R-R-Roaring action for big game players
Safari was one the first fifty or so arcade games ever made. This 1977 release was a joint venture between Sega and Gremlin. It came in a green dedicated cabinet with sideart of a hunter in a jungle scene. This may have been the first game to utilize twin joysticks. The first was a 4-Way joystick that controlled the movement of your hunter. While the second was a 2-Way joystick with a top mounted fire button. That one was used to aim and shoot. The 2-Way joystick with fire button is no longer produced, use a standard 8-Way with fire button as a replacement (removing the microswitches for left and right).
I may dream in technicolor, but I trip the fuck out in old-school black and white
This game was in black and white, not greyscale (like many early games used), but just two colors, black and white. But the characters and animals were large, and very detailed for just using a single color. I had no problems telling exactly what kind of animals I was hunting. (This game requires a black and white CRT, and does not correctly display if a color one is used as a replacement).
There were four different animals that you could hunt. Snakes and lions were both rather slow moving, and good for 100 points each. Wild boars would run quickly across the screen, but would net you 200 for a kill. Finally, vultures were small and would move around erratically near the top of the screen (being worth 300 points if you could hit them). Touching any of the beasties meant instant death, but it mattered little, because this game played on time limits anyway. Death only meant that you would lose a few seconds waiting for your intrepid big game hunter to reappear (the game lasted 90 seconds total).
You may say to yourself, "I want to be a big game hunter"!
There are two ways that you can play this game even today. The first is to seek out and find an actual working copy in an arcade somewhere (or buy one at an amusement industry auction). But good luck on that, most of the original versions of this game have long since been converted, scrapped, or have simply stopped working. A few of them are still in the hands of dedicated collectors. But they usually don't let people just pop by to play their prized games.
But Safari is perfectly emulated by MAME, except that the sound emulation has not been implemented (at least not as of when I am writing this). So I would suggest playing some jungle type music while you play (like the background music to Donkey Kong Country). Most computers will have no problem emulating this game while playing an mp3 file. (It just doesn't take that much power to emulate a Z80.)