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Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

What is MAME?

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

MAME’s purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

License

The MAME project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, 2 (GPL-2.0), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses. A great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are under the BSD-3-Clause License and we would encourage new contributors to distribute files under this license.

Please note that MAME is a registered trademark of Gregory Ember, and permission is required to use the "MAME" name, logo or wordmark.

MAME 0.172

30 Mar 2016

It's with great pleasure that we announce the release of MAME 0.172. This release includes several notable things above and beyond the usual assortment of new systems, new features, and bug fixes.

Most importantly, this is the first release of MAME since the change to a proper open-source licensing scheme as announced earlier this month. From this release onward, MAME will be distributed under a GPL-2.0+ license, with the bulk of code being covered under a 3-clause BSD license.

MAME now has an up-to-date set of documentation! You can find it under the "Documentation" drop-down at the top of this site, or go to http://docs.mamedev.org/ to check it out.

Due to the large number of configuration changes made in this version, we strongly advise all users to delete their existing INI configuration files and re-create them using the "-cc" option.

In case you are just overwriting previous release files note that you better remove plugin folder first

For those of you running MAME on authentic CRT monitors, MAME now incorporates a number of scaling-related features from GroovyMAME, thanks to its author being brought on board the team, which should help reduce user fragmentation. Please note: If you have issues with MAME 0.172's graphics output, please ensure that "unevenstretch" is set to 1 in your MAME configuration.

MAME 0.172 will also introduce a new high-score saving system using Lua scripting. The feature is still experimental, but it's something to keep an eye on for interesting future developments!

This version additionally marks the creation of a cross-platform data-driven shader system via the BGFX renderer, which allows you to apply shader effects per-screen, and more.

If you want to view the full list of changes, view whatsnew.txt here. And as always, you can get MAME 0.172 binaries at the download page.

Attention for all derivative builds

04 Mar 2016

Please be aware that only files distributed by Mamedev (those available via the official GitHub) have been subject to the relicensing efforts.

If you maintain a derivative build please be aware that you will have to gain the correct permission from all contributors for any extra code you have in your build. Code that was distributed under the previous MAME license can not be included or linked to MAME from this point forward without being relicensed, requiring permission from all contributors to that code.

This applies to all derivative builds, including MAMEUI, MESSUI etc. so if you have a derivative build based upon that code you will need to either rewrite from scratch or obtain permission from all contributors to the code in order to relicense.

MAME is now Free and Open Source Software

04 Mar 2016

After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!

We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.

As a result, a great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are available under the 3-Clause BSD License but project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses.

If you have contributed to the MAME source code and believe we have not contacted you, please reach out to us at our contact page.

Please note that MAME is a registered trademark of Nicola Salmoria, and permission is required to use the "MAME" name, logo or wordmark.

Back to normal

28 Feb 2016

It is again safe to update by pacman -Syu thanks to MSYS2 team

Breaking change in tool update

26 Feb 2016

In case you have executed pacman -Syu today and updated packages, there were some breaking changes in MSYS2 repository
Please execute next to rollback:

for x64:
pacman -U http://repo.msys2.org/mingw/x86_64/mingw-w64-x86_64-crt-git-5.0.0.4609.566d621-1-any.pkg.tar.xz http://repo.msys2.org/mingw/x86_64/mingw-w64-x86_64-headers-git-5.0.0.4609.566d621-1-any.pkg.tar.xz

for x86:
pacman -U http://repo.msys2.org/mingw/i686/mingw-w64-i686-crt-git-5.0.0.4609.566d621-1-any.pkg.tar.xz http://repo.msys2.org/mingw/i686/mingw-w64-i686-headers-git-5.0.0.4609.566d621-1-any.pkg.tar.xz

MAME 0.171

24 Feb 2016

MAME 0.171 is now available.

Build tools

16 Feb 2016

MSYS2 based tools are now available for download.

Tools updated to version 2016-02-16, if you have some of previous versions please update.

Since way of handling MAME depending updates is now done using pacman package manager we recommend
you to install clean copy of tools.