Emulation Sensation
I love those old arcade games and the ones I used to play on my various Ataris. Toward the end of playing them again, I found three emulators that allow me to do just that on the iBook (yes, its easier to find good emulators for the PC)
MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) for MAC OS X
http://www.macmame.org/
Stella Atari 2600 Emulator for Mac OS X
http://stella.sourceforge.net/
NoSTalgia Atari ST emulator for Mac OS X
http://users.skynet.be/sky39147/
Atari800MacX emulator for the 8bit Atari for Mac OS X
http://members.cox.net/atarimac/
Of course, you need ROMs (disk images) for programs and games you want to run, and those are probably illegal unless you have the systems and can “dump” them yourself, but an enterprising person can usually find these things on the web.
Comment posted on 4-3-2005
Blast from the past! After trying out the Knoppix Games 3.7 LiveCD, I found a version of Xarchon on there which quickly gave me a hankering to play the real Archon (from 1983&1984) again and went on a hunt for the original ROM. I quickly got it up and running in the Atari 800 emulator on the iBook and man, what a great game! I have some very fond memories of blasting away at my brother in that game. Archon is like Chess, except that when you “capture” a piece, you enter ‘Battle Mode’ and the two pieces get to battle in against each other in an ‘arena’. Latest version of Atari800X is 2.1 as of this writing.
Comment posted on 11-4-2005
Had some fun playing with the latest version of NoSTalgia (link above), 1.42. I have a bunch of TOS images (the operating system Roms), but mine (the one in my old Atari ST) is 1.04, so thats the one I was using. I have also found a bunch of disk images with a lot of the games I used to have (certainly not all of them), including Sundog and Time Bandit (see images in the Screenshots album in the Photo gallery). Sundog didn’t play perfectly well unfortunately. I had some wierdness after I took the shuttle out into a city, so I ended up not getting screenshots of going into a bar (the cool role-playing aspect of the game), but Time Bandit seemed to run fine. How could you not like a game with about 20 other games built in (including a PacMan clone!), where you run around grab treasures and shoot stuff. I’d like to be able to salvage a bunch of stuff created on the ST and stored on old floppy disks, but rigging up a disk drive to play with the Mac would require me to buy a USB floppy drive (a decidedly un-useful piece of hardware, except for this express purpose) and I don’t even know if it would work with NoSTalgia, or if the disks are still even readable.
Comment posted on 11-7-2005
Atari800MacX is now at version 3.0! It is perhaps the slickest emulator I have ever used, and allows me to relive my youth by running all the old games we used to play on the Atari 800. So far I’ve gotten these to run (run well, in full screen, with sound and gamepad support):
Archon - battle chess!
Boulder Dash - classic, run around grab diamonds and avoid falling boulders
Eastern Front - a tabletop-like turn based war game
Jumpman - 2D platform game, avoid bullets and collect all the little dookies while jumping from platform to ladders
K-Razy Shootout - blast, or run away from the robots in each room.
Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory - the *most* awesome platform game ever made (back then anyway)
Temple of Apshai - computer RPG
The greatest thing about these games is that they are entirely kid-friendly. There’s no surreal blood and violence, its all cartoony stuff, with cutesey 8 bit sounds. Em loved boulder dash!
Comment posted on 2-6-2007
if you are into Pacman you should check out this online pacman website where you can play pacman, ms.pacman and more
Comment posted on 1-3-2008
[...] several different emulators and until today I was a big fan of MacMame, the ‘official’ port of Mame to the Mac. Unfortunately, the fates (and Apple) have conspired to make that emulator non-functional (at least on Mac 10.3.9) and so I needed to find an alternative. I can’t wait to tell you about my new favorite!MacMame has a long history porting Mame to the Mac, and in fact it’s always seemed a lot more functional and easier to use than the Windows GUIs. Unfortunately, recently when Apple released Quicktime 7.0.4 (and the related upgrades for iTunes, etc. that use it), they somehow broke MacMame on OS X 10.3.9 (Panther). [...]