Part 12 - MAME Demos and Savestates
MAME and Roms
MAME stand for Multipe Arcade Machine Emulator, and is a free programme which
allows you to play almost any arcade game (provided you have a copy of the game
roms and, for legal reasons, own the arcade game itself).
You can download the DOS version here, or
the Windows 32-bit Graphical
version here.
It's great to replay those old classics on your home computer,
especially if you've bought the game and it no longer works. The Wonder Boy
roms are not available on this web site for obvious legal reasons. In fact,
I'm probably not even allowed to suggest people do a Google search for wboy.zip.
In any case, if you want to legally own a copy of the roms one great place to
start is amusement machine distributors. Most of the time they don't deal with
the public unless someone wants to hire an old arcade or pipball machine for
a party. My local distributor throws away old arcade boards when they break,
so it might be worth asking yours if you can keep the left over boards and rom
chips of any busted games - it'll give you a licence to play them. Plus they'll
take up far less space than a collection of entire cabinets.
Of course, then you need a machine to read the data off the chips. At this point
you're better off searching for somewhere to download them from rather than
trying to extract them yourself. From what I've read, it's an ugly black art.
:-)
MAME allows you to record demos of games you play and save them as .inp files. These recordings are nothing more than a sequence of keystrokes so they can be quite large, but they compress well.
Demos
Here is a MAME demo recording of me finishing the game at 7-4 in one credit.
Not the most perfectly played game, but I made it.
wboy-1474820-area7finish.zip (222k)
It was made with MAME32 v85. It should work with all versions from about v80 onwards, provided the romset is current (wboy.zip - set 1, new encryption).
Save States
wboysta.zip (509k)
This file contains save states for the start of each area (wboy - set 1 new encryption). Unzip this file to your MAME sta folder. To load a save state, press F7 then the number of the area you want to start on (2 to 8). No lives were lost in the making of these saves.
Videoclip
Video clip showing how to get through the falling platforms in Area 8 Round 3
wonderboy8-3-4.avi (*.avi, 768 kb)
Longplay
On youtube you can find a Longplay of Wonder Boy Arcade.
It´s a perfect run: one credit, one life, no mistakes, all dolls, all hidden
bonus...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvim7O9RvK0
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