While wandering about looking for information, I discovered that there’s a PocketPC port of MAME, the arcade game emulator. Woohoo! It’s a little on the old side, not having been updated in over a year now, but that’s okay; being the old fogey that I am, I’m mainly interested in the older games that are already included in that version anyway.
The PocketPC seems almost ideal for MAME — it’s portable, so that gives me a lot of games in a fairly small package for travelling. The PocketPC screen is taller than it is wide, just like most arcade screens, for efficient space usage. It already has a directional pad and buttons built-in, so you don’t need a joystick (can’t attach one anyway) or clumsy on-screen emulation. And it should be powerful enough to run all those older games that I want.
Of course, nothing is ever perfect…
Problem #1: Space. The emulator itself takes up about 7 megs, plus the roms (another 11 megs for the ones I want). That’s a lot when you only have 36 megs of memory to begin with, which then has to be split into ‘storage’ and ‘program’ memory and is already filled with various bits of junk. It should run from a flash card, but then a bit of juggling is necessary.
Problem #2: The controls. Although most games only need the joystick and one or two buttons, other features want to be assigned keys too. Coin insert, Player 1 start, Player 2 start, Quit, 3rd fire button, config screen toggle, etc., and there just aren’t enough buttons to define them all. You can at least get something workable if you dump all the ones you don’t really need on a single button though.
Problem #3: The controls, again. Although this PocketPC has the directional pad and buttons, they’re not all that well suited to gaming. There isn’t much feedback to the pad and it’s not well-aligned with each direction, so you can push downwards but it’ll register as left instead, or nothing at all. The pad is fine for normal usage where you can be more precise in how you push it, but it’s not so good in the heat of gaming. The buttons on the other hand have an acceptable feel to them, but they’re placed too close together and to the pad. With one thumb on the pad and one on the buttons, they’re often bumping each other.
Also, pushing on the pad and the buttons tends to make the whole PocketPC ‘wiggle’ a bit, since you’re only pushing on one end of it and there’s nothing bracing the other end. Annoying.
Problem #4: Sound. Although you can enable sound in a lot of the games, doing so slows it down considerably, and then it starts to sound awful and choppy anyway. You may as well just keep the sound off.
Problem #5: Speed. Even with the sound off, a lot of the games don’t seem to run at full speed. Even some fairly simple games like Elevator Action and Arkanoid, which were fine on my old 200MHz Pentium, are a bit slow on this 400MHz PocketPC. This isn’t exactly a high-end model though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like slow memory at fault here.
Problem #6: Stability. After a few minutes of play it often freezes up or crashes, requiring a hard reset. I’m not sure if it’s MAME itself or the PocketPC to blame here, but regardless it’s rather pointless if I can’t play for more than that at a time.
Problem #7: Battery life. Although this device claims a battery life of eight hours, I can barely get three hours out of it while playing music on it, and that’s with the backlight turned off. It’ll be even worse when playing games full-tilt.
So close and yet so far. It’s one of those things that *seems* like it should work beautifully, but gets ruined in the details…