I just love arcade games - and have done ever since I was old enough to hold a joystick. Thanks to todays powerful PC hardware and talented coders it is possible to play those arcade games at home - exactly the way they appeared in the arcades. Emulators such as MAME, RAINE and Hive mean that video game junkies such as myself can live the dream of having our own personal arcade. Things weren't always this rosy though - Back in the 1980s and early 90s if you wanted to play Outrun, Kung-Fu Master or Star Wars then your only option was to fill the arcades with money - but there was an option for people who wanted to play at home.
Back in those days if you wanted to play arcade games at home then you had to buy a conversion for your home computer or console. Unlike emulation where your PC simulates all of the hardware of an arcade machine which the original code runs on - home conversions were an approximation of the original. The computers of the time such as the Sinclair Spectrum , Commodore 64, Atari St and so on were nowhere near as powerful as machines in the arcades and so many corners had to be cut. Anyone who has played outrun for the spectrum will know what i mean.
Despite the fact that home versions of arcade games were sometimes very far removed from the original - they were the only way that many of us poor 80s kids could enjoy them. This website is written for those people - those of us who spent hours playing Bubble Bobble on the spectrum, OutRun on the Atari ST or DigDug on the VCS2600. On the following pages you will find downloadable home conversions of many classic arcade games combined with information about the emulators required to run them. Hopefully they wil bring back some happy memoriesI currently have pages for 7 classic arcade games, each one having at least 3 versions. Current Number of downloadable games is 34.
Last Updated 1st February 2002
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