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How did you learn about MAME?

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Jdurg:
This is always a question that I have for those I encounter in the emulation community.  How did you discover MAME?

For me, it was pretty simple.  It was the fall of 1998 and I had just gotten onto my network at college.  (Freshman year where I was introduced to a LOT of things.  ;)  :P  ;D ).  I went and got a TON of MP3 files as well as Grand Theft Auto.  (The Original.  God knows how many hours my friends and I wasted killing each other in that game).

I wanted to get a copy of Mortal Kombat since I loved playing it in the arcade.  So I went onto the www.dogpile.com search engine and searched for "Mortal Kombat Arcade".  On the first page, I found a link to the mame.net forums.  I then learned about how I could play the original arcade game on my computer!  I couldn't believe it.  I downloaded MAME, downloaded the ROM and had no idea what I was doing.  I registered on the forums and got the living hell chewed out of me.  I then learned that 90% of all people on emulation forums are ass-holes and aren't willing to help out the new people.  A couple of people, however, were willing to help and politely directed me to the FAQs.  I read them all, did more reading, and eventually figured it all out.  Soon, I was playing MK and SF2, and all the arcade games I remembered playing as a kid.  I was in heaven.  Soon, I learned how to compile MAME myself and eventually get rid of all the things that annoyed me.  I was in heaven.

Now, I'm building my own arcade cabinet and when all is ready to go I'll compile a personal copy of MAME with all the tweaks I want in order to play all the games I want.

Still, to this day, I will always remember sitting on my bed in my dorm room as I loaded up Mortal Kombat for the first time on my computer.  It was like heaven.  I couldn't believe it, and to this day I still can't.

So how did you all get introduced to MAME and emulation in general?

polaris:
not as long ago, but i was searching for a way to play pac-land, took me about a year to work out mame :laugh2:

Jdurg:

--- Quote from: polaris on December 31, 2007, 08:39:31 pm ---not as long ago, but i was searching for a way to play pac-land, took me about a year to work out mame :laugh2:

--- End quote ---

Ain't that the truth?  MAME is NOT easy to learn, but once you learn the ins and outs it becomes pretty sweet with how much you can customize it.  I remember seeing CPS2 get emulated, and the complete SHOCK when CPS3 was emulated.  Because of the work of some INCREDIBLE decryptors, we've been able to properly emulate both systems and I will be able to play SF1 through SF3 on my cabinet when it's built.  Amazing work.   :applaud:

danny_galaga:

it was a dark and stormy night.

hehe. actually a friend showed it to me in 2002 on his laptop. i still cant believe it didnt totally blow me away. the next year after i came back from holidays, the idea had grown on me. when i first started thinking of building a cab, i didnt even know you could buy joysticks and buttons! i was going to make them from scratch  :o

MaximRecoil:
I was in Yahoo's Car Chat: 1 chat room in late 2001 talking to the resident computer expert of that room about how I wished/wondered if there was a way to play Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out on the PC. I knew about emulation because I had some of the commercial Atari and Namco Playstation discs, which emulated games like Missile Command and Pac-Man respectively. I didn't think it could happen unless Nintendo themselves, or a commercial company associated with Nintendo did it, and even then I wondered how they would deal with the dual monitor display output of the original games.

At the time I'd only had a PC and internet access for a few months, so everything was still new to me.

Then he said he found something and gave me some links. After he showed me how to work the command-line version of MAME, all of the sudden Punch-Out was displaying on my screen, and then, Super Punch-Out. Not ports, but the actual games. I couldn't believe it. I'd wished for a way to play those games at home since the 80's, and until that point, the SNES version of SPO was the closest I'd gotten.

I own an SPO machine now, along with a PO boardset that I can swap into it, so I don't need MAME for those games anymore, but playing them on MAME is what got me to seriously look into getting the real machine.

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