rich, the name of that game is Keystone Capers. One of the best games on Atari. :D

The first arcade or video game i ever got hooked on was Frogger because my uncle used to fix arcade machines & took a broken  table top of Frogger & fixed it & kept it in his dinning room. I can't remember if i was any good, but my uncle says i was a bit of a wiz at it & that i'd play it non stop. My all time favourite though is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game 1989. I also loved Golden Axe, Final Fight, Crime Fighters & heaps of others. Ahhhhhh hell they were all great back then. Now all we've got is stuff like that crappy Dance Dance Revolution. If kids these days are gulable enough to pay to dance they can go right ahead, but they can do that without giving up all their change aswell. At least with the classics you got to live out some cool adventure or the early ones were like cool challenging puzzle style games. 

Some of you who like old arcade machines might want to check out MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

This program lets you load ROM sets, and play the original arcade games.  And there are sites you can get the ROM sets from.  The big difference is that these are not "ports", but the original game ROM.  You have to put in a "coin" before you can play.

I have been collecting MAME ROMs for about 6 years now, and have been able to play a lot of my old favorites that nobody else even heard of, like "Reactor".

There are even people who create "MAME Boxes".  They take an old arcade machine (or fabricate one), then put in an old computer.  Simply load the games and either buy or create a joystick-button assembly, and away you go.

I built a MAME rig about 4 years ago, but had to sell it when I left LA.  I think I had about 3,000 ROMs on it when I sold it for $600.  I am in negotiation now to buy a broken Ikari Warriors system so I can build a new one.

http://www.mame.net/
http://www.arcadeathome.com/pics.phtml

Some of you who like old arcade machines might want to check out MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

This program lets you load ROM sets, and play the original arcade games.  And there are sites you can get the ROM sets from.  The big difference is that these are not "ports", but the original game ROM.  You have to put in a "coin" before you can play.

I have been collecting MAME ROMs for about 6 years now, and have been able to play a lot of my old favorites that nobody else even heard of, like "Reactor".

There are even people who create "MAME Boxes".  They take an old arcade machine (or fabricate one), then put in an old computer.  Simply load the games and either buy or create a joystick-button assembly, and away you go.

I built a MAME rig about 4 years ago, but had to sell it when I left LA.  I think I had about 3,000 ROMs on it when I sold it for $600.  I am in negotiation now to buy a broken Ikari Warriors system so I can build a new one.

http://www.mame.net/
http://www.arcadeathome.com/pics.phtml

Yeah i mentioned it before. I'm running Mame with a custom made USB Joystick with the real deal arcade machine buttons & stick i bought from an arcade machine repair shop & i made the joystick so it can be bolted down so it won't move. I've got it bolted down to the little slide out board on my desk which is meant for a keyboad really & it works well. I've been collecting the roms for quite a few years now. I have over 5000 on CD, but i only keep about 300 on my hard drive which are my favourites & the ones i think are the cream of the crop. I have arcade games as recent as 2001. I've set it up so my Mame menu list only shows the roms available on my hard drive & i've done great snapshots for all of them. I don't bother with the cabinets & all that other stuff though because in the end it would use up too much HD space. I have a neat little set up though.

  I have MAME on another machine. It is quit the program for playing old arcade games. Alas, I have it on a 266mHz PII so I can only play the oldest of the arcade classics. I haven't updated in a while, hmmm, maybe I better do that.
  I was just starting to get a good collection of ROMs when the stupid DMCA kicked in and the best ROM site(MAME.dk) was closed down  >:( . I haven't searched lately but last time I went looking for games the pickins' were mighty slim.
  You can buy cd's with game ROMs on them, but where's the fun in that?  ::)

My favorite games would have been on my computer. Games which quickly come to mind are Archon, Archon II, M.U.L.E., Mail Order Monsters, Zork II, the Ultima series, the goldbox AD&D series, Bard's Tale series, and Wasteland. As far as arcade games are concerned my favorite would probably be Cobra Command (not to be confused with Chopper Command)... that game just plain rocks.

