Welcome to The Official Site of the MAME Development Team

It’s the end of another month, and time for a new MAME release. This time there are more improvements for capabilities we have added in previous versions.

MAME now includes ports of some popular shaders for the BGFX renderer, including the EAGLE, HQx and xBR scaling effects. Please be aware that the BGFX renderer is still a work in progress, and you may experience some stability issues when using it.

This release introduces a new cheat engine based on the Lua scripting language. This opens the door to exciting new possibilities. One of the most significant improvements is better support for systems with banked memory, including many 8-bit home computers like the Apple II family.

MAME’s archive file handling has been improved in a number of ways. ZIP64 format is now supported, allowing MAME to archives over 4GiB in size. This mean that, for example, large flyer collections don’t need to be unzipped for use with the internal UI. 7zip support has been updated for the latest 7zip release, including new archive features and many bug fixes. We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in the internal file browser.

We would also like to announce the #mame channel on the Freenode IRC network where you can give us your feedback and chat with other MAME users.

Of course this release also includes many other improvements from the MAME team and external contributors. If you want to see a more complete list of changes, it’s in whatsnew.txt here. And as always, you can get MAME 0.173 binaries at the download page.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 is now available.