Wings Over Scotland

My Retropie setup is my favourite physical thing I’ve ever owned. For a total cost of about £300 (the Retropie box itself, plus a monitor and a double arcade joystick), I have instant access to just about the entire history of videogaming up to and including the original Playstation (plus some later stuff too, like the Nintendo DS).

But the physicality of it makes a huge difference. It’s hard to overstate what a complete revelation switching the Pi from a little box under my living-room TV controlled with Playstation joypads to a stand-up machine with proper joysticks was. It changed from something that was nice to have a little play on once in a while to something I use for pleasure every single day.

It’s basically become magic.

Obviously a part of it is nostalgia. The image above is an actual photo of the Retropie running Stop The Express inside a backdrop made in turn from a photo of my real-life teenage bedroom and a picture of the exact model of TV I owned. (Scanned by a very lovely person from an advert in an old issue of Your Computer.)

But a huge part of the appeal is also the exact OPPOSITE of nostalgia – discovering new things. With a library of thousands of arcade titles alone, whole days can be lost just taking a random stab at the catalogue (there’s a handy button that does precisely that) and finding brilliant games that never came to your local arcade.

There’s also the joy of curation – putting together themed collections of, say, every Space Harrier game ever made for any format, and tracking down the artwork for them to make the menu screens look pretty. It’s enormously satisfying, especially at a time when we’re all stuck indoors with a lot of time to kill.

And somewhere in between those things lies what this piece is going to be about – the world of homebrews, hacks and mods.

Because it should be said that Retropie doesn’t make things too easy for you. While most of the ones you buy will work out of the box and let you play games straight away, really getting the most out of it (eg recreating your teenage bedroom onscreen) is a labour of love and learning and literally hundreds of hours of tinkering about with code and Paint Shop Pro and config files.

Nowhere is that more the case than getting arcade hacks and mods to run. If you’re just running emulations on your PC, programs like Misfit MAME and its more up-to-date cousin HBMAME do a great job of playing just about any hack you can think of – or at least, they do if you can find the ROMs, which tends to be a little trickier than with “mainstream” stuff.

But nobody’s ported any of them to Retropie yet, and the notoriously prissy MAME developers frown on supporting anything as vulgar as unofficial hacked games, so you have to get very creative if you want to play them on a Pi.

But readers will be pleased to know that I don’t intend to go into all the many forms of arcane trickery you need to deploy to get any of it to work – I’ve done all the work for you, and I’m just going to give you the end results.

Most hacks are in truth quite dull – as you might guess, there’s a lot of “it’s Space Invaders except all the invaders are penises and the bunkers are penises and you shoot jizz LOLOLOL!!!!” – and in all my explorations of MFM and HBM etc I’ve only discovered a handful that are worth going to any trouble for. So what we have here is Stuey’s Top 20 Arcade Game Hacks And Mods, in the form of a single folder than you can (more or less) just drop into your Retropie setup and go.

What you need to do is download this small 1MB file, unzip it to produce a folder called “ZZ-HACKS” (you can safely change the name if you want, I just call it that so that it appears at the bottom of my MAME ROMs list), and drop that complete folder into your Retropie roms>arcade directory.

Most of the games will then run straight away on your default arcade emulator with no further faffery – probably MAME2003 or MAME2003-PLUS if you’re sensible. A couple, which we’ll note below, will need you to hit a button during the “Runcommand” boot sequence and set a specific emu instead. (You only have to do that once, Retropie will remember to use it every time afterwards.)

[EDIT: I’ve just realised that because these don’t come with the gamelist.cfg file, they’ll all show up as their parent ROM not the mod name, eg Galaga instead of Galagalaxian. But it should be obvious what’s what, just edit the names from the Retropie menu.]

And here’s what you’ll get, in alphabetical order.

ASTRO BLASTER (SET 2)

This is actually a fix – the real version of this brutally tough revision of Sega’s iconic Galaxian derivative didn’t work in emulators, but now it does. Expect a different level order and absolutely savage fuel consumption.

