Coastin' and Co-Hostin'

Sorry I've been gone for a while (again). I just wanted to mention that if you'd like to read my random jumble of gaming thoughts on a more frequent basis, you might want to check out my Cohost, or my Mastodon account, if you just don't have the time for posts over five hundred characters. Twitter what now? That is like, so last year... this is the age of the Mastodon! Yes, again. The hirsute elephant that ruled the Ice Age is back, in social media form!

The Namco Museum cabinet, with a few
additions to enhance its performance. Strategic
use of a wooden bead, some zinc washers,
and a few drops of super glue yield a vast
improvement in responsiveness and comfort.

Anyway. In case you were wondering, right now I'm working through an unhealthy addiction to this Namco Museum cabinet by My Arcade. I didn't like it so much when I first got it, but one Android script by Terry Goodwin, one greatly improved joystick, and about a hundred extra games later, I'm starting to see its appeal. See, it's as much a vintage product as the arcade games it emulates, using an ARM processor from 2014 that's still stranded in Kit Kat land and very hamstrung by its hardware. It's been a fun and occasionally tedious process, finding out which arcade oldies can run on this thing and which Retroarch cores are needed to do it. 

The results of this informal study have been surprising... the age and technology of the arcade system being emulated does not perfectly correlate with its performance on this cabinet. Oh no, it's far more arbitrary than that. Sometimes what seem like gimmies, like 1983's Popeye, won't run for crap using any core, while games that should be well beyond the cabinet's reach somehow just work anyway. R-Type? Yeah, the technological marvel from 1987, whose FM Townes port left everyone drooling into their copies of EGM, runs at full speed. Pretty much anything using Irem's M series of arcade processors will work on this cabinet until you reach about 1991, where performance starts getting dicey.

Depending on the game, you can push this system a whole lot farther than you might have expected. Trog, the late 1980s Midway game in PlayMation, will run on this cabinet with only the voice effects being a little worse for wear. Seibu Kaihatsu's Raiden is perfectly playable with an early version of MAME, and Dodonpachi from 19-effing-97 isn't perfect, but is certainly playable. Shooter fans who know how demanding this game is to play can also imagine how stressful it would be for an emulator running on dated Android hardware (I mean, the specs speak for themselves...), but the Namco Museum cabinet just barely pulls it off. 

I bought the Namco Museum cabinet to play all my arcade favorites from the early 1980s, and with few exceptions, it does exactly that. A selection of Namco games are baked in right from the start, but you can greatly expand on that library, and almost everything from before 1990 works. Yeah, get Ms. Pac-Man in there too, you know you want it. The Donkey Kongs? They all work. Pretty much everything by Konami from before the 16-bit era? Yeah, those all run just fine, and they're great, especially Jackal and Shaolin's Road. The obscure titles like Rockola's Eyes and Technos' forgotten platformer Xain'd Sleena and Meta Fox, the shoot 'em up which you'll only remember for its obnoxiously loud Japanese punk soundtrack? Throw 'em all into the van... there's plenty of room.

So I'm already stoked. There's like seventy percent of my childhood arcade experience crammed into this little toy, but the fact that it can go all the way to my twenties with Dodonpachi? Especially for forty dollars, I can hardly complain. That'll do, pig... that'll do.