I’ve been a gamer pretty much as long as I can remember right from the Atari 2600, right through to your present day where Xbox 360s and PS3s hold pride of place in almost every house. (Even the Redknapps play them…) Most of those systems of the past 30 years take up the entire space under the spare bed and most of the loft space too much to the annoyance of the other half. However, as a child and teenager nothing in the home could come close to the experience of throwing countless 10 pences down the neck of an arcade machine. Whether it was tapping your finger ends to bloody stumps playing Hyper Sports (I was always shit at weight lifting), getting motion sickness on the hydraulic Power Drift, crying at just how hard Ghosts and Goblins was or dislocating your wrist trying to pull off Zangief’s Spinning Piledriver in Street Fighter II, the Arcades were the absolute mecca.Unfortunately as the home consoles powers have increased year on year, Arcades have declined in tandem. However, if you long for the days of yore MAME answers your prayers.
The Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator allows you to relive those rose tinted memories and in more cases than not the games have stood the test of time too. So to cut a long story short, a few years ago (12 Jan 2005 according to my Amazon history) I purchased the Twin Galaxies’ Official Video Game and Pinball Book of World Records with a 
view to using MAME as a means to break some of the records. Of course I didn’t do anything of the sort. I read the book a few times (if you can actually read a book consisting of high scores) and it was put on the bookshelf and there it remained until I watched King Of Kong a year or so ago. Filled with renewed vim and vigour I had a crack at the world record for my old favourite R-Type and submitted it to Twin Galaxies. Would you believe it? I held the MAME world record. It has subsequently been surpassed but hey ho. I might get round to taking it back one day, so watch out Brad H Juhala, whoever you are. : )
But now the other half is back at work 4 nights a week and the Josh is asleep at 8 I’ve plenty of time on my hands so from next week I’m going to attempt to go through each of the games supported by MAME and see where I get. There are ony 3910 after all… I’ll post the updates on here so you can see all my futile attempts and I might break some records, I might break none but hey it’s something to do. You can join me in the ridiculous task if you like. Be sure to check out the Twin Galaxies MAME submission policy first though. Happy Gaming.