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 new update to MAME 0.121 has been posted. With this update we now have support for a number of new and rare Namco System 12 games (not all working), some nice new SCSP updates, improved Star Wars accuracy, and a mostly working Mortal Kombat 4. We're nearing the end of the 0.122 development cycle, so be sure to report any significant bugs over at MAMETesters. Thanks!
Time for a new update. Grab it from the Source Updates page. Some nice SCSP improvements this time around from kingshriek, another big dkong driver update from couriersud, and the usual collection of internal cleanups. Full details in the whatsnew file.
Also, I'd like to announce that I've found a couple of volunteers to help keep the site running smoothly. I'll let them introduce themselves when they are ready, but things are already progressing behind the scenes. I'm also looking for help with keeping the wiki up to date and adding content. If you are interested in helping out there, please contact me and let me know what you'd like to help with.
After the hiccups of the past few weeks, I've switched this site over to a new server. I had to do a lot more manual configuration on this side, so if anything is not working, please email the webmaster.
A quick turnaround for this update, mainly to address a few lingering bugs in the official 0.121 release. Grab it from the new Source Updates page. Happy Thanksgiving (if that means anything in your part of the world)!
Time for another full release of MAME. Grab it from the Latest Release page. This time around I've done some shuffling to improve traffic. The binary releases are being hosted on two mirror sites. Click through to them to download the actual binaries. I've also pulled the source updates off of the main release page and created a new MAME Source Updates page which will hold them when the time comes. Hopefully this will keep things running smoothly!
Time for the weekly MAME update; grab it from the Latest Release page.
Apologies if you have tried to grab a full release or development tools over the past few days. I am currently experimenting with techniques to be nicer on this server, since it is a shared server and MAME can suck up an awful lot of bandwidth! As of tonight, all the full releases are now mirrored over at the old mame.net site, and links are appropriately updated here. The only thing missing is the development tools, which I hope to have back online shortly.
A new update to MAME 0.120 is now available at the Latest Release page. This update features support for several new Bell-Fruit Cobra games thanks to Philip Bennett, as well as some improvements to the recent inlining changes, and some more work on the polygon renderer.
Please report bugs or issues over at the MAMETesters site. Thanks!