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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 0.131u3

28 May 2009

Apologies for the one week delay, but vacation was a higher priority! Anyway, we are back with another update, so head over to the Source Updates page to grab the lastest changes. I anticipate one more intermediate update before we move on to 0.132, so get your bug reports into MAMETesters soon if you want to see something fixed before then.

MAME 0.131u2

14 May 2009

MAME 0.131u2 is ready for testing. Please download the source diff from our Source Updates page.

MAME 0.131u1

07 May 2009

MAME 0.131u1 is now available. Big changes this release include an initial basic renderer for Naomi and numerous internal changes related to memory maps and memory allocation. Please report any anomalies you discover over at MAMETesters.

MAME 0.131

23 Apr 2009

The official 0.131 release has been posted on the Latest Release page.

Those of you who haven't been keeping with the intermediate releases will need to take heed of the warning that came with MAME 0.130u1. I'm repeating it here just to be sure:

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.

As always, make sure you report any issues over at MAMETesters. Have fun!

MAME 0.130u4

16 Apr 2009

The MAME 0.130u4 update is now available. This should be the final update before we move on to 0.131. Please report any issues to MAMETesters.

MAME 0.130u3

09 Apr 2009

There's a new update now available: MAME 0.130u3. This update changes the way crosshairs work. If want to experiment with custom crosshairs you can grab this file, which contains PNGs of the built-in crosshairs, as a starting point.

MAME 0.130u2

28 Mar 2009

Come and get it: MAME 0.130u2.