ASTRO FIGHTER BLACK

A historical curio – the prototype/test version with its original moodier black backdrop, not the slightly garish sky-blue one that appeared in arcades.

BAGMAN TURBO

A more enjoyable, less impossible cheat version of Stern’s monstrously hard mining game, seen on home computers as Ocean’s splendid unofficial port Gilligan’s Gold. (Hold down Button 2 for superspeed, and Button 3 for invincibility to anything but falls. Invincibility is obviously plain cheating, but the speed boost just gives you a fighting chance, the game’s still pretty tough.)

BUBBLE BOBBLE – THE LOST CAVE

The all-original levels from the Game Boy version retrofitted into the arcade.

BUBBLE BOBBLE ULTRA

Extra-hard, not-quite-as-well-done collection of brand new levels.

DONKEY KONG 2600 (run with FBNeo)

Donkey Kong with Atari VCS-style graphics.

GALAGALAXIAN

Galaga, but with Galaxian sprites. I like stuff like this and Galaxian Invaders (below), because it gives a really palpable sense of how the whole genre evolved.

GALAGA X

This one’s quite special – it’s actually 1942, reskinned with Galaga graphics, which gives the game a dramatically different atmosphere.

GALAXIAN INVADERS

Galaxian with Space Invaders graphics, duh.

MR. DIG-DO!

You can probably figure this one out.

MR DO’S NIGHTMARE (run with FBNeo)

But this is amazing – Mr Do hacked to create a totally new game completely unlike the original – an overhead-view action game with no digging, that even comes with clever bonus stages. A stunning piece of work.

MS. PAC-MAN 2600

Ms Pac-Man with Atari VCS-style graphics.

MS. PAC-MAN AFTER DARK

Ingenious mod in which the inner maze walls are invisible, so the more dots you eat the harder it gets to find your way around.

MS. YAK-MAN

Ms Pac-Man reskinned in trademark style by none other than Jeff Minter.

PAC-MAN 2600

As with Ms Pac-Man 2600, except that here you get an approximation of the VCS maze rather than the arcade one and the Pac-Man sprite authentically still faces sideways when you move vertically.

PAC-MAN AFTER DARK

As above.

PAC-MAN AFTER DARK 2000

The same idea, except now only the ghosts’ eyes are visible and when you eat a power-pill even those vanish, for extra stress.

TEMPEST TUBES

The most famous of many hacked levelsets for Dave Theurer’s classic.

THE SIMPSONS TAPPER

Does what it says on the tin.

TRON RALLY-X

As does this one.

VECTOR BURGER TIME

An example of a popular theme in the arcade-mod world: stripping game graphics down to neon outlines. There’s a really nice ultra-minimalist Centipede one of these that I’m still battling to get running on the Pi. [EDIT: now working and included.]

So there are just some of the possibilities. There’s other stuff I’m still wrestling with, like Clay Cowgill’s remarkable and completely batshit reworking of the Tempest hardware to turn it into a Breakout game:

Then there’s the likes of Crazy Otto – the hack that was repurposed and went legit to become the official Ms Pac-Man – and the terrific Donkey Kong Spooky Remix, which also run but aren’t included in the zip for incredibly dull technical reasons, along with the simply extraordinary Pac Manic Miner Man, which we’ve covered previously.

But that should be enough for you crazy kids to be going on with in the meantime. (Or at least, for the approximately four people to whom this article is even theoretically of interest and happen to have checked in on this very rarely-updated old blog.)

If you ever cared even a tiny little bit for videogames, gang, get yourselves a Retropie, then splash out that little bit extra to make it a stand-up gaming station. A combination of the physical set-up and the infinite customisations that allow you to display the original artwork surrounds and simulate the curve of an oldschool CRT monitor really do make it like having your own arcade to an immensely convincing degree.

Except this one takes up a fraction of the space of even one real cabinet, costs a fifth as much, runs Spectrum games as well, and you can store 20 years of history in a super-portable box the size of your fist. I mean, what is it you want?