Classic 80's Arcades

[garman]

Last night I was speaking to a colleague about a game "galaga" I discussed with him about a little trick in the first stage, where you do not shoot any enemies when the game starts and after all enemies settle you let them attack until they stop firing. After this, all enemies would stop firing at all stages. I'm kind of vague on this because I did it only once and it did work. Unfortunately the owner noticed the change in the game and unplugged it. My question is was that correct or did I forget. BTW my game I was hooked on was "defender" first game I every broke a million point after using a million quarters. -garman

[Silvas]

On the first or second stage, kill everything but the two bees in the bottom left corner. Then just wait, dodging the bees' shots, until the bee no longer drops any shots towards you. After the bees stop firing, let it pass for 5 more trips or so and then kill them. For the rest of the game, the enemies will not drop shots. It will take approximately 15 minutes for the bees to quit shooting at you, so this trick requires a lot of patience.

[thecoalman]

Find out for yourself .... www.mame.net If it works on the original it will work on MAME. My quarter eating machine was Vanguard then Two Tigers, TT didn't eat too many after a while, me and my buddy got so good at it the local arcade got rid of it because we'd play it for two hours on 50 cents.

[Dr. DOS]

There was a special route you could take with PacMan... to where if you didn't waver from the path they wouldn't touch you.

[fmctm1sw]

I love these threads. You could also let one of your ships be captured. After you shoot the enemy, you end up with two ships...
The Defender variant "Stargate" was a favorite of mine. As was Punch Out and Super Punch Out, Dig Dug, the list goes on and on....

[neomaine]

My game to fame was easily Q-Bert. I somehow had a nack of knowing when the green balls would come out to freeze all enemies and knowing when the green guys would fall to change the colors back. One night at college I played for 5-6 hours (25million+ points) on a single quarter. Still had tons of free men left but I was exhausted...

I've tried remakes on playstation and other consoles but none have the right joy-stick feel to get in a good rhythm.

By the way, an arcade classics (Atari?) has come out for gamecube (probably pc, ps2 and xbox also) that has this family of games (not Q-Bert though....). Almost exact remakes of dig-dug, galaga, galaxian, pac-man, ms pac-man and a few others.

Heck even some of those 'games on a joy-stick/gampad' games that you just plug into the video jacks on a tv (or vcr for that matter) seem to have done a pretty good job.

[babyboo]

The Arcade ROMS that run in MAME are actual scans of the ROMS from the consoles themselves, so they run identical to the way they did in the arcade console...including the POST screens. Even QBert is available. I enjoy using MAME as well as an emulator for the old Atari 2600 ROMS.

[Doramius]

You can turn practically any controller or joystick into a USB device. The trick is to know how. I know there are tons all over the net. I remember seeing one where A guy yanker the stick deck off an old arcade machine. Rebuilt the deck putting the stick and buttons though like the original, and added a chip and wires play MAME games through a USB port. From what I heard, it only works with Win2000 & XP, but that'd be way cool. This would be the same person that took the NES controller kit to making it USB usable, and made a little box to plug any NES controller into instead. The box plugged into the USB of the PC and had the female NES controller ports. I think he did it with SNES too.