MAMEdev.org | Home of The MAME Project

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.

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MAME 0.128u2

01 Nov 2008

In addition to the redesign, we have a new update, MAME 0.128u2. Get it from the Source Updates page.

Welcome to the New Design!

01 Nov 2008

As you can probably tell, the site looks quite a bit different as of today. I've often longed for a spiffier design, but never had the time to do it. Then I was approached by Michael Heald of Fully Illustrated for a makeover. And hey, who can turn down a great offer? I also happen to think it looks great and is a huge improvement over the old look.

I also took the opportunity to make a few key changes to the site:

I consolidated the various project history related links into a single Project History page. From here you can find the development chart (newly updated thanks to Fujix), links to the classic WIP pages, and other project-related information.
I also consolidated the various legal pages into a single MAME Legal Information page, including the license, information about the trademark and copyright, and a non-wiki FAQ for common questions.
The wiki has a new default skin which seamlessly blends into the new design. In fact, apart from the "Toolbox" link on the bottom-left, you would be hard-pressed to realize you were on a wiki page. This is intentional, as there are many users viewing the pages, but few people modifying them, so it makes no sense to clutter up the page with all these unused controls. Rest assured, the full complement of tools are still available, you just have to "pop" them open in the toolbox.
Searching within the wiki is now available on all pages in the left-hand sidebar. Since a large amount of content is in the wiki, this is a handy quick way to find stuff on the site.
The ROMs for Free Download page has been cleaned up and reorganized, and the pages for each game have been updated with the new look & feel.

There may still be a few straggling issues remaining; I plan to take care of the obvious ones today. After that, if anything else seems weird, please contact me via the Contacts Page (assuming all is working correctly!)

MAME 0.128u1

23 Oct 2008

The first update to MAME 0.128 is now available on the Source Updates page.

MAME 0.128

16 Oct 2008

Come and get it. The first full release in almost 2 months. Have fun!

MAME 0.127u8

13 Oct 2008

Ok, so I lied. We're not quite ready for 0.128 without a little more testing, so here we have 0.127u8. If you are playing with this version, make sure the Neo-Geo and Sega C2 drivers are working as expected, and report bugs as usual to MAMETesters.