The Fundamental Question: What Needs to be Emulated?

[nurnobi40]

Floating in the back of this new collection, and in the many new LCD and electronic games being emulated by the MAME Team, is the core concern of “what will bring the most of the old game to life to be able to experience and study it?” With “standard” arcade games, it is often just a case of providing the video output as well as the speaker output and accepting the control panel signals either through a keyboard or through connected hardware. While you do not get the full role-play of being inside a dark arcade in the 1980s, you do get both the chance to play the original program as well as study its inner workings and the discoveries made in the process. Additional efforts to photograph or reference control panels, outside artwork and so on are also being done to the best available amount.

This question falls into sharp focus, however, with these telemarketing data electronic toys. The plastic is such a major component of the experience that it may not be enough for some researchers and users to be handed a version of the visual output to really know what the game was like. Compare the output of Bandai Pair Match:



…to what the original toy looked like:



The “core” is there, but a lot is left to the side out of necessity. Documentation, research and capturing all aspects of these machines will be required if they are to be ever recreated or understood in the future.

It’s the best of times that we are able to ask these questions while originals are still around, and it’s a testament to the many great teams and researchers who are bringing these old games into the realms of archives.

So please, take a walk through the Handheld History collection (as well as our other emulation efforts) and relive those plastic days of joy again.

Shout Outs and Thanks

Many different efforts and projects were brought together to make the Handheld History collection what it is. (We intend to expand it over time.) As always, a huge thanks to the MAME Developers for their tireless efforts to emulate our digital history; a special shout-out to Ryan Holtz for his announcements and highlighting of advances in this effort that inspired this collection to be assembled. Thanks to Daniel Brooks for maintenance of The Emularity as well as expanding the capabilities of the system to handle these new emulations. Sources for the photographs of the original plastic systems include The Handheld Games Museum and Electronic Plastic. (It is amazing how few photos of the original toy systems exist; in some cases Ebay sales are the only documented photographs of any resolution.) As a reference work for knowing which systems are emulated and how, we relied heavily on the work of the Arcade Italia Database site. Thanks to Azma and Zeether for providing metadata on images and control schemes for these games; and a huge thanks to all the photographers, documenters, scanners and reviewers who have been chronicling the history of these games for decades.