MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Some thoughts and questions regarding arcade-games, credits and difficulty

Hi, new guy at the forum here, although I'm not new to emulation in general. The first emulator I've installed was Snes9x way back in the year 2000.

I've never quite got into arcade-emulation in general, because of various reasons. The most notable one I suppose is the way arcade games are designed; the games difficulty pumped up to 11 and the game itself designed to eat quarters.

Thereby there's only a handful arcade games I do enjoy, and that's mostly fighting games (Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2) and the very few games that can be enjoyed in freeplay-mode that I know of.

More ofter than not I feel that arcade-games in general are way to hard at 1 credit and becomes effortless in freeplay-mode, because you don't feel any kind of penalty when you die like in Shinoby and Shadow Dancer, where you would have to restart the whole level all over again.

Maybe a solution to this could be that MAME itself had the option of a predefined credit-limit for different difficulty-settings, like 20 credits for easy, 10 for normal and 3 for hard? I just watched a youtube-video of four gamers playing through Turtles in Time arcade and mashing the credit buttons for each player so that they all had above 40 credits to play through the game. In my opinion that didn't look any rewarding, because of lack of penalty for dieing.

Even with such a system in place, there would need to be any kind of input from the community itself on how many credits that's recommended for each difficulty for each game. I don't know how hard such a feature would be to implement, or if it already exist in an already existing fork of MAME, but personally because of the lack of such a feature as far as I know, I find a whole lot of the many so-called quality/recommended arcade-games to be boring.

This is by no means a topic to bash arcade-games in general, but I see much potential for the games being more enjoyable with such a feature. I would also love to hear your input regarding this.