tickle

Tickle is a small and portable multiple arcade machine emulator that runs on Linux, OS X, Windows and the Raspberry Pi. It currently supports about 40 games from the 80's.

Current version

Get it on GitHub.

Version 0.94 (Apr 16, 2011)

This is the last version with a native UI for Windows and Mac OS X.

Tickle 0.94 source files.

Screenshots

A few screenshots taken from the emulator... can you guess them all?

Screenshot from Amidars Screenshot from Crush Roller Screenshot Frogger Screenshot from Galaxian Screenshot from Pacman Screenshot from Pinball Action Screenshot from Pooyan Screenshot from Scramble Screenshot from 1942 Screenshot from Galaga Screenshot from Nibbler Screenshot from Lunar Rescue Screenshot from Eyes Screenshot from Jump Shot Screenshot from Rally X

How to use

Emulated games usually require a copy of the corresponding ROM files. Tickle uses the same naming convention of the MAME emulator. Required files must be placed in a properly named ZIP file in a subdirectory names "roms" (if sound samples are needed, they must be placed in a subdirectory named "samples").

If one or more of the required files are missing the program will display an error message but will also offer a choice to continue: this may be used to emulate errors or such, a feature that will be probably tested more in later releases.

Please remember that the ROM files are usually copyrighted material and are not included with this program. Furthermore, they must be never bundled or distributed together with this program in any format or media.

The following table contains a list of all the drivers supported in this release:

List of drivers supported by the current release
Name Manufacturer Year Screen Resources

Trivia

Tickle 0.94 is built from more than 35,000 lines of C++ code. It can emulate the following chips:

...plus a lot of custom hardware and discrete components!

Acknowledgements

Tickle includes part of the zlib library, which is Copyright (c) 1995-2012 by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler.

Since version 0.95 Tickle uses the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL), a fantastic cross-platform library for getting access to the system audio, video and input resources.

Most of the information (but no code!) that was necessary to write the emulation drivers comes from studying MAME and I would like to thank all of the MAME developers and testers for providing the best emulator out there, and for always keeping it the best.