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.
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.
A little early, but there has been a ton of activity in the last few days, so now is the right time for an update. What's new? Over 40 MAMETesters bugfixes, for a start! Read about the rest of it in the whatsnew.
Edit: due to an unexplained glitch, I had to break this patch into two pieces. Apply them both. If you already tried to apply the original single patch and failed, then simply applying the second part should give you a working result. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Thanks to the very kind generosity of mr H.R. Kaufmann, president of Xidy, now owner of the Exidy trademark, we have been allowed more ROM for free, personal non-commercial use. You can get them in the ROM Page, Targ and Spectar are the new additions, and more to come!
Getting back on a Thursday schedule after the holidays, it's time for the first update of the new year. Some nice bug fixes included this time, with 14 new MAMETesters bugs fixed in the last couple of days. Have fun!
Get it hot off the presses at the Latest Updates page!
As a little pre-Christmas treat, we have the first update to MAME 0.122 posted at the Source Updates page. The big news here is a working driver for the upright Buggy Boy, thanks to Philip Bennett. Haze and Dox have been busy cleaning up the afega and nmk16 drivers, and as a result a large number of previously non-working games are now working. In addition to the Buggy Boy work, Philip also submitted a nice fix to the Namco NA1 sound which improves the results substantially.
Happy holidays!
It's late, so I'll make it short: MAME 0.122 has been published. Download it. Check out the whatsnew. Report bugs at MAMETesters. Good night!
There have been a couple of small changes to the way file downloads are handled on this site. Source Updates, which are still on their own page, will continue to be hosted here directly. However, for larger files, it is becoming necessary to rely on mirror sites to keep under bandwidth limitations. In order to facilitate this, the Latest Release and Previous Releases pages now select a mirror at random when you click the Download link. Depending on the mirror site, this may be either a direct link to the file, or in some case might require a redirect to the mirror site where the download will auto-initiate after a few seconds.
While we all definitely prefer a simpler mechanism, this one seems a good compromise given current realities.
Another change you probably won't notice is that the Source Updates, Latest Release, and Source Code Browser pages are all now auto-generated based on which files are on the server. This certainly makes my life a little easier.
Special thanks to s_bastian and Twisty for help with the backend coding!