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*                                                            *
*                         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:                          *
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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.

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