Kick our faces off

Stuart's discovery one day of MAME (the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, or something) while idly running up a £6 trillion phone bill opened the latest - and some would say most vibratingly pointless - chapter in our Gentlemanly Contest of Gaming Superiority, or whatever the hell it is you do with chapters.

Coquettish readers of AP may recall the high score battles in Marathon (a constantly shifting balance of power), Sensi Soccer (a victory for Stuart), Guardian CD32 (JN ultimately triumphing over Paul), Gravity Power (Jonathan Davies's airmanship proving unassailable), Super Tennis Champs (with Sue possibly edging it over Martin), Monster Business (which only Stuart ever played. Or saw), Shadow Fighter, Skidmarks 2 and so on, to infinity.

MAME, an amazing freeware coin-op emulator run up in their spare time by some gods of programming, suddenly widened the field to include all those ridiculously old games everyone claimed to be great at because they knew no one would ever, for example, run up a generic emulator for the lot of in their spare time.

The stages of editing AP2, therefore, now include a mid-month exchange between Stuart and JN of messages like, "Mr Do? A game for girls," accompanied by unbelievably colossal Crush Roller scores. Those of AP who took advantage of being brutally slain to run away as fast as possible from computer games look on in bewilderment.

If you have MAME (it runs on the Mac, the PC, and, via means we don't understand, or - and let us make this clear - want explained to us, the Amiga) you may therefore obtain an archive of our high scores and, quite literally, do your best to kick our faces off. Should you succeed, or have a high score of your own you're particularly proud of, send the high score table bit (it's a tiny file usually called "whatever Scores" or "whatever.hi") to Two The Write Thing and we'll add you to the Honour Roll of Champions.

Which, incidentally, is just over the page.