INTRODUCTION

WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS ABOUT?

If you were a kid in the late seventies & early eighties, then you already know. Growing up during that time meant growing up with video games. Even if you weren't a video game player, you couldn't avoid them -- they were everywhere.

My generation saw the introduction of Pong and Space Invaders in the arcade, the Atari 2600 become a powerhouse in homes across America, and the video game crash of the late eighties. We lived through video game pop-culture, like Pac-Man Fever (both the record and the addiction) & Donkey Kong (which gave birth to Nintendo's now-famous hero, Mairo).

If you visit a video arcade today, you're likely to find only three types of games: driving, shooting & fighting. It seems that with the advent of faster computer processing power came the demise of truly creative games. Today's video games are very pretty and very flashy, but the "magic" of the first video games just isn't there.

That's where MAME comes in. A team of computer programmers from all around the world have been working together for more than three years now on the emulation project called MAME. To make a long story short, MAME allows you to play hundreds of original arcade games on your home PC.

If you're a member of my generation, then you are most likely already salivating at the thought of playing Galaga or Frogger again. But even if you're a bit younger, you might be surprised by just how captivating these older games are. You'll find no 3D polygon tri-linear filtered mip-mapping here; but you will find some damn fun games. And isn't that what it's all about?

AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY?

Or at least it seems that way. Creating a "complete" MAME CD is like building a "top-of-the-line" computer. By the time you can gather up all of the pieces in one place and plug them together, something newer, faster, and with more bells & whistles has been introduced.

That mentality kept me from creating a MAME CD for more than a year (and kept me from completing it for another year). I don't know what I was waiting for; I always knew that MAME would never really be finished. The version included on this CD is 0.36 -- nowhere near the "version 1.0" that most software bears when it ships. The "Version 1.0" on this CD is not to imply the version of MAME, but version 1.0 of this complete package. Once a new version of MAME comes along and I get all caught up again, the MAME-CD versions will no doubt increase as well.

So should you be disappointed to know that the CD you just put in your CD-ROM drive is probably already obsolete? Absolutely not! Here's why:

[1] MAME is an ongoing project which will likely never be entirely completed, but in its current state, it supports 2048 different ROMsets. Of those, nearly 2000 of them are emulated flawlessly!

[2] If you have access to the internet, you can keep yourself up-to-date by downloading the newest versions of MAME. And if you're industrious, you can even find newly-supported ROMs as they are added to MAME.

[3] Everything on this CD (except for what you're reading) can be found on the internet for download; which is where I got all of it. But if you tried to duplicate my efforts yourself, you're looking at over 2 Gigabytes of downloading, then comes the sorting, trimming, checking and compressing. Think of all the time you've saved by owning this CD!