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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.

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MAME 0.130u1

19 Mar 2009

The first update to MAME 0.130 is now posted on the Source Updates page. Please take heed of the warning at the top of the whatsnew.txt:

IMPORTANT NOTE: The CHD format has undergone a change with this release. The main reason for this change is to include some of the key metadata into the hashes for the CHDs. This ensures that the metadata is valid and prevents abuse.

The first impact you will find is that all of your CHD differencing files are invalid. Just delete your "diff" directory contents entirely.

The second impact is that all your existing CHDs will warn you that they have incorrect hashes. This is expected. Your old CHDs should still work fine, so if you can live with the "bad ROM" warnings, you don't really need to do anything. However, if this bugs you or you want to be "clean", you can update your CHDs, using this command line:

chdman -update <chdfile> <newchdfile>

for each one of your CHDs. This will take a while, but will produce CHDs that match the new checksums posted in the drivers.

MAME 0.130

09 Mar 2009

MAME 0.130 has been released! Thanks to everyone who tested and fixed bugs.

MAME 0.129u6

05 Mar 2009

Ok, we are on the home stretch now. Thanks to Phil Bennett, most of the major problems of the last few versions have been cleaned up. This should be the last update before we release 0.130, so make sure you get your bug reports into MAMETesters as soon as you can to help ensure this is a good release!

MAME 0.129u5

26 Feb 2009

Still cleaning up the big device-ification mess from last version. Most all reported bugs are fixed now, so hopefully we are on the home stretch. Please grab the latest 0.129u5 update and verify that everything you care about is working fine and playing sounds as expected. And while you're at it, try out a few games you don't care about. Who knows, you might discover something new!

Once again, please report all issues over at MAMETesters to ensure they get proper attention. You will notice the large list of fixed bugs at the top of the whatsnew.txt. If it's not reported, don't assume we know about it!

MAME 0.129u4

17 Feb 2009

After a bit of a hiatus, due to Real Life issues and a major change being in progress, we now have the 0.129u4 update. Please take some time to test this build and be on the lookout for audio problems or crashes that may result from converting the sound chips into proper devices. Report issues over at MAMETesters to ensure they get fixed as we wind down the 0.129 development cycle.