Yesterday I found out that ALL Windows OS after 98 had an Easter Egg audio file…
It’s in the location of “C:/Windows/Media/onestop.mid” and was used to test if your software could run MIDI files. And it’s nostalgic. Listen to it. (Link for those who don’t have Windows.)
There’s also two others in that folder; “town.mid” and “flourish.mid”. Both are also epic.
After listening to both of these, I wanted more. I searched for music ‘styles’ like this but didn’t come up anything unless it was an OST for a specific game.
Then I remembered I had a disc somewhere which had about 2,000 ROMs and an emulator on it. Somehow I found it, and somehow, it wasn’t damaged (I’d had it since I was 3.)
I quickly took all the files off the disc before something terrible could happen, packed a copy of it into a .rar file and uploaded the copy to MediaFire.
Here’s the download link (670 MB): 2000ClassicArcadeGamesMAME
To get it working:
[ol]- Extract it using WinRAR, 7zip, whatever.
- Open the folder and run ‘MAME32’.
- You will get a prompt saying something about libraries being out of date or whatever; it doesn’t matter. Just click ‘Yes’ and a window should open.
- This is the MAME Emulator. On the left you have some ordering lists you can toggle, in the middle you have a list of all the games, and on the right you have a screenshot of the selected game.
- In the top left-hand corner of the MAME Emulator window you have your typical Menu Bar. Click File, and then click ‘Audit all games’. This should take only a few minutes.
- All the games have now been checked, simply double click on any of them to start the emulation! NOTE: Some games won’t work [incompatible emulation software], others will have bugs/are corrupt, and there are quite a large amount of ‘clones’ (duplicate copies of the same game). Somewhere between 250-500 are just ‘fillers’.
- Once the emulation has started, a notification will pop up alerting you that you must be legally entitled to play this game. Press O and then K.
- Another small dialog will appear, this time stating the games info such as name, CPUs (that are being emulated), Sound Cards emulated, etc. Press any key to load the game.
- The game will then do a quick self-diagnostic of itself, seeing if everything is as normal.
- FINALLY! The game is ready.
- To insert credits, press 3 or 4. It depends on the game. To start you usually hit 1, or 2 for a co-op game.
- To check all the controls of the game (and MAME itself), hit TAB. A pop-up menu will appear. Here you can check the controls, adjust them, or even screw with the difficulty settings via ‘Dip Switches’. Either that or hit F2 to bring up Service Mode and see if you can find it there. Sometimes there won’t be a Service Mode because it’s broken/wasn’t included in the original ROM. Oh, ‘P’ pauses the game too.
- Enjoy the game. Once you’ve had enough, hit ESC to quit the emulation and load up another.[/ol]
THINGS TO NOTE:
- Everything isn’t exactly up-to-scratch. The emulator is over 16 years old, be glad it’s even functional.
- Most options in the MAME settings shouldn’t be touched; it’s a balancing act as it is. I’m pretty sure every ‘feature’ on MAME doesn’t work anymore.
- There’s an audio bug you’ll encounter every ~10 minutes where audio seems to overlap and echo until it clips (which isn’t that loud). After about 30 seconds it goes away so you’ll have to endure it for the time being.
- When I used this on my Windows 7 computer, I noticed the colours were fucked up and everything was way off. On my Windows 8 rig, everything is fine. If you’re having colour issues then I can’t help you.
- There is a much newer version of MAME I need to test out, I’m just unsure on whether all the ROMs will still be compatible with the newer version.
- Some games are incredibly laggy/slow for some reason. It’s not your PC’s fault, either the CPUs that are being emulated weren’t powerful enough for the game [and this is what it usually played like] or MAME is an asshole.
- If you tab-out and tab-in, the game’s graphics freak out as you just transported them in and out of a dimension they don’t support.
Enjoy! There are many, many classics here including Galaga, Pac-Man, Frogger, Mario, Donkey Kong, Contra, and Tetris.
I’ll probably get some media up soon, but now I need to get to bed.
probably a win8.1 thing