I am so fed up with the slack-jawed, uneducated, beer-belching video buying masses who think “FULL FRAME” is the best video format because it gets rid of “them black bars.”And the film industry isn’t helping any, either. Believe me, they know better, but are petrified that weening Joe Six-Pack from his cropped Pan-N-Scan movies will brutalize their bottomline. If they’d just stop releasing DVDs in two formats and get rid of PNS (Pan-n-scan) altogether, the public would come around in no time. You notice that you can’t buy the James Bond films on Betamax anymore? Where’s outcry? Exactly. Just release what’s right and the public will buy it. Sure, they’ll bitch for a little while because they think you’ve “cut off the top n’ bottom of my moovie,” but finally they’ll buy the correct aspect widescreen versions, lest they be without the latest trailer-window-rattling explosion-packed blockbuster in their video collection. Stop confusing the dumbed-down populace by giving them a choice of aspect ratios — they’re not smart enough to figure out which one is accurate and future-proofed.

And this accuracy isn’t just my opinion, it’s a matter of what the director intended. The whole debate is often summed up with the question of Original Aspect Ratio (OAR), which is the proportion of width to height which the director intended when framing shots, shooting them and then editing them together. When films are modified via any method to conform to the shape of a standard 4:3 television, you are always changing the intent of the material. Always. There are several methods of doing this which I won’t try to explain here but they all involve changing the film, and the predominant method of change is by simply chopping off 30-50% of the image and zooming in on the middle of the frame.

Take a look at the image on the left and imagine this sort of blasphemy being applied to other things we hold dear. You wouldn’t mask off the sides of the Sistine Chapel ceiling or rip the ends off of your $20 bill, now would you? Then why should it be okay to obliterate a widescreen film?

Try as I might, I just can’t understand why anyone would voluntarily choose to watch only the middle 55% of a movie just to fill up their TV. That’s like buying a 12-inch Sub and throwing away all but the middle 6 inches because the ends won’t fit in your hand!

Maybe, as I mentioned above, it’s just because they’re uneducated as to what’s going on with the whole conversion to video (even more reason that we shouldn’t give them the choice in the first place). Not only are the widescreen releases faithful to the director’s composition, but are the version which will be best viewed on tomorrow’s TVs. And you know, these are going to be the same people who are raising a stink when they buy that new widescreen TV and those full frame DVDs are all stretched out or have black bars on the left & right. And this goes not just for PNS but also for open matte titles.

And to those who are bothered by the “black bars” generated on 4:3 TVs from the letterboxing process, let me ask this: What the hell are you doing looking at the black bars?! You do understand that the movie is that bright area with moving pictures going on between the black bars, right?

Seriously, do you go to a theater and stare at the floor and complain that the picture isn’t projected down there? The reason you don’t notice “black bars” in a theater is becuase the screen’s width is variable depending on the aspect ratio of the film being shown. Your TV just doesn’t have that ability. I say, if you’re staring at the blackness, you must not be watching the movie. Just try watching the movie and believe me, you will (or should be) be absorbed and forget there’s anything above & below it. If you’re not, then try buying a good movie.

And finally, if you just can’t wrap your head around the idea that widescreen releases of films are not only the more accurate way to see a movie in your home, and you just can’t stop staring at the black bars, at least do a little sound financial planning: Buy a DVD player with the zoom function and buy widescreen discs to watch on your 4:3 TV. That way you can blissfully watch the middle half of movies now, and you won’t have to re-purchase those movies to watch them correctly on your future widescreen set.

Then the film companies can stop producing multiple versions of films, thus reducing the production costs and eventually the price of DVDs, and with the money you save you can buy more beer and new tires for your house.

If you ever spent a childhood afternoon in a mall arcade watching your allowance be drained into the coinbox of Donkey Kong, Tempest, Asteroids or Centipede as the callous on your thumb ached, you should be aware of MAME.As a kid in 1982, if you had told me that one day I’d be able to play all of my favorite arcade games in front of my home computer for hours on end, all without the need to pump quarter after quarter into that slot, I’d have said you were illin’.

