Zelda is on my Linux box!

I am a big fan of computer and video games. The list of my favorites could go on and on, but I am going to focus on just two, with a honorary mention of Civ I, Civ II, and Civ III. The Civ series doesn’t actually have anything to do with what I want to talk about, but I don’t think I could mention favorite and computer games without mentioning good ol’ Civ. Only last year I played the original Civ I game again. I even played straight through start to finish in a several hour mini-epic, old school fashion. Quite nostalgic, with the rioting townsfolk cutscenes and all. A load of fun. Suprisingly crude in some aspects compared to later versions, especially in areas of trade and diplomacy, but challenging and brilliant just the same.

Both the games I want to talk about predate the original Civilization game I played, which was the version for Windows that came out in 1993. The Legend of Zelda is six years older, having come out for the Nintendo console system in 1987. Pac-Man arrived even earlier, showing up in arcades 1981.

The first time I ever saw an arcade game was around 81 or 82. I had seen pinball machines before, of course, but never one of these arcade cabinet games. I saw my first one all by itself, chained to a pole in Gene Walter’s Open Air Market- a slightly battered Pac-Man game. I didn’t realize it, but the only thing missing was a soft golden glow caused by heaven sent rays of light. All I remember of that first meeting was plunking in the coins my mom gave me and moving the joystick around without understanding anything other than the fact that the Pac-Man moved when I moved the joystick around. It sticks with me that the first thing I tried to do was chase Binky, Inky, Pinky, and Clyde instead of avoiding them. Just the same, it was pretty exciting. I guess I wasn’t one of those hard-to-please kids.

I have been able to indulge in some nostalgic Pac-Man playing thanks to this nifty all-in-one package that plugs into any TV that has RCA inputs. The game unit also includes Galaxian, Dig Dug, and a couple of ‘B’-list games, Bosconian, which is actually kinda fun, and Rally X, which is pretty lame, in my opinion. These game units can be had for about $20. There are additonal game units available, covering more games from both Namco (Ms. Pac-Man, Pole Position, etc.) and other game platforms like Atari and Intellivision. Cool stuff. Fun to play and not a big bite in the wallet.

The other blast from the past I have been playing is the orignal Legend of Zelda. The Zelda series has been an active and long lived series, the original game coming out in 1987 and the latest, a 4 person cooperative game for the Game Cube called Four Swords Adventures was released in June of this year. Not too shabby to have a viable 15+ year franchise!

I am playing Legend of Zelda on my Linux box (Fedora Core 2, if you are the type of reader who likes to know those things) using the iNES emulator. There are other, more famous emulators out there, MAME comes to mind as probably the best known example. It just so happened that I found the iNES emulator and it worked on my GNU/Linux box on the first try. In no time at all, I am playing legend of Zelda, vintage “do-do-da, do-do-doo” soundtrack and all. Really cool, lots of fun. Less traumatic and taxing than some of the great but still scary as hell games like Doom, System Shock 2, etc. Zelda is really one of the first computer/video games I can remember playing in the fantasy Dungeons & Dragons styled RPG genre. I was already a pencil-and-paper D&D geek who liked computers, being lucky enough to have a Commodore VIC 20 as a kid, so Zelda and the like were a natural fit.

There were other games, of course. I can remember another kid a couple houses down from me had an Intellivision system with an “explore the castle, whack the goblin” type game, but I can’t remember if you could actually save your progress and thus not ‘die’ from session to session. It might have even been D&D’s Cloudy Mountain game for Intellivision, I just can’t remember.

TJM had a similarly themed game on his computer, on 5 1/4″ disks, if memory serves. What was the name of that game? Super basic block figures, with the game seen from a top-down perspective. That was one you actually could save your progress and characters, etc. It might have been on a Commodore 64. TJM, any comments/clarifications?

The point being that these games are still playable today thanks to simulators and emulators. The ‘retrogaming’ scene is pretty solid. Barnes and Nobles carries the nice glossy UK magazine Retro Gamer. (Usually shrinkwrapped with a companion CD until some theiving bastard rips the plastic bag and boosts the disc. Won’t dwell on it here, as a rant about theiving bastards is another post) The Nintendo systems has quite a few emulators available. “The Blue Sky Rangers”, who are made up at least in part by some of the original developers of the system, are responsible for Intellivision’s emulation, available on PC, Mac, plug in the TV units, etc. Even the Commodore 64, which was pitched as a home computer, even though it had video game innards, has multiple emulators* available to play one’s old C64 favorites.

edit: TJM informed that a prior link is full of popups. As such, I removed the link to the offending page and offer up a premade Google search for C64 emulators. My apologies for the inconvenience.

So, ready to play some games? I have written about and linked a fair number of emulators, but no games. The games are actually the sticky issue, the degree of stickiness largely depending on how one feels about software piracy. The ROMs, the software version of the game cartridges, are available if one just looks hard enough. The issue is this- it is only considered legal for a person to have a software version of the game, a ROM to use in conjunction with an emulator, in this case of Nintendo’s Zelda, if they have an actual game cartridge.

This stickiness has some leeway, in my opinion, caused entirely by the sheer “it is just a technicality” aspect of the whole deal. I am no fan of piracy, so I would like to be legitmate. I can do so by owning any old battered, probably broken game cartridge, with a dead game save battery and I have done my legal duty. I don’t even need a game system to plug it into, and I’m covered. If I find it in the trash or buy it for a $1 or $100 at a flea market, I am in the clear. I find that relatively absurd.

Is copyright somehow preserved? Since I have performed the funny dance and produced a game cartridge, can I now pat myself on the back for striking one small blow against piracy? I don’t really feel that is the case. I understand the process and why owning a cartridge puts one in the clear, but it seems so fake.

The downside is that there is no alternative that I know of. One can’t simply go out and buy a legitmate ROM of Legend of Zelda, to my knowledge. There is Console Classix, which functions in some way like a video game rental shop. It doesn’t support Linux yet, from what I can tell, so I haven’t tried it. I like the idea, but it doesn’t fit what I am looking for. In an ideal world, I could pay a nominal fee- let’s say $9.99 or under- and have a legal ROM without the wink-wink shenanigans of having some piece of second or third hand plastic crap that is a Magic Legal Piracy Free Token(tm). Not that I live in an ideal world or anything, but that would be suitable for me…