Sometimes my uncle Josh starts reminiscing the moments of his youth when he used to spend all the afternoon playing games on arcade machines. He almost becomes delirious with those fond memories of him and his friends having fun at the arcade game parlors. I can but only imagine how much fun it would have been. So one day I decided to give him a surprise by presenting him the old world arcade games right inside a Windows PC using a arcade machine emulator called MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). And sure enough he called his buddy Randy and they laughed all the day long playing some of the old world games over MAME.
If you are also a classic arcade game enthusiast, then you may also want to give MAME a try. MAME is standalone arcade machine emulator for Windows. After downloading the MAME binary files you can extract them to a folder of your choice. You would notice that there is a sub-folder called roms where you extracted the MAME program files. Inside this roms folder, you have to copy the game ROM files that you can legally and easily find over the internet. Even the MAME site has links to some of the sites that provide legal ROM downloads. You have to copy the downloaded ZIP files belonging to the game ROMS inside the roms sub-folder.
Once you have copied the game ROM files inside the roms sub-folder, you can try launching the main MAME program (mame64.exe or mame.exe). This will launch in full-screen and show you a list of all the games found inside the roms sub-folder. You can select any of the games that you want to play using the up-down arrow keys and pressing the Enter key.
Some of the games require you to insert a coin (just like in the arcade machines that used to allow playing games only when you dropped a coin in the coin-slot). But in the MAME emulator, there is no coin-slot (do not try inserting anywhere in your PC). All you have to do is press 5 or 6 keys on the main keyboard (not on the Numpad). Then select player 1 or player 2 using keys 1 or 2. The games are using controlled using the keys like enter, space bar, up-down, left-right arrow keys and so on.
Conclusion: MAME allows easy arcade machine emulation on a Windows PC and supports a wide variety of arcade machines. MAME can emulate the original games faithfully along with all the original game bugs, flaws and glitches.
You can download MAME for Windows from http://www.mamedev.org/.