But that’s what this miraculous little program can do for you. It’s no secret that the computer in your house is much more powerful than vacuum tube ones which used to fill entire laboratories in the 50′s, but back in 1996, a guy by the name of Nicola Salmoria applied that knowledge to old arcade games. It stood to reason, he deduced, that the home PC of the 90′s was at far more powerful than the hardware which ran those games in the 80′s, so he got ahold of the ROM chips and extracted the program into ROM files. Those files were imported into a PC and a program written to fool that program into thinking it was running on its original hardware. The MAME Project is now carried on by Nicola and a team of dozens of other talented programmers who continue to add drivers for more and more games.

The process is complex, but it’s called “emulation.” This differs from a simulation in that it does not approximate the original, but replicates it perfectly. There are many simulations of Pac-Man, but none were precise. MAME allows you to play Pac-Man exactly as you would standing in front of an arcade machine with a pocket full of quarters. Keeping with the Pac-Man example, Microsoft has a package called Return of Arcade which includes a Pac-Man simulation; not exactly Pac-Man, but a fairly well written approximation of the game. But Pac-Man in the arcade never said, ” Press F1 to Play.” But emulated Pac-Man via MAME is not a random programmer’s reinterpretation of the game, but the exact game, bit for bit.

The differences may be subtle to some, but glaring to the classic video game afficianado — there’s just nothing quite like the real thing.

“So what’s the catch?” you must be asking by now. Well, there are some bumps in the road to classic arcade game bliss, but depending on your tenacity and desire to play, they’re far from insurmountable. Here are some points to consider:

• MAME is FREE! That’s right, free. You can get the Windows command line version directly from the MAME site itself, or the more robust MAME32, which has a great graphical user interface, from this site.
• ROMs are not included. This is the biggest bummer. The MAME program alone does nothing without the ROM files extracted from the thousands of various video game circuit boards. You see, the ROMs are in the legally gray area. Though most of them are games more than twenty years old an no longer in production, the copyright holders still have the legal rights to them. The bright side of this is that there are people out there willing to burn DVD/CD sets of MAME ROM files for the cost of the media and shipping, and if you look hard enough you can find them.
• You’ll have to follow the directions. Yes, I know. But as painful as it sounds, particularly to younger folks who’ve grown up in Generation Gimme, having software that doesn’t just install itself and autostart can be quite inconvenient. But getting MAME running, while not complicated, is far from automatic. It will require reading the directions and placing files in the appropriate folders so MAME can find what it needs to run. If you’re too young and impatient to be bothered, you’re probably not interested in Galaga anyhow.
• There are literally thousands of games supported. This can be both a good and bad point. In addition to any classic game you remember and love, there are also hundreds upon hundreds that you probably never saw, and in fact, many that were never mass produced at all. So you’ll be wading through a sea of choices finding a lot of hidden gems and also a good many duds. There’s also the storage issue. At the time I’m writing this MAME supports over 4000 different games, and the ROMs and support files fill more than two DVD-R discs! If you want them all at your fingertips you’re gonna need a big hard drive.

If you have any fond memories at all of the video arcades of the past, not the crappy ones of the present which have only three types of games (fight, shoot, drive), you should check out MAME. It’s more than a game, but for me at least, a little slice of my childhood digitally recreated each time I click that icon.

My wife is constantly threatening to buy this shirt for me.Being a nerd and electronics hobbyist all my life, I tend to be just slightly ahead of the curve of standard computer knowledge. I’m far from being an expert, but I tend to know more than most of my immediate friends. I can build a PC from scratch, understand well enough the process of drivers and hardware conflicts and can generally debug a PC that’s on the blink.Unfortunately, all my friends know this and I’m first on the list of who to call if thier PC starts acting up. Of course, being a good natured sap I’m always eager and willing to please, so I say, “Sure, bring it on over and I’ll have a look.” This results in the not-so-uncommon sight of a foreign PC occupying our dining room table for a few days, which as you might imagine, does not amuse my wife.

Maybe she thinks wearing this shirt will keep the table clear. I doubt it, but it is damned funny.

Incidentally, this is another of the fine t-shirts I found at thinkgeek.com.