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.
If you're not on the mamedev mailing list and wish to submit changes for consideration, I've created a new address that you can send them to. Just address them to submit@thenameofthissite.com, replacing thenameofthissite with, well, the name of this site. :-)
As has been widely reported, Haze has decided to step down as maintainer of MAME. During his time as maintainer, he managed to accomplish a lot in terms of accelerating the pace of development and keeping the releases coming at a regular rate. Fortunately, he won't be giving up MAME for good. Here's hoping that some time away from being maintainer will do him some good, or at the very least produce more accurate emulation of Korean porn titles. :-)
Following in his wake, Aaron Giles (that's me) will be stepping in to take over the role of maintainer. The first major side effect of this transition is that you will no longer find the intermediate updates at Haze's site, but rather you will find them here. Well, not here on this page, but over here on the sources page.
In fact, if you check it out now, you'll see that I've put up a 0.95u3 update. I should point out that I am using a different tool to generate the diffs, which means that you no longer apply them with the -p1 parameter, but instead use -p0. Apart from that, it shouldn't be too much of a change from before.
Just a friendly reminder that this site is in beta. We are still getting things up and running and accepting feedback at this time. A number of folks have emailed the request line asking for permission to use the trademark. Rest assured, these mails have been received, and they will be taken care of once the license and trademark terms have been finalized. This is likely going to take a little while, so please be patient!
Welcome to the official MAME development team site. This site is intended to be the official communications channel for the development team.
At the moment, this site is in "beta" mode in order to get feedback on the new license and the other info that appears on the left-hand side. Note that most of the text from the old license didn't really belong in a license, and is now a separate document called About MAME. If you have feedback, please use the contact form to send it to the appropriate place.
What you will find here:
What you will not find here:
For that kind of stuff, go to mame.net.
Hopefully this site will help end some of the confusion over how to contact the team and where the official releases come from.