Ms. Pac Man WORSE than Pac Man?!

[BrianC]

oops. hit the reply button by mistake.

Edited May 7, 2006 by BrianC

[Paranoid]

Don't the Multi-arcade systems have licensed ROM versions of Pac Man on them? I think so. I'm pretty sure you can get licensed arcade ROM versions of just about all the titles. If you shop around, I bet you could pick up a working, beat up Pac Man cabinet for less than a couple of hundred dollars. The point is, a HOME arcade Pac Man experience is easily available now, where it wasn't back then... and that makes the old home ports, on their own, kind of redundant as far as what the BEST home version is. What the real question becomes is, "what is YOUR -favorite- classic console version of..."

 

I've yet to find a classic ROM that didn't work right if you know how to tweak with MAME and are willing to have a couple versions installed. You may have to do a lot of searching for the right ROM, the right engine, the right samples, and then do some tweaking with the monitor to get the timing right... but in the end, you almost always end up with something so close to the actual arcade experience that nothing but having the actual machine can compare.

 

And actually, I know there are "designed for home" arcade cabs that have Pac Man... Galaga, and other titles... I've seen the catalogs for them.

 

As far as "legal ownership"... look on e-bay and buy a dead arcade logic board that was pulled from a machine. They're always available. Ta-dum...

 

Personally, I think it becomes an issue like the RIAA and their reluctance to accept digital media as a distribution method, and their insistance that the consumers were doing something WRONG by seeking out altnerative distribution methods that the recording industry was REFUSING to embrace. As soon as the RIAA got on board and started allowing reasonably priced downloads of songs, the piracy issue became far less of a concern. Instead of EVERYONE doing it, it only became the guys who pirate EVERYTHING that was doing it... and the RIAA started making money again...

 

Same thing here. Instead of insisting that the only way to get a licensed arcade title at home is to buy the entire cabinet, realize that MAME is going to be it... or something like MAME... and start releasing reasonably priced, legitimate packages of ROMS... or put up a web site where you can download a ROM for a reasonable price...

 

There you go... if these guys were bright, that is the model. Like the iTunes store, for video games. Get this huge multi-vendor library, each game for $2.50... and have an engine that it runs on...

 

The reason people like a legitimate Napster or iTunes is because you don't get a song that is mislabeled, or is a bad rip, or ends half way through... and you know it is going to work, and there is a company behind it that will support it.

 

If the arcade industry wanted to fight MAME, this model would work. If they WANTED to fight MAME, legal challenges would also work. They simply do not consider the home market part of their business strategy at all. Not enough to provide product for it, and not enough to worry about home users "pirating" their games. Not enough to worry about one-off dealers making MAME cabinets and selling them on craigslist or eBay. The only time they're going to even notice or get upset is when you're cutting into their coin-op vending commercial business.

[BrianC]

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Edited May 8, 2006 by BrianC