FAQ:General Games
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Why are there so many versions of Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, etc.?
Games were often licensed to other companies for a variety of reasons: the most common was that the makers wished to sell the game in a country or region in which they had no distribution of their own. In the early 80s, Namco had no US distribution network so their games were licensed to Atari, Bally-Midway, and others. Conversely, Atari licensed their games to Japanese companies (usually Namco) for sale there.
Sometimes a set of ROMs with a different copyright date is found, or a bootleg set, or another alternate version. When the "parent" game has already been emulated in MAME, these alternates are usually easy to add. In some cases, alternate versions are slightly different: Game levels are in a different order, the game is harder or faster, etc.
In some cases, ROMs were hacked to run on hardware they were not intended for. For example, when Pac-Man was "hot," some arcade operators found a way to dump Pac-Man ROMs and hack them to work on Scramble machines* so they wouldn't have to purchase extra Pac-Man boards. Since these hacked versions are masterpieces in their own right, the MAME developers have included them.
- Apparently, Scramble's board was especially easy to re-use; several games were hacked to play on it. A long-running joke with MAME enthusiasts is that anything can be run on Scramble hardware - N64 games, your toaster, your automatic garage door, etc. :?) (Ironically, Scramble itself was hacked to play on Galaxian hardware!)