Kryllith

I built a MAME machine some years ago, but took it apart once the monitor died. The project page is still up at http://www.geocities.com/videoinvasion2001. I still have the prototype of the original I-Pac control panel interface and plan on using it on a cocktail table project sometime in the next 30 years or so :)

I spent some time on the MAME team doing some work on the history database and adding a couple of game drivers, but left some time ago. Like any big project, MAME has become unbearably political. But that's besides the point. MAME is a great way to enjoy games that one wouldn't be able to otherwise, and another way to "relive" the greatness that was the eighties. 

Fantastic :) It's great to hear from someone who was involved in furthering the best software or should i say freeware ever. Would the politics you speak of be all the copyright issues & all that sort of garbage. Because without Mame some of these games might disappear out of existance because the machines & boards eventually bite the dust & some games probably have very few in working order in the world. Besides if some amusment parlours kept the classics istead of some of the crap new games they have & we still had access to them Mame would "almost" be uneccesary. When was the last time you saw a Pac-man or Galaga machine at an amusment parlour. I saw a Galaga table top at a nightclub & i was really surprised & even though i have it at home on Mame i couldn't resist, i had to put money in & have a go. 
Anyhow my friend actually also built a mame machine using an old cabinet & controls he painted. Then he just worked out how to put a TV as a monitor in it & ran it it from the video out port in his PC. I told him to add the scanlines in the options to make it look more authentic. He removed the coin box & all that, but he added a credit button aswell as the P1 & P2 start buttons that were already there on the controls. My custom made joystick setup on my desk pales in comparasin, but i really don't have anywhere to put a whole cabinet, so the joystick was a novel solution i guess.

I was nuts over CENTIPEDE, BOSCONIAN, MS. PAC-MAN, FOOD FIGHT, and GALAGA!

There was a game with a man climbing up a building...and people throwing stuff like flowerpots at him to try and knock him off..anyone remember the game or at least the name of it?

There was a game with a man climbing up a building...and people throwing stuff like flowerpots at him to try and knock him off..anyone remember the game or at least the name of it?


That would be Crazy Climber.  I loved that game also.  :)

A thread about the 80's and videogames?! I could be in here all day! ;)

One of my favorite things in the world still is the NES (I have an operational one and still proudly play it almost daily - it was a part of some of my coolest childhood memories), but that didn't really explode, so it's technically more of a late 80's/early 90's thing.

I think the arcade games, like PacMan, Asteroids, etc were more "80s" 80's, since they came along more in about 1979-83 - the more caricature part of the decade.

I've played some of those at the arcades around here (there's a couple that are still going, and they look very "80s" inside!). I can never get past about Level 7 or 8 on Pacman, but it's still probably my favorite early era game. Just too bad it came out before games started using the memory/save feature! :D


I was and am still not good at arcade games. I used to like to play Q-bert and Frogger.


Frogger sounds fun, but I've never played it - it'll always remind me of George Constanza on Seinfeld now! That was the best "end era" episode! ;D Love Qbert though -- in the old days I remember my dad and I playing that at the yogurt store near our house at the time (back then they had machines everywhere!). That's another game I can't recall finding a way to beat, LOL. ;)

If you get the Mame 32 arcade emulator i think you can save the game by using the "save state" & "load state" options. At least i think it does because i've never tried to use that option, but every other emulator for stuff like nintendo & sega etc have that option. It's not that easy to doaload a complete Mame 32 program that's already configured though & the game roms are even hard to get. If you email me i can give you the link to a site that has almost all the game roms, i don't wanna paste it in this post because of legal & copyright reasons. What i mean by that is it took me ages to fin a stite that "actually" has roms & we don't need another site that does being shut down & you don't know who's reading these posts. 

