************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** There's been a lot of press lately on MP3s (a sound compression scheme) and the threat they pose to the music industry. The music industry has been working over time trying to shut down sites trading in these illegally copied sound files. The video game industry, or what's left of it since the boom years of the early '80s, has been fighting a similar, though much less publicized, battle the music industry has been waging against web sites offering files they claim are in violation of intellectual property rights laws. The culprit is a piece of software called MAME: Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. MAME uses software to emulate an arcade game's processor. MAME reads and runs software images of coding stripped from a video game's ROM chips. Technically MAME is perfectly legal. It's the extraction and distribution of ROM images of games such as Pac Man and Space Invaders that is actually illegal. I suppose technically it's not even illegal to dump the ROM coding into software format if you legally own a Pac Man coin-op machine (and who of us doesn't?). One can legally make a back up whatever software you own. It's when you start handing out copies to your friends. That's when it suddenly becomes illegal. The gross and wanton violation of intellectual property rights aside, MAME is an amazing piece of work. Since it simply emulates the original ROM code, MAME lets you play arcade games exactly like they were played on the stand-up quarter gobblers. You get the graphics, teaser screens, sounds, and the unfortunate blinking "game over" reminder that even the best of us are fallible. MAME was originally written as a DOS application in 1997. It's a pretty user unfriendly bit of software. Being a DOS application in a Windows world hasn't stopped its popularity. In little more than two years, far flung but wired techie types have stripped the ROM coding out of more than 1,400 games and converted them to MAME format. MAME provides an interesting trip down read-only memory lane for those of us who spent their youth and their quarters on games like Asteroids and Space Invaders. You can find the emulator plus ROM images at mame.retrogames.com. If you back track through the URL to www.retrogames.com, you'll discover MAME is not the only emulator going. You'll find emulators for more modern systems like Gameboy and Sega. When it comes right down to it, it's the classic arcade games like Donkey Kong that excite and drive the techies to development emulators like MAME. It's one thing to distribute code for a Sega game that you can still buy. Dumping the ROMs of a video game that simply can't be found anymore except in Steve Wozniak's den seems to some an act of historical and cultural preservation. The law and decency be damned! I mean the Brits stole the Elgin Marbles fair and square. Those with an Indiana Jones spirit but a layman's technical knowledge have still managed to capture the excitement of the early days of video games with web pages offering screen captures and sound files of favorite games. The ultimate game machine in the mid-'80s was the Commodore 64. The C64 was cheap, it came with what seemed like more than enough RAM (64K!), and it had a sound synthesizer chip (the SID chip) that more expensive machines at the time like the Apple II and the IBM PC could not rival. The C64 Game Source page at www.emucamp.com/c64/ has all kinds of Commodore 64 oriented information, product shots, and sound files. The C64's industrious little SID chip could pump out some pretty funky music. Probably the best music developed for any computer game was the theme music to Electronic Arts' MULE. Luckily this boppin' little ditty has been preserved at the C64 Game Source page (as well as sounds from many other C64 games). Links are provided on the page to players for Windows and Mac that can read and play the C64 SID format.