Writters and Bloggers

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With the advent of new this and new that, sometimes I feel most comfortable with something proven… something that’s withstood the test of time.  Maybe it’s the old man inside my thirty-something body, silently muttering to himself about better days while eating cold beans out of a can.  Sure I have an Ipod… but I also have a sweet record collection.  New car?  Yeah, newish… but I still drive my first car, a ’67 Chevelle Malibu.  And video games?  I have a 360… but sometimes nothing does the trick better than a classic video game.

Still, who wants to play old school on a PC?  Besides the fact that playing an old arcade game on a keyboard is like eating a hot dog in a sock, it also lacks that nostalgic feel of worn buttons, an old wooden cabinet, and a strange fat man wearing a green apron filled with warm tokens.  So, you have a wad of cash to blow?  Good… invest it in a MAME powered arcade cabinet.

If you don’t know what MAME is, it’s basically an emulator designed to play old games… simple as  that.  There exists out there people who will happily sell and deliver to you an honest to goodness arcade cabinet, with a PC inside, and it’s only job is to make sure you can enter the 30 lives code in Contra, accurately send six mugs of beer down the bar in Tapper, and get trapped in Super Mario’s minus worlds.  Most cabinets come preloaded with hundreds of games, and the enterprising owner can add more with the ease of a thumb drive.  Soon, you’ll recapture the hundreds of hours you would have wasted in your youth, if your parents hadn’t been so stingy as to not buy you the entire collection of NES cartridges (it isn’t like public school charges an admittance fee).

Most cabinets advertised on line start at a little over two grand, with more expensive models adding larger monitors and speakers.  I have yet to see any site offering to send over the creepy green apron man, but a cleverly placed ad on Craigslist should remedy that problem.  Hell, he might even have warm tokens.