Before I actually started cutting wood and spending money, however, I needed some belief that I could make the software work. While I can build a PC and write a little code when I need to, I'm no programmer... and I wanted to make sure the project would actually work before I started construction.
And that's where I decided to become a criminal.
The easiest way to get games into a retro-cabinet is through MAME, which stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. An open source project, MAME is a software environment for loading the original ROMs from arcade games and playing them using keyboard controls, mouse inputs, and PC joysticks. But the MAME development team doesn't actually provide more than a handful of ROMs from 1980's arcade publisher Exidy, all of which are in the public domain (and few of which anyone's actually heard of).
To get Tempest -- or any of the other games -- I had to step into pirate territory.
Breakin' the Law, Breakin' the Law
No reputable company or website (including this one) will just hand over the ROM for an old arcade game. But in order to actually play games with MAME, you need ROMs -- pushing almost everyone who engages into the hobby into tricky legal and moral territory (and it's a topic of real scholarly debate).
Legally, the status of MAME is quite clear: The emulator itself is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as it exists to preserve obsolete technology. In fact, without the work from folks like the MAME team, efforts by people like the Strong National Museum of Play to preserve the past would be much more difficult (see Lara Crigger's excellent GameSpy article on said museum). And as mentioned, legal ROMs do exist, which in turn justifies MAME's existence.
With Tempest, before I sold the upright cabinet, I would likely be in safe territory owning a digital copy of the Tempest arcade ROM for use in MAME. As an owner of the original arcade ROM -- the physical chip -- I would likely escape any legal trouble for owning a copy of that ROM in a different medium. It's effectively the "backup copy" defense that has allowed users to make legal copies of their own software or TV programs for decades.
But today, with that Tempest machine long since sold, I am most likely a filthy pirate.
"If you don't own the PC board, and download the ROM, you're outside the law," explains St. Clair. "But then there's the question about alternate ownership. Is this just like play-shifting TV, where you record something on your PC, and then watch it on your laptop? Is there an analogy there for ROM-shifting?" It's a completely gray area. As I noted earlier, I do, in fact, own the object code required to play Tempest several times over. But I can't exactly connect my Xbox 360 to a third-party spinner and play it in a cabinet. Microsoft won't let me, nor will Atari. But that code does exist in this house, and I did pay for it. Is my "ROM-shifting" to the basement illegal?
For now, the MAME movement remains small enough -- and the money involved minimal enough -- that we'll probably never know. And morally, I've already crossed a line by downloading games I've never even heard of that are included in the torrents of ROMs easily available to anyone with an Internet connection. Still, most of the enthusiasts I talked to genuinely seemed interested in being on the right side of the law. "Those of us that were teenagers in the mid-'80s arcades, we all have money to spend," says St. Clair. "That's why we're still seeing Rubik's cubes and Pac-Man furniture. I had hoped that by now we'd have something like iTunes for ROMs."
How far can I justify things morally, even if I know I'm on the wrong side of the intellectual property speed-limit? Atari's copyright for Quantum, for instance, is now almost 30 years old.
As far as I know, this brilliant trackball game has never been reproduced in any playable format. And since the old cabinet had a vector screen, it's virtually impossible to buy a used Quantum cabinet on the open market.
If you're listening, Atari, Midway, Capcom, and everyone else -- I'd happily pay Good Old Games-like prices to own legal copies of dozens of old favorites that are collecting dust in your back-catalogs. I buy them already, over and over again when you put them out in crappy console collections with bad controls. So why not make it possible to just license the content in its original form? Not crappy Xbox Live Arcade remakes, but the real deal, running on a PC. Or, to put it another way... let me give you money.
But until that's possible, I'll just have to live with the constant threat of the 1980s police knocking on my door and asking for my quarters.
Unsurprisingly, none of the largely anonymous contributors to the MAME project itself, or members of "The Dumping Union" -- a kind of collective for buying rare arcade PC boards and extracting the ROMs -- wanted to be quoted publicly for this story.
The Test Bed
Having put myself at peace with the moral issue, it was short work to prove that yes, I could download MAME and some ROMs onto a spare, ancient Pentium 4 PC in the basement and play Tempest with a mouse. In fact, it's literally as simple as installing MAME, copying the ROM into the ROM folder, and double-clicking on "mame.exe."
Now it was time to start building something.
Continue on to The Perfect Arcade: Part 2, a blow-by-blow construction diary. And don't miss The Perfect Arcade: Part 3, which comprises a modern-day resource guide for all the other do-it-yourself arcade junkies out there.
Freelance writer Julian Murdoch lives with his wife, two kids, a dog, and an arcade in the woods of western Massachusetts. His wife still has the high score at Tempest. You can keep up with his wily doings over at Gamers With Jobs.
