War of the Worlds: The Arcade Games

In 1979, Cinematronics put out a War of the Worlds vector arcade game. This game is in black-and-white vector graphics, but there is one and only one color version of this same game, which was made in 1981.

The Multiple Arcade Machine emulator (MAME), starting with version 0.35b12 ("Combat School"), now supports the Cinematronics arcade game War of the Worlds. thereby making MacMAME the first emulator capable of emulating this rare arcade game on a Macintosh, as well as allowing for its emulation under Unix and on Amigas. The support on so many platforms is possible because the source code for the this emulator is freely-available, portable C code.

Here are the official sites for the various builds of MAME. Note that not all builds are perfectly in sync. It takes time to port each new version.

The official Mutliple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) page -- DOS
MAME32 home page -- Windows 95
MacMAME.org -- Power Macintosh
Triumph Software: MAME -- Amiga: 68060 and PowerUP
ARM MAME -- RISC OS

Version 0.36 has color support, but warns that the colors are not completely accurate. It does not appear to have the option to play in black and white as was the arcade releases. MAME is open source.

There is a Cinematronics Emulator in the works that will allow the War of the Worlds arcade game to be played on Windows platforms. Development appears to have stopped in 1999.

The Cinematronics Home Page does have available Cinemu 1.1, an emulator which will play all Cinematronics vector games (except Cosmic Chasm) including War of the Worlds if provided ROM images for those games. It will run War of the Worlds in color. Since only one arcade prototype was ever made in color and the owner will never sell it, the only ways to play it are to convince him to let you play, get this emulator, or get MAME (listed above). It requires at minimum a 486-66MHz, 640 KB RAM, VGA adapter w/ 512KB video RAM, under DOS ver 3.1 or higher. Will run full-screen under Windows 95, runs slow on Win 3.1, 3.5, and 4.0. Check the website for the latest version and compatibility information. Source code is provided.

The Arcade

The Consoles

The Computers