Words and Links

Since the conception of the MMORPG, World of Warcraft [WoW] has constantly set itself apart.  Starting as a computer RPG it has morphed true to its name into a world all its own.  Here are a few facts to acquaint you with the growing extent of that world.

Subscriber Percentage by Continent:
Asia        48%
North America    22%
Europe        17%
Other        13%

World of Warcraft has 11.5 million subscribers worldwide.

If you only took the players in North America and Europe, they alone produced 800 million per year in revenue.  Larger than the GDP of Samoa (537 million).  This is not including the other 5.5 million subscribers in Asia who often pay by the hour.

The most popular race are Humans at 19% of all characters.

One of five World of Warcraft subscribers are female.

The average American subscriber spends 22.7 hours a week on WoW, whereas the average American spends 35 hours at work and almost 40 hours watching TV.

Players complete 16.6 million quests a day.  They participate in 3.5 million auctions a day.

The 11.5 million players also include celebrities like Dave Chappell, Mila Kunis, McCauley Culkin, Jenna Jameson, Cameron Diaz, Elijah Wood, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Simpson, and Mr. T.

To put 11.5 million players into perspective, that’s more than the population of Cuba or the City of New York.

It only took a mere 150 developers to create 30,000 items, 1,400 locations, 7,600 quests, and 5,300 NPCs.

The server side of World of Warcraft consists of 20,000 computers, 1.3 petabytes of storage, 75,000 CPU cores, 5.5 million lines of code, and 2 million words of text.  This adds up to $136,986 of upkeep costs per day.  The same as Purchasing a brand new Audi R8 every day.

Info and graphic courtesy of OnlineSchools.org

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!