer and home systems, such as MESS, Multiple Emulator Super System, a companion of MAME.

The emulators are easily available online: check out mamedev.org or mess.org. Having an emulator is perfectly legal, too. But playing emulated games, well ... that’s different.

It is illegal to play emulated games of which you don’t own the original version. Although what are the odds that someone from the FBI is breaking down MAME users’ doors for illegally playing 25-year-old arcade games they downloaded, especially if many of the game makers have long since folded?

Classic collector

Bill Combs has the kind of video game collection that would make a classic gamer drool.

The 42-year-old Bowling Green resident has dozens of game consoles and home computers in his 'collection room' and in the basement of his house, including the original Atari 2600, along with its box, that he purchased in 1978, as well as more obscure systems such as the Bally Astrocade and Fairchild Channel F.

Combs started collecting classic video and computer games in the 1990s, when the game owners would sell the systems and cartridges in junk piles at weekend garage sales.

Not any more.

'It's virtually impossible now to find them at a thrift store or garage sale ... unless you get very lucky,' he said, 'You can still find it on eBay, if you want to pay for it.'

Fortunately for Combs, his wife is supportive of his hobby. In fact, she's a big fan of the Atari 800 computer from the '80s, having owned one herself.

'That's probably one of the reasons I married her,' Combs joked.

Making the ROMs available to the public is different, and to find those ROMs requires a lot of searching. Newsgroups are a good place to start. eBay sellers also make entire ROM collections for MAME and other emulators available for a price.

Jason Cronin of Lambertville has built four arcade cabinets already, with plans to develop a business around it, Cronin’s Custom Arcades (croninsarcade.com). His cabinets, which run $200 through $3,500, include a legal copy of an 80 pack of Atari games he purchased.

“You can’t sell MAME,” he said. “I can load everything on there and tell you how to do it, but I can’t do it for you. [But] if they want to put MAME on there and put ROMs on there, so be it. From my point, my hands are clean.”

And just because you have an emulator loaded with classic games doesn’t mean you’re going to have a PC powerful enough to run the games — it takes a reasonably up-to-date computer to play many of them, especially newer titles, at normal speeds. Plus, to get the full retro thrill of playing the classics means duplicating a lot of controller hardware. That means a spinner knob for Tempest, a roller ball for Centipede, a four-way joystick for Pac-Man, and let’s not even get into Defender’s complicated button configuration.

It’s little wonder why Keith Bergman, a 36-year-old Toledo resident, sticks to playing the classic games as they were originally intended to be played: on home systems.

“I know a lot of people have their memories tweaked in the old systems through emulators,” said Bergman, who has about 20 home game systems and computers from the 1970s and ’80s in his home. “But it’s nice to fire up that equipment and know that, even though it’s 30 years old, it’s still working and you’re playing it the way you did as a kid. It’s a more satisfying experience.”

5 must-have games

If you download MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator), here are five games you can't do without:

Space Invaders, 1978: The incessant drone of the marching aliens in the sky is iconic. And when the pounding bass sped up with the horde, your heart rate increased, too.

Defender, 1980: With its five-button configuration, Defender was considered too complicated to be successful. It only became one of the top video games of all time.

Pac-Man, 1981: The game's simplicity proved to be its charm, as Pac-Man drew in female gamers to the previously mostly male bastion known as the arcade.

Donkey Kong, 1981: Donkey Kong was a cartoon in pixel form, with beautifully animated sequences that brought to life the man vs. ape tale.

Galaga, 1981: So popular was the outer-space fixed shooter Galaga, many gamers forgot it was a sequel to Galaxian.

Daniel Donahoo, author and GeekDad (www.geekdad.com) who recently wrote about emulators for Wired magazine, said he runs a Commodore 64 emulator as an educational tool for his 5- and 7-year-old boys.

“I remember learning programming on my Commodore 64 in the ’80s and I had no idea how to get them programming in the ’00s, so I found a few old manuals ... and began teaching them how to write some simple C64 programs in BASIC,” he said. “It is just copying code written in the book, but they love it and really get a sense of achievement.”

Donahoo said that while developers and content providers wrestle with copyright issues, “fighting copyright is increasingly becoming a waste of time and if developers are really concerned about emulators and the role they play then they are overly paranoid.

“This is history. Books become freely available after 80 years. Given the rate of growth in processor speeds and computers, 30-year-old games are probably the equivalent of an 80-year-old book. Let it ride,” he said. “Give our kids a chance to experience a bit of history and use emulators as tools in the classrooms and other places to talk about how computers have evolved, why they have, and how we can make them better and more useful tools.”

Contact Kirk Baird atkbaird@theblade.comor 419-724-6734.

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