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.
Oops, a major bug crept into the last release at the last second, so without further ado, please grab the small update to MAME 0.125u8 from the Source Updates page. There will still be a u9 next week, and hopefully a 0.126 to follow shortly thereafter.
Time for the weekly MAME update: get MAME 0.125u7 over at the Source Updates page. I anticipate a u8 next week followed shortly thereafter with MAME 0.126, so now would be a great time to verify that there are no showstoppers in any games you care about!
An important note about this release: inclusion of debugging support in MAME is no longer optional. That is, you can still disable it (using the -nodebug option, or setting 'debug' to 0 in your mame.ini file), but you can no longer compile without it. This will give a small-ish performance hit (under 5% in most cases) in exchange for always being able to pull up the debugger and will reduce the test matrix necessary to verify MAME's behavior.
Note that due to a slight oversight, the debugger is enabled by default in this build, so you may need to explicitly turn it off. This will default to off in u8.
The latest in the now long-running series of updates to MAME 0.125 is now available. There will likely be at least two more intermediate updates before 0.126, due to the large number of changes in the dynamic recompilers and elsewhere in the system. So hang in there and please give these updates a try to ensure that everything still works as expected. As usual, report your bugs over at MAMETesters.
Get the latest update from the Source Updates page. It's even possible that -listxml is working again. ;)
Get it while it's hot from: Source Updates.
I'll also mention there are a couple of new interesting wiki articles: one from R. Belmont on how tilemaps work, and one from Mr. Do! on how to write .lay files for the artwork system. If anyone would like wiki access to write an article, use the contact form to send a proposal and request to the team. If you haven't checked out the wiki in a while, you may find there's a lot more content there than there used to be!
Grab the latest update to MAME 0.125 from our Source Updates page. And be sure to get bug reports in to MAMETesters if you find anything wrong!
A second update to MAME 0.125 is now available on the Source Updates page.