Of course I knew that MAME and MESS already existed, and I snooped through its sources to find out how that machine actually worked.
By emulation I don’t mean writing a game “just like” Galaga (which would not be a trivial task, anyway) but really emulating the hardware of that old arcade machine in all its details: the original ISA we want to emulate is those of the old Z80 processor and the program we want to run is the one stored in the original ROMs. One of the scenes that made the 1983 movie “Wargames” endearing to me is the one where the main character, David (Matthew Broderick) plays Galaga before going to school, and not even the presence of the beautiful classmate Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) can really distract him from his game… 🙂Ī few years ago I must have had really too much free time, so I engaged in the toy project of writing an emulator for the Galaga arcade machine.
When I was a kid I must have spent so many coins to play that game that I could probably drive a Ferrari, today, had I better invested them. Galaga was a very popular arcade in the ‘80s.
