It is one of the great inevitabilities in life: as you get older, popular music suddenly becomes too loud and has no rhythm or melody. Young people look on, shake their heads and wonder where it all went wrong for you. The same effect occurs with computer games.
Back in the late 1970s, mysterious machines started appearing in bars and pool halls, giving the player basic control of pixels on a screen. The challenge was controlling a ball bouncing against a wall in a game called Pong. This was new, sophisticated and very addictive. It changed everything. Space Invaders arrived and upped the ante. Billions of valuable student studying hours were lost worldwide. Technology improved and the games with it. Battlezone was a first fascinating foray into three dimensions. Pac-Man, for some reason, was beloved of the fairer sex. Don't talk to me about Defender - virtually impossible unless you were my friend Brian, who could make the game kneel down and beg for mercy.
The way to relive those days is emulation - the art of fooling a computer into thinking it's something else. Check out www.davesclassics.com (PC) or www.emulation.net (Mac) for emulators for the many home computers which have come and gone over the past 20 years. They include the ZX Spectrum, VIC-20 and Commodore 64, and the rest of those underpowered, overpriced classics which were massively compelling and cutting edge in their day. Computer processing power has advanced so much that emulating an older, slower computer is, well, child's play. You name it and some nostalgic hacker has worked it out, meaning ancient games can live again on a modern computer. Better still, anyone who has ever darkened the doors of a dingy arcade can use an emulator called MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulation) to play all the games which drove them demented in their youth.
What the MAME emulator works off are game ROMS - tiny patches of code containing the original program and graphics data for each game. These are a corporate cash-in. The coders who produce the ROMs make a point of using the actual code from the original games, in all 16 glorious colours. There is one catch. You must own or have a licence for each ROM set that you wish to use with MAME. Handily, the only way to own them is by owning the original arcade game. The places which provide ROM images for download offer them on the understanding that you have the legal right to download them: that is, you're a strange person with a garage full of old arcade machines who is looking to stay squarely above the law. The companies which own the copyrights are not making any money from these ROMs, but then they don't seem to have any desire to cater for emulator users by selling the ROMs. Enthusiasts contend that emulation is all that stands between the great arcade games and oblivion, and they have a point. The answer is for the companies to address these issues, realise that there's a lot of arcade game enthusiasts out there and give them a means of buying licences for the games.
Just as the music of the 1960s has been hailed as classic, some of those earliest video games, complete with minuscule memory, abysmal graphics and playschool sounds, are more playable and addictive than many current games for machines from Nintendo and Sony. Render millions of polygons all you like, but for me there will be few greater digital thrills than Gorf promoting me from space cadet when I was 10. After all, this is where the vast computer game industry (twice the size of Hollywood, and growing) started. Asteroids, Galaxian and Scramble are part of what we are.
felton@indigo.ie