Arcade

Arcade machines were where video games first reached the public. Computer Space arrived in 1971 and Pong in 1972, and through the late 1970s and 1980s games such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Street Fighter II made arcades the centre of gaming.

Unlike home consoles, arcade games were built on hundreds of different boards, often designed for a single game. That makes them hard to preserve: each board has to be dumped and documented before it breaks. MAME, which began in 1997, has spent almost three decades doing exactly that, and today covers tens of thousands of machines. FinalBurn Neo focuses on the most popular boards, such as Capcom’s CPS systems and SNK’s Neo Geo, and is known for low input lag and good netplay.

Later arcade hardware, such as SEGA’s Model 2, Model 3 and NAOMI boards, has its own dedicated emulators, listed on each system’s page.