I was playing on one of those multi-cade things at an arcade a few weeks ago. I don’t know a thing about those things so I don’t know what one it was, but I played some Qix, DK, 1943, Juno First, Lady Bug, Centipede, and a few others on that machine.
It was fun playing those games in the ambience of a real arcade, but I must say I was a bit taken aback by how crappy the emulation was. Some games outright glitched in weird ways and were unplayable. The monitor was LCD and all blocky-looking, and the audio was terrible. In 1943, that awesome “bawhooooshh” noise the game makes when you down one of the larger green bombers was worse than incorrect—it was omitted entirely.
I know MAME isn’t perfect either, but comparing the two, I can’t fathom why anybody in their right mind would choose the multi-cade route over MAME. Am I missing something?
There was another machine in that arcade that was all Williams games, including Smash TV and Robotron. It had the dual sticks, but get this—they were both 4-way! WTF, how useless is that?