Virtual OS/2 International Consumer Education

October 1998


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More Games for OS/2 YES!!!
with
M.A.M.E. for OS/2

By: Thom Davis - confed2@sssnet.com

Yes, I said GAMES for OS/2. Martin Amodeo has done a port of M.A.M.E. (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) Ok so these are not NATIVE OS/2 games, but hey, let's take what we can get! Ask yourself right now how many quarters you put into Dig Dug, Tron, Mr. Do or any of those coin munchers, I know for a fact that I spent many an hour playing Tempest with the money I was making from mowing lawns when I was kid. Well, this is revenge time for me.

The Emulator has got some good points and some bad ones, let start with the good stuff and we'll talk about it like we already know what we are doing, cause it's really that easy to use. First off, grab a game or 2 from the M.A.M.E. site (for testing purposes only), put it in a SUBdirectory under the MAME for OS/2 program, we'll work with this later. Your then ready to fire it up

The interface.

Looking like a Rainbow with a pot of gold inside the interface is pretty straight forward with basic Open, Scan and Add options. This is where you'll want to let the program SCAN subdirectories to look for the game(s) you downloaded. It will set all games up in their basic modes, after you have done that, click the OPEN option and select the game, BOOM! Arcade Machine on the Desktop.

Another few selections are GAME, this is where you can set a few extra options like using a mouse, keyboard or Joystick you can use the cheat option (I haven't tried this, no need, YET!) DISPLAY, where you can set the frame rate and timing methods and finally, the Proverbial ABOUT, nuf' said about that :)

Now on to actual GAMEPLAY.

The games are not "JUST LIKE" they are ACTUALLY the games that you played at the arcades! Some take a few liberties with colors and such, but that is only because they have not quite gotten all of the code for that particular game or they need to figure it out some more, none the less, I have not found one game that has not played like the original.


The program in my opinion is good and very playable, not totally finished, but far enough along that I will be including it on our Centari Select CD. This brings us to the other side of the coin, I'm going to be nice about this, after all, it is a FREE program and it is still being worked on.

Some of the games we played in the arcades were pretty complicated, this fact was not overlooked when running a certain few on my Centari G'Kar System with a 300mhz AMD with 64meg of ram, 8.4gig HDD and a 4meg Video card, Elevator Action was REALLY slowwwww, but try to remember, the program is FREE!


You can flip the program into the background and it will automatically pause, nice feature for the BOSS, also when you load a game, it will take use of the mouse if you are using it in a game, but when you pause it will give it up right away, this is also very nice.

Conclusions

Another publication has done a review about MAME for OS/2 recently, but theirs did not include the version with SOUND! Mine did, Marty was kind enough to let me grab a copy of it. I had previously tried the no sound version and found it good enough to start asking Marty a few question about it and to send my compliments on creating a OS/2 version of it. Marty informed me that the Sound version caused a massive amount of overhead in the program and would make it run slower and not all sounds were correct, this was very true.I got the sound version loaded it up and started blasting some Alien butt, sounds of course were a little off & choppy, but after playing them a few times with no sound, I could deal with the slowness.

Some games have MAJOR problems when it comes to them running with sounds, such as"1942", which had my machine doing some fantastic actions with the mouse, it was everywhere but where it should have been, when I informed Marty of this, he told me to adjust the frequency of the sounds, Boom! Works fine now, so I little bit of tweaking has to be done, but this is also a fault of the DOS and WinDOS versions so I do not hold him responsible for it, he just did the port :)

Like I said, this is really a FANTASTIC piece of software for the price we pay for it. It brings a lot of GOOD, Quality games to the OS/2 platform and a lot of nostalgia too, but hey, us Old guys like to re-live our childhood sometimes, that's not to say that the games won't appeal to the younger set, but when you think back to actually dropping a ton of quarters into those machines and now you can just hit the button and run Tron through his paces for as many times as you can without having to run to the dollar changer every five minutes or so, this is just too Cool!

We'll be providing a link to MAME for OS/2 on the Centari Computers Support page so that you can always get the latest version, so link in, grab a copy and get down to kicking some Galaxian tails

MAME for OS/2 can be obtained from the OS/2 Netlabs site: http://www.netlabs.org/projects/mame.html

Thom Davis
Centari Computers
http://pages.sssnet.com/Confed2
Toll-Free 1-877-OS2-WARP

Editor's note: As of October 15th, there is a new version of MAME for OS/2 available. For a complete list of changes check the MAME for OS/2 page!

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