I can't resist. Aargh. Must be the pain pills.
The "home-made and stock" joysticks / arcade controllers displayed in section 1.5 of Wapedia's coverage falls far short of giving an idea of just how wide a spectrum of controllers falls under that umbrella, in the real world.
Not to mention having no good references (that I saw) to where one might obtain such or even where to find details to build them.
They barely mention the spinner, without a reference to what it is, discussing it only in comparison to the driving controller from the Atari 2600- which frankly was (and still is, I have 4 2600 systems and *lots* of carts. Huh- wonder if that's why I dislike most driving games?) one of the banes of my life, being a purely mechanical switch with poor wiping action.
The spinner is far more durable, elegant, and flexible. As anyone who's played Tempest, or one of many Arkanoid variants in an arcade can say with surety.
Pinball Controllers should be listed as quite active, since Visual Pinball and Visual PinMAME does the same thing for older pinballs that M.A.M.E. does for their completely electronic brethren. Alas, while it's fun, it's a bit harder to squeeze a pin table on the screen- although with a widescreen monitor on it's side, it might be better. Huh.
I may not yet have resolved where I stand in terms of aiding and abetting the use of M.A.M.E. and it's many variants by others (I in theory at least have better legal footing than most- I own the games I like to play, but heck, the console emulators are probably officially verboten in the US. of Argh), but there are so *many* variations that were put into video arcade games and thus used when emulating true arcade games- which is done *very* well for a *lot* of titles by M.A.M.E. that I simply have to widen the spotlight.
I think this thread needs more spread.
First, for the DIY folks and people who just wanna know how things work, I offer the Build Your Own Arcade Controls FAQ, which is just a link away from MAMEWorld which is supposed to be (I'm not gonna argue it) the largest MAME resource on the 'net.
Along the left side of that page, about 2/3 of the way down- (after The Emulator, Hosted Sites, Frontends, Builds/Ports [Variants for every taste- I use MAMEUI as having a win32 gui helps me out, and MisfitMAME for playing things like Tempest with wildly different and difficult custom maps] and Cool stuff) there's a block called "Controllers" which gets you to places where you can buy, build, and order custom controllers for most any taste and budget.
Although if you want to play Time Soldiers, that's a pretty specialized joystick. There are a few other truly unique (and, by the guys sent to fix them, intensely disliked) controllers out there that were really bizarre. I imagine a flight yoke might work for Star Wars- but I haven't tried it.
There's some Emulation Links and Gaming Links below that.
While the emulator and a few 'legal' (that is, either released to the public domain or no copyright owners found) ROMs are available via MAMEWorld, you'll have to look elsewhere for the vast majority of the extracted ROM codes that M.A.M.E. uses to recreate a particular game right down to the easter eggs and bugs- because it's the actual software off the boardsets and M.A.M.E. is designed to simulate in software the actual custom chips that software ran on.
At the moment (I'm sure somebody could find more sources) the place I've heard most of with complete sets of ROMS and (for those crazy enough to try and run relatively "modern" arcade games) Compressed Hard Drive [CHD] images is the Pleasuredome Bittorent Tracker in the UK.
I've pretty well lost track of Visual Pinball and VpinMAME sources and news. Sorry about that.
Pleasuredome does cut a new user (yep, gotta register) some slack- the current ROM and CHD update (dunno about full CHD) sets are available on a one-way tracking system where downloads are not counted but uploads are. And the update packs (there is now a system where one only needs to download the difference between what you have on your system and the updated ROMs, which was a really impressive help) are usually the same way.
This is a good thing- if one wants a full set of ROMs starting from nada, the current v.138 pack is just about 24.95 gigabytes. (this is up from .137's 24.1gb) The CHD set is riding at 105 gigs- for now.
If one just wants a full Atari set (2600, 5200, 7800, Jaguar, Lynx) you're looking at a mere 150 megs. But consoles are but pale shades (ok, old consoles) of the arcade originals.
a few things about M.A.M.E. go against conventional wisdom- for one thing, it truly is designed to recreate the hardware a game used *exactly*, so the ROMs work *exactly* as as they did in the arcade- even at the cost of speed.
So it takes a serious system to run the games that used hard drives and PC-class processors when built, and no matter what, the CPU rules. No video GPU's were used in the games, so a PC with a fast video card has no advantage over one with a very low-end video card with the same CPU horsepower.
On the other hand, most of the early (and there were a fair number of years this held true) Arcade Video Games used very slow, low-powered CPU's, often one for video and one for sound.
I've heard it stated that the earliest several thousand games could be played at original speed on as basic a system as a 1 ghz athlon with modest memory- and experience suggests this is fair. I do not know if M.A.M.E. can use multiple CPU cores, but I'd suspect not.
Even vector-monitor based games like Tempest, Battlezone, Star Trek Strategic Simulator, Star Castle and Armor Attack are displayed on raster monitors quite faithfully and smoothly, and you can get and use electronic copies of the overlays that defined the 'maps' for games like Armor Attack that used a see-through plastic guide for buildings.
BTW, you don't have to download the full set if you just want a particular old nostalgic game you want to play again.
But don't expect to download just one rom for a game, often the variant you've seen in an arcade is a variant and will have a 'parent' rom that also has to be present. And the naming can be cryptic as well.
OTOH, 7,300+ of the 9,650 ROMs (in TorrentZip- it plays the game directly from the archive) are under 1 megabyte in the v.137 set.
So a bit of overkill isn't real painful. If folks want to get together and suck a set of ROMs down and then post the smaller ones to hosting sites for others, that seems a better way to go. But I really don't think I'm allowed to.
