Consoles allow nostalgia buffs to play 1980s arcade favorites

Mention electronic console gaming and most people probably think of Japan's Sony, with its hugely popular PlayStation machines, or Microsoft's rival XBox or the Nintendo GameCube. Hardly anyone would mention UltraCade Technologies of San Jose, Calif. That's probably because UltraCade's home gaming consoles aren't priced for the average consumer. Indeed, the $3,000 price of a single UltraCade machine would buy 17 or so PlayStations.

Granted, the UltraCade console delivers state-of-the-art performance. But it's state of the art circa 1985. The console, called Arcade Legends, is a re-creation of the coin-operated arcade games of the Reagan era. Each refrigerator-size unit is decorated with images of monsters and heroes and equipped with an array of standard game controls -- trackballs, push buttons, joysticks.

It's all designed to recall countless after-school hours at the 7-Eleven or the mall, playing Asteroids or Missile Command. As a matter of fact, you can play these games on the Arcade Legends machine, and dozens more. The modern PC inside the box has been programmed with dozens of arcade oldies that can be called up at the touch of a button. You don't even have to insert a quarter.

"Hundreds have been sold since they've been released just two months ago," said UltraCade sales manager Liz Breen. "They're very, very popular."

UltraCade isn't alone in this market. Another California firm, HanaHo Games Inc., sells Arcade PC Deluxe, a $5,000 arcade box that's been seen on the television series "ER" and given away as a prize on "Wheel of Fortune."

It all seems rather odd. The arcade games of the 1980s were laughably primitive compared to the immersive 3-D games we take for granted today. Who would want to play Donkey Kong when he could choose Halo or Splinter Cell instead?

More people than you might think. As with 1940s detective flicks and 1950s doo-wop music, there's a sizable audience for gaming nostalgia. Most are people who grew up on the arcade classics, and PlayStation precursors like the old Atari 2600. Some are now using their technical skills to resurrect those long-vanished digital amusements. But resurrection is never easy.

First, there are technical challenges. The old arcade and console games were designed to run on archaic computer hardware. But a PC can run special programs called "emulators" that make them simulate the performance of a different type of computer.

"In order to emulate something, you need to have 10 times as much RAM (computer memory) and processing power as what you're emulating," said multimedia developer Jacob Metcalf, who runs 8Bit Joystick, a webzine devoted to video games. No problem: Any standard desktop computer of the last few years has many times more power than an old arcade machine.

In 1996, a programmer named Nicola Salmoria created an emulator that made a PC work just like the old arcade consoles. He called the program MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, and made it freely available for download over the Internet. Now anybody could run the old games on pretty much any PC. Soon similar emulators were being developed for game devices such as the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, the Magnavox Odyssey, or the Colecovision system. Players can even get specially made desktop controllers that plug into a computer's USB port and have the same joysticks and trackballs as the old arcade consoles.

Converting PCs into game machines was trivial compared to laying hands on the old games. Back in the day, these weren't stored on CD-ROMs but encoded onto special read-only memory chips, or ROMs. Nostalgic gamers developed ROM readers that copied the game codes onto modern computer hard drives. Then they began swapping them over the Internet.

At first it all went well, according to Tim Eckel of Toledo, Ohio, who runs Arcade@Home, a website devoted to nostalgic gaming. "Several years ago it was pretty easy" to find game ROMS, said Eckel. "There were places all over the Internet where you could download them." Strictly speaking, the ROM swappers were trading commercial software without paying for it. But the games had been off the market so long that their manufacturers didn't care.

But then emulators began popping up that let PC users run games designed for modern systems such as the Nintendo 64, precursor to today's GameCube, or Nintendo's handheld gaming unit, the Game Boy. "They really didn't like that," Eckel said. "Instead of emulating an old game that hadn't been played in 20 years, they were cutting into their profits."

Suddenly, Nintendo, Namco, Atari, Capcom, and other makers of old arcade software began contacting Internet services, ordering them to shut down websites that traded in old game ROMs. Today you can easily get emulator software, but good luck finding a website offering game ROMs.

Of course, that hasn't stopped the gamers. They just did what the music file-swappers do and began trading the game ROMs on file-swapping services like Kazaa. In addition, the Internet's bulletin board service, called Usenet, has several areas devoted to game emulation. These sections routinely offer downloads of old games by the dozen. And because Usenet makes it easy for users to hide their identities, there's no way to figure out who illegally published the games.

There's a simple way to shut down the pirates. The game companies could sell the games to nostalgia buffs, mostly baby boomers who'd be happy to purchase legal copies of the code. UltraCade and HanaHo have licensing deals that let them include legal copies of the classic games on their costly consoles. But there's a much bigger market out there, made up of 40-something gamers who can't afford $5,000 for a game console but who still haven't grown up.

In November, Atari Inc. began selling PC versions of 80 of its old console games for $20. Chicago-based Midway Games Inc. recently released Midway Arcade Treasures, which comes with 20 classic games for $20. Arcade Treasures was designed for the PlayStation, XBox, and GameCube, but it's been so popular that Midway now plans a PC version. "It was our top product from last Christmas," Midway spokesman Reilly Brennan said. "It's selling great."

Which might seem surprising, when you consider the crude graphics and rinky-dink music of these archaic titles. They've got nothing going for them but an old-fashioned sense of fun. And for some gamers, that's more than enough.