The first arcade or video game i ever got hooked on was Frogger because my uncle used to fix arcade machines & took a broken  table top of Frogger & fixed it & kept it in his dinning room. I can't remember if i was any good, but my uncle says i was a bit of a wiz at it & that i'd play it non stop. My all time favourite though is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game 1989. I also loved Golden Axe, Final Fight, Crime Fighters & heaps of others. Ahhhhhh hell they were all great back then. Now all we've got is stuff like that crappy Dance Dance Revolution. If kids these days are gulable enough to pay to dance they can go right ahead, but they can do that without giving up all their change aswell. At least with the classics you got to live out some cool adventure or the early ones were like cool challenging puzzle style games. 


Tee hee. That was my era. Golden Axe, R-Type, Final Fight all came onto the 8 bit machines (Spectrum, Amstrad, Commodore etc). They were so playable!  :D

My cousin had a console system called Famicom which played Street Fighter 2, Super Mario Bros., some racing game and an air combat shooting game. Also a few of my cousins had an old atari which had the capability to switch through games by pressing a button or switch on the system, it would often switch through pacman games, qbert, pitfall and other atari classics. This was much different from the atari system our family bought sometime in the 90's which used cartridges instead.

My cousin had a console system called Famicom which played Street Fighter 2, Super Mario Bros., some racing game and an air combat shooting game. Also a few of my cousins had an old atari which had the capability to switch through games by pressing a button or switch on the system, it would often switch through pacman games, qbert, pitfall and other atari classics. This was much different from the atari system our family bought sometime in the 90's which used cartridges instead.


Wasn't the Super Famicom basically the Super Nintendo?  :)

Wasn't the Super Famicom basically the Super Nintendo?  :)

Yeah i think the Super Famicon was just the Japanese version of Super Nintendo.

Yeah i think the Super Famicon was just the Japanese version of Super Nintendo.


Ah I see. I remember a 'Super Mario World' review in a computer magazine for the Famicom years back and thinking 'I've got to get hold of that!' I bought the Super Nintendo and the game about 7 years later, lol - totally a worthy purchase.  8)

I still have 2 Hyper magazines left, one from August 94 & one from November 94 & it they have reviews for Mortal Kombat 1 & 2 Street Fighter 2 Turbo & Super Street Fighter 2 & heaps of Neo Geo & Sega Genesis games, but i guess that's a subject for the 90s forum. It was cool to find them after all these years though & see all those cool articles & it made me remember about the arcade stick i had for playing Street Fighter 2 on SNES. It was called a Viper joystick & there was a nice photo of it in one of the magazines.

Actually i still have a Super Nintendo with 20 games, A NES with 10 games & a Sega Master System 1 with 25 games. I'll attempt to list them.
SNES:
*Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4: Turtles In Time
*Rival Turf
*Super Double Dragon
*The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare
*Batman Returns
*Street Fighter 2 Turbo
*Street Fighter 2 World Warrior
*Super Adventure Island
*Super Mario World
*Super Mario Allstars
*Super Mario Kart
*Super R-Type
*Super Probotector Alien Rebels
*Starwing
*Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournement Fighters
*Alien 3
*Earthworm Jim
*Lost Vikings
*Battletoads: Battlemniacs
*F-Zero

NES:
*Kung Fu
*Cobra Triangle
*Super Mario Bros.
*Super Mario Bros. 2
*Super Mario Bros. 3
*Double Dragon
*Double Dragon 2
*Double Dragon 3
*Castlevania
*Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Sega Master System:
*Double Dragon
*Golden Axe
*California Games
*Vigilante
*Operation Wolf
*Dynamite Dux
*Shinobi
*Shadow Dancer
*Alex Kidd In Shinobi World
*Kenseiden
*Time Soldiers
*Action Fighter
*Wonderboy
*Wonderboy In Monsterland
*Wonderboy 3: The Dragons Trap
*Enduro Racer
*Spellcaster
*R-Type
*After Burner
*Rastan
*The Ninja
*Rampage
*Altered Beast
*Sonic The Hedgehog
*Sonic 2
all with covers & most (except a couple) with booklets aswell

I was quite fond of Defender.

Wasn't Sonic on Sega Genesis rather than Sega Mastersystem? Or are games from both systems compatible to a point?

