When I was a freshman and sophomore in high school I had a part-time job at a pizzeria/video game arcade called Old Towne Pizzeria. We made a pretty decent pizza, and also had subs, frozen things we dropped in the deep fryer, ice cream, cotton candy, popcorn, etc. When people bought a pizza they would get a few tokens to use in our video games. It was a pretty big place attached to a mall. We probably had close to 100 video games. This was in the early 80's right when Pac Man was the big new thing.

One of the fringe benefits of working there was we got free tokens to play video games. There was one game that stood out as a favorite of mine. You played a robber that ran through mine shafts picking up bags of money. The goal was to get all of the bags of money to the surface and drop them in a wheelbarrow. There were two wardens chasing you through the shafts. There were little train cars running back and forth in certain spots. You could jump in one of these and go faster than you or the wardens could run, plus when you are in one of these cars the wardens couldn't get you.

This was more than 20 years ago and I have never seen this game anywhere else since then, but I can still hear some of the sound effects just like it were yesterday. I forgot what the name of the game was so it has been difficult to do Google searches for it. Every now and then when I am feeling nostalgic I will see if I can find anything about it on the web, but have been unsuccessful, until yesterday.

It occurred to me that there has to be someone obsessed with classic 1980's arcade games that has compiled some sort of database, and I was right. I did a Google search on "arcade games database" and found The Killer List of Video Games. What gave me immediate hope with this website is that they have a search box with a checkbox next to it to let you search the game descriptions rather than just by title.

I spent maybe a half hour searching on various words and combing through all of the results, but it was daunting because there are over 4,300 games in the database! I did a search on "bags" and that was the magic word. I found it. The name of the game is Bagman. Here are some images:



While I was initially doing Google searches for this game yesterday I kept getting results that included a site called MAME. I glanced over it but didn't think it was anything useful. MAME is an acronym for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

After I discovered what the name of my favorite nostalgic game was I was able to start doing some searches for that to see if I could find any information on it. Was there an on-line version I could play? Could I buy a copy anywhere?

Well this MAME term kept coming up again. It turns out there is a whole enthusiast community out there that is dedicated to not letting these classic games die and be lost forever. The way they go about it is fascination. People buy these old arcade machines and then take out the computer guts of the thing. The game software is stored on a ROM (Read Only Memory) chip. Somehow they are able to copy everything off of the ROM chip and save it to a file. They then upload these files to various websites dedicated to this. There literally thousands of these files available! Any arcade video game you can think of is available out there for free download.

However these files are useless by themselves. They are not programs you can just double-click on to run. They are designed to be used on a dedicated piece of hardware designed just for that purpose.

That is where the MAME software comes in. It is a free download that emulates an arcade machine. So you download a ROM file and you download and install the MAME software and together you can relive your high school days.

So last night at midnight I finally figured out how all this stuff comes together and was able to play Bagman after about 22 years. All of the sounds are exactly the same as I remember. It is just amazing.

Another game I remember enjoying was Tempest. I download that ROM file and was treated to another nostalgic rush as I played that a few times.



Playing the games on the computer keyboard is OK, but a joystick would be easier, so today when we were out I bought a cheap game pad at Best Buy. It works like a charm.



The ROM files are surprisingly small too. The Zipped Bagman file was only about 24 kb and it unzipped to about 70 kb. I routinely save spreadsheets a that are hundreds of times bigger than that.

Go ahead and look for some of your old favorites. The best way to construct a Google search is probably "Game Name" rom mame where you of course replace the words Game Name with whatever game you are looking for.

To run a game you start it up from the command line. If you don't know what that means just drop me a line and I would be happy to walk you through it. It is actually very simple. Enjoy.