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 bit early this week, MAME 0.115u2 is now available. Big changes this time include a substantial improvement to the New York! New York! driver, thanks to Zsolt; some nice internal updates to the 6845 CRTC emulator, the 74123 timer emulator, and the 6821 PIA emulator; and some further improvements to Gorf and Wizard of Wor.
The first update to the MAME 0.115 source base is now available. Featured in this release is a new driver for the JPM Impact system thanks to Philip Bennett; a bunch of ARM core fixes from R. Belmont and Ryan Holtz; proper sound in Inferno at long last; and a bunch of cleanups and improvements to a several old drivers: Space Firebird, the GamePlan games, and Spiders thanks to Zsolt; Magic Fly thanks to Roberto; and my long-planned rewrite of the Bally Astrocade driver.
Have fun! And keep those bug reports coming into MAMETesters....
This month I'm proud to add two more classic Exidy games to the collection of freely-available ROM images. The first game is Side Trak, which shares some common elements with Crash, but features trains instead of cars and a bit less control over your destiny thanks to the fact that track changes by the computer's train affect your path as well.
In addition to Side Trak, we have also added a page for Star Fire, an obviously Star Wars-inspired game that represented a number of firsts in the industry, including the first environmental cabinet and the first game to let you enter your initials when you got a high score. The ROMs for the unreleased "sequel" (really just a small revision) Star Fire 2 are also available on the same page.
As a gentle reminder, I want to point out that although these Exidy ROM images are freely available here for non-commercial use, there is no implied license for other sites or mechanisms to distribute them. If you are interested in distributing or making use of these ROM images apart from running them in MAME for your own personal use, please fill out the contact form on this site with a description of what you wish to do, and we will make an effort to put you in touch with the appropriate people.
Time for a new full release. Get it from the Latest Release page. In addition to a number of fixes for recent regressions, this update features some additional black & white game cleanups and a rewrite of the pmpoker driver. Onward to 0.116....
Head on over to the Latest Releases page for the most recent update to MAME 0.114. Highlights this time around include some nice Model 1 rendering improvements from Yochizo, some more video cleanups from Zsolt, more accurate 6502 cores from Wilbert Pol, and working drivers for Excite League and Super League, whose FD1094 CPUs have finally been dumped.
Time for another update to MAME 0.114. This release features some more Konami game improvements from Ville, improved noise emulation in the SN76496 series of chips thanks to Lord Nightmare, several more MAMETesters fixes from couriersud, and new save state file locations (they are now stored in game-specific subdirectories of the save state path).
Time for another update to MAME 0.114. This week's update features full discrete audio for Space Invaders thanks to Derrick, a number of great bugfixes from couriersud, some more Konami improvements from Ville, and some more movement of previously Windows-specific code into the core. As usual, keep reporting those bugs over at MAME Testers!