And another game that was created in the former Soviet Union...TETRIS. I think the famous puzzle game debuted in the mid or late 1980's...I still like it,the best versions IMO are the NES and Game Boy versions.

Space Invaders got me hooked on videogames.

When were the first pro wrestling games released for arcade and home systems and what were their names?
I vaguely remember a WWF game....

i was partial to pitfall,space invaders,defenders and ka-boom.

Wasn't Sonic on Sega Genesis rather than Sega Mastersystem? Or are games from both systems compatible to a point?

And another game that was created in the former Soviet Union...TETRIS. I think the famous puzzle game debuted in the mid or late 1980's...I still like it,the best versions IMO are the NES and Game Boy versions.

Space Invaders got me hooked on videogames.


Sonic the Hedgehog was on Genesis, but they made an adapter for the 8 bit Master system that you could attach it to and play Genesis games on it.. it came out right before, I believe. I only know this because my brother had it.

Wasn't Sonic on Sega Genesis rather than Sega Mastersystem? Or are games from both systems compatible to a point?

And another game that was created in the former Soviet Union...TETRIS. I think the famous puzzle game debuted in the mid or late 1980's...I still like it,the best versions IMO are the NES and Game Boy versions.

Space Invaders got me hooked on videogames.

Yep Sonic 1 & 2 came out on Master System aswell, but the Genesis versions were so much better. Although the Master System versions were pretty good for 8 bit.
As for the Wrestling games, i have no idea. I'm was never into sports except BMX & i was never into any sports games either except California Games & some driving, Formula 1 & motorcycle games, so i'm not the best person to ask. There are tonnes of Wrestling games in the arcade from the early & mid 80s. I'd say maybe around 84, 85 or 86 would be when the first wrestling games came about when the graphics capabilities & game capabities allowed for that. The early games from about the late 70s to about 84 were pretty basic & the earliest ones from the late 70s were in black & white.

Tee hee. That was my era. Golden Axe, R-Type, Final Fight all came onto the 8 bit machines (Spectrum, Amstrad, Commodore etc). They were so playable!  :D

Yep the Golden Axe, R-Type, Final Fight, Double Dragon, Vigilante, P.O.W., After Burner, Crime Fighters, Dragoninja, Ninja Turtles era  was my favourite era for arcade games aswell. They weren't too simple & sketchy like the earliest arcade games & the graphics were just right & they weren't too over the top like the unexciting ones nowadays with more gimmicks like 3D graphics which i think looks crap anyway. They were perfect & just right & just the way they should be. I lost interest in Arcade games sometime after Street Fighter 2 & Mortal Kombat, when they they released Tekken 3D graphics & started doing a million & one Street Fighter 2 tournament fighting clone games. Digitized graphics like T2 arcade & Mortal Kombat was enough for me, 3D graphics is just too much. They should focus on good, smooth & addictive gameplay & a good concept rather than worring about trying to update sound & graphics technology every 2 seconds. Look at Neo Geo they've been making 2D 32 bit games for ages & some of them look absolutly amazing, to help understand my point though check out a game called Last Blade 2 it looks & sounds amazing for 32 bit capabilities & i'm sure most of you know of the Metal Slug game series. I still think 2D cartoon style looks the best & it looks just like that exactly, a cartoon. Which is what i could have only dreamed of in the very early 80s, i wanted games to look as good as a cartoon & when the mid/late 80s games started being made i was in heaven, but now it's just getting ridiculous & over the top. Ninja Turtles was so much like the cartoon & at the time it just blew me away, it was all i ever wanted in a game, simple yet playable & addictive & it looked & sounded great & like the cartoon. There was some early stuff that was mid 80s that looked amazing aswell like Rolling Thunder, dam* that game looks good for it's time & it's so addictive & playable.

Sonic 1&2 were early 90s games not 80s unless sonic 1&2 were out then but on the master system?

i loved  Wizards & Warriors, nintendo 87-88.  We have copies of all nintendo games except can't seem to find this one, which is my fav...

Asteroid, Pac Man and Donkey Kong