Game & Watch Games in MAME with Screenshots

Just a fast very honourable mention of the large efforts that the MAME community undertook in order to preserve the original Game & Watch LCD handheld games from the 80ies. 

As of MAME 0.223 every Game & Watch handheld is supported in MAME. While previous emulations, such as the Retroarch Core, were not based on the original dumped roms, I understand that MAME versions actually preserve the data of the old handhelds. Huge kudos for this, this was the time of sitting together and sharing the handheld from one friend to another. I particularly liked Mickey Mouse (screenshot below). This is very nice to look back.

However, if you only have the roms availabe, there is no way to play them properly. You also need the artwork.

Mickey Mouse without Artwork

And here it is, with artwork included!

Some hints here for conveniently getting it running:

1. The good news: Game & Watch roms are no Software List Roms. All roms have the format gnw_xxxx.zip, so you can conveniently identify them. The MAME UI also finds the games if you search for 'Game & Watch'.
2. There are two main repositories for Game & Watch Artwork: here at Progetto and here on a Google Drive. I personally rely on the Google Drive respository, it contains absolutely outstanding artwork. As always, place this zip files in the artwork repository.

Nothing more required. If the artwork does not appear when launching a Game & Watch title, you did something wrong.

Two further eye candies, all headsets are really worth a look:

click to enlarge

no idea that there were even tabletops!