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Donkey Kong

…when it was the destination for the day and you came with pockets full of quarters?  And when you got there the sounds and flashing lights and smells of pizza and hotdogs?

It is possible to recreate some of those feelings by playing the original games on your PC!

MAME logo

Thanks to Nicola Salmoria and the MAME team there is an emulator that is capable of playing thousands of the original games from those arcades.

MAME is a program that allows your PC to simulate the original hardware that the original games ran on.  It then reads the original programs for these games and allows you to play them.  The programs for the games were stored on ROM chips on the motherboards of the arcade games.  These chips can be dumped to files to be used on modern computers.

To use MAME you will need to get the emulator itself, and some ROM images.  The emulators home page is The Official Site of the MAME Development Team.  Here you can download the executable files or the source files to compile your own program.

MAME is a command line program, and might take a little work to configure and get working.  An easier version to use, complete with a graphical user interface is MameUI.  this program can be downloaded here.  Just download this program and install it like any other windows program.

You will then need to get some ROMs.  According to copyright law, you can’t use any ROMs that you don’t physically own, So don’t go Google and search for MAME ROMs or anything like that.

A few free and non-copyright bound ROMs can be located at the official MAME site.  You can then put these ROMs into the ROM folder of your program and start playing them.  Enjoy!