When the Sega Dreamcast was in the final stages of collapse, Sega seemed clueless as to how to get back in touch with their core audience of gamers — the generation who grew up at arcades and playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Megadrive.

I think they missed an obvious strategy — covertly port the MAME emulator to the Dreamcast platform and distribute the port covertly on the internet (without any attribution as a Sega product, given the copyright issues). It might not have rescued the platform, but it would have been a cheap and very easy way for them to reassert some of their key brand values, and reconnect the Dreamcast with the people for whom Sega was a watchword for classic gaming.

Anyway, they didn’t do that, and the rest is in any case history.

Now I find myself wondering similar thoughts about mobile gaming. Repeated claims that the new generation of phones have about the processing and graphics capability of the C64-generation of consoles and computers, and some pretty feeble offerings of Java-based or native games cloned from that era — Space Invaders, early driving games and so on.

Why not go for the real thing? If those phones are C64-spec this year, then next year’s will be capable of emulating that spec of machine (the iPaq 38xx-series runs MAME fairly well on a 200MHz StrongARM). Bring on MAME, lets have some REAL classic gaming on the new phones.

Obviously the manufacturers want a way to use phone gaming to up their ARPU, and hope that proprietary systems mean that users will be locked into their hardware and web service. I think that, like Sega, they’re missing a chance — increase uptake of more powerful handsets and ARPU will go up simply from people downloading more stuff directly onto the phone, from wherever they find it online.