"Alien Arena" Released for Non-Commercial Use

[Ze_ro]

Although you've almost certainly never heard of this game, the ROMs for "Alien Arena" have been released by the author for non-commercial use... which means it's entirely legal to download them and play the game in MAME. In fact, the author even gives some detailed instructions on how to convert a Williams board to play Alien Arena in case you want to actually implement the hardware version of the game instead of emulating it.

 

What's "Alien Arena" you say? Well, it's essentially a homebrew arcade game made by Duncan Brown in 1985. Duncan operated an arcade, and the only Alien Arena machine ever made was available for play at his arcade. I encourage you to read about the game's history... the guy actually managed to reverse-engineer Williams arcade boards, wrote the game using a cross-compiler on an Apple II, and created his own hardware emulator board in order to test the game without burning new ROMs each time! Even though I don't find the game to be terribly fun, I think it's extremely impressive what this guy managed to do!

 

Anyways, for more information and a place to download the ROMs, click here. You'll need MAME v0.103u4 or newer in order to play the game, as it was only recently added to MAME.

 

(Incidentally, this isn't the first arcade ROM released for non-commercial use... three others are available on the MAME download page (scroll down): Gridlee, Poly-Play, and Robby Roto.)

 

--Zero

[moycon]

Thanks for this

I'll try it out as soon as I get home.