Growing up in the late 70's / 80's we were privileged to be the first to play and experience all the new Arcade Video Games that were being released. Games like Pac-man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong and Asteroids were hugely popular games to play, and there were hundreds of others, and just like our obsession with Pinball machines, we became equally obsessed with these games.

There remains a large interest in these classic games to this very day, I am sure that most of us "arcade and pinball enthusiasts" would love to have a dozen or so of their favourite arcade classic cabinets mixed in amongst our pinball collections but the size of these things is a real problem, and that's exactly where Mame comes in to help out.

Mame allows you to play ALL of those old games PLUS thousand's of other arcade games on your home PC.

Mame is a program that is downloadable for free from various sites on the net.

Once downloaded however, you need the Game Rom files to be able to play the games and they are NOT easy to get hold of these days. One thing you can do is search for " Mame Burners" at Google and you can contact people who will burn the Roms onto a set of CDR's or onto a blank DVDR if you snail mail them the discs and a stamped self addressed envelope for them to return the discs to you, they do this for FREE.

f you are not happy with using a keyboard to play these games ( and you probably wont be ) then you can invest about $1800+ and about 2-3 months of your weekends (all DAMN worth it!) and build an actual Arcade Cabinet to house all of the gear with actual original arcade buttons and sticks wired up to your PC and decorate it how you want.

I have some shots of my Blue upright cabinet that I converted to a Mame cabinet for myself that plays 3000 games as well as running a 400 song Retro Jukebox and running a program called Visual Pinball that allows me to run 400 Pinball machines on a pretty good simulator on this cabinet as well.

Some Arcade purists are not happy with MAME and that's fine, but if you find it hard to fit a stack of Arcade cabinets in your house, then I suggest it as a great option, the games are IDENTICAL to the originals in (just about ) EVERY regard and it's a great way to add a stack of games to your arcade that are either impossible to find these days or just too big and bulky for the average home.

Ooops I nearly forgot. There is another emulator called Daphne.

Daphne allows you to play all of the old Laser disc games on your newly built Mame Arcade machine as well. Games like Dragons Lair 1 and 2, Space Ace, Don Quixote and Cliffhanger are ALL playable from your PC.

You can get Daphne here

That's fine, because now you can actually emulate OVER 1200 pinball machines with a couple of FANTASTIC pinball emulators that are available from the net for FREE !!

Visual Pinball combined with VpinMame is probably the best program that I have ever seen. This program enables you to play just about any pinball machine that has ever been made on a Pinball Emulator using your PC.

It uses the exact images and sound files from the original table and it really feels great in game play. All the tables are replicated very authentically and there is a team of guys continually working on making them better all the time.

So take a look at a couple of actual screenshots from Visual Pinball below and you will see what I mean.

Some guys, including myself have even installed "flipper and nudge' buttons on the side of the Mame machine control panels so the playing of pinball seems VERY realistic. I have had some tighter springs made up that go inside your normal arcade pushbutton that give a bit harder feedback so it feels VERY much like the feedback from an actual pinball machine button- email me if you want 2 because I have plenty spare ( Aussie Residents only- sorry ).

Future Pinball is the latest in pinball emulators, it goes one step further than Visual Pinball and is an INCREDIBLE program - see it here. Currently you need a quite powerful PC to operate Future Pinball in all it's glory AND there aren't that many tables available yet but it is building all the time.

Here is a screenshot of one of the tables in Future Pinball

I use all of the above emulators ( except Future Pinball ) on my Mame machine.

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