Retro Arcade

I spend a great deal of my early youth playing video games. The first video game console i can remember, was a Universum Multi-Spiel 4006, a pong-clone made by Quelle/Universum. It was capable of playing 4 versions of pong including tennis and pelota. Later my brother had a ColecoVision on which we played Donkey Kong, Zaxxon and Smurf Rescue for hours.

On christmas 1986 my parents gave me my first real computer, a Commodore C64. Unfortunately power supply had a loose connection, so i had to wait for 2 endless days until i could use it for the first time. My only cold comfort was a foosball table my brother had recieved.

In the following years we tortured our joysticks with games like Decathlon, Wizard of Wor and Bubble Bobble (and lots of them didn't survive it). But one day the enthusiasm was gone, other things became more impoprtant, and computer and game consoles disappeared in a dark corner.

A few years later, the time of home-computers was long over, i tried to revive old times with pc games - but with no luck. Games had become complicated and kind of boring. The fun of earlier years was gone. I tried different games from time to time, but i always lost interest after a short time.

One day i found VICE, a emulator for old 8-bit commodore computers which runs on linux. With Vice i was able to play my old favorites like BubbleBobble and Monty on the run. All that was missing now was 2 joysticks. After a short search on google i found BYOAC and MAME and immediately decided to build my own arcade machine to play old games.