Classic videogaming is not dead. Find out how to play your favorites.

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The sounds of your favorite old videogame are as familiar to you as the strains of your favorite old songs. While essentially the same, the blips and bleeps of "Pac-Man" are completely different from those of, say, "Dig-Dug."

So it might be news to you that you can relive this part of your childhood in the form of these classic games, for free, thanks to the Internet. What's more, these games are downloads, yours to keep and cherish forever. How does an arcade-perfect collection of your favorite games sound?

Emulators and ROMs
The gaming goodness comes your way in the form of emulators and ROMs. Emulators are software programs that essentially duplicate the innards of old videogame machines as well as classic consoles such as the Atari 2600. ROMs are the games themselves, extracted from the source code of the originals and zipped up to be read by the emulators.

If this seems a bit confusing, don't worry. There are some excellent sites that are devoted to this nostalgic pursuit. At ClassicGaming.com you can find a variety of emulators and hundreds of ROMs to download. William Cassidy, the ClassicGaming.com site director, explains how all this is possible.

Mame
By far the most popular type of emulator, according to Cassidy, is Mame. Mame and its Windows counterpart, Mame32, emulate more than 1,500 classic arcade games such as "Joust," "Centipede," and "Pole Position." There's also a Mac version called MacMame.

Here's how to use Mame:
  1. Download Mame. Be sure to download the binaries, not the source code, unless you're interested in programming.

  2. Download the game ROMs. ROMs are copies of the software originally stored in an arcade game's ROM (read only memory). Since the legalities involving ROMs are far from resolved, you'll have to find the ROMs on your own.

  3. Install or unzip the Mame file. Notice that in the newly created Mame directory there's a subfolder called ROMs.

  4. Take your downloaded ROM files and put them into the ROM folder in the Mame directory. Do not unzip the ROM files. Mame was created to accept ROM files in a zipped format.

  5. Start up Mame. From the file menu select "show only available." If you don't follow this step, Mame will list every supported game whether you have it or not.

  6. Note that you can customize controls within each game's properties. These include sound, game controller, and video settings.

  7. Select that game you want to play and click Run. To skip past the first warning screens type "ok" (without quotes). The game will need to boot up within Mame.

  8. Here are your game's controls:
    • 5 and 6 insert quarters into the game.
    • 1 and 2 let you select one or two players.
    • During the game you can adjust specific game settings by hitting the Tab key.
    • Hit Esc to exit the settings menu.


Console emulators
Most other emulators will focus on one game console such as the Atari 2600 or the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Some of these include Stella (an Atari 2600 emulator), ColEm (ColecoVision), Genecyst (Sega Genesis), and NESticle, which emulates the good old NES. "Virtually all console systems before 1995 or so have been emulated," Cassidy says, "and those that haven't been are usually so obscure you've never heard of them."

Emulate multiple consoles
The only emulator that handles multiple consoles successfully is called Mess. Most people, it seems, would rather find the emulator that gets their favorite games just right. "Mess is more popular for the consoles it emulates that no other emulators can, if you follow my meaning," Cassidy says.

Emulators for the Mac
Emulation.net is the one-stop shop for Mac users interested in emulating classic and not-so-classic game machines, including such greats as the Super Nintendo, the Atari 800, and of course the MAME.

So this community of classic game enthusiasts have given these games a whole new lease on life with emulator technology. But at this point you might be asking, are these games legal? Isn't someone, somewhere, going to want to be paid?

Roger Chang contributed to this article.

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