

















In the years before (and even some years after) the Game Boy revolutionized the portable gaming market, self-contained, single-serving LCD games were the best electronic gaming-on-the-go many of us could hope for. The Internet Archive has now captured a handful of these proto-examples of portable gaming for play in the Web browser, via MAME-powered emulation.

The Archive's just-launched Handheld History Collection captures a menagerie, including Coleco's miniature LCD Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, late '90s virtual pet fad Tamagotchi, and Tiger Electronics' inexplicable MC Hammer game (No Nintendo Game & Watch titles for the time being, even though some are supported in MAME). The in-browser versions come complete with all the limited, "burned-in" animation and chirpy, beep-based sound effects gamers of a certain age will remember from many a long car trip.

As the Internet Archive's Jason Scott notes in a detailed announcement post, getting these kinds of games into the increasingly poorly named Multi Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) is not a simple process. "To get the information off an LCD game, it has to be pulled apart and all its components scanned, vectorized, and traced to then make them into a software version of themselves," Scott writes.

That includes capturing the drawn backgrounds and the pre-etched LCD layer, which uses non-overlapping notches that toggle on and off to create every possible animation and situation possible in the game. A look at some examples of how these LCD scenes look when every notch is turned on shows just how much artistry and care went in to maximizing the usefulness of the extremely limited hardware.

That painstaking volunteer work has led to MAME supporting more than 200 LCD handhelds so far, more of which will be added to the Internet Archive as they are checked for bugs. But as Scott notes on Twitter, even when the emulated gameplay is "perfect," replicating these kinds of handhelds on modern hardware often loses a big part of that classic feel. "There are some [LCD portables] which have very little resemblance to the originals because the originals REALLY need the case," he writes.

Not to worry, in a few decades we'll have augmented reality glasses and shape-morphing smart materials that can capture the look and feel of that one cheap game you played a few times when you were nine years old in a convenient pocket-sized blob. Get on it, Silicon Valley venture capitalists!