Sure, Gameworks may be a cool place to blow a couple of hundred bucks in an afternoon or so, but after a while, you begin to realize that out of all the games there start to get repetitive after a while. Basically, you find that there are basically four genres that nearly all of these games fall into: Sports, fighting, racing and shooting. Then you slowly begin to realize that for the past couple of years now, all that anyone has been making are sports, racing, fighting or shooting games. Then suddenly you begin to have this uncontrollable urge to either a) head for the door, b) head for the pinball machines (at least nobody has figured out how to ruin those yet) or c) fly into a fit of rage and overturn a whole wall of Street Kombat eviscerators with decapitations and lotsa' gore part 6, which will probably get you escorted from the building by the authorities. In short, it is as JROK, one of the classic arcade game enthusiasts out there puts it, "Oh look two walls full of Turbo Nitro Ultra Fighting Full Disemblowment Chainsaw Real Blood Street Boxer Headbutt part 3"... Yawn.. "Where are the pinball machines ?"
To many, the modern era of arcade games has meant a total sacrifice of game content and replayibility for the sake of a few flashy graphics. At GameWorks, however, nestled into a tucked-away corner on the top floor is a nice little cache of some of the classics to emerge from the early days of arcade gaming, such as Pac-Man, Galaxian, Donkey Kong (as well as one of my personal favorites of the era, Phoenix). Unfortunately, as with everything else, even these are ridiculously overpriced, as is about everything else in this place.
But one should not lose hope. Over the users, these classic games have developed a devited following, and many have ended up in private collections. With computers developing the way that they are, it is rapidly becoming possible to make full speed software emulators of the processors used by these old games, such as the 68000 and z80 processors. From the schematics of the original game boards, and dumps of the ROM images into fies more digestible to modern computers, emulators of the older games are beginning to spring up like wildfire. At the forefront of the emulation movement is MAME, which stands for Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator. Programmed worldwide by a team of programmers, in less than six months this one has support for nearly 170 games, with many more classics on the way, including Bubble Bobble, perhaps my personal arcade favorite. The games that end up in each new release do not cease to amaze some people. In recent times, all of the Mr. Do! games have been emulated, as have nearly all of the Atari vector games (which were also done previously by EMU, another emulator) and most of the classic games by Williams (unfortunately, Sinistar doesn't work yet.) While the emulation is not quite perfect on many of the games (there are still quite a few without sound yet,) a lot of them are perfect. In fact, one post on a MAME-related message board suggests, the only way to get these games to be any more authentic would be to stick a paperclip in the floppy drive slot and watch nervously for the arcade operator. If you would like to find out more about MAME and some of the other emulators out there, I highly recommend the Atmospherical Heights site, which keeps a large collection of the necessary stuff to put an arcade in your own PC.
But the current emulation scene is by no means limited just to the arcades. In fact, many of the home console systems are now being emulated on many different platforms. These ranmge from dinosaurs such as the Odyssey 2 and the 2600 (which is the onw I wasted a good chunk of my childhood on) all way to having near-perfect emulation of the SNES and Genisis systems. There are even a few brave souls out there trying to write a PlayStation emulator! (All that I can say to them is good luck, at least until everyone owns Pentium III systems and a whole lotta' graphics hardware.) To sum it up, basically it is now not only possible to have both Mario and Sonic sitting in the background on the same system while you play Donkey Kong, but you can even write webpages at the same time... We can only look forward to the day when we have a Saturn in one window and a Nintendo64 in the other....
Thanks to many of these projects, one can experience what it was like to use systems that one would never even known existed. These emulators will all come in handy one of these days when our kids are asking us "you programmes this stuff with only 16MB of RAM?" and "What was a floppy disk?" Who knows, maybe one of these days people will think we are crazy when we write emulators of Windows95 for the crays we'll all be running. Hey, right now there are people out there writing TRS-80 emulators, and I am quite convinced that these people are about ready to be committed. Of course, when soneone actually does write a Win95 emulator, they will be pressured to slow it down considerably to create a more realistic experience.