New life for old games

New life for old games: By Howard Wen. Video-game emulators intriguingly blur the lines between hardware and software, PCs and game machines. Do they also promote piracy?

By Howard Wen

Jun 23, 1998 | Feel like playing your Sega Genesis games on your PC? You can -- regardless of whether your operating system of choice is Windows, MacOS, MS-DOS or Unix. Ever wanted to play Gameboy games on your Windows CE handheld computer? You can, thanks to emulator programs like Virtual Gameboy.

Straddling the legal line between reverse-engineering and software piracy, scores of programmers are coding freeware programs that emulate the hardware of video-game consoles, arcade machines and even other personal-computer formats.

Most media coverage has depicted emulation (or "emu") programming as a backward-looking novelty: "Hey, remember all those cool arcade games you played in the early '80s? Now you can run the same exact code on your PC and play them again!" But what's happening is deeper than just digital nostalgia: Emu programming is seriously blurring the lines between the proprietary formats that have always balkanized electronic gaming.

From programs like the hugely popular M.A.M.E. (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) to those perfectly mimicking popular video-game systems, emu programmers have liberated game code from the confines of hardware. Of course, all emulators aren't created equal -- and the speed and feel of game-play on an emulator depends on the power of the computer running it and the coding of the emulator itself. But there's an ever-increasing choice of emulators available on emu sites like the venerable Archaic Ruins. And the increasingly mind-boggling possibilities of the form are multiplying fast.

"I think hardware is still king, but emulation is proving code is quite powerful in today's age of quantity over quality," says Brad Oliver, 27, an Arizona State University student who has worked on M.A.M.E. and is now coordinating the effort behind a new emulator project, M.E.S.S. (Multi Emulator Super System), which will emulate several computer and video-game hardware formats via one program.

"The emu development process is getting quicker," observes Gordon Hollingworth, a 26-year-old NT systems manager in England who codes emulators. "It won't be long before a company releases a piece of hardware, and an emulator [for it comes out] two months later. Emulation could advance to such a point that people would ask, 'Why develop [new hardware] when we can emulate the process quicker in Windows, MacOS, etc.?'"

The Internet's emu scene is only 3 years old, but emulators for most of the old video-game hardware -- including the Atari VCS, ColecoVision and Nintendo Entertainment System -- were perfected long ago. All of the major-brand home computers from the late 1970s and early 1980s -- systems from Commodore, Apple, Atari, Tandy and Texas Instruments -- have also been resurrected in software form. These days, most emu programmers work on tweaking and enhancing their emulators. (Hardly anything is released as a "final" product; everything is considered a beta version.)

The challenge now isn't just to make an emulator; it's to make the best emulator possible. Competition to make the best can be intense -- just look at all the Super Nintendo emulators out there (there are at least seven different ones). Rivals often share their technical information, though, and some eventually choose to merge their individual efforts.

M.A.M.E. works differently; theirs is a collective project bringing together hundreds of programmers who code separate driver programs to run arcade machine games. The result: At current count, M.A.M.E. can run nearly 500 arcade-game ROMs (the code that constitutes the game's software), and the program goes through a substantial update about every month.

"Realistically, there's no point in being competitive. If one person withholds information, chances are, a legion of [other] coders will eventually [figure] it out for themselves," says Cameron Mac Millan, 24, a computer systems consultant in Ireland who beta-tests for emu programmers. "Besides, what really is the prize for being first? Having your name in cathode ahead of everyone else's? Ultimately, it just delays the project."

Next Page: It's cool -- but is it piracy?

• View blog reactions