Okay, so I’ve been hearing a lot about this “Nascar Midway” thing, and I finally decided to give it a shot. I’m not a huge racing fan, but I do like arcade games, and this seemed like a fun combination of both.
First, I gotta say, finding information about this was a bit of a pain. It’s not like there’s a central website or anything. I had to piece together bits of info from different forums and some really old-looking websites.
Anyway, I started by trying to figure out what I even needed. It seemed like I needed the actual game files, of course, and some kind of emulator. I’m not to familier with emulators, so this is completely new to me. From what I understood, MAME is a popular one for arcade games, so I went with that.
Downloaded MAME – that was pretty straightforward. Then came the hard part: finding the ROMs. I’m not gonna lie, this took a while. I ended up on some pretty sketchy-looking websites, but finally, I found what seemed like a reliable source.
- Download MAME.
- Find and Download the Nascar Midway ROMs. (This was the tricky part!)
Next step, setting it all up.
I extracted the MAME files, then put the ROMs in the “roms” folder – that seemed logical enough. I fired up MAME, and… nothing. Just a black screen. Ugh.
Turns out, I needed something called a “CHD” file. Back to Google I went. More digging, more sketchy websites. Eventually, I found the CHD, put it in the right folder (which I had to figure out by trial and error), and… it worked!
I saw the Midway logo, the Nascar intro, and then the game itself. Finally! I grabbed my controller (thank goodness I had one!), and started playing.
My First Race
The graphics are definitely dated, but that’s part of the charm, right? It’s super blocky, but in a fun, nostalgic way. The controls were pretty simple – accelerate, brake, steer. I started out pretty badly, crashing into walls and other cars. But I slowly got the hang of it. There is a way to improve this.
After a few races, I started to get the feel for the drifting, which is key to getting around corners quickly. It’s definitely an arcade racer – not realistic at all, but that’s what makes it fun. It’s all about speed and crashing and just having a good time.
I got my brother to play with me. We had so much fun!
So, yeah, that’s my “Nascar Midway” experience. It was a bit of a hassle to get set up, but totally worth it in the end. If you’re looking for a fun, retro racing game, and you don’t mind a little bit of tinkering, I’d say give it a shot!
