Arcade ROM Heaven

Well, not a lot is left these days of the website I started on 30 November 1998.

Back in the day when I was into arcade emulation and MAME was king, this site rocked. Some 50k page views per day and a lot of good memories and friends made. Then I got knifed in the back by someone I brought onto MAMEDEV and that was it — I'd had enough of the scene.

You can still get my Bubble Bobble FAQ from here, written lovingly before MAME even emulated it. These were the days when you played games by hand with no cheats; all knowledge in the FAQ came from playing Bubble Bobble, the greatest arcade game ever — well, that's my opinion. Sadly I no longer own any arcade machines, or Bubble Bobble or Rainbow Islands boards.

Receipt Radar Receipt Radar remembers the groceries you actually buy and watches the catalogues for you. Upload your digital receipts and it builds a private purchase history, then matches your regular products against current supermarket specials and upcoming offers. Instead of trawling through catalogues every week, you get useful matches on the things you already buy — making it easier to shop at the right time and avoid paying full price for the same favourites again. Time Poor Tourist Guides Travel guides for people who want to see the good stuff without wasting half the holiday working out what the good stuff is. Time Poor Tourist Guides cuts through the endless travel-blog waffle and turns a destination into a practical, usable plan — what is genuinely worth seeing, how to fit it together, and how to make the most of limited time. Built for travellers who would rather be out exploring than spending hours researching the trip. MapleStory Idle RPG — MapleOCR A seriously capable toolkit built to take the grunt work out of MapleStory Idle RPG equipment management. MapleOCR turns screenshots into usable equipment data, helps compare gear, tracks lock and unlock decisions, and keeps an ever-growing workflow of automation tools in one public GitHub project. What started as a simple OCR experiment has grown into a proper player-built toolbox designed to solve the annoying jobs the game itself does not. Bubble Bobble FAQ v2.3 The surviving version of my original Bubble Bobble guide. Bubble Bobble Archive Old pages, downloads and memories from the original site.

These days my focus has changed. You can find me riding my road bike with friends and generally doing things far removed from running a 1990s ROM site.

Gareth (guru-choc) Hall

Arcade ROM Heaven — online since 1998.