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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 0.118u2

15 Aug 2007

A new update to the 0.118 release is now available on the Latest Release page. Notable changes this time around include some nice DIP switch updates from stephh and a new command-line control to specify the emulation playback speed. This will hopefully be a useful tweak for those of you who have monitors stuck at 60Hz and who are experiencing audio issues as a result.

Read more details about what has changed in the whatsnew file, and report any issues over at MAMETesters.

MAME 0.118u1

10 Aug 2007

Get the first update to MAME 0.118 over at the Latest Release page. This major change this time around is an internally revamped tilemap system. A set of regression tests have already been done and things look pretty good, so I don't anticipate a lot of new bugs with the new code, but there will probably be a few things I missed. Make sure you read the top of tilemap.h (either in the source or in the online source when it is updated later today) for more detail on how the tilemap system works.

MAME 0.118

05 Aug 2007

The latest official release of MAME is now available on the Latest Release page. This release is the first official version with the updated input system support. Hopefully most of the issues were dealt with during the development cycle, but if you find something not working correctly, please report it (and any other bugs) over at MAME Testers.

Old MAME WIP Reports Now Available

04 Aug 2007

From Feburary 1999 through July 2004, Santeri Saarimaa took on the challenging task of maintaining a detailed daily work-in-progress report of MAME development. These pages represent a peek into what was happening during one of the most active times in the project's development.

These reports were previously hosted over at mame.net, but as part of a process of consolidating content between that site and this one, they are now hosted here. You can access them via the new "Past WIP Reports" link on the lefthand side.

MAME 0.117u3

01 Aug 2007

Now available for download is the latest update to MAME 0.117. This version is mostly internal changes and important bugfixes to the input system and the frontend menus. In addition, we have a preliminary Sega laserdisc game driver thanks to Andrew Gardner, further extensions to the built-in multi-segment LED support from James Wallace, and a new tool that converts the MAME source tree into HTML for browsing. You can see it in action by clicking on the new "Browse Source Code" link to the left. (Note that the total source code weighs in at over 100MB, so please be patient while it uploads!)

One side effect of the changes is that you will need updated ctrlr files if you currently rely on the ctrlr support. They will be included with the next binary release, but until then, you can grab them here.

Make sure you report any more issues with the new input code soon over at MAME Testers. Depending on the feedback, we will either move forward with the 0.118 release or hold off and do a u4 update.

MAME 0.117u2

26 Jul 2007

Time to grab the latest & greatest update from the Latest Release page. There are several bugfixes for the new input system this release, as well as several changes to the built-in game selection UI. Additional updates include some MCR game fixes from Ernesto Corvi and myself, render system support for 14 and 16 segment LEDs from Dirk Best, S14001A speech in Wolf Pack thanks to Lord Nightmare, and some more Imola GP (formerly claimed to be Monza GP) fixes from Phil Stroffolino.

Keep those bug reports coming into MAME Testers!

MAME 0.117u1

19 Jul 2007

And now time for a big update. Head on over to the Latest Release page and grab the 0.117u1 release. Make sure you check out the whatsnew file in detail as well.

The first major change in this release is the input system. The way that the OS-specific layer communicates with the core about input devices has changed substantially, allowing a lot of the tricky functionality to be handled automatically by the core code. For the Windows build specifically, this marks a shift in behavior: on Windows XP and later, both keyboard and mouse now use the raw input APIs, which allow support for multiple keyboards and mice.

A second big change is an experimental one. A new built-in user interface is provided for selecting a game. This interface is intended to be minimal and will not serve to replace a true frontend. However, it does provide a better first experience for those unfamiliar with MAME and is useful for launching a game when you can't remember the exact driver name.

In addition to these changes, we have discrete sound for Head On and clones thanks to couriersud; an updated Monza GP driver from Phil Stroffolino; and some nice fixes to the toaplan2 driver from Alex Jackson.

As always with big changes like this, make sure you test things out and report any strangeness over at MAME Testers. Have fun!