Arcade

Type: Coin-Op
Firstly released in: United States
First release: 1971
Release and compatibility details: "Arcade" means generally standalone videogame machine which plays one computer game, mostly after insertin some coin(s) to play for one game. First arcades have been released in early 70s in US.

Success and unsuccess:

Most popular years: 1982-now
Most popular countries: Japan, US, West Europe
Amount of games in database: 4849 (list)
Amount of music records in database: 138 (list)
Amount of downloadable MOD tunes: 13 (list)
Amount of downloadable MIDI tunes: 78 (list)
Importance on the market in the most popular years: Very high

Characteristics:

It's very common mechanism. You come, insert coin and play one game. This is principle of all Arcades - generally every arcade machine is "computer" with processor etc., completely made to run exactly ONE concrete game. This game will be run when inserted some low value coin and after the enemies will kill you, you have to insert next one to play another game or continue.

Many people say the first Arcade game ever was Pong in 1972 from Atari, but it's not exactly true. First Arcade game was "Computer Space" in 1971 from Nutting Associates, but it was completely unsuccessful. Pong, released one year later, became big success and caused the Arcade game market to grow. And it is growing until now, there are constantly published around 100 Arcade games ever year.

Of course, Arcade games are still better and better because they don't depend from any hardware standards or machines. Every machine uses its own hardware and it's fully adapted for the concrete game. That's the reason why the quality of Arcade games is very high, and is mostly 2-3 years before the computer games.

Games and music info:

Most common media for storing games: Built-in
Average packed game size: 150 kB

Emulation info:

MAME - This Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator tries to emulate as many of the arcade machines as possible, creating emulations completely for each one separately. It's very tough work and because of that it is rather slow and don't expect that lot of new games will work. But it still supports over 3000 games more than 5-6 years old, so use this really first and catch something else only if you won't be satisfied.

Other Arcade Emulators on Zophar's Domain - lot of other emulators which emulates part of Arcade games mostly with common hardware, often they emulate games which aren't yet emulated by MAME or are faster. The best ones to look at are Nebula (for Capcom Play System 2), Nebula 2 (for Model 2), NeoRageX (for NeoGeo hardware arcades), Raine or Zinc.

This emulation info was written on 15.January 2003. (This time is very important, because emulation info very depends on the time it was written - emulators can improve a lot after this time..).