Laser Mame

[Dr Laser]

Those I can find on eBay. That is all I need to have to legally play the game on my projector?

Hmmm you in US... I don't know then. You have that YMCA....ops DMSA...or whatever is called....Millennium act. But I think if you have a cartridge and you're emulating Atari 2600. I think it should be ok.

[marconi]

I think Ive been LaserMamed

[carmangary]

What does an Atari 2600 cartridge have to do with LaserMAME?

You would need the ROMS from the stand up arcade game (ie Asteroids) for you to be legal. But really, who cares. It isn't like those companies are making any money off of those games anymore.

[Dr Laser]

Asteroids and many others were ported over from Arcade machine to Atari 2600 by Atari itself!. So they are the same games!.

[Pangolin]

A few points.

The version of Asteroids and the other games that ran on the 2600 were not really the same games. They were really lame versions of the games. To be legit, you have to have the ROMs for what you are emulating, not some dumbed down version of what you are emulating.

And actually yes, Atari and other companies are making money off of these games. You can buy legitimage PC emulators from Atari that have these legacy games.

For a while, Rob Mudryk and Matt Pollack tried to work with an IP attorney to license the games from Atari and others, but it seems that it didn't go very far...

Best regards,

William Benner

[allthatwhichis]

Is the "arcade game board" the ROM?

[buffo]

If you have the entire arcade board, you also have the rom, yes. The rom is part of the circuit board, but it's usually only one (or a few) chips. (Note that you can sometimes find these boards on E-bay, but some of them have had the rom(s) removed.)

A few arcade cabinets could actually be made to play different games just by switching the rom chips and applying different graphics to the exterior of the cabinet. Other boards would play one game only. I believe Asteroids was a single-game board.

MAME recreates (emulates) the circuitry needed to play the game, but you still have to have the rom image to make it work. And unless you actually have the physical ROM, you really don't have a legal way to get a copy of the image of the chip. Nevertheless, there are numerous websites where you can download the rom images needed to make MAME work. And yes, this is copyright infringement - except in specific (and rare) cases where the manufacturer has either released the rom image to the public, or officially declared the software to be abandoned. So you are taking a risk (albeit a small one) by using them.

Adam

[james1095]

Well this has become a bit stale it seems, and the project appears to have died.

Is anyone working to resurrect Laser MAME? How about an output module to drive the cheap soundcard DACs people are making?

I actually own most of the original Atari vector arcade machines, but it sure would be cool to play them on a giant screen with a laser projector

When the project initially appeared I thought it was cool, but never thought I'd own the ($$$$) hardware necessary to do it. Now thanks to dramatic progress in diode lasers, as well as cheap commodity PC hardware outperforming the high end workstations of a few years go I'm getting close to finishing a <$300 RGB projector with ~1.5W output so this could be a reality.

[flecom]

For the Record:

Laser Mame was the invention of Rob Mudryck and Matt Polack
I was setting in Rob's old office in Bay Village one day and he asked me what kind of systems used vector graphics besides laser shows. I mentioned Arcade, Military, Radar, Scientific and Medical CRTS. His next line was like "Have you ever seen the mame emulator?" I explained about the simple core vector graphics engine used on older arcade systems and the next time I was up for a visit, he had some preliminary code. Matt helped out later on parts of it.

Rodney made a similar product when Rob didnt put it in the public domain.
While I respect Rodney for putting a public version of Laser Mame up, I feel a bit of clarification is in order.

Steve Roberts

I hate to reply to such an old thread but it predated me so I would just like to comment...

there may have been a group of people that made the application before the publicly available one, but honestly who cares?

had they released it they would have been (probably) the only laser mame... the reason there is more than one is because they didn't want to share... which is pretty lame

[james1095]

Yeah, MAME is an open source project made possible only by generous contributions of time and expertise. To develop a cool addition and then not distribute it does seem a bit lame. Something with such limited market, especially back at that time, if it isn't open source or at least free, it's pretty much guarranteed to die on the vine.

I have no problem with people trying to make a living, but I'm pretty much always willing to share my hobbies, all I ask from those wanting to duplicate or build off of my own work is give me some credit. It's nice when others do the same.